The international legal community has been quite vocal in condemning American treatment of POWs after 9/11, but it hasn’t evolved international law, even theoretically, to cope with this.

Whatever. The Bush administration intentionally blew off the international legal establishment. He blew off the Geneva conventions, he blew off the UN, hell, he even blew off our Constitution in the context of wiretapping and Habeas Corpus. Can you imagine the howls from the right wing if France and Germany had gotten together and come up with a set of rules for how the United States should deal with captured Al Queda? There is not a chance in hell that the Bush administration would have embraced such a thing. Blaming the "international legal community" for the situation is simply nonsensical.

Obama, for his part, continues to engage in a series of actions that seem designed to suit the prejudices of the dumbest of his supporters. There was no reason to close Gitmo, for example. The issue is not about where the physical prison is but what rules apply to people imprisoned there. Supreme Court decisions reached during the Bush years created a process for military trials of Al Queda suspects with a requirement for Habeas that applied to Gitmo. That process is mostly reasonable under the circumstances and mostly put an end to the Bush Administration's horrific attempt to ignore centuries old legal doctrine. Closing the prison is a really risky and expensive publicity stunt. So is trying a person like Mohammed in New York City. I'm not worried about these people escaping. I'm worried that an American might blow up the prison or blow up the court house.

I don't understand what the point is. Closing Gitmo doesn't actually matter. Trying Mohammed in New York doesn't actually matter either.

If Obama want to be seen as "doing something" there are all kinds of things that he could do. He could end suspicionless searches of laptops at the border. He could come clean on illegal wiretapping. He could work with members of Congress to reverse the stupid legal amnesty offered the telecoms and renew America's commitment to the rule of law. He could work with Congress to right cases of illegal rendition like Maher Arar. He could engage the international legal community in a long term process to establish norms for handling terrorist suspects.

There are all kinds of things that could be done that have actual substance. Unfortunately, this guy appears to prefer theater, which is not something that I expected from a law professor, but something that we'll have to live with, I guess. But if one of these theatrical stunts goes sideways it'll be mincemeat for the left, and we'll go back to being governed by people who have absolutely no respect for the ancient foundations of western democracy.