Unexpected Headline: Obama Backs Bush On Rendition Case, Secrecy

“The liberal legal scold”
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With all due respect, Michael, go f— yourself.

On the plus side, the latest Treasury plan is well liked.

Oops. Did that pop out?
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I must remember my manners.

The liberal legal scold Glenn Greenwald calls this a 180-degree reversal from Obama’s campaign promise.
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Scherer, you are just about the least qualified person to criticize Glenn Greenwald.

I suppose it’s possible to conceive of a tree of disclosures that would have to take place in open court, not only about torture sites in other countries, but the intelligence operation that named these men as sources and how and why that operation was functioning. A public trial is not a good place for explaining an intelligence network even if it had screwed up policies. Popular Mechanics is not a good place for a review of home processing of fissionable material either.

And Obama can go f— himself too.

Although, according to NPR, “On the same day as arguments in the Jeppesen case, Attorney General Eric Holder ordered senior Justice Department officials to review all of the Bush administration’s assertions of the state secret privilege.” I think they just need more time.

FISA, funding, freedom, fornication, federal courts flip flops all?

That’s Our Frozone!

Mr. Scherer, you should check Mr. Klein’s headline below, because I must provide you with a similar admonition. Obama is not backing the Bush policy of rendition, which is exactly what a lot of these stories make it sound like he’s doing. The administration is simply saying that the lawsuit against the Boeing corporation shouldn’t be allowed to proceed because it involves state secrets. The administration has not wavered in its firm opposition to rendition, and it’s hard to see how suing Boeing for something they were contracted to do by the government really helps justice.

Glenn nails the substantive argument, but he really has Obama dead to rights on the flip-flopping.

Silly libs.

Lies IS for Clixons.

Michael Scherer:
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The liberal legal scold Glenn Greenwald?
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That should read:
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Blogger Glenn Greenwald, largely derided as a “liberal legal scold” by the national press corps (of whom he has been often harshly critical)…
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Your Village context is showing, Michael Scherer.
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How disappointing…

Good point, astarf.
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Headline, revised: “Unexpected Headline: Obama Backs Bush On Secrecy, Abuse Of Executive Authority”

Welcome to BROWN SHIRT HYPOCRISY MONTH.

Regardless if this is a defensible position or not (I’m not entirely sure it is or it isn’t, I will admit that I don’t know enough of the case, and in ordinary times I would be fine with the govt. using this privelage, but after the Bush Administration we are not in ordinary times) this is the sort of thing they’re going to have to be more public about doing.
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If the DOJ is going to claim that a case is going to risk secrets and national security, they can’t just claim that anymore and leave it at that, they are going to need to make a case to the public about why (you can say enough to let folks on about what kind of information you’ld be leaking and explain why it’s too much of a risk), and after they make their case see if the public concurs or lynches them. If they try to ignore it… bad form, bad form.

Wow, that little story is made of fail MS. Without reading the links I would have a completely wrong impression of what’s actually happening. This is like that time I was in Iraq and came back after a mission to see CNN talking about what we just did – except what happened and their report had absolutely nothing in common.
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Incredibly weaksauce dude.

Thanks for highlighting this story, Michael. It’s important stuff. Very disappointing. We’re still early on in the administration, of course, but this is very discouraging if it is not reversed. I suspect they’re afraid to disclose just how much the Bush administration was breaking laws and torturing, because it would lead to prosecutions, which would kill a post-partisan era. Why David Broder and Eric Cantor’s feelings should supersede the rule of law is quite unclear to me.
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The liberal legal scold
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Sigh. What sqr1 said.

The administration is simply saying that the lawsuit against the Boeing corporation shouldn’t be allowed to proceed because it involves state secrets.
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Yeah, and that’s pretty much the core of my problem with the Obama Administration on this topic.
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I’m holding out some hope that he’ll reverse the DOJ’s position on this (I think there’s a precedent for it), but I’m preparing for disappointment.

McCarthy and Booby Kennedy were in fact correct, after all, and the loon lib NUTS including Klein on this board are proof positive that the greatest enemies to American freedom and human peace are not out in the 3rd world hinterlands or madrassas, but comfortably ensconced in the tenured Ivy halls and Foggy Bottom legacies and media mud pits otherwise known as the liberal establishment.

My favorite glowing example of this disconnect was during the CBS vs Westy trial (for those of you out of diapers) when the meddling mavens at Black Rock were reduced in public to their narcissistic, Old European coddling anti-American least. The loon left learned little from that episode, apparently, even where they were called out and feathered as rank & file liars about the troops, military leadership, and intelligence officers that they daily then and still now slander and liable as a career move.

No matter.

Obama has read the intel, he now knows what’s at stake, and perhaps a chance for true justice remains, despite the howling from his moronic mob of chanters dressed up like patriots no longer than election day.

What a group.

What a legacy.

Time to go old school
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Phuck you Mikey Scherer!

Obama has read the intel, he now knows what’s at stake…
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QH:
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You sound like you have “read the intel”, and therefore you (and Obama) know something that the rest of America does not.
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Are you somehow privy to the “state secrets” upon which the Obama DOJ is basing its position on the Boeing rendition case?

During the mid 70′s even the likes of Garrison Trudeau were forced by the relentless facts to admit their public duplicity with the enemies of America and freedom.

When will the liberal establishment admit now their willingness to burn all bridges to peace, but for the sake of their GET BUSH, GET CHENEY foaming allegiance to everything Red Brigades and nothing useful?

Petra Kelley’s dead and buried along with her idiot spouse.

Sadly, her spawn still crawl out from the core of the DNC hemp hut every 4 years, to rally the lemmings for pre-emptive Western defeat.

= CHAMBERLITES ACCOMPLISHED =

1. Let’s be honest: anyone with a history of covering up for torture-supporting racists has to be far to the right of Glenn Greenwald. Michael Scherer and the rest of the John McBirch Society have never believed in the rule of law.

2. Marty Lederman’s old haunt, Balkinization, pulls no punches as far as I can tell. Read this commentary by David Luban and tell me if I am wrong.

Yes, Greenwald did lay out a strong case on the legal issue for which you scolded Obama.

MS,
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If I’m not mistaken, you meant “privilege” rather than “priveledge” in the last sentence. (What can I say? Teacher editing habits die hard.)
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Also, I think you were deliberately baiting the Swampcommenters with the “liberal legal scold” thing. Am I right?

stuartzechman

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It does not take a Senate political scientist or DOD media mole to figure out that what the public knows needs to be severely limited during a time of war.

Lincoln and FDR both buried parts of the Constitution during war time, and to a lesser extent so did Clinton and the Bushes.

The dishonor belongs to those that would out our intelligence service members (the real ones, not the ones on the cover of Vanity Fair) and military ops as a day job — the NY Times in particular a leading candidate for prosecution, and long overdue.

If Obama were to release ANYTHING along the lines of what would be exposed at trial were it to go the normal civilian route, he’d be asking for TREASON charges and impeachment.

Even he’s not that short-sighted.

Poor Mikey… still shooting spitballs at the smarter boys, are we? for shame!

THANK YOU for posting on this important topic; this and the issue w/the Obama team continuing to pressure the Brits to keep information out of court w/the threat that they won’t share info is sad IMO. This stuff needs to not only come out in the light through the press; but the people who supported Obama need to pressure him to change these activities.

Just so we’re clear: it is hulagate’s position that if the government extralegally kidnapped his wife to be tortured in some other country, she would not be able to sue anyone involved in that kidnapping, provided that the executive branch wanted to keep any aspect of the kidnapping or torture secret.
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If you assume that the government is infallible, or that this power will only be used on brown-skinned people and that sounds ok to you, then you might support this decision. People who don’t share those views cannot support this decision.

Gosh, Mikey, now you’ve got hulagate on your side!

Wow, a halfway coherent post from Mark “Hula” Halperin. I guess the new meds are working.

Another precinct (out here on the plains) heard from –

It took a lot more than three weeks of secrecy claims to cause the consensus that George W. Bush and his administration were duplicitous, dishonest frauds whose secrecy assertions were usually self-serving lies. I’m willing to entertain the possibility that there are genuine situations where disclosure could be contrary to the public interest – in which case, this might well be the right call. One case doesn’t make a policy, and even sweeping policy reform doesn’t require disclosure of everything all the time.
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That said, I hope Michael “The Even-handed” Scherer will give equal coverage to individual cases where the government supports or allows disclosure.
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and, what sqr1 said about the Greenwald cheap shot, even though I disagree with GG here.
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and the word is “privilege.”

“…anyone with a history of covering up for torture-supporting racists…”

So your family was at a Japanese internment camp in Arkysaw during World War II, never mind the lack of valid charges from FDR’s regime?

The towel heads in Gitmo are not innocents, they were caught on the BATTLE FIELD — and a high percentage of them already released have gone right back to their Al Queda cadres, including Yemen which should be an immediate target beyond anything we do in Pakistan.

Obama has promised to take the fight to the enemy.

Let’s hope that includes those in the press and campus clods that think defending freedom and freeing slaves is a Chavezian joke to be played for their own casual fun.

The solemn coffins and proud families of the brave U.S. soldiers do not deserve to suffer from the pestering lunacy of the media and their shills in academia, to be sure.

“If Obama were to release ANYTHING along the lines of what would be exposed at trial were it to go the normal civilian route, he’d be asking for TREASON charges and impeachment.”
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Eh, he could always switch parties. We don’t impeach Republicans, no matter how they screw the country.

Can’t get it out of my head how funny it is that to you “scold” is a synonym for “substantive.” It’s LITERALLY annoying you to have to slog through the details. This is called a “tell” in gambling.

My position is that anyone that does not see the common sense in the DOJ’s reluctance to release vital national security secrets (ID’s of operating field agents, military shelf plans, transit routes, help from allies, communications) needs to be exported to Gitmo for the duration of the war on terror — since they clearly do not value the American way of life, or the efforts made to protect it.

Or was all that ranting about Valerie Flame and Say Joe Wilson just for show?

I understand they need more fresh press people in Russia, if you really think you’re being denied the truth, libwits.

Ask for the Putin Express to OBLIVION.

“Or was all that ranting about Valerie Flame and Say Joe Wilson just for show?”
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Speaking of treason.

Just so we’re clear: it is hulagate’s position that if the government extralegally kidnapped his wife to be tortured in some other country
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It’s always been hulagate’s position to stamp out human decency wherever it rears its ugly head.

QH:
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It does not take a Senate political scientist or DOD media mole to figure out that what the public knows needs to be severely limited during a time of war.
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So you have no idea whether or not there is any merit to the Obama DOJ’s proposed dismissal of the case based on “state secrets privilege”?
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That’s odd. How is it possible for you to know whether or not the State is simply, say, politically embarrassed, or jealously guarding its secrecy privileges beyond that which is truly necessary for national security?
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It’s very strange to hear you defending the horrible, bureaucracy-rife State’s “privilege” to absolute secrecy, given that you’ve almost always argued that we regard the government as an inevitably corrupt, inept, Midas-touch-in-reverse, immense social colon-block for whom we should perpetually harbor suspicion, if not outright hostility.
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Now you sound like a Soviet defender of the Kremlin’s policies.
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It seems as if your argument is:
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“In all things proclaimed national security-related by the State, absolute trust must be vested in their pronouncements. In all other areas, the State’s relationship to the people must be assumed to be adversarial.”
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That’s basically embracing a Soviet statist’s position and an anarchist’s position simultaneously, QH.
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It’s a perspective which in practice constitutes a recipe for oligarchy, if not tyranny.

We shouldn’t be surprised to find that Obama is trying to retain executive powers that Bush created. It really is up to the Congress to restrain him, or any other executive.
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He will no doubt say that he will not abuse the use of a state secret argument going forward, but we should never trust executives with this kind of power.

jayackroyd said:

We shouldn’t be surprised to find that Obama is trying to retain executive powers that Bush created. It really is up to the Congress to restrain him, or any other executive.

He will no doubt say that he will not abuse the use of a state secret argument going forward, but we should never trust executives with this kind of power.

That’s really spot on. Everyone is convinced that they will use unlimited power for good, as opposed to all those other scoundrals who will use it for evil. Thus the executive branch continually amasses power, because every president is convinced that he will only use it for good.

Liberal loons remain convinced that legal works trump combat realities?

That should really scare Al Queda!

The assumption by the SDS mob now is the same as they’ve practiced since at least the first World War, i.e. you can’t trust the military. Some would argue that it goes back even longer, to the Irish race riots against the Lincoln draft in Old New York — where blacks were lynched on Manhattan Island by a few Yankees that valued their personal comfort over that of the greater group.

Wilson, Carter, and Clinton actually bought into such crap — and alot of decent, innocent Americans and allies soon DIED as a result of their populist (narcissistic) stupidity. 9-11 was plotted over years if not decades. Should we allow that much time now?

Obama ran on the same platform, but perhaps he’s finally seen the light?

I will remind you libfolks that Howard Dean was screaming IRAN IRAN IRAN as we headed over to Iraq for the final move on Saddam. Dean was convinced that IRAN was the proper target, not Sunniland — but that’s not to be discussed during today’s diatribes, of course. Too many embarrassing facts.

I would make the case that we would do better to use a Canadian style legal system, if not their health care, if we’re to reform our courts for the public good and not just TMZ or Rolling Stone fodder.

Allow me to point out that except for the juvenile name-calling part, this is actually a good and important post. Just like the poorly answered question concerning the “truth commision’, Obama is developing a long track record of telling civil liberties and human-right advocates precisely what they want to hear while choking mightily when it comes to actually delivering on his promises. One of course wonders how much the threat of insubordination within the racks of Spooks and Generals might be in play. After all, all the people who relied on John Yoo’s opinions for cover are still precisely where we left them.

stuartzechman
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Based on history, I must assume that any screaming ACLU treatises regarding national security matters begin with the known liberal hatred of the U.S. military.

Any analysis of merit has to flow from that fact.

We shouldn’t be surprised to find that Obama is trying to retain executive powers that Bush created
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I give him slightly more credit. I’m sure he’s responding to pressure from underneath within the CIA and Pentagon.

Paul Dirks
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Obama did, as he daily reminds himself and America, win the 2008 election (not that he hesitates from running for 2012, in every public move).

Along with the other 59 million people that did not vote for Frozone, er, Skippy, uh, Kenya Cuzin, ahem, Ayers Head One, I am shocked and awed that there appears to be so little lib support for him here, and given his excellent adventure vetting of staffers and choice market moves by Treasury today.

Never mind his flip flops on FISA and campaign funding, of course.

No early indications there, that he might be pliable.

Hillary must be laughing all the way to Latvia.

“Obama is developing a long track record of telling civil liberties and human-right advocates precisely what they want to hear while choking mightily when it comes to actually delivering on his promises.”

That would indicate that he’s SMART, maybe — or just decent, when facts come to shove?

Anyone advocating the open dissemination of national security information, particularly at this time in history, needs to have their round logic examined, if not their alleged patriotism.

Liberal semantics do not secure the peace, justice, farm exports, AIDS clinics, school building, clean water wells, efficient power supplies, or anything else the leftists purport to support.

I question not only the left’s simplistic clueless judgment, I question their access to syphilis treatment.

I must assume that any screaming ACLU treatises regarding national security matters begin with the known liberal hatred of the U.S. military.
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QH:
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I concede that the character of the plaintiff is a reasonably valid consideration –one consideration– in forming an opinion of the matter.
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That said, that “known liberal hatred” is a ridiculous anachronism, an appendix left over from impressions formed about 40 years ago, the actual history of which is not reducible to your sloganeering.
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Most of the people with which I have contact are liberals, and, anecdotal-ly speaking, nobody resembles that caricature in the slightest. Is there any current polling data that you can produce in which liberals express “hatred” for the military, QH?
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I will remind you libfolks that Howard Dean was screaming IRAN IRAN IRAN as we headed over to Iraq for the final move on Saddam. Dean was convinced that IRAN was the proper target, not Sunniland — but that’s not to be discussed during today’s diatribes, of course. Too many embarrassing facts.
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Now that is an interesting assertion, QH.
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Links and quotes, please?

“Based on history, I must assume that any screaming ACLU treatises regarding national security matters begin with the known liberal hatred of the U.S. military.

Any analysis of merit has to flow from that fact.”

… … …

No replies to That One?

Maybe there IS hope for re-education of the Pell Grantees yet, eh?

“We shouldn’t be surprised to find that Obama is trying to retain executive powers that Bush created. It really is up to the Congress to restrain him, or any other executive.He will no doubt say that he will not abuse the use of a state secret argument going forward, but we should never trust executives with this kind of power.”
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I disagree with this analysis. President Obama inhereted a big mess from the Bush Administration and in the three weeks he’s actually inhabited the office, he’s had to walk a fine line in reconciling the excesses of the Bush Administration with legitimate national security issues. So, while bundling those men off to another country to get their heads kicked in was beyond the pale, the series of events that led to that outcome could very well involve highly sensitive legitimate intelligence information. And while it’s easy for us to sit here on the sidelines talk in absolutes, we elected Barack Obama as President because unlike his predecessor, he sees in shades of gray.
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So, I say all that to say that in this case I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and not assign this to some nefarious attempt to retain powers coopted by the Bush Administration. President Obama, in his three weeks in office, has not given me any indication that I should doubt him in this arena.

…President Obama, in his three weeks in office, has not given me any indication that I should doubt him in this arena.
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Err…apart from the subject of this post, that is, right?

stuartzechman
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2008 was the high water mark for the off-sprung, poorly publicly educated Pell Grantee idiots of the 60′s slackers, that remain the closest living facsimiles to NYC’s racist Irish lynch mobs of the Civil War era (clueless, gutless, and horrendous). Californians, in short.

Though the domestic nanny state thrives, I have yet to be persuaded that openly exposing national security information and DOD plans (even with the NY Time’s acting as judge, jury, and printed executioner of our troops) merits the total collapse of the credit card republic.

This is a shameless liberal legalistic game, and a long one, with deadly serious consequences should we fail to rid the world of armed terrorists.

We will achieve victory, despite Obama’s glaring naiveté and the left’s incessant lemming march into the sea — and then we’ll go after the trial lawyers, default swappers, and tenured liars.

This is the most interesting (bizarre?)blog post and comment thread I can remember. Greenwald supporters jump on MS for referring to him as a liberal legal scold, yet Greenwald was lowering the boom on Obama, who the commentators also greatly admire. hula is meanwhile having the best day of his life in the Swamp.
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I am disappointed with the continuation of the Bushie DOJ position, and hope that the story is evolving and Obama will reconsider. I agree with Greenwald and with Sullivan, who wrote that Obama is taking ownership of Bush acts when he defends them.

QH:
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I have yet to be persuaded that openly exposing national security information and DOD plans…
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That’s the point, dude. That is the shameless legalistic game.
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All we have is the State’s word, pronounced by Department of Justice (formerly headed by Janet Reno, don’t you recall?), that certain matters require unassailable, unaccountable secrecy –at their sole discretion.
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All the DOJ needs to do is declare anything they so desire “secret”, and therefore shield whatever they do from any public scrutiny whatsoever.
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It’s not necessarily that these matters are to do with national security, and therefore secret, it’s just as probable that these matters are secret, and therefore become matters of national security.
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This is not what the guys who wrote the Federalist papers had in mind for their executive branch, don’t you get it?
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This the same government that implements the Social Security program you hate so much. This is the same bureaucracy that you don’t trust to levy taxes appropriately.
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If all you have to go on is that “liberals are against it”, isn’t that like cutting off your nose to spite your face?
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Since when have you become in favor of the freaking Kremlin, QH?

Hula et all, you are arguing a straw man here. This is an application of state secrets doctrine so extreme, the judge cannot review the documents for national security reasons, so the case gets thrown out because no evidence can be presented. (anything concerning “state secrets” would be reviewed in parte). Just about everyone agrees State Secrets is legimate, just not for throwing out cases before they are heard.

BTW, when I wrote my representative Nita Lowey about FISA, she wrote back saying at least we can still investigate. Hah! Not if this view of State Secrets is maintained.

pobol – I know it’s tempting, but there’s nothing to be gained by arguing with Hula. He never learns anything, he never adjusts his views, and he always slips back into incoherency.
I’m not exactly sure what s_z is trying to do here, for that matter.

Frankly,
The U.S. government should pay the damages these people suffered and none of the stuff related to the rendition should be made public. The company that did the rendition should be protected with immunity because they were asked by the U.S. government. However, the U.S. is responsible for what happened to these men.

“Err…apart from the subject of this post, that is, right?”
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Uhhh…no Stuart. As I mentioned in the rest of my post, I think he’s currently trying to balance the excesses of the Bush Administration with legitimate national security concerns. I don’t know what President Obama knows, so I don’t have a knee-jerk reaction to view the worst based on his three weeks in office. As I also said, it’s easy for anyone on this board to assume they know what is absolutely right because it’s easier to be a pundit than it is to actually do the job. I voted for President Obama on what appeared throughout the campaign to be his ability to think and act not out of ideological dogma, but based on very reasoned analysis. And at the moment, I trust him to do just that.

Cliff:
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For one thing, I’m demonstrating that Question Hillary’s opinion and this commenter’s opinion:
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…while it’s easy for us to sit here on the sidelines talk in absolutes, we elected Barack Obama as President because unlike his predecessor, he sees in shades of gray…
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…I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and not assign this to some nefarious attempt to retain powers coopted by the Bush Administration. President Obama, in his three weeks in office, has not given me any indication that I should doubt him in this arena.
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are identical if analyzed solely in terms of the results of their practical application.
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As a “liberal legal scold” remarked today:

We don’t actually have a system of government (or at least we’re not supposed to) where we rely on the magnanimity and inherent Goodness of specific leaders to exercise secret powers wisely. That, by definition, is how grateful subjects of benevolent tyrants think (“this power was bad in Bush’s hands because he’s bad, but it’s OK in Obama’s hands because he is good and kind”). Countries that are nations of laws rather than of men don’t rely on blind faith in the good character of leaders to prevent abuse. They rely on what we call “law” and “accountability” and “checks and balances” to provide those safeguards — exactly the type that Democrats, when it came to the States Secret privilege, long insisted upon before January 20, 2009.

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Arguments like these with QH are demonstrative of what kind of perspective leads some to trust their leaders with the power of total, unaccountable secrecy. If some Obama cheerleaders are capable of even the most minimal of consistency or coherency in their political views, it can’t escape them that their blind trust in the benevolence of their chosen politician is essentially authoritarian-rightist in character.
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All the “trust Obama; he’s a good guy” folks need do is switch the name “Obama” for “Bush”…or read Question Hillary’s opinions as spelled out in these dialogues.

s_z: gotcha. On the surface it looked like you were actually trying to explain something to hulagate, which defied all my estimates of your intelligence.

“All the ‘trust Obama; he’s a good guy’ folks need do is switch the name ‘Obama’ for ‘Bush’…or read Question Hillary’s opinions as spelled out in these dialogues.”
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Well, Cliff, considering you are calling me out directly, I figured I’d respond to you directly. Contrary to what you are trying to ascribe to me, I’m not calling for blind loyalty to Obama. I don’t put much stock in any elected official. However, I do find it amazing that on this board the people who were lauding Obama for his nuance and ability to think through issues are calling him a Bush-clone at week three. The man hasn’t done anything yet to earn that label, and I’m not going to castigate him based on so little a body of work. So, no, the man has not done anything in my opinion to heap upon him the level of distrust I heaped upon George W. Bush. If that reasoning, in your estimation, puts me on par with Hulagate, so be it. I could say, by the same token, that your certainty in the rightness of your opinion in the absence of any evidence to the contrary (Obama is evil and is grasping for Bushian power) also puts you in that boat with Hula.

Pardon me, that should read “rightness of your opinion in the absence of any evidence”

No disrespect intended, koabd, but:

Nobody — not the ACLU or anyone else — argues that the State Secrets privilege is inherently invalid. Nobody contests that there is such a thing as a legitimate state secret. Nobody believes that Obama should declassify every last secret and never classify anything else ever again. Nor does anyone even assert that this particular lawsuit clearly involves no specific documents or portions of documents that might be legitimately subject to the privilege. Those are all transparent, moronic strawmen advanced by people who have no idea what they’re talking about.
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What was abusive and dangerous about the Bush administration’s version of the States Secret privilege — just as the Obama/Biden campaign pointed out — was that it was used not (as originally intended) to argue that specific pieces of evidence or documents were secret and therefore shouldn’t be allowed in a court case, but instead, to compel dismissal of entire lawsuits in advance based on the claim that any judicial adjudication of even the most illegal secret government programs would harm national security. That is the theory that caused the bulk of the controversy when used by the Bush DOJ — because it shields entire government programs from any judicial scrutiny — and it is that exact version of the privilege that the Obama DOJ yesterday expressly advocated (and, by implication, sought to preserve for all Presidents, including Obama).

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How can you simply assert
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I don’t know what President Obama knows
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and
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I voted for President Obama on what appeared throughout the campaign to be his ability to think and act not out of ideological dogma, but based on very reasoned analysis. And at the moment, I trust him to do just that.
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in the face of the Obama Aministration’s DOJ asserting the very same baseless and illegitimate claim to the State Secrets privilege empowering them to compel courts to throw out entire cases, and therefore effectively shield not just specific pieces of evidence but instead entire government programs from review?
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Isn’t that evidence of a blind trust in leadership that is not only inconsistent with the constitutional framework of “the rule of law”, but inconsistent with what Barack Obama himself advocated prior to taking office?
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Surely we can agree that the question isn’t whether or not Barack Obama aspires to tyrannical rule, but rather is whether or not Barack Obama still aspires to change the policies of the executive from the Bush Administration’s version, i.e. extreme, radical theories of total unaccountable secrecy, to those which he promised to enact, i.e. a return to accountable, checks-and-balances based policies premised upon a constitutionally-sound framework.
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Surely you can’t be advocating for a “I voted for him; therefore I trust him with power he specifically renounced during the campaign”, right, koabd?

koabd – it’s actually s_z that’s getting on your case.
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I’m not calling Obama a Bush clone. I feel like he’s shown himself to be a remarkable improvement over the past eight years.
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At the same time, I really do hate that Obama hasn’t done away with this “state secrets” business, I feel that it’s a black mark on his performance and I think it’s perfectly acceptable to criticize him for this.
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I’m still hoping that Obama will reverse his stance on this, he’s shown before that he’ll backtrack if a big enough fuss is raised.

Don’t mess with SZ, he will get you everytime. And I totally agree. This nonsense of state secrets protecting illegal kidnapping and torture is very, very weak. My guess is that Obama is focused on the economic troubles and doesn’t really want any diversion by this messy rendition business and secrets and all. The secrets argument falls on my deaf ears. It is hookum. We don’t know if the economic stimulus efforts will be successful, but accounting for criminal and unconstitutional behavior by our government matters in any event, even (especially) if we are riding the rails of poverty.

There’s not much point in reasoning with an old-school jihadi like hulagate. The only reason he comes here is to disrupt the thread because he hates our freedoms.

As for the claims that Obama should have cleaned up everything that Bush left on America’s shoes, let’s remember that the inauguration was less than three weeks ago. I don’t like the way the DOJ argued, and it doesn’t reflect much credit on them, but they are probably following through on the position inherited from under Bush. Can a legal team switch its legal rationale and position in mid-case? This is a question that seems worth raising before we blame Obama for everything.

If Glenn Greenwald is a liberal legal scold, we need more of them. Do we really require a rightwing gossip whore like Scherer?

Duh, that’s not a surprise.

Or maybe it is, given the success of liberals in distributing top secret blueprints for the manufacture of nuclear weapons to such allied and esteemed stalwarts of democracy such as Pakistan, Libya, and Iran.

“Liberal legal scold”? Caricature much?
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Michael, don’t let the fear consume you.

[...] Time Obama Backs Bush On Rendition Case, Secrecy [...]

[...] While conservatives are opposed to the Democrats’ health care initiatives as an expansion of the state, progressives are identifiably more opposed to a greater number of Obama legislative issues (willingness to abandon the public option, escalation of war in Afghanistan, continuation of rendition). [...]