Obama declares end to "War on Terror" - Washington Post

[TamilNet, Friday, 23 January 2009, 16:47 GMT]
Effectively declaring an end to Bush's "War on Terror," the U.S. President Barack Obama, by signing an executive order in the Oval Office Thursday, signaled to the world that the "reach of the U.S. Government in battling its enemies will not be limitless," and halted the notion that "a president can circumvent long-standing U.S. laws simply by declaring war," Washington Post said Friday.

"Key components of the secret structure developed under Bush are being swept away: The military's Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, facility, where the rights of habeas corpus and due process had been denied detainees, will close, and the CIA is now prohibited from maintaining its own overseas prisons. And in a broad swipe at the Bush administration's lawyers, Obama nullified every legal order and opinion on interrogations issued by any lawyer in the executive branch after Sept. 11, 2001," the paper said.

It was a swift and sudden end to an era, where "public sentiment grew against perceived abuses of government power," the paper added.

During his campaign and again in his inaugural address Tuesday, Obama used a different lexicon to describe operations to defeat terrorists. "As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals," he said. "And for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you."

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The Washington Post:

Bush's 'War' On Terror Comes to a Sudden End