>Surely you've noticed by now that every time he ask Congress to help him close Guantanamo and allocate funds for keeping those prisoners on the mainland, giving them civilian trials and so forth, it generates a shitstorm of opposition?

I like how you said "opposition" rather than "public opposition" because it's what makes the statement true. Fox News will spend all day and all night discussing how Obama is probably a Muslim from Kenya and then "let you draw your own conclusions" regardless of what Obama actually does. That's going to happen whether he does the right thing or not, so why should it stop him from doing the right thing?

I'm really not sure what you're even trying to argue here. It sounds a lot like an argument that because someone somewhere can be found loudly disagreeing with us that we ought to give up. People disagreeing with you is part of democracy. You fight for what you think is right in the court of public opinion and at some point we have an election -- and if the people we elect don't do what we want we get to try it again in the next round, and threaten them with the boot in the meantime. That's what we're doing right now. We're expressing our grievances in public and kicking up our own shitstorm so that more like-minded people will express their views to elected officials and otherwise try to make change.

I'm not talking about Fox News, I'm talking about opposition from within Congress and from the general public. Look outside your bubble; there are a lot of people that heartily approve of Guantanamo and would like to go farther down that route. Congress has persistently declined to allocate funds for housing any Guantanmo prisoners on the mainland, and the way the government operates, Obama can't just appropriate the money from some other part of the budget.

>Look outside your bubble; there are a lot of people that heartily approve of Guantanamo and would like to go farther down that route

There are a lot of people who think that ocean levels aren't rising or who deny evolution. Are we supposed to let the lie win just because a nontrivial number of people have been misled?

And the people in Congress know perfectly well what they're doing. It's not a coincidence that the set of Congressmen who most ardently refuse to close Guantanamo are the same Congressmen who take significant campaign contributions from defense contractors.

And yet people keep voting for them, which is the real problem. You think they're wrong, as do I, but ultimately that's a subjective opinion of ours. You can't show that the decision to follow a security posture you dislike is objectively flawed. This is why I think the long game is strengthening constitutional protections through amendment.

>You can't show that the decision to follow a security posture you dislike is objectively flawed.

To some extent you can. Cost benefit analysis, statistics and evidence point against the effectiveness and scale of our existing security posture. Obviously people can ignore all of those things if they please (cue Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"), but at some point you have to find a way to cause the people who are wrong to cease being wrong so that they stop fighting and start helping.

>This is why I think the long game is strengthening constitutional protections through amendment.

That's fine. But I'm sure you know how difficult it is, and how long it takes, to amend the constitution. We can surely approach the problem from other angles in the meantime.