T he saint is no longer quite so saintly. Barack Obama began his presidency promising a sea change in the way America handles civil liberties. Now, four months later, and after a masterful – if unconvincing – attempt this week to explain his contradictions, he's shown that he's still an old-time Chicago pol.

Willing to wheel, willing to deal and – when the going gets tough – willing to retreat.

Americans have already figured out that Obama is a mere mortal. But to the star-struck world outside, his abrupt reversal on the use of Guantanamo Bay military commissions is a stark reminder that the new U.S. president is more man than god.

He's also more like George W. Bush than either would care to admit.

As a candidate for the presidency, few were harder on military commissions than Obama. Set up by Bush to try alleged terrorists imprisoned at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay prison camp, they were designed to produce guilty verdicts.

Evidence gained under torture or hearsay was permitted. The usual rules governing civilian trials and even military courts martial were eliminated.

In the unlikely event that a defendant might be acquitted, the government reserved the right to keep him imprisoned anyway.

American military lawyers dismissed them as kangaroo courts. Obama called them an "enormous failure."

One of his first acts upon taking office was to indefinitely suspend the commissions – including the one set to try Canadian Omar Khadr.

Obama talked instead of trying terror suspects in the normal U.S. court system, a path he still says he'd like to follow whenever possible.

But now he says the commissions aren't that bad. In a speech Thursday, he noted that they have a long and honourable history dating back to the U.S. revolutionary war and that, with just a bit of tweaking, these ones too should be just fine – particularly in cases where there is not enough evidence to convince a civilian judge of a defendant's guilt.

Evidence explicitly obtained under torture will be banned. But evidence obtained through hearsay from foreign intelligence agencies (including those that routinely use torture) will be permitted.

Defendants will be free to choose their own lawyers – as long as these lawyers are serving members of the U.S. armed forces.

Yet there will be some terror suspects against whom there is not enough plausible evidence for even a military commission.

These people, Obama said, will simply continue to be imprisoned indefinitely – somewhere – without any kind of trial at all.

Why the change of heart? It seems that Obama, like Bush, is finding that many Americans don't much care about civil liberties – particularly the civil liberties of those they've been told are dangerous terrorists.

Obama's promise to close Guantanamo, while hailed by civil libertarians, is also coming under attack. In Congress, he suffered an embarrassing setback this week when both Democrats and Republicans voted against the idea.

Americans fear that if the prison camp is closed, some of its 240 inmates, many of whom can't return to their homelands for fear of persecution, might be resettled in the U.S.

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And so Obama is stuck. He had promised open government and a return to constitutional practices. Now he finds openness and constitutionality are politically difficult and, at times, inconvenient.

He had agreed to release more photos that show the abuse of prisoners by American soldiers. Now, under attack from the right, he's reversed himself.

Releasing the photos might endanger U.S. troops, he has explained.

He boasts about his decision to ban torture by government interrogators. But read the fine print: He would still permit the use of so-called extraordinary rendition – sending prisoners to be tortured in other countries.

And, as Central Intelligence Agency chief Leon Panetta told a Congressional committee this year, Obama has left open the possibility of authorizing harsher, unspecified interrogation techniques.

Obama once opposed Bush's use of domestic wiretaps as an unnecessary infringement on civil liberties. He now happily uses those same wiretaps.

As a senator, Obama staunchly fought Bush's attempt to forge a free trade deal with Colombia because of that nation's human-rights abuses. He now supports the deal and has ordered his trade representative to make it happen.

None of this means that Obama is a Bush clone. The new president at least understands the civil rights requirements of the U.S. Constitution. He's also more willing than Bush to spread the responsibility – and blame – to Congress and the courts when he chooses to curtail these rights.

But Obama's about-faces, dekes and backflips are reminders that he too operates within the real constraints of American politics – a fearful population suspicious of the outside world coupled with powerful national security institutions that want to hang on to the power they've accumulated since 9/11.

And if that requires the sacrifice of a few Muslim foreigners imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, then so be it. In the world of Chicago politics, this is known as a necessary compromise.

Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday and Saturday. Email him at: twalkom@thestar.ca

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