WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama's order to close the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, military prison by Jan. 22 was followed by a series of mistakes and missteps by his administration that will delay the prison's closing for months, according to a report from a policy organization with close ties to the White House.

Those mistakes, which ranged from initially having too few people on board for the workload to misreading Congress, put the timetable months behind schedule and will push the prison's closure well beyond the January deadline.

The White House declined to comment on the report.

The administration is expected to announce by Monday whether it will prosecute the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and four alleged co-conspirators in a federal civilian court.

``We hope we'll see the announcement very soon on the 9/11 case, that they're going to prosecute Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the other conspirators in federal court,'' said Ken Gude, a scholar at the Center for American Progress and the author of its new report on Guantánamo. The liberal policy organization enjoys close relations with the Obama administration, which has hired several of its scholars for senior positions.

In his study, Gude said the White House made mistakes in implementing the high-profile Guantánamo policy from the very beginning.

``It was always going to be difficult, but some unforeseen obstacles were thrown in its path, and the new administration made some mistakes that have cost time and sucked energy away from the core mission of closing the prison,'' he said in the report.

Two task forces -- one set up to study the case files of the more than 200 detainees still held at the prison and the other charged with examining the overall detention policy -- fell behind almost from the start.

A key problem was that the Obama administration was hours old and didn't have enough people to follow through quickly after Obama announced the closing plan. Those who were there couldn't find needed files quickly.

``The task forces struggled right out of the gate,'' Gude said in the report.

Then, he said, they made a critical mistake by not moving quickly to move some detainees out of Guantánamo. For example, he said, the administration should've worked with the Virginia congressional delegation to smooth the way politically to release a group of Uighurs to Northern Virginia, where there's a community of the Chinese Muslims.

``They could have put that together in six to eight weeks,'' Gude said in an interview. ``It would have taken some of the sting out of the criticism of bringing them into the United States.''

With little groundwork done to move some Guantánamo detainees to the U.S. or elsewhere, the Obama administration made what Gude called its ``biggest mistake'' in April by asking Congress for $80 million to finance the prison closing.

``Asking Congress for money for Guantánamo opened the door for conservatives on Capitol Hill, and the Obama administration was caught completely off guard when they began aggressively pushing back against the funding,'' Gude said in his report.

Gude called the backlash ``ridiculous'' because it was based on the implied argument that the country's maximum security prisons couldn't hold terrorists transferred from Guantánamo and that the closing of Guantánamo thus would endanger Americans.