'Obama backtracking on campaign promises'

WASHINGTON - Human Rights Watch, a prominent international watchdog, has called President Barack Obamas plan to use military commissions to try some US detainees a step back from his campaign promises.
The military commissions system is flawed beyond repair, said Kenneth Roth, the groups executive director. By resurrecting this failed Bush administration idea, President Obama is backtracking dangerously on his reform agenda.
Obama has said that only a few of the detainees now in Guantanamo would go before military commissions instead of courts.
He has also said that evidence rules would be changed in favour of the defence and detainees would have more freedom to choose their lawyers.
Human Rights Watch said that even if Obama places new limits on hearsay evidence it is still dangerous to allow it.
Meanwhile, The New York Times said the presidents recent decisions on detainee abuse photos and tribunals have put him more in line with his predecessor, despite pledges of a new direction.
Obamas opening gambits as president, the newspaper said, were bold declarations of new directions, from announcing the closing of the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to sweeping restrictions on interrogation techniques. He advertised both as a return to traditional American values, after the diversions taken by George W. Bush to the detriment of Americas image abroad and of itself.
But as he showed this week in the way he dealt with those two hard cases, the Times said Obama has begun to scale back. Faced with the choice of signalling an unambiguous break with the policies of the Bush era, or maintaining some continuity with its practices, the president has begun to come down on the side of taking fewer risks with security, even though he is clearly angering the liberal elements of his political base.
Obama balked on releasing the photographs of prisoners after the military - and his influential defence secretary, Robert M. Gates, the cabinets one holdover from the Bush administration - argued that making them public would hand Islamic militants a propaganda coup that could lead to renewed attacks on American forces,: the paper said in a dispatch from Washington.
In announcing on Friday that he would retain the military commission system set up by Bush, even while expanding the rights of detainees to mount a vigorous defence, Obama suggested that there was no inherent conflict between keeping the nation safe and reasserting values that he and many of his supporters believed had been swept aside during the Bush years, the paper observed.