In his interview with George Stephanopoulos today, Obama hedged on several issues related to Bush’s War on Terror. With regard to shutting down Gitmo, Stephanopoulos asked Obama twice if it would be shut down within Obama’s first 100 days. Such a closure would signal that it was a top priority and that Obama was serious about returning to the rule of law and repairing our reputation in the world.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You also agreed on Guantanamo when you say you want to shut it down. You say you’re still going to shut it down. Is it turning out to be harder than you expected, will you get that done in the first 100 days?

OBAMA: It is more difficult than I think a lot of people realize and we are going to get it done but part of the challenge that you have is that you have a bunch of folks that have been detained, many of whom who may be very dangerous who have not been put on trial or have not gone through some adjudication. And some of the evidence against them may be tainted even though it’s true. And so how to balance creating a process that adheres to rule of law, habeas corpus, basic principles of Anglo American legal system, by doing it in a way that doesn’t result in releasing people who are intent on blowing us up.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So not necessarily first 100 days.

OBAMA: That’s a challenge. I think it’s going to take some time and our legal teams are working in consultation with our national security apparatus as we speak to help design exactly what we need to do. But I don’t want to be ambiguous about this. We are going to close Guantanamo and we are going to make sure that the procedures we set up are ones that abide by our constitution. That is not only the right thing to do but it actually has to be part of our broader national security strategy because we will send a message to the world that we are serious about our values.

So no, Obama will not close Guantanamo in his first 100 days and the appropriate conclusions can be drawn by us and the world. And while Obama repeats the old inflammatory rhetoric that many of these are very dangerous people intent on “blowing us up,” here are the facts as best we know them. There are currently some 250 detainees at Gitmo. Of these only about 20 have been charged with anything and the government has indicated that it might like to charge at most 80. Even if we accept the higher number, it is simply untrue that our courts and our prison system could not accommodate them. Our court system has handled terrorist cases in the past and if anything these prosecutions have shown that the bar for conviction before an American jury is extraordinarily low. As for those not charged, they should be treated for the damage done them by their incarceration. Their home countries should be pressured into accepting them and their situations should be monitored to see they are not abused. For some like the Uighurs, either they should be released to third countries or failing that to the United States. Obama’s delay on closing Guantanamo, his raising spurious obstacles convey the very opposite of the message he wishes to send to the rest of the world that “we are serious about our values.”

Stephanopoulos also asked Obama if he would investigate and prosecute those who broke the law under the Bush Administration. Stephanopoulos asked him this three times. The first time was with reference to the proposal for a special prosecutor from Obama’s own website:

STEPHANOPOULOS: The most popular question on your own website is related to this. On change.gov it comes from Bob Fertik of New York City and he asks, "Will you appoint a special prosecutor ideally Patrick Fitzgerald to independently investigate the greatest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping."

OBAMA: We’re still evaluating how we’re going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth. And obviously we’re going to be looking at past practices and I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. And part of my job is to make sure that for example at the CIA, you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering (ph).

Obama repeated the line about moving forward 4 times in all:

my instinct is for us to focus on how do we make sure that moving forward we are doing the right thing. That doesn’t mean that if somebody has blatantly broken the law, that they are above the law. But my orientation’s going to be to move forward.

And

my general belief is that when it comes to national security, what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed looking at what we got wrong in the past

So while Obama maintains he doesn’t think anyone is above the law he makes it clear that he isn’t actually that interested in pursuing those who broke the law under Bush. And what does “blatantly broken the law” mean? Is this some new prosecutorial standard? And even if you accepted this wacky notion, how can breaking the law on torture and domestic spying not fall under the “blatant” rubric? How can you have the rule of law if it is to be such a sometime thing? How can you deter future illegal conduct if you sanction it now?

Although it was the first of the topics I am treating here discussed in the interview, I thought I would close with it because I found it so telling. Stephanopoulos plays a tape of Dick Cheney saying:

Before you start to implement your campaign rhetoric you need to sit down and find out precisely what it is we did and how we did it. Because it is going to be vital to keeping the nation safe and secure in the years ahead and it would be a tragedy if they threw over those policies simply because they’ve campaigned against them

And what is Obama’s reply?

I think that was pretty good advice, which is I should know what’s going on before we make judgments and that we shouldn’t be making judgments on the basis of incomplete information or campaign rhetoric. So, I’ve got no quibble with that particular quote. I think if Vice President Cheney were here he and I would have some significant disagreements on some things that we know happened.

Yes, folks, Obama is taking advice from Cheney himself. That really is change we can believe in, isn’t it? But wait, you say, he also said he disagreed with Cheney on a lot of things. But what things precisely?

For example, Vice President Cheney I think continues to defend what he calls extraordinary measures or procedures when it comes to interrogations and from my view waterboarding is torture. I have said that under my administration we will not torture.

Of course, the Bush Administration too has said it does not torture. And the rejection of waterboarding is a difference although it is only one of many torture techniques. But does this mean that Obama will push for all government agencies, including the CIA, to adhere to the interrogation techniques permitted by the Army Field Manual? Well no.

I’m not going to lay out a particular program because again, I thought that Dick Cheney’s advice was good, which is let’s make sure we know everything that’s being done.

So even on torture, Obama waffles. If Obama was seriously opposed to torture, it would have cost him nothing to point out that A)torture does not work and that B)the guidelines of the Army Field Manual sounded reasonable to him. Instead he thinks it would be a good idea to follow the advice of the most evil and twisted Vice President in our history, and he says this twice just in case we might think it was a slip of the tongue. To this I say, do we really need to wait until January 20th or later before we can begin to assess what Obama says and does? And would we be so reticent and hesitant if this were oh say, George Bush?