Free democracies look forward—with ardent hope and expectation—to Barack Obama’s Presidency. Obama’s youth and idealism are his main attraction. The image of America was badly impaired during the Bush administration on many counts—the invasion of Iraq on the pretext of imminent use of weapons of mass destruction, the barbaric treatment of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib and the indefinite detention of suspected enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay without affording them elementary due process. The US Supreme Court provided limited relief to the detainees despite stiff opposition by the administration. Bush was certainly not a malevolent person but he had no understanding of America’s role and destiny. We must however be thankful to Bush for his hilarious gaffes. Bush alone is not to be blamed for his delusion that the people of India love him. It was our Prime Minister who fed him that fiction. In his last press conference there was a touch of pathos in his remark that after his retirement, “he will soon be waking up, not to receive an intelligence briefing on terrorist threats six days a week, but to make or fetch the coffee for his wife, Laura.”

Heavy responsibility will lie on Obama’s shoulders after he assumes office. His topmost priority should be to order the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. No doubt that will take considerable time. Nonetheless it is imperative to order immediate suspension of military commissions trying detainees and thereby remove this shameful blot on the US justice system and its human rights record.

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