I continue to be disturbed by the first steps of the Obama administration with regard to Guantanemo Bay prisoners. I had honestly hoped that the abuses of the Bush administration would be not only overturned but some fairness and justice returned to the process of determining if those incarcerated are actually guilty, with proof, if torture took place, and those incarcerated would get some semblance of due process. Several items I read today make me shudder.

From Stuff/NZ- National Security equates to torture okay?  Talking about Binyam Mohamed. Let's hope this case gets reopened, as Stuff says, it's a fiasco.

After receiving information about his torture, another legal team in London has gone to the High Court with a summons asking that the British Government be ordered to hand over evidence it has of Mohamed's abuse.

What fun that has been. The judges hummed and hahed, saying they wanted to release the CIA file detailing the prisoner's treatment, but they held back seven vital paragraphs on grounds of national security.

The Foreign Secretary, David Milibrand, had begged the court not to go there. To do so, he claimed, would endanger security arrangements with the US and in turn that would endanger the security of the British people.

That's baloney. It would have endangered the MI5.

It has emerged that it was not so much the initiative of the Bush administration that things be kept hush-hush, but that Milibrand's people in London had urged the Americans to help in keeping crucial evidence suppressed. The judges said they responded to a US "threat" to Britain. Now it seems the British invited the Americans to threaten.

If that is so, then it was still inappropriate for Obama to intervene.

Next, in Obama's visit to Canada. No special review for Canadian Omar Khadr

U.S. President Barack Obama indicated to Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff on Thursday that there is no special review, let alone immediate release, in the works for Omar Khadr, the only Canadian imprisoned in the U.S. detention camp in Guantanamo Bay.

Omar Khadr was a juvenile when he was brought to Guantanemo Bay. Read the case here.

And I continue to be sorry that Obama does not open up investigations into the abuses by the Bush administration with their catchall *war on terror* excuse that flattened the constitution. From Brunei online.

At issue are White House requests for delays in prosecuting Guantanamo Bay detainees, the upholding of positions by the previous administration of George W Bush, and the invoking of national security concerns to delay cases or the release documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The apparent contradiction between the current administration's positions and Obama's landmark decisions in his first full day in office - to close Guantanamo and ban torture and rendition - have created much confusion among human rights advocates, lawyers and editorial writers.

The administration has been sharply criticised for its handling of a case involving serious allegations of torture by five alleged victims of Bush's program of extraordinary rendition, who were kept in secret CIA prisons overseas.

A Justice Department lawyer dispatched to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco examining the case put forward the same argument that state secrets were at risk advanced by the Bush administration....

"Voters have good reason to feel betrayed if they took Mr Obama seriously on the campaign trail when he criticised the Bush administration's tactic of stretching the state-secret privilege to get lawsuits tossed out of court," the newspaper said in an editorial.

I do see in that article that a judge dismissed Obama's request to suspend a case involving Bush's illegal warrantless wiretapping program. But why did Obama even ASK that of the judge?