"A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise."

All of these orders are improvements over Bush's policies, but they include unnecessary equivocations. The order closing Guantanamo, for example, expresses Obama's preference that detainees be tried in civilian courts or in courts-martial conducted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. But it reserves the option of using the current, and flawed, military commission system (though perhaps with new procedures).

The order governing interrogation is similarly compromised. It rightly requires CIA interrogators to abide by the Army Field Manual, which prohibits physical force, waterboarding, extended solitary confinement, placing hoods on prisoners' heads or using dogs to intimidate them. The order, however, seems to allow the administration to change its mind. It creates a task force to review the manual's guidelines "to determine whether different or additional guidance is necessary for the CIA." It isn't.

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Obama deserves credit for ending the worst of the Bush administration's excesses in the "war on terror." As he does, he should not introduce shades of gray into issues that call for black-and-white clarity.

The LA Times has thoughts on Gitmo's going-out-of-business sale.

Anyone who believed that an incoming American President would unequivocally repudiate powers of his office, particularly powers relating to defense was either gullible or mad. Obama's orders are not, as we may have been led to believe, the triumph of the better angels of our nature over fear. Instead, it is the inevitable victory of propriety over open hostility. Gitmo is not being closed because it was evil (though it was, and is) but because it's closing soothes the nagging vestigal threads of conscience the American public still possess. Gitmo was an international embarrassment, not because of what was done, but because of the honesty with which it was being done. We don't torture, because we say we don't torture and because we got rid of that place where the all the torture happened. It's a symbol-- and such a transparent one that even American journalists can quite clearly see it's duplicity.