Obama: Guantanamo won't close by Jan. deadline

BEIJING ¿ President Obama directly acknowledged for the first time on Wednesday that the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay will not close by the January deadline he set, but he said he hoped to still achieve that goal sometime next year.

Obama refused, however, to set a new deadline.

In an interview with Fox News' Major Garrett in the Chinese capital, Obama claimed he was "not disappointed" that the Guantanamo deadline had slipped, saying he "knew this was going to be hard."

"People, I think understandably, are fearful after a lot of years where they weretold that Guantanamo was critical to keep terrorists out," Obama said. Closing the facility, he added, is "also just technically hard."

Obama came to office pledging to shut a detainee facility that had become a symbol for prisoner abuse at the hands of American officials. He signed orders to shut Guantanamo by January 2010, butWhite House officials quickly encountered resistance ¿ both from members Congress to moving prisoners to U.S. soil and from other countries they had hoped would take detainees in ¿ as well as a tangle of legal issues involving suspected terrorists who had been tortured in prison or could not stand trial.

Last week, the administration announced that it will try five Guantanamo prisoners, including the self-declared mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, in federal court in New York. The fate of dozens of other detainees remains in limbo.

Guantanamo is a sensitive subject in China, where Obama conducted the interview, because the United States has refused to release some ethnic minorities known as Uighurs back to Chinese officials for fear that they will be treated as political prisoners. Several Uighurs who had been detained at Guantanamo have been sent instead to Bermuda and Palau after being cleared as non-combatants.

Despite the slow trickle of prisoners out of the facility, Obama insisted that it will still eventually shut.

"We are on a path and a process where I would anticipate that Guantanamo will be closed next year," he said. "I'm not going to set an exact date because a lot of this is also going to depend on cooperation from Congress."