Getting Out In Front...

Illinois Senator, presidential candidate, and all-around political rockstar Barack Obama gets unequivocal about restoring legitimacy to our detention and "rendition" policies post 9/11. In an essay in the forthcoming Foreign Affairs, Senator Obama faces off against Republican candidate Mitt Romney, who, in the recent torture one-upmanship exchange during the second GOP debate said he'd "double Guantanamo." I'm not exactly sure what that means, but it sounds bad.Here's Obama being nicely straightforward on torture, rendition and the other black arts of the current administration:

People around the world have heard a great deal of late about freedom on the march. Tragically, many have come to associate this with war, torture, and forcibly imposed regime change. To build a better, freer world, we must first behave in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people. This means ending the practices of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, of detaining thousands without charge or trial, of maintaining a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law.