"Poor Dan"

Christian Brose praises a New Republic profile of U.S. Ambassador Dan Fried, the man tasked with finding homes for Gitmo detainees. Brose then goes on:

What is dawning on the Obama administration is that, in the moral interest of closing Guantanamo, they'll have to cut some moral corners elsewhere. This is not a new idea, and it's what makes the prison dilemma so hard. Maybe those "assurances" and "monitoring mechanisms" will hold up. But it's very possible they won't, and to some degree the administration will just have to look the other way, or else Guantanamo will be open forever. Other moral corner-cutting might (and likely will) include holding more detainees in Bagram Air Base, or just killing more of them preemptively on the battlefield so as to avoid the whole problem of detention altogether, as Jack Goldsmith suggested this weekend in the Washington Post. There is no easy or morally straightforward answer.

And this is the direct responsibility of the Bush administration. If they had made Gitmo a decent POW camp, instead of a torture factory, it would not have the ugly and dangerous symbolism it now has. Whatever moral corners Obama has to cut to remove this terrorist-recruiter and alliance-destroyer should be placed squarely at the feet of Cheney.