Here is a recent Reuters news item by http:/www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/07/us-guantanamo-idUSTRE7265KL20110307″>Patricia Zengerie:

“President Barack Obama lifted a two-year freeze on new military trials at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and suggested on Monday Congress was hurting national security by blocking his attempts to move some trials into U.S. civilian courts.”

Zengerie fails to note that from January 2009 to January 2011, the president had a huge majority in the House and, until February 2010, a filibuster-proof Senate, as we saw with the president’s success in ramming through the health-care bill. The reason why Obama did not close down Guantanamo must be either that he did not pursue the effort with the same zeal as the health-care initiative, or that too many Democrats opposed the move, or that Obama himself quietly accepted the reality that Guantanamo was useful and therefore could be left both open and occasionally lamented.

Likewise, Eric Holder is free at any time to resume his efforts to hold civilian trials, as once loudly proclaimed, for terrorists, among them the long-promised prosecution of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the purported architect of 9/11.

The tribunals join a long list of protocols that, as a state and federal legislator, Barack Obama once demonized as anti-constitutional — Guantanamo, renditions, Predator drones, preventive detention, the Patriot Act. And they can be added to other areas in which the president has done a complete reversal from his earlier impassioned declarations, given changing political realities, from recess appointments and filibusters to up-or-down votes on judicial nominees and public financing of campaigns.

In matters of national security, conservatives don’t know whether to be relieved that Obama has now largely kept intact all the Bush protocols — albeit with new euphemisms of the “man-caused disasters” sort — or to be angry that, when he was not our chief executive responsible for the nation’s security, he demagogued those necessary tools for short-term political purposes and so helped to harm the reputation of the United States at a critical juncture between 2001 and 2008.

By the same token, liberals who used to cite tribunals as proof of the satanic Bush-Cheney nexus will be further embarrassed by their silence at the resumption of these trials — suggesting that all the docudramas, novels, protests, movies, and speeches about Bush’s diabolic Guantanamo, renditions, wiretaps, tribunals, Predators, etc. were never really about constitutional principles at all. The angst, as we see in the erstwhile furor now gone mute, was mostly about power and the desire to gain and hold it.