Closing the Guantánamo detention facility remains a priority, the Joint Chiefs chairman said Sunday, but amid congressional intransigence and lack of a plan from the Obama administration, it will take some time to assemble a viable solution.

“I’ve [been] advocating for a long time now that it needs to be closed,” Adm. Mike Mullen , chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on ABC’s “This Week.” “President Obama made a decision very early after his Inauguration to do that by next January. And we’re all working very hard to meet that deadline.”

However, the central issue is “what you do with the detainees who are there. There are some really bad people there,” he said. “We’re working hard now to figure out what the options are and what the best one would be. And that really is a decision the president is going to have to make, certainly in meeting this deadline of what we do.”

Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who also served as Joint Chiefs chairman, said the logistics involved in closing the facility also were a problem for President George W. Bush . “President Bush stated repeatedly to international audiences and to the country that he wanted to close Guantánamo,” Powell said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “The problem he had was he couldn’t get all the pieces together.

“Secretary of State [Condoleezza] Rice and Secretary of Defense [Robert M.} Gates had come forward with plans, but the plans ran into difficulties with Department of Justice and others.”

Obama, he said, “has run into some of those same sorts of problems. So I think we need to kind of take the heat out of this issue.”

Obama has suffered some setbacks on Capitol Hill to his nascent Guantánamo policy. Lawmakers in both chambers have stripped out $80 million he had requested in the fiscal 2009 supplemental (HR 2346) because the administration has not presented a detailed plan for the detainees.

“I think President Obama didn’t handle it very well by going up to the Congress and asking for $80 million without a plan,” Powell said. “And by, frankly, giving enough time to opponents of it to marshal their forces as to why we shouldn’t do this.”

Powell also cited what he called a “hard-core problem”: with some detainees “you really do not have cold evidence ... that you could put before an Article III court. ... We may have to find new legislation or have the Congress assist us with this. But let’s get it into our system of laws with an executive and a legislative and a judicial branch all working it together.”

When asked whether he had discussed this possibility with Obama, Powell replied, “The views I have just expressed to you President Obama has heard from me. ... I have been public on this.”

It will take some time, Powell said, but “I think after we have had these dueling speeches and the controversy of recent days, things will settle down and the president can go off and spend some time with his staff thinking it through all the way and coming up with a plan just as he said he would do in his speech.”

However, Sen. Jon Kyl , R-Ariz., expressed doubt that Obama will be able to follow through with a plan because of the public’s negative reaction.

“I mean, the president can make a very foolish decision and close it without having figured out what to do with the people,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “I can’t imagine that he would do that, however. The reality is that the American people don’t want these people in the United States.”