Greenwald nails it

On Obama's "centrism":

After all, this is someone who, upon arriving in the Senate, sought out Joe Lieberman as his mentor, supported Lieberman over Ned Lamont in the primary, campaigned for Blue Dogs against progressive challengers, and has long paid homage to the Beltway centrism and post-partisan religion. And you can't very well place someone in a high-ranking position who explicitly advocates rendition and enhanced interrogation tactics and then simultaneously lead the way in criminally investigating those who authorized those same tactics.

The latter reference goes to CIA vet John Brennan, now a key adviser on the war on terror.

Obama is subtly backing down on his promise to close Gitmo. He says he will close the place, but that he will do so slowly, in order to assure that "people who want to blow us up" are not released.

In fact, nearly all of the detainees in Gitmo were scooped up under a foolish "paid informant" program. In the desperately poor nation of Afghanistan, villagers fingered the innocent in order to earn a year's income. Actual terrorists (along with some not-so-actual terrorists) were rendered to facilities outside U.S. soil.

Of course, the people interred at Gitmo probably want to blow us up now. That's the problem.

Obama's reversal-that-is-not-a-reversal will probably surprise and shock most Obots, which is why neither Kos nor DU are now allowing their readers to hear the news. I, for one, am not surprised. Greenwald again:

There are detainees who the U.S. may not be able to convict in a court of law. Why not? Because the evidence that we believe establishes their guilt was obtained by torture, and it is therefore likely inadmissible in our courts (torture-obtained evidence is inadmissible in all courts in the civilized world; one might say it's a defining attribute of being civilized). But Obama wants to detain them anyway -- even though we can't convict them of anything in our courts of law. So before he can close Guantanamo, he wants a new, special court to be created -- presumably by an act of Congress -- where evidence obtained by torture (confessions and the like) can be used to justify someone's detention and where, presumably, other safeguards are abolished. That's what he means when he refers to "creating a process."

That said, I recognize that Obama has no good options here. If any released former inmate at Gitmo were to join the Taliban -- and can you blame those who itch to do just that? -- the GOP would shout that Bush's atrocious policies have been justified.