Um..hello? Obama voted to re-enact the Patriot Act (along with almost all of his Democrat buddies).
It looks like he might flip on Guantanamo too, to top it off.
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.
You can’t do it. That’s all we have heard from the close Guantanamo crowd for years. Obama never gave any indication of such thinking during the last couple of years while campaigning for the presidency. Obama 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.Now that he is going to be in charge Obama has to live with these decisions and not just complain from the sidelines.
Criticizing is easy.
"Ruling?"
Not so much, not so much.
I suspect Obama will only add some window dressing to the existing Gitmo policy. I could be wrong, but if I am not, I would love to see the comments of some of the posters here in a couple of years. I doubt they will be as critical as they are now.
BTS