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Obama hit the ground running on his first first days in office, issuing a series of executive orders with the purpose of reversing some post-9/11 policies. He promised to close the military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, overrule Bush´s executive order of 2002 stating that the Geneva convention on torture did not apply during the War on Terror, bring an end to the Military Tribunal system for trying foreign detainees, and return the right of Habeas Corpus (the right to due legal process) to the detainees. Later at the State Dept. Obama announced his plans for Afghanistand and the Middle-East.

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Steven Thomma is a White House correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers, his second assignment since coming to Washington in 1987. He joined what was then the Knight-Ridder Washington bureau as a regional reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press and became the bureau's National Political Correspondent in 1994. He was assigned to cover the White House for the first time in 1997 and was named Chief Political Correspondent in 2001. He assumed his current White House duties in November 2008.