Obama took office thinking all the right things, I assume. He was going to close Gitmo, now he won't. He was going to reverse the Bush detention doctrines, now he won't. And on, and on.

So what accounts for it. His already running for a second term so he's afraid to get out in front of any real issues. Gays in the military, maybe next term. (You understand guys, wink wink.) Gitmo transfers to the US, yeah maybe next term. On and on.

Then if he gets reelected he's lame duck and everyone else is thinking of runnning for president. I think Howard Dean has it right, nothing changes in DC nor has it ever changed.

Remember guys, the liberties we had never came from Congress, they came from the Supreme Court. Don't count on Congress to do anything of importance in those areas. Never had, never will.

It's just too bad we could not elect someone who took office and said to himself (can't tell anyone) "it's only going to be one term and I'm going to bring America back to where it should be. I'm not going to let those terrorist bastards destroy the liberties we had." I thought Obama was that guy but right now he's looking like the guy that sold me the shit box car I own.

It's up the Bush Administration,and now the Obama Administration to define words, and NPR's ( & other "journalists") job to adopt those definitions unchallenged? Sheez!!! She actually said that!? Had to listen to it twice, to make sure I heard that.

Re the latest proposed travesty,( as I said back in '01) somebody should inform these depraved a-holes that Kafka didn't intend to write a #!&^#@!!! how-to manual.

the direction Obama is going in is so much worse than i could have ever imagined. i don't understand it and i am sickened by it. why why why?

I am horrified. I thought that we had elected a president who would do the right thing. It is becoming more and more difficult to get through the obfuscation and bureacracy to find out what is really going on within our government. Obama is no better than Bush--and that is very difficult for me to say.

Where are all the "Let's just give him a chance. He has a lot on his plate, so let's give him some time." people are.

There is a way that this policy could make some kind of sense, at least in the abstract. If we're at war, and these people were fighting in that war, then they're POW's. As POW's, they have rights under the Geneva Convention. In the case where they may also have committed crimes, then they could be tried in a court of law; and in that case they have a right to due process as criminal defendants. But if you fail to convict them in a court of law, or if you can't even make a good faith effort to try them in a court of law, they are still POWs. You can still hold them until there is peace. That has nothing to do with due process; that's just war. If you're against war, okay, I respect that; but if you accept that there can be war, then, holding POWs is far from the worst thing we do in a war.

None of this would allow torture. In fact, mistreatment that nobody would call torture, but is still mistreatment, is not allowed by the Geneva Convention. So where all this falls down is when it confronts the reality of how these people have already been handled -- the Bush administration set out from the beginning to violate the Geneva Convention, and it also never intended to give these people due process in a legal trial. Honorable officers resigned over it. The offense is rank — it smells to heaven.

But so what do we do now with people who really are combatants, irregular as they may be, or who really are criminals -- for instance, who helped carry out the attack on the World Trade Center? Having tortured them, having contaminated any evidence that may ever have existed, we can't in good faith try them in a real court of law. But if they were part of that attack — which reasonably could be said to qualify as war, as a crime, and as a war crime — then can't we hold them as POWs until we can reach some kind of peace, or some kind of justice, or both?

I don't respect the double-shuffle or the hypocrisy any more than anyone else does, and the torture is plainly a crime in its own right. But it's also true that somebody planned and abetted the mass murder of more than 3,000 innocent people in the World Trade Center. Our government has the right to respond to that crime.

What the Bush administration did was wrong — on its face. But the Obama administration didn't do that. Now they have to decide what to do now. So give them an answer. What is it? Let everybody go? That seems irresponsible. Would that make things right? What will make things right? It's easy to be outraged in this situation. It's not so easy to be responsible.

somehow freedom and liberty have been conveniently suspended, either by the marriage of the industrial-military systems that we were warned about, or an equivalent of the so-called "Illuminati" pulling the strings of whoever becomes President.

i won't be a registered Democrat much longer and i would strongly encourage any registered Dem or Republican to abandon their party affiliation. we are not being served.

i wonder if there is any hope of change via a 3rd, 4th or 5th political party?

I understand and respect the president's decision to...embrace the same policies of indefinite detention and denial of due process that made the Bush-Cheney administration so effective in preventing another terror attack. I support those policies because as illegal enemy combatants, terrorists have no right to due process.

Falgy asks; "why, why, why?"

I'm interested in what you all think as to why obama is doing this.

What's his motivation?