Today in an interview broadcast live exclusively on YouTube, Americans asked President Obama questions via email or video submissions. One questioner asked the President why it is taking so long to close Guantanamo Bay. Obama noted the various complicating factors in closing the facility, including what to do with the detainees, where they can be tried, and where they will be held. He also noted that one key problem has been “rank politics”:

OBAMA: One of the things that we’ve had to try to communicate to the country at large is that, historically, we’ve tried a lot of terrorists in our courts; we have them in our federal prisons; they’ve never escaped. And these folks are no different. But it’s been one of those things that’s been subject to a lot of, in some cases, pretty rank politics.

Of course, Obama is right — Republicans and conservatives have launched attack after attack with baseless fear-mongering since the President announced his decision to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, and in particular, for proposals to move some of the detainees to maximum security prisons in the U.S.:

– Rep. Steve King (R-IA): “What happens then if another judge grants him asylum in the United States and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is on a path to citizenship.”

– Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL): “If your Administration brings Al Qaeda terrorists to Illinois, our state and the Chicago Metropolitan Area will become ground zero for Jihadist terrorist plots, recruitment and radicalization.”

– Rep. Don Manzullo (R-IL): “[U.S. prisons housing terrorists] could be a target for future terrorist activity.”

– Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC): “Transferring detainees from Guantanamo Bay to U.S. soil will endanger American lives.”

– House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH): “I think the administration wasn’t around for 9/11.”

– Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL): “They wouldn’t be treated any better in the United States, and they wouldn’t have the tropical breezes blowing through.”

Fox News hosts have joined in on the act, too. Fox & Friends even showed photos of Muslim men and asked, “Would you want a guy like this living in your backyard?” One local conservative even suggested that the al Qaeda suspects would indoctrinate the other American inmates. “You intermix them with the prison population, and there’s the very real possibility they would influence those individuals in prison,” she said.

Many terrorists have already been convicted in U.S. courts and currently reside in federal maximum security prisons, where they remain to this day without incident, whether indoctrinating inmates or escaping into locals’ “backyards.” In fact, many local residents have welcomed the idea of bringing the detainees to their prisons. Even Gen. David Petraeus — the right wing’s go-to man on national security issues — has said the U.S. needs to close Gitmo. “Gitmo has caused us problems, there’s no question about it. I oversee a region in which the existence of Gitmo has indeed been used by the enemy against us,” he said.

Last week, many in the immigrant community were disappointed by the vague reference that President Obama made to immigration reform in his State of the Union address. Earlier today, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs passed up an opportunity to clarify why President Obama chose to so opaquely iterate his commitment to immigration reform. However, he did seem to indicate that the administration’s position hasn’t changed:

REPORTER: In his speech last week, the President mentioned immigration in passing, but didn’t go into detail. That obviously disappointed advocates who were hoping there was weight behind a comprehensive bill that would include legalization. So my question is, if this is such a priority for him this year, why not go stake out a specific position?

GIBBS: I think the President’s position on immigration reform and what he supports is enormously clear. He campaigned on it, he worked on legislation I think is quite similar to what would come up this year in the House or the Senate with people like John McCain or Lindsey Graham in 2005 and 2006 in the Senate. Like climate change there are bipartisan efforts that are ongoing to bring legislation like this to the fore and to create bipartisan majorities to get it passed. The president hosted a meeting here not too long ago to keep that process going and we look forward to taking part in it.

Watch it:

According to Gibbs, the question isn’t whether President Obama still supports passing comprehensive immigration reform, but rather, whether the White House can be convinced that there is enough bipartisan support to get it passed. A recent affirmative statement from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) indicates that at least one key GOP member is reaching out to his colleagues and encouraging them to embrace the immigration issue. Meanwhile, the majority of Republican and Independent voters already support comprehensive immigration reform.

Ultimately, immigration has always come at the end of a long list of priorities and promises that President Obama optimistically pledged would be realized within his first couple years in office. Immigration advocates who would like to see the issue addressed in 2010 have already pointed out that immigration reform has become “low-hanging fruit” on a legislative tree that has fewer and fewer branches. Yet it’s perhaps even more critical to emphasize how immigration would fit into Obama’s broader policy agenda in terms of creating jobs, growing the Democratic Party, minimizing losses in 2010, and removing an obstructive wedge that has plagued American politics for decades.

Last Thursday, I wrote about the need for the Obama administration to come up with a regional security strategy for the Persian Gulf as it withdraws its troops from Iraq, and link its arms sales to the region to this strategy. This weekend, both the New York Times and Washington Post led with stories on the future of U.S. security policy in the Gulf.

The most concrete information coming out of these stories is that the United States is deploying eight Patriot anti-missile missile batteries to Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia in addition to stationing Aegis ballistic missile defense ships in the Gulf. In addition, they also reveal that the United States is supporting an expansion of the Saudi facilities protection force to 30,000 personnel.

On arms sales, an anonymous administration official made grandiose claims to the Post about “developing a truly regional defensive capability, with missile systems, air defense and a hardening up of critical infrastructure.” These claims are difficult to substantiate given the lack of new information provided by this anonymous official, and the relative slowness it’s taking the U.S. to fulfill arms requests already in the pipeline.

In fact, what these announcements reveal, if anything, is that the region is becoming more — not less — dependent on the United States for its security. The U.S. military is sending a significant number of its own missile defense capabilities to the Gulf while requests by local states for missile defense equipment have only begun to be fulfilled in the last month. U.S. efforts still seem to be concentrated on bilateral relationships rather than working to create a “truly regional” security system.

Taken together, these stories indicate that while the United States is preparing to withdraw from Iraq, it’s not preparing to substantially shift from or even rethink the role it’s had for the last 30 years as the security guarantor of the Gulf.