There are clearly differences between George Bush and Barack Obama. But on at least one issue, the detention of terror suspects, Obama is gradually coming to some of the same reluctant conclusions as his predecessor.

After boldly promising to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, Barack Obama has yet to come up with a feasible alternative. The off-shore military prison has held about 800 detainees since the war in Afghanistan began in October of 2001. Of these, more than half have been released without charges or returned to their home countries. Three men have been convicted of crimes, and the U.S. hopes to release more before transferring 60-80 prisoners to the U.S. for eventual military trials.

Now the administration has a team visiting empty prisons in the U.S. hoping to convert one of them, either in a remote area or on a military base, into a new prison for terror suspects.

And how, exactly — other than location — would this be different than holding these men at Guantanamo Bay? And what exactly is to keep the new lockup from becoming the same sort of global public relations disaster as its Cuban predecessor?

Monday, the Obama administration faced another unpleasant remnant of the Bush years — foreign renditions — and came to a strikingly similar decision to that reached by the Bush administration.

The notorious renditions involve spiriting suspects away to foreign prisons where they can be tortured for information without the constraints of U.S. law. Human rights organizations have long condemned the practice, which has sometimes resulted in completely innocent people disappearing for a few months of hellish mistreatment.

Two years ago, Obama wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine that the U.S.
must “behave in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the
American people. This means ending the practice of shipping away
prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries
without charge or trial …” 

Monday, the administration announced that it will continue the rendition policy, with only a slight difference: The U.S. will monitor the treatment of these suspects and will insist on “diplomatic assurances”
that the host country will not torture them.

And that is laughable on its face. In reality, once these prisoners are dumped into overseas prisons, the U.S. will have little or no control over their treatment. As the Abu Ghraib photos showed, we have had trouble monitoring torture in our own military prisons.

Again, high-minded rhetoric has now yielded to the ugly but practical realities of the war on terror. As the war in Iraq shifts to the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. will continue to pick up terror suspects and foreign fighters from various Middle Eastern and African countries.

Ending the renditions would mean shipping these people to U.S. custody, either at Guantanamo or in a U.S. lock, which is an even greater public-relations problem.

Obama is said to be a pragmatic person. On at least these two difficult issues, pragmatism has led him to abandon his campaign positions.

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