President Obama again backtracked in the never-ending Guantanamo saga this week. On Monday, he extended by six months the work of a task force that is looking at how Gitmo detainees should be handled, which jeopardizes his campaign promise of closing Gitmo by January. Earlier this month, he said deciding how to handle the Gitmo detainees, including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was “one of the biggest challenges of my administration.” If handling terrorists is such a major challenge for him (seems like a no-brainer here), how does he expect to handle Iran and North Korea, or the nation’s health and energy industries, for that matter? Just asking.
Also on Monday, the Obama administration said it preferred that Gitmo detainees be tried in criminal courts, but that some lower level terrorists, or those with weaker evidence against them, could be tried before military tribunals. While that process seems backwards to us, it will no doubt upset leftist civil liberties groups who want all detainees to be tried in criminal courts or, even better, traffic court. It would be entertaining to watch Obama’s naïveté continue to clash with reality if the stakes for the nation’s security were not so high.
