Spencer Ack­er­man, who con­fuses the coun­try we live in with the coun­try we want to live in, still gets it exactly right in the end:

This is the fun­da­men­tal error of Obama’s civil-​liberties back­slid­ing. The coun­try, I’d con­jec­ture, would tol­er­ate a pres­i­dent saying: You know what? Now that my team has looked in detail at all of the Guan­tanamo cases, I see that the Bush admin­is­tra­tion fucked this up even worse than I thought. We’ve been hold­ing people at Guan­tanamo on pretty flimsy evi­dence. Some of them may be bad people. Some of them may not be. Some of them are prob­a­bly pretty pissed at the U.S. for detain­ing them unjustly. But I’m not going to con­tinue to per­vert the rule of law because Bush pan­icked, as most of us did, after 9/11. And I’m really not going to do that to cover up the ini­tial error. Guess what, Amer­ica: some of these men are inno­cent, even if they’re not angels. We have to deal with that. I wish it wasn’t the case, but it is.

But instead Obama took the coward’s way out. Which is no way “out,” only a way deeper into the morass.

See also.