Barack Obama gained the presidency with promises to restore America's fidelity to international law. A lawyer and law professor, he attacked the Bush administration's legal shortcuts in the "war on terror" and made a pledge to close Guantánamo. Since his inauguration, he has offered lofty rhetoric and reiterated pledges to end the Guantánamo camps, forbid torture and end the process of "extraordinary" renditions involving black sites. But his actions fall remarkably short of his words.
Let's start with Guantánamo. Not only is it still in business, word is now spreading that the original one-year deadline for its closing can't be met. Obama has progressively embraced many of his predecessor's dubious ideas, including the notion that under the laws of war he was somehow entitled to detain any of the prisoners there indefinitely, without criminal charges.
Moreover, even the pledge to end torture at Gitmo has its exceptions. Force-feeding operations which have continued at the detention centre during the course of the Obama administration fail to conform to the standards of the Malta declaration, and they are apparently administered with such violence and brutality that one prisoner who was being force-fed died under unexplained circumstances. The Pentagon had hushed up all discussion about the case, and one official responsible for detainee affairs tells me "when the full story comes out, we won't look good". That is probably an understatement.
Even as Gitmo winds down, the US continues to operate large-scale detention facilities in Iraq, and it is actually ramping up its prison capacity in Afghanistan.
