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State Dept. shutters Guantanamo closure office

The State Department has reassigned its top diplomat charged with emptying out the prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay and effectively shuttered the office responsible for handling that issue.

In an internal personnel bulletin on Monday, the State Department said Ambassador Daniel Fried has been named as coordinator for sanctions policy and will leave his current post as special envoy in charge of resettling Guantanamo Bay prisoners.

In the first couple years of President Barack Obama's administration, Fried was very active in diplomatic efforts to persuade other countries to accept Guantanamo prisoners.

When Obama took office, 242 prisoners were at the facility. There are now 166 at Guantanamo. Three have died in custody since 2009 and the remainder were transferred to foreign countries on terms Fried often negotiated.

However, the pace of transfers has slowed to a trickle. Just four took place in 2012. The reduction is due to limits Congress imposed in legislation and Obama signed, while saying that he objected to those provisions. The slowdown is also attributable to a moratorium Obama imposed on transfers to Yemen in early 2010. A total of 86 of the men currently at Guantanamo are Yemeni nationals.

White House officials insist Obama still wants to close the prison at Guantanamo. However, as recently as earlier this month, Obama again signed legislation continuing the restrictions that effectively make it impossible to close the facility.

"The department will continue to work on these matters in coordination with other departments and agencies," said Ian Moss, an aide to Fried. "Our work with regard to Guantanamo will not stop. "

When Fried was given the job, the Obama Administration emphasized the need for full-time attention to the task.

"In order to carry out President Obama’s commitment to close the detention facility at Guantanamo within one year, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has determined we need to intensify our efforts to facilitate the transfer of detainees. Secretary Clinton therefore has asked Ambassador Daniel Fried, a seasoned diplomat with a strong record of accomplishment, to lead a dedicated team to address this issue full-time," State Department spokesman Robert Wood said in March 2009.

Two months later, Fried was formally named Special Envoy for the Closure of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility.

Moss didn't say directly if the office would continue as a distinct entity, but he acknowledged that the position of special envoy will be vacant for now. "As of right now there isn’t one," he said. "There will be full-time attention to this."

The announcement Monday is to some degree bureaucratic formality catching up with reality. Detainee issues had become a declining portion of Fried's work in recent months. He had become the State Department's point person on issues relating to the Mujahideen-e Khalq, an Iranian dissident group that the U.S. long considered a terrorist organization but formally removed from the U.S. list of terrorist groups in September.

UPDATE (Monday, 6:00 P.M.): This post has been updated with Moss's comments.