The media headlined its most common orbit for Obama’s former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter as, “Ash Carter, the U.S. defense secretary who opened combat jobs to women, dies at 68”.

Ash Carter helped usher in a new era of military wokeness. He was a timid and uninspiring figure at best and heavily complicit in Obama’s agendas for the military.

But he did have one thing to his credit.

Obama had forced out Secretary of Defense Hagel for resisting his push to immediately free all the Jihadists from Gitmo. To his credit, even knowing that, Ash Carter put up at least somewhat of a fight. Not enough, but it was something.

When Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, asked him, “Can you talk to us about how you might resist such pressure if you receive it from the White House?”

“I sure can,” Carter said. “I call it straight. I have an obligation under the law with respect to the risk … and I intend to discharge that responsibility in a very straight-up way.”

How do we know he did?

Carter’s comments come after the New York Times’s editorial board earlier this month charged that defense officials “have used every bureaucratic trick in the book to slow down the release of inmates,” saying the action “basically amounts to insubordination.”

Almost unimaginable.

The Daily Beast reports that according to a White House source, Carter is unwilling to be responsible for the release of Guantanamo detainees and accountable for their conduct once they are released. His aversion to signing off on detainees’ transfers is so strong that he seems willing to ignore Obama’s preferred timeline.

Last month, The New York Times reported that White House national security adviser Susan Rice had presented Carter with a memo that said he would have one month to make decisions on transferring the prisoners away from Guantanamo.

But it is Carter’s signature that leads to a detainee’s release. The complaint heard at the Pentagon is Carter and the Defense Department are not moving fast enough for a White House that hopes to have the question of closing the facility answered by the end of its term. So far, Carter has signed off on only a handful of detainees at one time and has waited weeks to act on those cases.

As one defense official explained, Carter “is definitely under pressure… The White House, if it had its way, would like to see more regular signatures.”

It got so bad that Obama tried asking a Republican congress to let him bypass Carter.

There’s even speculation that if the president follows through on his threat to veto the defense budget bill to win changes on detainee policy, he will ask that the law be amended so that the president, not the defense secretary, has the final say on detainee transfers.

Beyond Gitmo, moments like these may be a small thing, but notice how no one in the Biden administration is willing to dissent the way that some defense and intelligence people did under Obama?

Defense Secretary Ash Carter told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Wednesday that he did not support President Obama’s decision to commute former Army soldier Bradley Manning’s prison sentence.

“All I’ll say about the Manning case is I did not support the direction the president went, but he’s made his decision. That’s all I’m going to say,” Carter said. “That was not my recommendation.”

If Ash Carter is worth remembering, it’s for showing some honor in moments like these. Honor that is entirely absent from the current administration’s leadership.