President Obama is considering indefinite detention for some of the Guantánamo prisoners, according to a new Wall Street Journal report. Not good.
Is he continuing to backpedal on campaign promises, or was he intentionally vague in the first place? Weren’t we led to believe that the closing of Gitmo would be closely followed by finally trying all the detainees and either releasing them or imposing appropriate sentences?
After all, it hasn’t been so much a matter of where those “enemy combatants” were being held as how they were being held — without charges, without trial, indefinitely.
Closing Gitmo will be meaningless if the detainees aren’t afforded the fair, legal treatment they’ve been denied until now. Without proper trials, we aren’t solving the problem, we’re simply moving it. The world will not be fooled.
I think he has now realized that governing is not as easy as it appears to be. Maybe history will be kind to Mr. Bush.
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Few things in life are ever as simple as they appear to be. There are probably a lot of considerations here that Obama wasn’t even entitled to know about until after he became president. It’s hard to condemn someone for changing his mind when presented with new and compelling information. I’m just disappointed that closing Gitmo might not include long-delayed justice for the prisoners. Bush himself spoke often of “bringing the terrorists to justice.” It’s time to get it done.