Obama's broken Guantanamo promises.

• Author: Isaac, Gary A.
• Position: From 'Obama's Guantanamo: Stories from an Enduring Prison' - Reprint

Barack Obama's first official act in office addressed not the economy or health care but Guantanamo. In a moment of high drama, surrounded by a phalanx of retired military brass, the president signed a series of executive orders acknowledging that "the individuals currently detained at Guantanamo have the constitutional privilege of the writ of habeas corpus," providing that the executive branch would undertake "a prompt and thorough review" of whetherthe "continued detention" ofthe men at Guantanamo "is in the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and in the interests of justice," and ordering that "the detention facilities at Guantanamo...shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no laterthan 1 year from the date of this order." Obama issued a separate executive order banning the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," i.e., torture.

As far as Guantanamo was concerned, those executive orders would representthe high-water mark ofthe Obama presidency. The first year of his administration was noteworthy not forthe closure of Guantanamo but for a series of unilateral actions that were starkly at odds with the president's rhetorical defense of habeas corpus and that doomed his much-heralded directive to close the island facility:

* The Obama administration caved on its plan to resettle two ofthe Uyghur detainees in the United States. In its first months, the Obama administration had reached an agreement with habeas counsel for the Uyghur detainees--members of a persecuted minority group in China--to resettle two of their clients in the Washington, D.C., area, where there was an existing Uyghur-American community ready to help the detainees with jobs, housing, and other support. But in mid-2009, only a few days before their scheduled arrival, word ofthe plan was leaked. In the face of opposition by some members of Congress, the Obama administration walked away from the agreement.

* The Obama administration argued, as previously the Bush administration had done, that the courts have no authority to order the president to release detainees here, even if there is no basis to continue to detain them and even if they present no security risk. In the waning days ofthe Bush administration, the district court that was hearing the Uyghurdetainees' habeas cases ruled in theirfavor and ordered their release into the United States. The Bush administration immediately appealed, and in February 2009, just after Obama...