Its not clear to me why the NYT chose today to publish those two Gitmo editorials.

They are an important reminder of why it was wrong for the US to operate a policy of detaining people apprehended anywhere in the world forever without so much as a habeas hearing.

But why today? What are the politics behind the timing?

Perhaps its a reminder that Obama promised to close Gitmo and hasn't. Frankly, a continued advocacy of this is stupid - it doesn't matter where the prison is. Whats important are the policies that apply there.

Since Boumediene's case we've got Habeas hearings. Since then, honestly, I've seen the detention issue as having been resolved. What else do you want?

Greenwald is claiming that since Boumediene Obama is routing suspects to Bagram in order to avoid Habeas review, but its not clear that such a loophole actually exists.

The government couldn't have transferred them to Bagram for the express purpose of avoiding habeas review. In fact, the court implies that had the government done that in this case, they might have ruled differently, and they might do so in the future should a case of that nature reach them. "Perhaps such manipulation by the Executive might constitute an additional factor in some case in which it is in fact present."

Greenwald raises other concerns about drone strikes and dishonest partisan enforcement by liberal activists that are much more difficult to dismiss... (Emphasis mine.)

Thus, so goes this reasoning, to demand that issues like indefinite detention and civilian deaths be prioritized in assessing the presidential race is to subordinate the importance of other issues such as abortion, gay equality, and domestic civil rights enforcement on which Obama and the Democrats are better. Many of these commentators strongly imply, or now even outright state, that only white males are willing to argue for such a prioritization scheme because the de-prioritized issues do not affect them...

...it’s much easier to... insist on their de-prioritization in favor of other policies because their white, non-Muslim privilege means that they aren’t the ones who are going to be indefinitely detained, assassinated without due process, or have their homes and children targeted with drones and cluster bombs.

But, these things aren't really about detention policy, unless you reckon we're doing more drone strikes because if we captured people we'd have to explain why in court, and even the most shrill voices aren't going there as far as I've seen.

On the other hand, conservatives, to a man, seem to have completely forgotten their vocal opposition to habeas hearings for terrorism suspects and their protests over the Bush Administration's loss in Boumediene's case. They are now claiming these policies as their own!

Enemy combatants will get their day in court but won't be treated as common criminals who can invoke Miranda rights.

And guess what: That sound you don't hear is the lack of a political uproar. The U.S. seems to have arrived at a political consensus that is far closer to the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld rules than their critics want to admit.

Are you fucking kidding me?!

The only thing that could possibly be more infuriating than the years and years of conservative arguments against granting habeas hearings to terrorism suspects is for them to claim, and worse, truly believe, now that they've finally, totally lost those arguments, that they supported granting those hearings all along.

The reason that conservatives are able to get away with this astonishing act of historical revisionism is, of course, that the liberals were unwilling to declare victory upon winning Boumediene. Unwilling, of course, because liberals didn't care about winning on the substantive question of detention policy so much as they cared about winning the election of 2008. The decision was handed down in June, too early in the election season for liberals to celebrate something they believed was motivating people to vote for their candidate. It needed to still be broken so they could win in the ballot box instead of a court room. Closing Gitmo would have given them a phony symbolic victory, after the election when they were willing to celebrate. But reality set in, and the prison is still open, as it should be.

So liberals are still waiting for a victory celebration handed to them by a President who isn't the solution to the problem they have, and conservatives have claimed the moral high ground after taking the wrong side of the most important political question of the decade and loosing.