On his detention and interrogation policies, Obama faces two right-wing critiques. They are equally wrong, I believe, and also contradict each other. The first is Cheney's:

Once you go into a wartime situation and it's a strategic threat, then you use all of your assets to go after the enemy. You go after the state sponsors of terror, places where they've got sanctuary. You use your intelligence resources, your military resources, your financial resources, everything you can in order to shut down that terrorist threat against you. When you go back to the law enforcement mode, which I sense is what they're doing, closing Guantanamo and so forth, that they are very much giving up that center of attention and focus that's required, and that concept of military threat that is essential if you're going to successfully defend the nation against further attacks.

The second is a version of Victor Davis Hanson:

Guantanamo is still open, but there are no longer "enemy combatants" there (Perhaps the name of the camp can be changed next?)...

And this, rhetorically putting words into Obama's mouth:

“On matters of protecting civil liberties, I assure the American people that I have examined the Patriot Act, the FISA accords, and renditions and I have discovered that they, in fact, do not shred our Constitution. I will, however, shut down Guantanamo Bay but must keep it open another year and appoint a task force to study the issue."

The first critique is that Obama has taken the country back to an entirely pre-9/11 footing, and is abandoning the notion of a war against Jihadist terrorists altogether. The second is that he is continuing Bush-Cheney policies but doesn't have the intellectual honesty to say so. Whatever else one might say about these two arguments, offered often in tandem on the right, the first thing to note is that they cannot both be correct.

It's still early days in the administration and the reviews of a complex policy thoroughly integrated over seven years into the federal bureaucracy have yet to be completed. But we can say, I think, two things. The first is that Obama absolutely has retained the concept of war as the definition of what he is doing against Jihadism. That's why rendition - not extraordinary rendition to torturers - but rendition of potentially lethal terrorists not easily or quickly prosecuted through the criminal law has been retained. That's why the Obama peeps have defended the right of the president to detain prisoners under the laws of war, at Gitmo temporarily, and elsewhere. That's why drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan continue. So Cheney is simply misleading in a self-serving and lazy way. Surprise!