Is the great Guantanamo getaway proving to be a distraction?

With news that three more Guantanamo Bay detainees are heading to Italy that means that we have fewer than 50 of the easiest category of detainees to deal with — folks not deemed a material threat but who can’t safely be sent home because of reprisals.

This includes the Uighur Muslims shipped, along with some purely coincidental U.S. aid, to the island paradises of Palau and Bermuda. We’ll be sending some aid along with the folks headed to Italy, I’m sure.

Some have lamented the plight of the Uighurs, but from the looks of it they’re having a pretty swell time. I’ve never been to Bermuda or Palau, but I have to imagine that they are a sight better than the Uighur’s digs in Afghanistan, where we picked them up, or their Chinese homeland, where they were being persecuted. They told FOX News  that Guantanamo was better than China, and Bermuda must be better than Gunatanamo.

If we’re going to this much cost and this much trouble to place every two or three of these folks from the least dangerous category, what is it going to take to get the remaining 220 bad guys out of Guantanamo?

Even if one finds Obama’s goal laudable, isn’t this amounting to an expensive distraction? Is it a good use of the president’s time to haggle with various nations to take the detainees, to say noting of the unnecessary political maelstrom that will follow the eventual importation of the worst of the worst?

With a major shift in Iraq less than two weeks ahead, Iran at a high boil, the Norks acting nutty and Obama’s plan to doouble down on Afghanistan just getting underway, is the symbolic act of closing Guantanamo worth so much of the president’s time?