Friday, January 23, 2009 8:53 AM

With Gitmo Order, Obama Commits Himself To Thorny Questions

By CORINE HEGLAND

(Credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

With a few strokes of the pen Thursday morning, President Obama toppled most of his predecessor's dilapidated framework for handling prisoners from the war on terrorism. The final vestiges of "enhanced" interrogations and secret prisons, both already shrunk from their post-9/11 heyday by court order and congressional action, were swept away by an executive order putting the entire U.S. government under the interrogation standards of the U.S. Army Field Manual and prohibiting the CIA from operating detention facilities.

"It is a blanket repudiation of the Bush approach," said Elisa Massimino, the CEO and executive director of Human Rights First. She pointed in particular to the order's effective overruling of all legal advice on interrogations issued between Sept. 11, 2001, and Jan. 29, 2009, saying it "wipes away all of the barnacles that the Bush administration had accumulated over the legal standards."

A second executive order ensures that the last 250 or so detainees in Guantanamo Bay, all that remains of the approximately 770 prisoners who have been there since January 2002, will depart the island within the next 12 months. After individual case reviews, some of the detainees will go home; some, who face the possibility of torture at home, will settle in third countries; some will be prosecuted, and some may well continue their indefinite detention as enemy combatants in prisons on the soil of the continental United States.

"We are not," Obama said as he signed the orders amidst beaming retired military officers, "going to continue with a false choice between our safety and our ideals."

The slew of orders leaves quite a few questions unanswered: What, for example, will happen to prisoners like Mohammed al-Qahtani, whose torture at American hands makes prosecution difficult, but whose alleged role in the 9/11 hijacking makes his release dangerous? What about people like the Uighurs, who pose no security risk but face almost-certain persecution if they are returned to China? Or to the detainees without al-Qaeda connections whose low potential risk could be mitigated by rehabilitation and surveillance, if their countries had programs for such things?

On the other hand, none of the questions raised by Obama's executive orders are new. Over the past two years, they were all fiercely debated inside the Bush administration, which wanted to close Guantanamo, too. Obama's signatures Thursday morning simply commit him to mustering the political will necessary to find the solutions that eluded Bush.

His initial steps toward finding that solution garnered swift support from an unlikely source later that day as his former White House rival, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., issued a joint statement with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. "Numerous difficult issues remain," the Republican pair noted, but "we support President Obama's decision to close the prison at Guantanamo, reaffirm America's adherence to the Geneva Conventions and begin a process that will, we hope, lead to the resolution of all cases of Guantanamo detainees."

CORRECTION: The original version of this post misstated the date of Obama's executive orders.