Transcript: Sens. Jim Webb, D-Va., and Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Will you support that? Because you support...

WEBB: We spend hundreds of millions of dollars building an appropriate facility with all security precautions in Guantanamo to try these cases. There are cases against international law.

These aren't people who were in the United States, committing a crime in the United States. These are people who were brought to Guantanamo for international terrorism. I do not believe they should be tried in the United States.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Yet back in January, you supported the president's decision to close Guantanamo.

WEBB: I think Guantanamo has become the great Rorschach test of how we feel about international terrorism. We should, at the right time, close Guantanamo. But I don't think that it should be closed, and in terms of transferring people here.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, but I -- I just want to press this one more time, because, actually, in January, on January 23rd, you said the president has given a reasonable timeline here in sorting this out. You no believe it's reasonable?

WEBB: Well, no, I don't, actually. You know, having sat down with my staff and gone through the numbers in detail, and looking at, you know, the facilities that have been built there, and coming to the point where I have to, you know, personally weigh in on this in a detailed way, I think what we're doing is the right way.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you will not support funding for closing down Guantanamo?

WEBB: We should close down Guantanamo at the right time. I think what has happened is Guantanamo has become the issue rather than how we process these people who were detained there.

Let's process them the right rules of law, the right due process, within the constraints of how we have to handle these cases, with military intelligence and that sort of thing, but the facility is there at Guantanamo to do it. And then close it down.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So the January deadline should be relaxed. The president should not meet that January deadline. You don't believe Guantanamo...

(CROSSTALK)

WEBB: I think we should -- you know, I think we should defer to the judgment of the administration who is looking at this. I think we all are moving toward the right direction. But we shouldn't be creating artificial timelines.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But the administration said January.

WEBB: They've said a lot of things and taken a look and said some other things. So let's process these people in a very careful way and then take care of it.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me come back to you, Senator Kyl. Yesterday, President Obama appointed the Republican governor of Utah, Jon Huntsman, to be ambassador of China.

A high profile governor, he had been looking at a presidential run. Are you disappointed that he took this job?

KYL: No. He's a very capable guy. He speaks Mandarin Chinese. He had a post in Singapore similar to this in the past. He is very experienced. He is knowledgeable about trade issues. And I think it's great to have a highly qualified person like that.

And to the fact that the president reached out to appoint a Republican is a good thing. I'm not at all disappointed. It's, I think, good for the United States.

WEBB: I'm chairman of the East Asia Subcommittee on the Foreign Relations Committee, I'm happy to take a look at his qualifications.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator Webb, Senator Kyl, thank you both very much for your time this morning.

Straight to the roundtable now. So as our panelists take their seats, take a look at Robert Gibbs from Friday's press briefing, showing just a little bit of exasperation after a week of taking a lot of heat from both sides.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROBERT GIBBS, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: You started out on Monday wondering why we were being so opposite of George Bush in all of these questions. And on Friday, I'm answering questions about, why are we so much like George Bush on all of these questions?

I'll let you guys discern what inflection point -- what period of days that all changed.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, we'll let the round table discern what period of day that all changed.

Let me bring them all in right now. I've got George Will as always, former State Department official Liz Cheney, Steve Schmidt, John McCain's former campaign manager, James Carville, Democratic strategist, also the author of "40 More Years, How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation". Making George Will laugh. And Katrina Vanden Heuvel of "The Nation" magazine.

George, let's begin with the decisions President Obama made this week. He decided not to allow the release of these photos of detainee abuse. He decided to reinstitute military commissions. You saw there a lot of human rights groups upset. Jim Webb apparently not all that upset as a Democrat. How significant are these shifts and are they the right moves?

GEORGE WILL, COLUMNIST: Well, they come after he essentially affirmed warrantless wiretapping and escalated in Afghanistan. So you can see why a certain faction of the Democratic Party is unhappy.

On the other hand, he has changed his mind on the photographs, but he's changed his mind by keeping a promise. The promise he made during the campaign was I will always consult with my commanders. He consulted with the commanders who said among other things, the 10 days after the Abu Ghraib photos were released, there was a spike of violence in Iraq. They strongly urged him not to release these and he won't.

Now there is a court involved in this and the court has so far said that under the Freedom of Information Act, they have to be released. He can appeal that, he can lose, and he can then say I did my best and the photos come out.

STEPHANOPOULOS: That good enough?

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL, "THE NATION": Obama was elected in part to correct the illegal shameful policies of these last eight years. I'm interested in the military commission's decision. Because he sided ...

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you support him on the photos?

VANDEN HEUVEL: I don't. And I think they will come out and I think Obama could've set a clean break by saying we will never allow these policies to happen again. They should be released to a commission. That's what I think he should have said if he wanted to elide the full disclosure. But on the military commissions, he sided with the military over his Justice Department, which weighed in and said that the federal courts have a long and good tradition of safeguarding the government's national legitimate interests as well as safeguarding intelligence information and the due process of suspects.

I think that it was a mistake. And I think what he's done, President Obama, is made it harder for some of his supporters to support him. And he will need them. He will need them in the fights ahead. And he can't -- my final point, he cannot evade any longer the need for full true transparency and accountability. The momentum for a commission, a nonpartisan independent commission is so powerful at this stage.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I'm not sure that's true. If you heard those senators today ...

VANDEN HEUVEL: Well, we're not just inside the Beltway, George. I think there is interest in this country as more and more comes out if he's going to pursue what he wants to pursue in terms of his agenda.

LIZ CHENEY, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: Well, I would imagine listening to Katrina that you would agree, then, that the president ought to declassified the memos the vice president's asked for, so the American people can see the effectiveness of this program. And I think the president deserves some credit for coming to the right place on military commissions and on the photos. But I do think it gives the American people some pause to sort of have watched the stops and starts here. The president on Guantanamo second day in office announces it's going to be closed before I think he had a real understanding and a handle on what the alternatives would be and how difficult it would be.

And with the pictures, I think also, you saw again, an announcement they would be released, and then having to walk that back, and even an admission, frankly, that he hadn't looked at the pictures before announcing they'd be released. And I think on issues that have to do with national security and war and peace, the American people would like to see a little bit more consistency in terms of their commander-in-chief.

STEPHANOPOULOS: George, the White House is obviously sensitive this charge on flip-flopping, but does it matter if you're going to end up in a place where you are going to get a lot of support?

JAMES CARVILLE, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: First of all if you say my generals said I shouldn't release, it would cause a spike and the president says, OK, I won't release it. I think as George pointed out, that was something he said during the campaign. We would be awfully uncomfortable as Democrats if he were releasing these pictures tomorrow and it was these things that General Petraeus and Secretary Gates and the new commander coming into Afghanistan, General McChrystal, would've said let's don't do this. So let me tell you, as a Democrat I'm very happy that he decided to listen to his commanders. And it may very well be that as it winds its way through the courts the courts will release them anyway. I don't know.

STEPHANOPOULOS: That may be, and maybe part of the calculation is they are going to come out eventually. But we're at a critical time in Iraq now as troops are moving out of the cities, we're heading towards elections. And Afghanistan, the timing here did matter.

CARVILLE: It did. And again, you would not want to be president and have the secretary of defense and your top commanders come back and say we advise against doing this. That would make me uncomfortable and I'm a pretty good Democrat.

CHENEY: Those same people advised against doing it before the White House publicly announced they would release the photos. It's a little disingenuous to say he made the decision based on what the military commander ...

VANDEN HEUVEL: But it's also buying the military argument -- It's buying the military argument that the release of these photos will increase violence. These photos, Guantanamo, Bagram, that has been the cause for anti-Americanism and our actions, our policies in escalating in Afghanistan.

CARVILLE: I agree with you. We became infatuated with torture. We should've never done that. However, and the reason you have these photographs is because they exist. Having said all of that, if these generals come in and you're the president and he says -- they say you shouldn't do it right now.

VANDEN HEUVEL: You don't envy ...

CARVILLE: I don't envy the decision, but I'm more comfortable as a Democrat with him making this decision than another decision.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Steve, he's also facing, we saw with the senator as well today, some more controversy over Guantanamo. And this was the next big political controversy that's going to be coming down the pike for the president. He said he wants Guantanamo to close, Democrats in the House say they're not going to fund it. And now appears the Democrats in the Senate are going to say exactly the same thing and what you've got above all is a huge consensus developing in the Senate that no one wants a detainee in their own state.

SCHMIDT: Well, there are a lot of very dangerous people committed to kill Americans that are housed at Guantanamo Bay. It was a very irresponsible decision to announce the closing of the Guantanamo Bay prison before he had any idea where the detainees there were going to go.

The decision he made this week was the right decision. Katrina said he bought the military story. When an American military commander says you're going to get soldiers killed if you release these photos, commander in chief made the prudent decision, he made the right decision, and he deserves credit for it here.

More and more, though, you see over this course of his young presidency him adopting policies that he criticized on the campaign, because now he's in the real world. He's leading our country and we are a nation at war. And he is making decisions, thankfully, that are responsible with regard to the security of the country and the lives of our men and women.

STEPHANOPOULOS: One of the things you see is the president is pretty unsentimental about it. He's showing unsentimentality. He's also showing great flexibility, which is, you know, useful in a president, but he is getting criticism on this Guantanamo issue for not giving his own party cover. I mean, he's got his secretary of defense saying we're going to have to bring some of them into the States. He's got his attorney general saying we're not going to let any dangerous people into the States, but we might have to allow some detainees here, yet he's been relatively silent.

WILL: Well, you know, the supermax prisons in our country are full of Americans who have killed Americans and are perfectly safe. So the idea that we can't find a place to house these very few people who are really dangerous strikes me as preposterous.