And then [McCain] got acerbic: Cheney, he says, “believes that waterboarding doesn’t fall under the Geneva Conventions and that it’s not a form of torture. But you know, it goes back to the Spanish Inquisition.”

***
OBAMA’s PLAN:(quotes below)
1) Try criminals in Federal courts
2) Military Tribunals
3) Release ones ordered released by courts
4) Transfer as many as possible to other countries
5) Hold really bad guys until we can figure out how to hold them w out trial indefinitely by legal means

BUSH’S Sept 6, 2006 PLAN: (quotes below)
1) Transfer as many as possible to other countries
2) Try criminals in Federal courts
3) Military Tribunals
4) Beg Congress to figure out how to hold the really bad guys without trial indefinitely by legal means

***
It was precisely to avoid the kind of moral dilemma posed by rendition that Gitmo had been created in the first place, and why the so-called “torture memos” had been drafted. Far from looking for a way to unleash the CIA and other interrogators, Bush officials and lawyers had focused on reining them in even as they recognized that an unprecedented global conflict like the war on terror required some rethinking of old rules.

All this was ignored as the Gitmo myth took hold. That myth had crystallized around two assertions: First, that Bush administration rules had made torture routine at Gitmo and elsewhere; and second, that the very existence of Gitmo was counterproductive to the war on terror and undermined our image abroad…

The final verdict on Gitmo rests on whether one believes the claims of the terrorists and their allies, or the evidence presented by the Pentagon and other official investigators. Where President Obama stands on this question is still unclear. At times, he has shown pragmatism in conducting “the war on terror” (although he has banished the term from the official lexicon). At other times, he has been willing to use anti-American sentiment to his own advantage. By feeding the media with selective leaks of interrogation memos and by publicly contemplating legal action against former Bush officials, he is able to devalue George Bush’s accomplishment in making us safe after 9/11. This helps burnish Obama’s own reputation—while implicitly paying obeisance to Ratner, Soros, and others who have distorted American public perception of why and how the Bush administration fought the war on terror in the way it did.