Obama faces a political reality

Officials said the decision to proceed with military commissions came partly as a result of concerns that some detainees might not be successfully prosecuted in federal courts. They said that questions surrounding confessions made after the brutal treatment of some detainees had become an obstacle. Though some detainees, in so-called clean confessions, admitted to terrorist activities in 2007, they were not given the warnings against self-incrimination that are standard in law enforcement.

That's the nub of it, and I bet "partly" means about 95% partly.

No politician is going to withstand the outrage over a confessed conspirator walking free because he wasn't given an adequate Miranda warning.* Why didn't Obama think of this before? Wasn't he following the last two Wisconsin Supreme Court elections?

Here's a lawyer who pronounces Obama's decision "astonishing" and "mindboggling" without even once mentioning the Fifth Amendment.

* "A milestone of judicial overreaching." — A. Scalia, C. Thomas