While pundits have been busy analyzing Friday’s Presidential debate, no one has been talking about a crucial issue that has disappeared from the election campaign since Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination in August, even though it is absolutely central to the complaints about the Bush administration’s behaviour over the last seven years.

The issue is unfettered executive power, and it has been manifested, to the horror of the world, and the dismay of Americans who pride themselves on being a nation founded on the rule of law, in the endorsement of torture as official US policy, the transformation of the CIA into an organization that has run a colossal “extraordinary rendition programme” and a network of secret prisons around the world, and the detention of thousands of prisoners without charge or trial in a legal black hole between the Geneva Conventions and the US court system.

In Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, over 20,000 prisoners in US custody are held neither as Prisoners of War, who would be protected from “humiliating and degrading treatment” and coercive interrogations by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects who will be tried in a US court. The only trials put forward by the government — the Military Commissions at Guantánamo — are so tainted by accusations of pro-prosecution bias and the suppression of exculpatory evidence that the administration is fighting a losing battle to establish their legitimacy, nearly seven years after they were set up by Dick Cheney and David Addington.

In John McCain’s case, his refusal to discuss executive overreach is understandable. Republicans have been encouraged to endorse without question the bellicose rhetoric of the “War on Terror” and to turn a blind eye to the government’s shredding of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Forget the rights of foreign prisoners; warrantless wiretapping and the President’s self-declared right to imprison anyone as an “enemy combatant” — even American citizens — have been sold as vital steps to protect America, rather than a naked power grab by a Vice President who believes, above all, in unfettered executive power.

Although McCain has stated that he wants to close Guantánamo, and has often declared his opposition to the use of torture by US forces, he has flip-flopped horribly as the election has approached. Back in February, he conveniently shelved his lifelong opposition to torture by voting against a bill banning the use of torture by the CIA, and after the Supreme Court ruled, in June, that the prisoners at Guantánamo have constitutional habeas corpus rights, he declared that it was “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

The disappointment, therefore, is in Barack Obama’s unwillingness to tackle the administration’s crimes head-on. His team has presumably discovered that neither the plight of prisoners held beyond the law nor the executive’s dictatorial power grab is of paramount importance to voters, but this is lamentable for two reasons: firstly, because Obama clearly both knows and cares about the law, and secondly because it is the Bush administration’s quest for unfettered executive power that has led to almost all the ills that currently plague the United States.

On respecting the law, Obama has a proven track record. He has worked with lawyers representing the Guantánamo prisoners, and has consistently voted against ill-conceived “War on Terror” legislation. Last August, in a speech in Washington D.C., he touched on all the issues that are currently lacking in his campaign:

In the dark halls of Abu Ghraib and the detention cells of Guantánamo, we have compromised our most precious values. What could have been a call to a generation has become an excuse for unchecked presidential power. A tragedy that united us was turned into a political wedge issue used to divide us.

And as recently as June, after the Supreme Court’s ruling, he declared that the ruling was “an important step toward reestablishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law, and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus.”

This is not only fine oratory; it is also, I believe, essential to Obama’s campaign for change. In order to demonstrate quite how different he is from the Republicans who have brought the country to the brink of ruin, he should use his opposition to the Iraq war as a springboard for an assault on the executive’s power grab, in which all the horrors of the “War on Terror”, outlined above, would also be included. Instead of playing on the folly of an expensive war without end, he should be focusing on the war’s origins, and nailing it as the supreme gesture of a power-crazed executive, acting without restraint and with the arrogant assumption that it has destroyed both the “quaint” principles on which the United States was founded, and the separation of powers that was established to prevent tyranny.

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Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press) and a regular commentator on US politics and the “War on Terror.” Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk