President Odubya Crashes And Burns On Gitmo

President Obama's first major promise upon taking office was to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  Two years later his failure to close Gitmo is now complete.

President Barack Obama will allow new military terror trials of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, the White House announced Monday. But Obama's statement said that the U.S. "will continue to draw on all aspects of our justice system" -- including federal courts -- to handle terrorism cases.

The announcement comes more than two years after Obama signed an executive order order Guantanamo Bay to close by January 2010. A White House fact sheet acknowledged that in recent months, "some in Congress have sought to undermine" the process developed by the Departments of Justice and Defense to "determine which system - military or civilian - is most appropriate based on the nature of the evidence and traditional principles of prosecution."

The White House said it would continue to "vigorously defend the authority of the Executive to make these well- informed prosecution decisions, both with respect to those detainees in our custody at Guantanamo and those we may apprehend in the future."

"A one-size-fits-all policy for the prosecution of suspected terrorists, whether for past or future cases, undermines our Nation's counterterrorism efforts and harms our national security," the White House fact sheet said.

Granted, a fair amount of blame for this goes straight to Democrats in Congress who not only abandoned the President on closing Gitmo, bt did everything they could to undermine and reverse the promise out of abject fear of "escaped prisoners blowing up nursery schools" even though America continues to safely house terrorists in US prisons on US soil.

Congress was even more afraid of the world finding out more about Bush-era abuses of power after 9/11 too.  But that included President Obama, who soon found himself not only emulating President Bush on civil liberties failures, but expanding them into national permanence.

So two years later, here we are, right back where we were in 2008:  prisoners held without due process or hope of due process, detained indefinitely without trial at the whim of the President, and kangaroo court military tribunals used to "process" the rest.  We have learned precisely nothing, other than President Obama has completely reversed his first promise upon taking office.

I like President Obama personally.  I like many of his policies.  But on this he has utterly and completely failed the American people, and that's something I'm not going to forget...or forgive.  At some point in the future Gitmo will have to be closed, but the President who does it will never be Barack Obama.