Huckabee Would Close Club Gitmo

Following up on my post from last week on Mike Huckabee's attendance at the weekend Mints-For-Terrorists confab, Huckabee says he would close Club Gitmo, the tropical retreat from the stress of jihad.

From the Washington Post:

After the Iowa poll showed that Republican voters like him but found him much less "presidential" and "electable" than Romney, Huckabee sought to build his foreign policy credentials, meeting with a group of retired generals who are in Des Moines to urge the 2008 candidates to commit to opposing torture. After the meeting, Huckabee joined Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in declaring his opposition to the interrogation procedure known as "waterboarding," and said he would support closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a contrast with the other leading Republicans.

HotAir has video of Huckabee talking about Club Gitmo:

MIKE HUCKABEE: I’ve been to Guantanamo, I was there, I guess it’s been about a year and a half ago. I think the problem with Guantanamo is not in that its facilities are inadequate. It’s the symbol that it represents. It’s clearly become a symbol to the rest of the world as a place that has become problematic for us as a nation. I was quite frankly impressed with the quality of the facilities and even the attention to care that was given to the detainees, but that aside, it doesn’t alter that Guantanamo to the rest of the world is a symbol that is not in our best interests to continue pursuing.

HotAir also links to a story in June where Huckabee was singing a different tune (before he got in the national spotlight?):

The former Arkansas governor, who has visited Guantanamo, said Arkansas prisoners most likely would prefer Guantanamo to incarceration in Arkansas.

“I can tell you most of our prisoners would love to be in a facility more like Guantanamo and less like the state prisons that people are in in the United States,” Huckabee said on a cable news network.

So he admits it's not an evil dungeon of torture, yet he wants to close it? So if Huckabee had been president during World War II, would he have given German POWs some complimentary bottles of shampoo and sent them home in 1943 if the Italians or Japanese had complained?

In the same Fox News article, Huckabee admits the need to keep these prisoners in the war on terrorism locked up where they can't get back in the fight themselves:

“But I tell you if we let somebody out and it turns out that they come and fly an airliner into one of our skyscrapers, we’re going to be asking how come we didn’t stop them, we had them detained,” he said. “If we’re going to make a mistake right now, let’s make it on the side of protecting the American people.”

But now that his improved poll numbers makes him seem more "presidential," suddenly he has a change of heart? Is he now reaching out to the "mushy middle?"

This kind of susceptibility to peer pressure from a bunch of jealous, corrupt countries isn't what makes good presidential material.