This is an excellent start to Obama's administration!

Yesterday, at around 11:30 a.m. (EST), President Obama signed an executive order to close Guantanamo Bay detention center. In addition, the order formally:

1. Bans torture and inhumane and degrading treatment of detainees by requiring that the Army field manual be used as the guide for terror interrogations. 
2. Closes the CIA’s secret prisons and ends the Bush administration's CIA program of enhanced interrogation methods that have included abhorrent procedures like water-boarding. 
3. Provides the International Committee of the Red Cross access to all U.S.-held detainees. 
4. Establishes an interagency task force to lead a systematic review of detention policies and procedures and a review of all individual cases.

We applaud our new president for taking this important step on his second day in office. UUSC believes that any government-sponsored acts of torture, under any circumstances, are profoundly immoral, unjustified, and illegal. These practices can and must be ended now.

President Obama expressed the values and beliefs of all Americans of conscience in his inaugural speech when he stated, “We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.”