The beginning of the end of Gitmo?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

WaPo:

In one of its first actions, the Obama administration instructed military prosecutors late Tuesday to seek a 120-day suspension of legal proceedings involving detainees at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- a clear break with the approach of the outgoing Bush administration.

The instruction came in a motion filed with a military court in the case of five defendants accused of organizing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. The motion called for "a continuance of the proceedings" until May 20 so that "the newly inaugurated president and his administration [can] review the military commissions process, generally, and the cases currently pending before military commissions, specifically."

The same motion was filed in another case scheduled to resume Wednesday, involving a Canadian detainee, and will be filed in all other pending matters.

Such a request may not be automatically granted by military judges, and not all defense attorneys may agree to such a suspension. But the move is a first step toward closing a detention facility and system of military trials that became a worldwide symbol of the Bush administration's war on terrorism and its unyielding attitude toward foreign and domestic critics.

Make sure to read Greenwald: "This is a very good and important step," albeit "only a first step and a temporary one at that. Subsequent actions that the Obama administration is clearly considering could severely undermine both the symbolic and substantive value of this act... Still, this order clearly signals that Obama -- even for one day -- did not want his name anywhere near the grotesque mockery of justice known as the "Guantanamo military commissions," tribunals that were created when his own political party, in the weeks before the 2006 mid-term elections, helped to enact the Military Commissions Act..."

The resurrection of America's image and standing around the world, not to mention of its commitment to its own ideals, has begun.