From the House Armed Services Committee’s summary of the marked-up defense authorization bill they approved 59-0 last night:

“The Committee firmly believes that the construction or modification of any facility in the U.S. to detain or imprison individuals currently being held at Guantanamo must be accompanied by a thorough and comprehensive plan that outlines the merits, costs, and risks associated with utilizing such a facility,” the summary text read. “No such plan has been presented to date. The bill prohibits the use of any funds for this purpose.”

That means no money for buying the Thomson Corrections Center in Illinois to move and house Guantanamo detainees, the administration’s path to closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. (Or, more precisely, closing the facility while exporting military commissions and indefinite detention without charge to Thomson.) Vince Warren of the Center for Constitutional Rights told me, “this makes it much, much harder for the administration to move forward with the closure of Guantanamo, there’s no doubt about that… It’s hard to see what reasonable options the president has without jumping through congressional hoops that are unreasonable and unnecessary, and it’s harder to move forward both with prosecuting those who are terrorist suspects and releasing to freedom those who are not.”

Intrigued? Read my full report at the Washington Independent.