same as the old boss

[solarbird]

As with the torture case previously discussed, the Obama administration has also continued the Bush administration policy of attempting to use state-secrets to block the only remaining investigation into the Bush administration's illegal domestic wiretapping programme. Wired has an extensive story here on what is happily the latest failure in that ongoing attempt to cover up these Federal crimes. Glenn Greenwald, reliably, has extensive commentary here, including:

One of the worst abuses of the Bush administration was its endless reliance on vast claims of secrecy to ensure that no court could ever rule on the legality of the President's actions. They would insist that "secrecy" prevented a judicial ruling even when the President's actions were (a) already publicly disclosed in detail and (b) were blatantly criminal -- as is the case with the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program, which The New York Times described on its front page more than three years ago and which a federal statute explicitly criminalized. Secrecy claims of that sort -- to block judicial review of the President's conduct, i.e., to immunize the President from the rule of law -- provoked endless howls of outrage from Bush critics.

Yet now, the Obama administration is doing exactly the same thing. Hence, it is accurately deemed "a blow to the Obama administration" that a court might rule on whether George Bush broke the law when eavesdropping on Americans without warrants. Why is the Obama administration so vested in preventing that from happening, and -- worse still -- in ensuring that Presidents continue to have the power to invoke extremely broad secrecy claims in order to block courts from ruling on allegations that a President has violated the law?

What's most painful is that the document they're trying to prevent the court from legally seeing via this privilege has already been published. The claimants already have it. It's not secret in any way - this action is not in any way actually about state security; it's about continuing the ability of the executive branch and higher members of the government to be immune from, or above, the law - as the political class deems is necessary and right, because, after all, the right people are in charge. (Them.)

There's more, but not better, at the Greenwald link.

Comments

[wiredhound.livejournal.com]

This is very disappointing and difficult to understand. Great quote from the Wired article:

"We're trying to establish a legal precedent: A rule that the president must comply with legislation passed by Congress," said Jon Eisenberg, the attorney for the two lawyers.

It has come to this!

[cafiorello.livejournal.com]

I know, I know--you told us so! *sigh*