"Why should we continue to care about Guantánamo?"

A student asked Linda Greenhouse on the last day of the law school course she taught on the sole topic of Guantánamo. She doesn't mention that the law school is Yale, which is the most difficult law school to gain admission to and therefore the one with the most elite set of students. Odd to think that someone who got into Yale and elected to take a course dealing solely with Guantánamo — it can't possibly be a required course — endured the experience to the last day and still asked why should I care?

I wasn't there, so I don't know the tone of the question. Greenhouse gives the context the student presented — "the Guantánamo population has shrunk even as urgent human rights crises that place many more people at risk have erupted in other parts of the world" —  and characterizes the question as "deliberately provocative and not entirely rhetorical." Greenhouse informs us that the class was provoked to "lively" "conversation" that "quickly" produced "consensus."

Of course, the intense activity of devoting a law school semester to one legal problem needs to make sense in the end. Simple human defensiveness could explain the quick trip to consensus. Why did we take this course instead of Information Privacy Law or Law and Regulation of Banks and Other Financial Intermediaries or whatever else might have captured our hearts on Yale Law School's rich menu of course offerings?

Here's how Greenhouse, in her NYT column, phrases the consensus:

We care because the Guantánamo saga isn’t only about the 162 men still held there, or the hundreds who have come and gone. It’s about the health of our own institutions, our own commitments. We look in the mirror of Guantánamo and see ourselves.

From "isn’t only about the 162 men" I gather that the students got weary of caring about those 162 men. If they are the 162 who are left, they are there for a reason. Bush put them there, but Obama has kept them there. Must we really go over and over the question of whether it all was done precisely right? And then you see it: the place of refuge from this nagging doubt about whether these 162 men deserved all this elite law study.

And that place is: ME! This is about ME! This is US! This is WHO. WE. ARE. Ah, relief. So I haven't been staring for months into the dismal stories of 162 shady-but-perhaps-procedurally-abused characters. I've been staring into a mirror at myself. Ah! The relief! It was about me!

That was where the elite students quickly found relief from provocation. I suspect that practically any particular legal problem can support the claim that it's really about the legitimacy and principle of the entire legal system, so the quick consensus position — to me, seen from a distance — feels more like evidence of the students' desire to free themselves from the anxiety of having paid a semester's worth of attention to something they believed they would care about, because they liked the idea of being the sort of people who do care when others do not care, but then they saw that they did not really care at least not quite that much.

And then the relief comes, and it has sufficient resonance with the original choice of what to study: I am studying myself caring about the people I wanted to believe I cared about. I've been looking into the mirror to see if I care, and I must now see that I care, or it doesn't make sense to have chosen to stare for months into a mirror to see if I care. I do care. I care about me caring.

"I'm blogging from behind. Your confusion is part of the From-Behinders technique."

My answer in response to a commenter who says he's confused by my statement "Another job well done by leading-from-behind Obama" in yesterday's post about the end of the hunger strike at Guantanamo.

"I think the hunger strike ended because the men achieved their objectives."

"As far as I know, Korans are not being searched. Guantánamo has returned to the national agenda. And President Obama has renewed efforts to close it. And, frankly, six months is a long time to be on a hunger strike."

All right then. All is well in detaineeworld. 

Another job well done by leading-from-behind Obama.

Michelle Obama — unlike Barack — will not be interrupted.

Everyone's paying attention to the way Michelle Obama insisted that everyone pay attention to her or she's leaving. When some lady yelled about gay rights during a fundraising speech, the First Lady said "One of the things I don’t do well is this" and that the heckler could "listen to me or you can take the mic, but I’m leaving" and "You all decide. You have one choice."

The "you" is the heckler when she says "you can take the mic." But the "you" in "You all decide" and "You have one choice" is probably the whole audience. "You all" is a way to indicate the larger group, and she says that after the crowd, we're told, applauds loudly. She doesn't order the throng to throttle the heckler, but she's essentially saying you need to shut this woman up, because obviously, no one there wants Michelle Obama to walk out.

10 days earlier, Barack Obama was famously interrupted, also by a female heckler. He was talking about his military policies, and she was anti-war. Obama — amazing many people — went off script, engaged with her criticism, and even said she — or at least her "voice" — was "worth paying attention to"

Obama departed from his prepared script by responding: "Look at the current situation, where we are force-feeding detainees who are being held on a hunger strike. I'm willing to cut the young lady who interrupted me some slack because it's worth being passionate about. Is this who we are? Is that something our founders foresaw? Is that the America we want to leave our children? Our sense of justice is stronger than that."...

After she was led out of the auditorium, Obama was applauded when he said: "The voice of that woman is worth paying attention to.... Obviously, I do not agree with much of what she said, and obviously she wasn't listening to me in much of what I said. But these are tough issues, and the suggestion that we can gloss over them is wrong."

Obama had his reasons for engaging with his protester. In fact, it could have been planned political theater. It might have made him look good, though it's also easy to mock him for it (or, more aptly, to mock the entire speech for going this way and that, evasively). There's no way the heckler made Michelle Obama look good, especially in contrast to her husband's recent performance. It's all too easy to portray her as arrogant and unconcerned about the interests of everyone who came to the event.

But let's be a little sympathetic. She began with self-deprecation: "One of the things I don’t do well is this." And I hear in that a reference to Barack: He does do these things well. You just saw him make vivid political theater out of engaging with a woman who yelled at him. I can't do that. I can't risk that. 

Even the statements she did make are getting critiqued! She attends these events, gives a dramatic reading of the lines in a competent, actorly fashion, and that's her public role. She can't ad lib policy on the topic of some random person's choice. (In this case, it was some executive order about federal contractors discriminating against gay people.) She only wanted to say: The planners of this event are responsible for keeping perfect decorum, and my appearance is conditional on their meeting this responsibility. They've already failed me, and they need to step up and get it right immediately.

On the spot, she found a way to say that in simple language that did not involve smacking down the heckler or ordering any minions around. She used the language of choice when addressing others and spoke of her own choice as if she were a simple and powerless person who could either continue to speak or stop.

Considering the alternatives, she did pretty well.

"The U.S. needs a leader, not a law professor."

Says the Washington Post in line 2 of a front-page teaser. The first line is: "Barack Obama, Agonizer in Chief" — which implicates a stereotype about law professors.  

(Do we agonize? Maybe the law school class is some sort of theater of agonizing over whatever it is we're talking about as we do what we can't do — or we'd be lying/putting ourselves out of work — just tell the students what the answer is.)

But when I click on the link I get to this Ruth Marcus column which begins: "No doubt: Barack Obama has what it takes to be a terrific law student. It’s less clear those are the ingredients of a successful president." So... not even a law professor. A law student. I guess the WaPo couldn't bring itself to tease us with "The U.S. needs a leader, not a law student."

Marcus tells us that a "terrific law student" analyzes everything "in a dispassionate, balanced way" without necessarily really taking much of a position, which is what, she says, Obama did in his speech last week at the National Defense University. "Barack Obama... the Agonizer" is at least way better than "George W. Bush... the Decider," because Obama must be better than Bush, because Bush was terrible. Bush was so not terrific. Bush, Marcus tells us, "decided too precipitously and agonized too little." But Obama is just too thoughtful.

Marcus compares Obama's speech to "scribbling exam answers in a blue book." She calls him "ever the A-plus student," even as she looks ready to give him a C- as he calls Guantanamo "this legacy problem" that ought to be "resolved, consistent with our commitment to the rule of law."

This answer doesn’t even pass the law student test. How, exactly? That the solution is elusive does not justify this blatant dodge.

The lawprof in me wants to say that if Obama's speech is the text to be understood, Marcus is the one who's not a terrific student. Her writing rests on the presumption that the words of his speech are the same words that run through his head as he thinks about the various problems and the words that he speaks in private. I say "her writing" because I'm not deluded enough to think that the words in the Washington Post are the words inside Marcus's head. She's arguing to him and his advisers that he needs to do something different and he's not getting away with the seemingly dispassionate, balanced analysis. She'd like to manipulate his mind.

And Obama, in his speech, was attempting to manipulate our minds. The performance in the Theater of Agonizing is for a purpose. We can try to discern his purpose — perhaps to get us to trust in his caretaking and to be patient while he continues to do the things that need to be done and not to look too closely at the incoherencies and possible illegalities. This is what leaders do.

"Will the United States keep these detainees alive for 12 years against their will?"

"If 12 years sounds too long, then what is an appropriate amount of time to keep a prisoner alive by tube feed? Is this torture?"

It's suicide prevention.

Obama gets back to the topic of closing Guantanamo.

At the press conference today:

"It' is not a surprise to me that we are having problems at Guantanamo." He calls Guantanamo unsafe, expensive, and lessens cooperation with our allies. "It needs to be closed," Obama said. He notes that Congress has legislatively blocked him from closing Guantanamo.

"I am going to go back at this," said Obama, "I am going to reengage with Congress that this is not in the best interest of the American people."...

"This is a lingering problem that is not going to get better," Obama says. "It's going to get worse."

I am going to go back at this ≈ Nothing will change.

Thinking about George W. Bush.

1. He just became a granddad.

2. A Guantanamo detainee is railing against the President on the op-ed page of the NYT: "Gitmo Is Killing Me."

One man here weighs just 77 pounds. Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed 132, but that was a month ago... The only reason I am still here is that President Obama refuses to send any detainees back to Yemen. This makes no sense. I am a human being, not a passport, and I deserve to be treated like one.

Rand Paul made being against the drones... cool.