First, Gibbs told reporters that more transfers of Guantanamo detainees out of the prison camp “have taken place in the past eight months than have taken — than took place in the previous eight years.”

Uh, wrong. As Linzer points out, the Obama administration has transferred 31 detainees in the last eight months, as compared to some 520 transferred by the Bush administration before that.

Gibbs also went on to claim that, when courts have ruled that the government is unlawfully holding a detainee, the Obama administration has transferred the detainees “back to either their home country or third-party countries.”

Well, not really. As of today, 11 detainees who’ve won the right to be released by a federal court are still imprisoned at Guantanamo, as we note on our Gitmo Habeas Scoreboard, posted earlier today.  We’ll continue to update that as developments occur.

It’s worth noting that not only has the Obama administration not complied with court orders for release, but when lawyers for the Chinese Muslim Uighurs detained at Gitmo won an order to be released into the United States — since they can’t go home to China and the U.S. hasn’t been able to place them all in other countries — the Obama administration fought back hard. That case, Kiyemba v. Obama, is now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.

I’m not trying to take any credit for The Times’ awakening on this issue, but I’m glad to see it is finally joining the party. As I’ve noted before (as did The Wall Street Journal), much of the mainstream media has been gingerly tip-toeing around these issues, making excuses for a new president who needs time to get his appointees in place and his policies on paper. But in the meantime, his Justice Department has been quietly pressing forward with some of the more controversial policies of the previous administration.

We’re talking about lawsuits over torture, warrantless wiretapping, state secrets and policies of extraordinary executive powers that allow the president to indefinitely detain suspected terror supporters abroad — and even here on U.S. soil.

Sure, the Obama administration announced it was withdrawing the use of the word “enemy combatant”, but as I’ve pointed out before, that’s more about semantics than substance. At the same time, the administration is asking the federal courts to stall their habeas corpus cases on the theory that the courts don’t have the authority to free these prisoners anyway.

I have to wonder if Obama — who, to be fair, has his hands full these days with the depressing economic legacy left him by the last administration — is being fully briefed on some of the more outrageous positions being taken in his name. If he’s not, he should be; after all, he’s the one who’s been saying that as president, he has to be able to take on more than one thing at a time.