2. He did not reject and reaffirm that the U.S. does not torture. After Cheney openly admitted his role as the Vice-President representing the United States in authorizing waterboarding (i.e., torture), his failure to order that any action be taken against Cheney and failure to even condemn Cheney's actions shows that he did not and does not reject torture.
Guantanamo guests who go on hunger strikes, and who are force fed with rubber hoses put down their gullets like ducks being force-fed for foie gras prodution, are tortured. It's no excuse to blame the Republicans for not financing the closing of Gitmo when the Chief Executive has the Army and Navy behind him, and can even hold press conferences on a monthy, weekly, or even daily basis to challenge and criticize the Republicans. You probably criticize the Republicans more than he does.
We do not know that all CIA torture camps were closed. There is no factual basis for that claim. What we do know is that Obama went to the CIA headquarters and reassured CIA employees that there would be no prosecutions for any torture activities or the destruction of the CIA video tapes showing such torture.
...the ACLU disagrees with you.
No policy or practice of the last decade has brought greater shame on America. But the stain of torture extends far beyond the damage to the nation’s moral standing. The use of torture—and the failure to engage in any formal legal reckoning—has degraded the rule of law in ways that continue to metastasize.
President Obama categorically disavowed torture when he came to office, and closed the secret CIA prisons where so much of the abuse took place.14 But the President’s political calculation that the nation must look forward and not backward leaves the door open to future abuses.
http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/acalltocourage.pdf And he did end the Iraq war:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/100295645
And instead of speculating, as the OP does, about what Obama might do, while ignoring his statement to the contrary, support the claim with real evidence like this showing Bush did just that, Human Rights Watch, 2003:
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The line between war and law enforcement gained importance as the U.S. government extended its military efforts against terrorism outside of Afghanistan and Pakistan. In November, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency used a missile to kill Qaid Salim Sinan al-Harethi, an alleged senior al-Qaeda official, and five companions as they were driving in a remote and lawless area of Yemen controlled by tribal chiefs. Washington accused al-Harethi of masterminding the October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole which had killed seventeen sailors.
Based on the limited information available, Human Rights Watch did not criticize the attack on al-Harethi as an extra-judicial execution because his alleged al-Qaeda role arguably made him a combatant, the government apparently lacked control over the area in question, and there evidently was no reasonable law enforcement alternative. Indeed, eighteen Yemeni soldiers had reportedly been killed in a prior attempt to arrest al-Harethi. However, the U.S. government made no public effort to justify this use of its war powers or to articulate the legal limits to such powers.
It is Human Rights Watch's position that even someone who might be classified as an enemy combatant should not be subject to military attack when reasonable law enforcement means are available. The failure to respect this principle would risk creating a huge loophole in due process protections worldwide. It would leave everyone open to being summarily killed anyplace in the world upon the unilateral determination by the United States (or, as the approach is inevitably emulated, by any other government) that he or she is an enemy combatant.
<...>
The appropriate line between war and law enforcement was crossed in the case of Jose Padilla,
a U.S. citizen who the Bush administration claimed had flown from Pakistan to the United States to investigate creating a radiological bomb. The Bush administration arrested him as he arrived in the United States, but instead of charging him with this serious criminal offense and bringing him to trial, it unilaterally declared him an "enemy combatant." That designation, it claimed, permitted it to hold him without access to counsel and without charge or trial until the end of the war against terrorism, which may never come. With no link to a discernible battlefield, that assertion of power, again, threatens to create a giant exception to the most basic criminal justice guarantees. Anyone could be picked up and detained forever as an "enemy combatant" upon the unverified claim of the Bush administration or any other government. As the year ended, the U.S. courts were considering this radical claim.
http://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k3/introduction.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
