In regard to Lindsey Graham and John McCain's "How to Handle the Guantanamo Detainees" (op-ed, May 6): The news that the Obama administration is considering reactivating the military commissions put on hold when the president came into office is the latest in a series of disappointments for human rights campaigners. These are the same commissions that Barack Obama denounced on the campaign trail as "an enormous failure."

Should the president decide to abandon a campaign pledge to "reject" the Military Commissions Act, he will be breathing life into a court system with the fewest rights for suspects of any court in the Western world. His first instinct was right -- we should not bastardize our judicial system to accommodate practices that should not have been countenanced in the first place.

The detainees in Guantanamo were supposed to be the worst of the worst but the majority of those who have passed through its gates have now been released without charge. And lest we not forget, they were released by the Bush administration. These men were all erroneously detained on the basis of faulty intelligence reporting, and these military commissions will give unsupported intelligence the weight of evidence.

The Obama administration is about to go down a path that will repeat many of the mistakes of the past eight years. This is a time for moral courage, not moral compromise. We can do better and we need to make sure that this White House hears that message.

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