Glenn Greenwald:

As the Bush administration comes to a close… Just consider – with no hyperbole – what our Government, our country, has done. We systematically tortured people in our custody using techniques approved at the highest levels, many of whom died as a result. We created secret prisons – “black site” gulags – beyond the reach of international monitoring groups. We abducted and imprisoned even U.S. citizens and legal residents without any trial, holding them incommunicado and without even the right to access lawyers for years, while we tortured them to the point of insanity. We disappeared innocent people off the streets, sent them to countries where we knew they’d be tortured, and then closed off our courts to them once it was clear they had done nothing wrong. We adopted the very policies and techniques long considered to be the very definition of “war crimes".

Our Government turned the NSA apparatus inward – something that was never supposed to happen – spying on our conversations in secret and without warrants or oversight, all in violation of the law, and then, once revealed, acted to immunize the private-sector lawbreakers. And that’s to say nothing about the hundreds of thousands of people we killed and the millions more we displaced with a war launched on false pretense. And on and on and on.

I did not vote for Obama nor did I vote for McCain because I strongly disagree with the policies of both. Be that as it may, I’ll tell you one thing that Obama gives me that McCain wouldn’t: hope.

I’m not talking about hope that Obama will suddenly fix all of our nations problems or hope that he will change our economy, education, and health care for the better. I’m talking about hope that he will undo some of the things mentioned above by Greenwald. Some of them are changes that Obama can begin to enact as soon as he takes office. Shut down the secret prisons. End spying on and detention of our own citizens. Create iron-clad policy against the usage of torture. Begin to restore a level of trust in the office of President of the United States of America.

It may be unlikely that President Obama will fulfill these hopes, but they stand a much better chance under Obama than they would under McCain.

UPDATE

This is a good sign (emphasis added):

President-elect Obama’s advisers are quietly crafting a proposal to ship dozens, if not hundreds, of imprisoned terrorism suspects to the United States to face criminal trials, a plan that would make good on his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison …

Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and Obama legal adviser, said discussions about plans for Guantanamo had been “theoretical” before the election but would quickly become very focused because closing the prison is a top priority. Bringing the detainees to the United States will be controversial, he said, but could be accomplished.

“I think the answer is going to be, they can be as securely guarded on U.S. soil as anywhere else,” Tribe said. “We can’t put people in a dungeon forever without processing whether they deserve to be there.“