Being the asshole ...

Been there myself. Comes a time when someone has to stand up and say "enough", regardless of the consequences:

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There is no middle way. That's the point, really. The point of this was that there is no middle ground. This is the With Us or Against Us strategy; there's no way out of this that doesn't involve being the asshole, and in fact the whole system is predicated on the idea that politicians are too cowardly to ever accept that somebody's just gonna have to be the asshole.

The war worked the same way; if we leave things will be bad and we'll have screwed the Iraqis over and killed lots of them for no good reason. Things are bad anyway, not likely to get any better, and we broke this country and screwed it all up, and I hate as much as anybody being the asshole who says, "Nothing we can do to unbreak it, let's get the hell out" because that sucks, but there's no way to stop it anymore. Same with this, our "detainees." Somebody's gonna have to be the guy who says okay, and opens the prison doors.

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It's called 'pragmatism' and it's time for the hard decisions to be made. The war is killing us financially (not to mention the lives that are actually being lost) and we should have left years ago (and no, we shouldn't have been there in the first place but we're there now) and it's time to say "We're leaving now".

Same thing with Gitmo. If the NYPD had arrested these folks and treated them this way, their cases would never make it to trial. A judge would throw them out on a host of technicalities. If we're supposed to be a "nation of laws", we have to obey those laws or what's left of our credibility will never be restored. We have to turn 'em all loose and if we catch them again, they have to be prosecuted properly, under the "Rule of Law".