Uhh...Gitmo...Wiretapping...Torture...Uhh...HOPE! CHANGE!

Barack Obama has kinda-sorta deftly re-arranged the goalposts (translation: he lied) on one of his signature campaign promises: closing that hotbed of virulent American torture, Gitmo.  Earlier this week I posted this:

So, it looks like Obama is going to issue the order to close Gitmo very quickly after his inauguration, and then fiddlefart around for as long as it takes to come up with an alternate plan before actually carrying out the order. Although I find this to be very good news, his Leftist base isn't going to like it.

This is an example of the hypocrisy that is so typical in liberals - they'll say anything to win the election, knowing full well that they can change the story once they're in office. It is yet another illustration that liberals simply cannot be trusted when they make a promise or commitment.

At the time, he was saying it could be up to a year before the actual closing.  Now we find that Obama's promise is sliding forward even further:

In a wide-ranging 70-minute interview with Washington Post reporters and editors, the president-elect pledged quick action on the Middle East once he takes office, promised to support voting rights for D.C. residents, and said he will consider it a failure if he has not closed the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by the end of his first term in office.

Oooh, the anti-war crowd is not going to be happy about that!  Of course, it's great news to me, so I'm not complaining one bit (with any luck, Gitmo will still be open when a Republican President takes over in 2012...).  Here's some analysis from Hot Air:

What? During the campaign, Obama often demanded the immediate closure of Gitmo and promised just that repeatedly.  It didn't make much of a splash during the general election, as John McCain made the same pledge.

And now?  Now Obama has decided to set the expectation that it might take as long as four years to figure out how to fulfill his campaign promise.  This stunning nugget that dropped into the Post's lap was recognized as so newsworthy that the Post failed to even ask about the four-year shift in the timeline even once.  Gitmo only gets one more mention in the 34-paragraph story — in paragraph 28.  And in that paragraph, the Post tells readers that Obama is "confident" that he can make his new self-imposed deadline of whenever.

If Bush promised to close Gitmo immediately and then shared the idea that "immediately" means sometime in the next four years, would the Post have buried that?

They also raise the very interesting point that if McCain had won, it is quite likely that he would have found a way to actually close Gitmo before 2013.  There's irony for you.

Another nasty bullet in the Obamessiah's hypocrite gun is the so-called torture itself.  Apparently, Obama is planning to use a classified loophole to allow 'enhanced interrogations' while publicly saying he stopped 'torture':

For Obama, who repeatedly insisted during the 2008 presidential campaign and the transition period that "America doesn't torture," a classified loophole would allow him to back up his vow to end harsh interrogations while retaining a full range of presidential options in conducting the war against terrorism.

The proposed loophole, which could come in the form of a classified annex to the manual, would satisfy intelligence experts who fear that an outright ban of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques would limit the government in obtaining threat information that could save American lives. It would also preserve Obama's flexibility to authorize any interrogation tactics he might deem necessary for national security.

I bet George W. Bush is pretty irritated that he didn't think of that - he took a ton of heat for authorizing the waterboarding of three terrorist masterminds when all he had to do was just rename waterboarding to, oh, say, something along the lines of 'dihydrogen oxide-induced interrogative therapy'.  Apparently, that would have made it okay.  Oh well, live and learn.

To close out the classic three-point plan, here's another great hypocrisy concerning national security: the Obamessiah has reversed himself on warrantless wiretapping, too.  No, this is not a joke:

A federal intelligence court, in a rare public opinion, is expected to issue a major ruling validating the power of the president and Congress to wiretap international phone calls and intercept e-mail messages without a court order, even when Americans' private communications may be involved, according to a person with knowledge of the opinion.

The decision marks the first time since the disclosure of the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping program three years ago that an appellate court has addressed the constitutionality of the federal government's wiretapping powers. In validating the government's wide authority to collect foreign intelligence, it may offer legal credence to the Bush administration's repeated assertions that the president has constitutional authority to act without specific court approval in ordering national security eavesdropping.

Yes, this is the very same battle of FISA courts and warrantless wiretapping over which Bush was savaged in the liberal media.  Turns out Bush was right, but we only know that because Obama eventually woke up and agreed with him.  Now that Obama is on the hook for actually protecting America, the program seems like a pretty darned good idea!  Once again, the Obamessiah waved his magic wand at an issue, prompting the media to dutifully nod and endorse precisely the same thing for which they accused Bush of being eeeeevil.

Speaking of which, Bush press secretary Dana Perino hit a grand slam on this subject:

[Perino] took a little dig at the incoming president for attacking Bush's policy on Guantanamo throughout the campaign. "All of a sudden, 'Gosh it's so complicated to close Guantanamo Bay,'" she said.

As Ace of Spades summarizes:

Yes, we're going to be finding a great many things which were previously declared to be easy-peasy-lemon-squeezey are just so goshdarn difficult and complex and nuanced.

Indeed.  But pay no attention to these things.  Hope!  Change!

There's my two cents.