Obama: Gee, this Gitmo thing is more complicated than I thought

I razzed Team Obama over their newfound appreciation of the nuances of closing Gitmo back in November. Now, we are hearing it from the Messiah directly.
This morning on ABC’s Sunday show, he admitted that his recklessly simplistic promise to the nutroots to shut down the detention facility had run into some barriers.
Namely: Reality.
When he says “a lot of people,” he means himself.
President-elect Barack Obama said this weekend that he does not expect to close Guantanamo Bay in his first 100 days in office.
“I think it’s going to take some time and our legal teams are working in consultation with our national security apparatus as we speak to help design exactly what we need to do,” Obama said in an exclusive “This Week” interview with George Stephanopoulos, his first since arriving in Washington.
“It is more difficult than I think a lot of people realize,” the president-elect explained. “Part of the challenge that you have is that you have a bunch of folks that have been detained, many of whom may be very dangerous who have not been put on trial or have not gone through some adjudication. And some of the evidence against them may be tainted even though it’s true. And so how to balance creating a process that adheres to rule of law, habeas corpus, basic principles of Anglo-American legal system, by doing it in a way that doesn’t result in releasing people who are intent on blowing us up.”
Like I said two months ago: Nothing clarifies the mind like a jihadi boomerang.
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The pages you link to don’t exactly support your conclusion.
The uighur detainees you seem to be intent on portraying as innocent bystanders who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time were actually islamic militants receiving paramilitary training at a camp funded by Al Q’aeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The reason their status as enemy combatants was denied by the court is because the uighurs claimed they planned to use their training to kill chicoms, not Americans (even though uighurs have waged jihad as part of the Al Q’aeda terrorist network in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Uzbekistan, where not a single chicom is to be found.)
No actually the above is a perfect example of what I am talking about. I have absolutely no issue with these people being initially detained. The soldiers that did so certainly had more than sufficient reason to. My issue is with the fact that after it was determined that these five were innocent of any threat to US interests, they were still detained. But that does not mean in anyway I second guess the decision of the soldiers.
Good for Obama. Maybe he’s starting to realize what he’s gotten himself into, and is trying to Do The Right Thing for once.
But there’s a bunch of moonbats out there that are going to be VERY disappointed.
How long before we start hearing screeching about “failed Bush-Obama policies”? (You just know Bush is gonna get blamed in there somewhere…)
I beg to differ. Perhaps “the above” is a perfect example of what you meant to talk about, but prior to the post to which I am responding, the innocence of the accused enemy combatants was the basis for your objections to their continued detainment (they were involved in any terrorist activities at all, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, they weren’t captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan so they weren’t terrorists at all, as though no terrorists fled the battlefield after the U.S. toppled the taliban.)
Now, the relationship between the acknowledged terrorist activities of the detainees (the detained uighurs are all affiliated with Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement and all trained in al q’aeda and taliban funded teror camps in Afghanistan) and the immediacy of the threat these activities pose to the strategic interests of the U.S. is suddenly what matters most:
The part I emphasized represents a new wrinkle added to your argument. I looked back over your previous posts on this thread and found no previous annunciation of this standard, just an assertion of the presumed innocence of the detainees (as though enemy combatants are entitled to habeas corpus.) So your links were off the mark.
Regardless, the court’s decision in boumediene is not a cut-and-dry case of simply applying an established precedent to a highly analogous case. The decision as to what constitutes a threat to U.S. interests is a political one, not a legal one. That’s why the handling of enemy combatants properly falls under the jurisdiction of the executive and not the judiciary.