Establishment View of Obama's Civil Liberties Record

One of the most cherished weapons for dismissing political arguments
without having to engage them is to claim they come from "the Far Left"
or are confined to "liberal ideologues." For years, that was what was
said about withdrawing from Iraq even as majorities of Americans supported that position, and it is how the political and media establishment now demonize the call for investigations into Bush/Cheney crimes, despite large percentages and diverse ideological support
for those views . Exactly the same tactic is used to dismiss those who
criticize Obama for adopting Bush policies in the areas of civil
liberties and secrecy: only people from the Far Left fringe or civil
liberties extremists would equate Obama and Bush when it comes to such
matters.

From today's Op-Ed page of The Washington Post -- the ultimate establishment organ -- one finds this observation about Obama's use of the state secrets privilege from a Post Editorial:

The second Bush administration took the state secrets doctrine to new heights
by arguing that an entire case should be dismissed -- sometimes at its
earliest stages -- if it could touch on any information that could
conceivably have national security ramifications. The Justice
Department under President George W. Bush used this approach to try to
quash litigation involving, among other things, domestic surveillance
and extraordinary rendition (the forced transfer of detainees to
countries where they may be tortured).

President Obama has
said that the state secrets doctrine should be reformed, and he has
promised to be more measured. Yet when confronted with actual cases the Obama Justice Department has adopted the same legal arguments as the Bush administration.

From a Post Op-Ed today
by two of the leading advocates of preventive detention -- former Bush
DOJ official Jack Goldsmith and Benjamim Wittes of the right-wing
Hoover Institute and neoconservative Brookings Institution -- there is
this observation on Obama's possible use of an Executive Order to vest himself with preventive detention powers rather than having Congress do it for him:

Obama, to put it bluntly, seems poised for a nearly wholesale adoption of the Bush administration's unilateral approach to detention.
The attraction is simple, seductive and familiar. The legal arguments
for unilateralism are strong in theory; past presidents in shorter,
traditional wars did not seek specific congressional input on
detention. Securing such input for our current war, it turns out, is
still hard. The unilateral approach, by contrast, lets the president
define the rules in ways that are convenient for him and then dares the
courts to say no.

This seductive logic, however, failed disastrously for Bush -- and it will not serve Obama any better.

That
Obama is replicating the Bush/Cheney approach in these areas isn't a
by-product of some civil liberties extremist refusal to appreciate the
joys of pragmatism or Leftist-purist dissatisfaction with all dogmatic
imperfection. That this observation is heard from The Washington Post Editorial Page (of all places), from right-wing advocates such as Wittes and Goldsmith, and from mainstream, liberal and pro-Obama outlets (TPM this weekend: preventive detention approach is "the latest installment in the Obama administration's tendency to mimic the Bushies on war on terror tactics")
demonstrates that rather conclusively. Rather, it's just a blindlingly
clear fact that any minimally honest person is compelled to
acknowledge. When one combines that with the fact that Bush's actions
in the areas of civil liberties, Terrorism and secrecy were (at least
ostensibly) central to the widespread anger about the
Bush presidency, it's impossible to understand how anyone whose
objections over the last eight years were sincere (as opposed to a
handy weapon opportunistically used to politically weaken Bush) could
be supporting what Obama, in these areas, is doing now.

* * * * *

One
last related point: Ever since Obama reversed himself on the question
of whether to suppress the torture photos, I've been searching for an
Obama supporter who (a) defends his decision to suppress those photos
but also (b) criticized him when, two weeks earlier, he announced that
he would release those photos. I haven't found such a person yet, but
I'm still looking.

When Obama originally announced he would
release the photos, he was attacked on seemingly every television news
show by people like Lindsey Graham, Liz Cheney and Joe Lieberman for
endangering the Troops, but I don't know of a single Democrats who
joined in with those criticisms on the ground that the photos shouldn't
be released. But as soon as Obama changed his mind and embraced the
Graham/Cheney/Lieberman position, up rose hordes of Obama supporters
suddely insisting that those photos must be suppressed because to
release them would be to endanger the Troops. I'm still searching for
any pro-photo-suppression Democrats who criticized Obama when he
triggered controversy by orginally announcing he would release them.