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Gitmo is a symbol of torture- so the closure will be mostly symbolic. the whole point of housing detainees at Gitmo was to put them outside of the American legal system, a practice that was struck down by the Supreme Court when it ruled that detainees have habeus rights.
the Bush administration tried to walk around domestic and international principles of law, creating the “unlawful combatant” so that they could hide detainees from due process indefinitely and conduct kangaroo courts.
If they’d just stuck with the existing definitions, all the Gitmo detainees against whom they could build a real case under the actual rules of law, without torture and without rigging the courts, would have been tried...already. If found guilty, the death penalty would have been warranted in some cases.
Trying detainees won't appear legitimate unless we bring them under the American system, and if we do that some very bad men will go free.
But that is Bush's failing, not Obama's. This was inevitable the minute the Bush administration decided to authorize torture.
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