Guantánamo Seems So Yesterday & Other Bush Torture Regime News

It was just fine with Barack Obama and John McCain that they could pretty much avoid talking about the Bush administration’s kangaroo court military tribunals and its embrace of torture during the presidential campaign.

While these aspects of the U.S.’s so-called War on Terror were not a priority for voters who are beleaguered by a collapsed economy and wondering how to pay for their Uncle Leo’s thousand-dollar medications, the candidates also knew that there are no easy answers about how to deal with Guantánamo Bay, but one tentacle of the legacy of a cowardly president who is dumping an extraordinary amount of self-created effluvia in his successor’s lap before he tucks his tail between his legs and scurries back to Texas.

George Bush said he would shutter Guantánamo after a third Supreme Court ruling that the tribunals made a mockery of the Constitution. Obama and McCain also said they would close the detention camp, and Obama will now have to make good on that pledge because Bush, of course, has reneged while pretty much thumbing his nose at the ruling as he did the first two.

Compounding the problem is that while a majority of the so-called enemy combatants were never threats, some of them were and remain so. These include dozens of the 255 prisoners remaining at Guantánamo, including some with connections to Osama bin Laden and other top Al Qaeda leaders, who have moldered at the Navy base in Cuba without being brought to trial as the tribunal system continues to unravel.

More here.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House and here for an index with links to previous torture-related posts.