It's hard to argue with what Ben Wittes writes here:
Madison would not have trouble analyzing why Obama is getting his butt kicked here. And to be frank, I can’t muster much sympathy for the predicament in which the President finds himself. If closing Guantanamo and civilian trials for terrorist leaders are truly policy goals of transcendent importance, as he has said since the campaign, then Obama should be prepared to stand up for them – and lose. If Obama were to veto this bill with a message that said that he supports all of it save a few paragraphs which no self-respecting president would sign and that Congress can either override his veto or send the bill back without the offending provisions, he would do himself a world of good – even if Congress overrode his veto. At least he would have stood up for a policy his administration has repeatedly described as a “national security imperative” and been seen to have done so.
On the other hand, if these policy goals are not so important as to go down swinging for, then Obama should stop talking about them as though they were. He should come to a reasonable understanding with the right. He might agree, for example, to use military commissions, not civilian courts, for Guantanamo detainees, but insist on retaining prosecutorial flexibility for new captures and the option of transferring current detainees abroad without ridiculous certification requirements. Sure, it would be a climb-down, but at least it would be an honest, deliberate climb-down – rather than the whimpering one in which the president is now engaged, in which he continues to sniff about the importance of a policy that everyone knows he won't fight for and won't accomplish.
Wittes' remarks put him in a less rare than one might think agreement with Marcy Wheeler, who writes that the White House's late efforts here undermine the sincerity of the original promise. Obama ran on restoring the rule of law, but as president, his administration has been loath to engage Republicans in big fights where there's a serious chance of losing. The circumstances in which the administration finds itself on these matters are due to a deficit of courage, not merely the skittishness of the now-lost Democratic majority or the demagoguery of the GOP.
We're still talking about real people here, though, people who have been imprisoned for years without a chance for a day in court. But of course post-Ahmed Ghailani, any civilian trial of a Gitmo detainee would be even more ceremonial, in the sense that acquittal would be unacceptable and post-acquittal detention almost assured. So in signing, statement or no, Republicans have gotten what they wanted anyway, which is a complete dismantling of anything resembling real due process for the remaining detainees at Gitmo. But they didn't do it alone.