This article from Nick Baumann at Mother Jones is filled with political-insider information, but I think it is a significant marker of how the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility has moved from an Obama pledge in January 2009 to a site for internal Administration struggle in November.

I learned several weeks ago that the Administration’s top lawyer, Gregory Craig, was going to leave or be pushed out the door, in part because his political position was fixed to the promise to shut Gitmo. I was always sceptical, given the politics of the War on Terror, that the deadline of January 2010 was going to be met, so it was no surprise that Craig would have to walk the plank.

Britain’s Role in Pakistan Torture: Video and Human Rights Watch Report

The broader issue is that we are now in a mish-mash of measures. There will be trials in the US for a few detainees (such as 9-11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammad) whom the Administration is sure will be convicted without the use of lost or discredited (i.e., obtained “via duress”) evidence. There will be military commissions for about 75 detainees whose convictions cannot be assured. And the rest of the prisoners will remain in the limbo of a Guantanamo that is open well into 2010.

Liberals have not done enough public wrestling with Massimo Calabresi and Michael Weisskopf’s Time article on the ouster of White House counsel Gregory Craig. Perhaps that’s because they don’t want to deal with the article’s troubling implications. As Kevinexplains, Craig was “the White House lawyer tasked with dismantling Bush-era interrogation and detention policies. At first, Obama was on board with Craig’s plans.  Then, reality set in.”
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