In the early days of the Obama administration, the president announced — with great fanfare — that he was overturning all the Bush administration detention policies. He didn’t have new policies to replace them with, though. In reality, he was just announcing a plan to have a plan.
It turns out that even the plan to have a plan wasn’t so rigid:
The Obama administration on Monday pushed back its own deadline for devising new anti-terrorism policies.
The decision had been expected, as presidentially appointed task forces have failed to meet a six-month schedule for making policy recommendations on how terror suspects should be interrogated, held in custody or handed over to other countries.
Senior administration officials said Monday that the report on detention will be delayed six months and the report on interrogation and transfer policy will be delayed two months.
The cynics who suggested that intending to change policies was much easier than actually changing policies have been pretty well vindicated. Not that anyone is paying attention any more.
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