Now it's complicated

As I pointed out before, no matter how much President-elect Obama wants to close the facility at Guantanamo Bay, it's not as easy to do as it is to say. There is reason why it exists: people captured on a battlefield are not the same as people committing crimes in the US. And yet, they can be just as dangerous, if not more so, to the American people.

Mr Obama has clearly come to this conclusion as well.

Mr. Obama has repeatedly said he wants to close the camp. But in an interview on Sunday on ABC, he indicated that the process could take time, saying, “It is more difficult than I think a lot of people realize.” Closing it within the first 100 days of his administration, he said, would be “a challenge.”

In the face of criticisms from his Left "who said his remarks suggested that closing Guantánamo was not among the new administration’s highest priorities" once he becomes President he "plans to issue an executive order on his first full day in office directing the closing of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba" which will mostly be a symbolic gesture.

Now, he has Senator Patrick Leahy covering for him, in a way that Leahy would never have considered doing for President Bush. But the situation hasn't changed, only the President has. In an interview today with NPR (it's near the end of the audio clip) Leahy said (and I'm paraphrasing slightly because there is no transcript):

Most will be easy to dispense with. We come down to a small core who one, we know they're very dangerous, we don't know how we came by the information and third other countries don't want them.

Well no kidding. This is precisely the argument Bush has made over and over again. And one which Senator leahy was never before receptive to. In June 2006 President Bush said

I'd like to close Guantanamo, but I also recognize that we're holding some people that are darn dangerous, and that we better have a plan to deal with them in our courts. And the best way to handle -- in my judgment, handle these types of people is through our military courts. And that's why we're waiting on the Supreme Court to make a decision.

Part of closing Guantanamo is to send some folks back home, like we've been doing. And the State Department is in the process of encouraging countries to take the folks back. Of course, sometimes we get criticized for sending some people out of Guantanamo back to their home country because of the nature of the home country. It's a little bit of a Catch-22. But we're working through this.

No question, Guantanamo sends a signal to some of our friends -- provides an excuse, for example, to say the United States is not upholding the values that they're trying to encourage other countries to adhere to. And my answer to them is, is that we are a nation of laws and rule of law. These people have been picked up off the battlefield and they're very dangerous. And so we have that balance between customary justice, the typical system, and one that will be done in the military courts. And that's what we're waiting for.

In response to the Supreme Court's decision in Boumediene v. Bush, Leahy said

...the Supreme Court did the right thing in the detainee case upholding the great writ of habeas corpus," he insisted, to sustained applause. "When I heard the decision, I wondered 'Why do we have to have a 5-4 decision in the Supreme Court to uphold habeas corpus in the United States?' It should be unanimous."

Of course, now that Guantanamo Bay is Obama and the Democrat's problem, the solution is not so obvious. Now Leahy says of Obama about Guantanamo

He has to be careful...

But that's not how he counseled President Bush.