In stark legal turnaround, Obama now resembles Bush

[billyoc]

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is morphing into George W. Bush, as administration attorneys repeatedly adopt the executive-authority and national-security rationales that their Republican predecessors preferred.

In courtroom battles and freedom-of-information fights from Washington, D.C., to California, Obama's legal arguments repeatedly mirror Bush's: White House turf is to be protected, secrets must be retained and dire warnings are wielded as weapons.

"It's putting up a veritable wall around the White House, and it's so at odds with Obama's campaign commitment to more open government," said Anne Weismann, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a legal watchdog group.

...

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/70383.html

[leeroysphitz]

1. but he has a strategy!

[debbierlus]

2. Obama choose corporate servitude over public service

I don't know if he was a cleverly crafted candidate for the corporate powers that be or just a complete sellout who lacked the courage of his former convictions.

Either way - he is not change. He is the mask that the fascist systems wear as change.

If he keeps it up - he soon will be as villified as George W Bush.

[SunsetDreams]

8. I couldn't disagree more.

[960]

9. +1 & I STRONGLY suspect he as a cleverly crafted candidate.

[treestar]

3. They are the same lawyers there at the time of the Bush Administration

And weren't they picked with political considerations?

They should make the legal argument and then let the courts decide. This has probably never changed.

Also that sounds like opinion. We'd have to read the cases to see what the arguments were.

[solstice]

4. He doesn't just resemble Bush...he's super-sized him.

[Baltoman991]

22. Only one

word comes to mind to respond to your post and thats BULLSHIT!!!

[Turbineguy]

5. The freepers will be glad to see this.

Carry on!

[billyoc]

6. I'll take your word for what the freepers will be glad to see.

Keep me posted.

[sisters6]

10. We certainly do not hear much complaining from the RW on these issues.

[chill_wind]

30. Because they heartily supported Bush on these issues. DU found them indefensible

and the expanded unitary executive powers and excessive secrecy generally abhorrent before January 19, 2009, along with a whole lot of Constitutional experts who condemned them then- and obviously still do.

[sisters6]

31. It is bewildering that Democrats

--many of them---esp. on this board---now support them. Sad.

[masuki bance]

7. The fierce urgency of transparency. nt

[JimGinPA]

11. FAIL

[chill_wind]

12. Let's see.....

White house emails:

The Bush White House sought to keep e-mails secret. The Obama White House has followed suit.

White House visitor logs:

The Bush White House sought to keep visitor logs secret. The Obama White House, so far, takes the same view.

Warrantless wiretaps:

The Bush administration claimed Jewell V NSA lawsuit endangered national security. The Obama administration now agrees.

Detainee abuse photo evidence:

Bush admin fought to suppress the photos Courts ruled for their release. Now Obama is asking Congress to pass a law to defy and over-turn the courts.

Bush sought retroactive protections from the courts for Bush admin lawbreakers and cronies by getting Congress to amend FISA.
Obama seeks retroactive statutory exemptions from the courts by asking Congress to amend FOIA.

CIA Torture Flights litigation:

"State Secrets" the whole world knows about.

On the opposite coast, a similar drama is playing out in a clash over so-called "torture flights."

An ACLU lawsuit, initially filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., contends that the Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen DataPlan knowingly supported a CIA operation that flew terrorism suspects to brutal overseas prisons. The Bush administration invoked the "state secrets" privilege in an effort to stop the suit.

"Further litigation of this case would pose an unacceptable risk of disclosure of information that the nation's security requires not be disclosed," the Bush administration declared in a legal filing on Oct. 18, 2007.

The Obama administration now says the same, after a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled April 21 that the case could proceed.

"Permitting this suit to proceed would pose an unacceptable risk to national security," the Obama administration declared in a legal filing June 12.

For both arguments, the two administrations relied on the attestations of the same man: former Bush CIA Director Michael Hayden.

Glenn Greenwald:

Yet here is Obama, the very first chance he gets, invoking exactly this doctrine in its most expansive and abusive form to prevent torture victims even from having their day in court, on the ground that national security will be jeopardized if courts examine the Bush administration's rendition and torture programs -- even though (a) the rendition and torture programs have been written about extensively in the public record; (b) numerous other countries have investigated exactly these allegations; and (c) other countries have provided judicial forums in which these same victims could obtain relief. As Wizner said:



For one thing, the idea you alluded to, the facts of this story are absolutely well-known, have been the front pages of the New York Times and Washington Post, are in books, and all of these stories are based on CIA and other government sources, that essentially said, well, in this case we got the wrong guy. So the position of the Bush administration, accepted by conservative judges in that case, really the only place in the world where Khalid El-Masri's case could not be discussed was in a federal courtroom. Everywhere else it could be discussed without harm to the nation, but in a federal court before a federal judge there, all kinds of terrible things could happen.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/02/09/state_secrets/

Nah. No parallels here. None. Move along, little donkeys.

[chill_wind]

13. MAYBE

there will be more Bush WH emails released, if there is not a flip-flop as with the detainee photo evidence.

The Obama WH just released some to CREW, that were apparently previously released to other parties in 2007 and 2008


http://www.citizensforethics.org/node/40119

The documents, released after negotiations with the current administration, represent only a small percentage of the promised records, and appear to be part of a set of documents already provided to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in 2007 and 2008.


(...)

In providing these documents to CREW and the National Security Archive (which brought a separate lawsuit now consolidated with CREW’s), the Obama administration marked some of the documents “sensitive,” and therefore not subject to public disclosure, and redacted the identities and contact information of virtually all individuals named in the documents.

Many questions remain and the White House has promised to release more documents shortly. For example, there are approximately 38 boxes of documents the administration plans to review for disclosure. These boxes contain records related to the White House’s discovery of the missing email problem as well as proposals to address the issue and implement effective electronic recordkeeping. CREW is also awaiting documents regarding the limited effort to restore some of the missing emails that was begun by the Bush White House and is continuing. CREW anticipates these additional documents will fill in more of the blanks and will inform the public whether the White House is finally on the right track with its electronic record keeping practices.

[boppers]

14. They aren't protecting the known secrets.

They're drawing a line in the sand to protect the unknown secrets.

Most people have no idea what our intelligence systems are capable of, or how our methods work, for good reason.

[masuki bance]

27. Why would known secrets need protecting?

Why does your post remind me of Rumsfeld?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Known_unknown

[boppers]

29. Protecting them keeps the publicity down, and doesn't further expose even more questions.

Take our network SIGINT, the US's network inspection abilities are roughly known (at least to those in the field), but exactly *where* they are collecting all this data, exactly how much data they collect, and exactly how they filter and process the data, is (mostly) hidden. By stopping investigation at "yes, there are fiber splitters, where intelligence is gathered, it's a secret, stop talking", the deeper questions go unasked, and unanswered, and (perhaps most importantly) unknown.

[TomCADem]

15. Yeah, look at healthcare, climate change, financial regs laws, exactly the same.

:sarcasm:

[chill_wind]

16. The subject is about executive-authority and national-security rationales

The article makes no such claims about healthcare, climate change, financial regs laws.

Critical commentary of any kind on valid issues-- however difficult to refute in many cases-- is so totally unbearable to some of you to even bother reading, we know.

[TomCADem]

17. Just referring to the subject line, which contains no such limitation

I guess if the subject line was specific with respect to national-security, I could address that one as well, by comparing President's Obama approach to GOP rhetoric regarding Iran and North Korea. Afterall, there is a significant contingent of Republicans who really do favor a military response or would support an Israeli missle attack on Iran in which case we probably would not even be debating the current election, because most Iranians would rally around the President of Iran whoever it is.

[chill_wind]

18. I fully agree with you on the matter of Obama's approach to Iran.

That is an immensely important political difference. A John McCain/Palin admin in this development is a very disturbing thought.

I just think the article here has a lot of merit (I wish it didn't) and that the context doesn't make it all difficult to see the point of the title. Some of those aspects really bother me. I deplored them under Bush/Cheney. I like them no better now. The examples do appear to me to be on a continuum and they are not at all trivial.

[TomCADem]

19. John McCain - We Are All Iranian Protestors Now...

Remember Georgia, and how belligerant McCain was with Russia even though Georgia initiated the conflict with U.S. tacit consent, since U.S. forces were on the ground, and McCain's foreign policy advisor was a Georgia lobbyist? I shudder to think what McCain/Palin would be doing on the foreign policy front.

[chill_wind]

20. We both shudder.

The differences between those two men and likewise between Bush/Cheney and Obama on this score are not the least trivial, either. It's an important side point you have-- sorry my initial response to you in this thread was so abrasive. Welcome to DU.

:hi:

[TomCADem]

26. The Irony Is Israel/Right Wing Wanted To Bomb Iran, But Now...

They are condemning President Obama for not doing enough to stop Iran from killing its people. So, I guess Israel and the Right Wing believe that the privilege of killing Iranians is theirs alone? I guess after a week of condemning Iran for cracking down on protesters, the GOP will go back to advocating that bomb and invade Iran.

[SeattleGirl]

21. Bull. Shit.

[styersc]

23. Hillary, Hillary, Hillary, Hillary.......

am I too early, or too late?

[billyoc]

25. Hillary who?

[ProSense]

24. I've come to the conclusion

that the vocal, non-stop and over-the-top criticisms of Obama are designed to create a sustained impression that he is not doing well, and on the Republican side, they're trying to go for "I told you so."

Whatever. Obama is President, and he will be judged on his accomplishments, not stupid comparisons to Bush.

[Peacetrain]

28. Nope...that is just wrong