Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times had a Saturday op-ed on the hope-and-changeyness of Team Obama, specifically on the issue of detainee rights. I guess he submitted the piece before the Friday announcement that terrorists at Bagram have no constitutional protections. An excerpt:

Speaking to an audience composed mainly of CIA employees — who reportedly responded enthusiastically — Biden pointed out that President Obama already has “issued an executive order to reverse the policies that in my view and the view of many in this agency caused America to fall short of its founding principles, and which gave Al Qaeda a powerful recruiting tool.”
Biden said the U.S. was closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, setting a single standard across the government for interrogation rules and ensuring Red Cross access to detainees. “We will use force if necessary, but we will engage in aggressive and active diplomacy,” he said. “And we’ll be true to our own values.”
Panetta, the former Monterey-area congressman and White House chief of staff, responded in kind, saying, “I want to perform our job with integrity and with respect for the laws and for the Constitution that we are all pledged to uphold.”
In other words, no more torture, no more secret prisons, no more indefinite incarceration without charges, access to counsel or recourse to established courts.

The Biden and Panetta quotes are from the February 19. Could they have been out of the loop on the Bagram decision?

Rutten continues. . .

One of the most inexplicable things about the Bush/Cheney clique’s utter disregard of those values was that we have our own examples of the legal system’s competency to deal with jihadi criminality right here in the United States. Since 1996, another jihadi preacher, the “blind sheik,” Omar Abdel Rahman, has been serving a life sentence after he and nine of his associates were convicted of seditious conspiracy for plotting attacks in New York and for their role in the first World Trade Center bombing. The mastermind of that attack, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef — who happens to be Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s nephew — was arrested in Pakistan, extradited to New York and sentenced in 1998 to life in prison without parole. (According to some media reports, he’s since converted to Christianity.)

The obvious conclusion: Put Andy McCarthy in charge!