Nearly five years ago, Gary Isaac, a corporate lawyer at a prestigious Chicago law firm, drank deeply from candidate Sen. Barack Obama’s rhetorical reservoir of hope and change. The change Isaac was most concerned about had to do with the operation, outside the rule of law, of the U.S. military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Isaac was deeply involved, pro bono, in helping detainees challenge their detention in U.S. courts by asserting their rights under the ancient writ of habeas corpus, which requires that the state justify the detention of a person before a judge.
So convinced was Isaac that a President Obama would restore habeas for detainees that in February 2008 he published a blog called Habeas Lawyers for Obama, composed of one impassioned post, signed by 132 habeas lawyers, and posted just before Super Tuesday in the Democratic Primaries. It concluded: