Portion of Glenn Greenwald's column on the Obama administration's embrace of Bush "state secret" defense of torture below (via Angry Arab Newservice); whole column here:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/02/09/state_secrets/
UPDATE II: There wasn't a more enthusiastic Obama supporter during the campaign than Andrew Sullivan. Here is what he wrote just now:
The Obama administration will continue the cover-up of the alleged torture of the British resident. The argument is that revealing the extent of the man's torture and abuse would reveal state secrets. No shit. This is a depressing sign that the Obama administration will protect the Bush-Cheney torture regime from the light of day. And with each decision to cover for their predecessors, the Obamaites become retroactively complicit in them.
So what are they hiding from us? Wouldn't you like to know?
There is no viable excuse, or even mitigation, for what they did here.
UPDATE III: For those interested, I wrote many times in the past about the origins of the State Secrets Privilege and how the Bush administration's abuse of it (endorsed by the Obama DOJ today) has been so severe and destructive -- see, for instance, here and here. And see this excellent comment from DCLaw1, explaining yet another reason why the Obama administration's decision today is such a substantial setback for the cause of restoring our Constitutional framework.
UPDATE IV: The New York Times' article by John Schwartz on today's hearing contains the quotes from the exchange which I described in the Update above:
[A] lawyer for the government, Douglas N. Letter, made the same state-secrets argument on Monday, startling several judges on the panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
“Is there anything material that has happened” that might have caused the Justice Department to shift its views, asked Judge Mary M. Schroeder, an appointee of President Jimmy Carter, coyly referring to the recent election.
“No, your honor,” Mr. Letter replied.
“The change in administration has no bearing?” she asked.
“No, your honor,” he said once more. The position he was taking in court on behalf of the government had been “thoroughly vetted with the appropriate officials within the new administration,” and “these are the authorized positions,” he said.
"Thoroughly vetted with the appropriate officials within the new administration": that's about as explicit as it gets. It will be extremely difficult for even the most loyal Obama followers to deny that this was an active and conscious decision on the part of the Obama DOJ to embrace one of the most extreme abuses of the Bush presidency.
It isn't merely that the Obama DOJ is invoking the privilege for this particular case, which contains allegations of torture that are as brutal and severe as any. That's bad enough. But worse is that they're invoking the most abusive parts of the Bush theory: namely, that the privilege can be used to block the adjudication of entire cases (rather than, say, justify the concealment of specific classified documents or other pieces of evidence), and, worse still, can be used to prevent judicial scrutiny even when the alleged government conduct is blatantly illegal and, as here, a war crime of the greatest seriousness.
They're embracing a theory that literally places government officials beyond the rule of law. No minimally honest person who criticized the Bush administration for relying on this instrument can defend the Obama administration for doing so here.
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