Bush, Cheney and their various enablers and apologists are obviously hoping that they have so thoroughly scrambled “the choice between our safety and our ideals” that the Obama administration will never be able to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

(Aside: the quote is from Obama’s inaugural address. I cannot find the transcript anywhere on the new whitehouse.gov, which is pretty bizarre. So here’s an alternate link.)

The Obama administration, however, has already begun to try:

In one of its first actions, the Obama administration instructed military prosecutors late Tuesday to seek a 120-day suspension of legal proceedings involving detainees at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — a clear break with the approach of the outgoing Bush administration.

The instruction came in a motion filed with a military court in the case of five defendants accused of organizing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. The motion called for “a continuance of the proceedings” until May 20 so that “the newly inaugurated president and his administration [can] review the military commissions process, generally, and the cases currently pending before military commissions, specifically.”

The same motion was filed in another case scheduled to resume Wednesday, involving a Canadian detainee, and will be filed in all other pending matters.

One small step for a bureaucrat, a giant leap for America.