No more difficult than that job will be another critical task his predecessor leaves him. Obama must find a way through the legal morass President George W. Bush created with his war on terror.

For starters, there is Guantanamo Bay, the prison camp Bush established in Cuba for suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda members. He had hoped to put them beyond the reach of the courts, the Constitution, domestic and international law.

Official contempt for the law doesn’t make the world safer. It gives fodder to the enemy.

The murderous attacks in Mumbai last week make tragically clear that Islamist terrorism is on the rise, not the wane. Many forces contribute, and U.S. treatment of captives at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and black sites elsewhere rallies extremists and helps them recruit new followers.

Obama must decide what to do with the 250 men who remain at Guantanamo, the wrongly accused as well as the truly dangerous. The latter group is surprisingly small, no more than 5 percent or 10 percent, says Lieutenant Colonel Stephen E. Abraham, a decorated Army reservist and intelligence officer previously posted at Guantanamo.

The military itself says 60 detainees are safe for release, but they can’t be freed unless the U.S. finds a place to send them. Nor can the U.S. free those labeled unlawful enemy combatants on shamefully skimpy information.

A federal judge in Washington, Richard Leon, last month ordered the release of five men who have been at Guantanamo for 6 1/2 years. The government is holding them because one single, unnamed source — whose credibility can’t be assessed — said the men had been planning to travel from Bosnia to Afghanistan to fight U.S. troops.

They hadn’t actually taken up arms or supported Americas enemies. After considering classified information the government offered, Leon, appointed to the bench by Bush, ordered them released.

What’s surprising is “not how could Judge Leon have decided what he did, but how for years the government has maintained that the little information that they have is sufficient for holding hundreds of people for years,” says Abraham, now a business lawyer in Newport Beach, California.

He says hundreds because those five cases typify the quality of evidence Abraham saw when he gathered information for detainee review panels, and again when he served as a judge on a panel.

Leon isn’t the first judge to order releases from Guantanamo.

But, where to ship those ordered freed? Where do we send detainees even the military wants to release but who have no safe place to go?

With a new president comes the chance to persuade other countries to take these detainees, especially if the U.S. agrees to host some, too.

“It is unreasonable for the United States to say to other countries, “Here, you guys take them. We don¡¦t want them,”” says retired Rear Admiral John Hutson, formerly Judge Advocate General of the Navy.

If that thought scares you, remember we are talking about people either declared not dangerous by the government itself, or whom a court says were wrongly imprisoned.

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