Obama Will Not Close Gitmo After All?

Suddenly, civil liberty lawyers, the NY Times, and Barack himself are adopting the Bush doctrine. 

Perhaps sniping from the sidelines was easier than facing the complexity of reality.

As a presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama sketched the broad outlines of a plan to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba: try detainees in American courts and reject the Bush administration’s military commission system.

Now, as Mr. Obama moves closer to assuming responsibility for Guantánamo, his pledge to close the detention center is bringing to the fore thorny questions under consideration by his advisers. They include where Guantánamo’s detainees could be held in this country, how many might be sent home and a matter that people with ties to the Obama transition team say is worrying them most: What if some detainees are acquitted or cannot be prosecuted at all?

That concern is at the center of a debate among national security, human rights and legal experts that has intensified since the election. Even some liberals are arguing that to deal realistically with terrorism, the new administration should seek Congressional authority for preventive detention of terrorism suspects deemed too dangerous to release even if they cannot be successfully prosecuted.

“You can’t be a purist and say there’s never any circumstance in which a democratic society can preventively detain someone,” said one civil liberties lawyer, David D. Cole, a Georgetown law professor who has been a critic of the Bush administration.

Huh? I seem to remember the majority of liberals arguing that if we can not give Constitutional rights to terrorists, try or release them, then the terrorist had already won. I’m not the only one remembering this rhetoric. Ed Morrisey recalls as well:

That’s all we’ve heard from the close-Gitmo crowd for the last seven years. Indefinite detention supposedly violates American values, we’re losing the war if we adapt to the threat against us, blah blah blah. Certainly Barack Obama never gave any indication of nuanced thinking along the lines of indefinite detention during the last two years while campaigning for the presidency. In fact, Obama made the absolutist case that Cole now belatedly rejects in June 2007:

“While we’re at it,” he said, “we’re going to close Guantanamo. And we’re going to restore habeas corpus. … We’re going to lead by example _ by not just word but by deed. That’s our vision for the future.

If Obama keeps Gitmo open, will there be a nut-roots revolt? Imagine the possiblity that Bush isn’t actually Hitler, but had inside information and many expert advisors that fretted over this issue with fine combs. Imagine they busted brains balancing liberty and national security behind the scenes. That would be crazy, huh?