Plus ca Change

"I really thought Obama meant it." Such is the lament of Tina Foster, a lawyer with the International Justice Network. She is disappointed that the Obama administration has decided to adopt, at least for the time being, the Bush administration's policy on foreign detainees.

The Bush administration argued that persons held in U.S. prisons in foreign countries, such as the non-Afghans being held at Bagram Air Base, have no legal right to challenge their detention. The Obama administration has appealed a court decision saying otherwise. Essentially, the administration said denying prisoners a hearing was driven by military necessity: litigating the cases would compromise military operations.

Well, there's something to that. On the other hand, there's something to the argument that if the military is going to hold someone captive for years, and perhaps even decades, then at some point it ought to be able to demonstrate that it has a good reason for doing so, and did not accidentally grab the wrong guy.

That was the view President Obama took when he was candidate Obama. After the Supreme Court ruled last summer that the prisoners at Camp Delta in Guantanamo had the right to challenge their detentions in court, Obama praised the decision, saying the "principle of habeas corpus -- a state can't just hold you for any reason without charging you and without giving you any kind of due process -- that's the essence of who we are. I mean, you remember during the Nuremberg trials, part of what made us different was even after these Nazis had performed atrocities that no one had ever seen before, we still gave them a day in court."

The "essence of who we are" seems to have undergone a metamorphosis. That's probably not the change a lot of Americans thought they were voting for.