bucy wrote:

President Obama is expected to sign executive orders Thursday directing the Central Intelligence Agency to shut what remains of its network of secret prisons and ordering the closing of the Guantánamo detention camp within a year, government officials said.

Honestly, at this point closing Gitmo is silly.

The problem with Gitmo is not the physical prison. Its that it was designed as a legal black hole. After Boumediene that is no longer the case, and so Gitmo is no longer a problem in my view.

As a prison its not a bad place to keep terrorism suspects. Its a modern facility which is physically separate from the US mainland, so you don't have to worry about escapees. Surely building a new facility and moving all of these prisoners is more expensive than keeping the place open.

At this point its closure is almost entirely symbolic, which makes it a really easy thing for Obama to do. I'm not saying symbols aren't important. But they aren't more important than Supreme Court decisions about Habeas Corpus. There is an element of partisanship in the fact that people care more about the end of the symbol than the end of the policy. Focusing on the wrong things teaches the wrong lessons about how our system works. A preferred policy by a President can be reversed by another President. Constitutional law is more concrete.

Obama has more difficult choices ahead of him.

RE: Obama to Close Foreign Prisons and Guantánamo - NYTimes.com