Lefty outrage

It's been two days, where is it?

It's been two days, each one bringing a new air of transparency, respect for the law, and morality to our national government.

WASHINGTON — Saying that “our ideals give us the strength and moral high ground” to combat terrorism, President Obama signed executive orders Thursday effectively ending the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret interrogation program, directing the closing of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp within a year and setting up a sweeping, high-level review of the best way to hold and question terrorist suspects in the future.

“We intend to win this fight,” Mr. Obama said, “We are going to win it on our own terms.”

As he signed three orders, 16 retired generals and admirals who have fought for months for a ban on coercive interrogations stood behind him and applauded. The group, organized to lobby the Obama transition team by the group Human Rights First, did not include any career C.I.A. officers or retirees, participants said.

One of Mr. Obama’s orders requires the C.I.A. to use only the 19 interrogation methods outlined in the Army Field Manual, ending President Bush’s policy of permitting the agency to use some secret methods that went beyond those allowed to the military.

“We believe we can abide by a rule that says we don’t torture, but we can effectively obtain the intelligence we need,” Mr. Obama said.

This paragraph is, however, extremely weird.

But the orders leave unresolved complex questions surrounding the closing of the Guantánamo prison, including whether, where and how many of the detainees are to be prosecuted. They could also allow Mr. Obama to reinstate the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation operations in the future, by presidential order, as some have argued would be appropriate if Osama bin Laden or another top-level leader of Al Qaeda were captured.

Emphasis mine. First, who are those "some" who've argued this, and let's hear what their argument is? What could be better in our battle against extremists, terrorists, and those "who hate us for our freedoms," as the previous president used to say, then for the world to see bin Laden in the docket of an American court room?

The new administration late Tuesday night ordered an immediate halt to the military commission proceedings for prosecuting detainees at Guantánamo and filed a request in Federal District Court in Washington to stay habeas corpus proceedings there. Government lawyers described both delays as necessary for the administration to make a broad assessment of detention policy.

The cases immediately affected include those of five detainees charged as the coordinators of the 2001 attacks, including the case against Mr. Mohammed, the self-described mastermind.

The decision to stop the commissions was described by the military prosecutors as a pause in the war-crimes system “to permit the newly inaugurated president and his administration time to review the military commission process generally and the cases currently pending before the military commissions, specifically.”

More than 200 detainees’ habeas corpus cases have been filed in federal court, and lawyers said they expected that all of the cases would be stayed.

Mr. Obama had suggested in the campaign that, in place of military commissions, he would prefer prosecutions in federal courts or, perhaps, in the existing military justice system, which provides legal guarantees similar to those of American civilian courts.

It feels like we can breathe again. The fact that President Obama has focused so intently on this issue in his first two days in office is extremely encouraging.

Further encouraging is the fact that Obama seems serious about his campaign pledges.

And, while not unexpected, this is great news, too.

The Obama Administration has frozen the Department of Interior effort to take gray wolves off the list of animals protected under the Endangered Species Act in the Northern Rockies and Great Lakes regions.

In a memorandum issued Tuesday to federal department heads, Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, wrote that no proposed or final regulations should be sent to the Federal Register for publication until they have been reviewed and approved by new agency heads appointed by the president.

Emanuel added that all regulations sent to the Federal Register, but not yet published, also should be withdrawn for review and approval.

Last week, the Department of Interior, which oversees endangered species, had said it expected to delist gray wolves after publishing a new rule in the Federal Register this week. That rule hadn’t been published as of Wednesday, which means it falls under Emanuel’s memo