Inheriting Gitmo

Jonathan Mahler knows that shutting down the camp won't be easy:

Obama's flexibility to handle the remaining detainees as he sees fit will be constrained by the manner in which they have been treated while in U.S. custody. Remember that Hamdan was chosen as the first defendant for the military commissions in large part because the prosecution thought it has a "clean" case against himand yet on the very first day of his trial, his military judge threw out a number of his statements to interrogators, ruling that they had been coerced from him and were therefore unreliable. And that happened in a trial system effectively designed by the Pentagon to ensure convictions.

Look at it this way: Of the 200 or so detainees left on Guantanamo who have not been cleared for release (pending the necessary arrangements), the Bush administration intended to try only some 70 or 80 before military commissions. That leaves more than 100 whom it considered too dangerous to release but was not planning to put on trial. "What lies in those files that's an obstacle to prosecution?" Waxman asks.

When Obama finds out, he may learn that his options for keeping them locked up are limited.