Here is the Washington Post headline:

Obama Starts Reversing Bush Policies
Guantanamo Order Readied; Lobbying Rules Tightened

And here’s the first sentence of the story that supposedly reflects the headline by Michael D. Shear:

President Obama moved swiftly yesterday to begin rolling back eight years of his predecessor’s policies, ordering tough new ethics rules and preparing to issue an order closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which has been at the center of the debate over the treatment of U.S. prisoners in the campaign against terrorism.”

And here’s the problem from the very beginning: “Tough new ethics rules” doesn’t quite reflect current reality: Bush signed a lot of ethics legislation (including the Sarbanes-Oxley Wall Street reform) and, compared to past administrations, his was probably the most free administration of scandal and ethical lapses of any in a quarter century.

In contrast, before Obama even set foot in office, his Commerce-secretary designate bowed out due to ethical problems; his attorney general gave deer-in-the-headlights conflicting testimony about why he once was instrumental in pardoning a felon on the FBI’s most-wanted list who gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to his boss’s various appendages (ditto convicted Puerto Rican terrorists); and his Treasury nominee who would oversee the nation’s revenue can’t seem to explain simply and honestly why he skipped out on thousands of dollars in overdue taxes; Obama’s own staff (we are still awaiting the hundreds of hours of Blago tapes) may well have been engaged in unsavory horse-trading over their preferred choices for Obama’s own former Senate seat, and the governor of his state who was endorsed by Obama is in trouble with a federal prosecutor. Again, there is need for some balance and perspective on contemporary politics and casting the first stone…

Meanwhile on Guantanamo: Who can sort out how many released terrrorists have returned to the battlefield, or exactly what is an unlawful combatant, or what is ‘out of uniform’ mean these days in war, etc.? The point is not to take cheap shots at Obama, but simply to suggest that he empathize with the sort of lose/lose/lose choices that led to Guantanamo in the first place. (One trial where a 9/11 planner is let go by a nullifcating-juror, or one fresh mass murderer caught who was a Gitmo veteran–and suddenly erstwhile constitutional purists join the mob, howling “how could you do that to us!”)

Ordering Guantanamo to be readied for closure “within a year” is not closing Guantanamo, but once again simply a continuation of Bush’s existing drawn-out non-policy (cf. Bush’s June 21, 2006, declaration “I’d like to end Guantanamo. I’d like it to be over with.”).

But the rub is not planning, wanting, ordering, or readying Guantanamo for closure, but closing it and thereby either releasing, trying, incarcerating elsewhere, or deporting the inmates, many of whom are responsible for serial murdering, and a few for the planning of 9/11 (thus the need for a “task force” instead of a simple close-down this supposedly Constitutional-shredding embarrassment). So keeping it open or closing it—it’s a lose/lose proposition for any “decider” (as in recent stopping trials for suspects whom we once insisted were unfairly being treated by waiting indeterminately in limbo—for trials).

Guantanamo is better hoped and changed away by instead voting present via something like “readying an order to close Guantanamo a year from now”–sorta, hopefully, kinda.