>From Glenn Greenwald (a progressive who supported Obama in the primary and a constitutional lawyer) in Salon.com:
The Obama DOJ's embrace of Bush's state secrets privilege in the Jeppesen (torture/rendition) case generated substantial outrage, and rightly so. But it's now safe to say that far worse is the Obama DOJ's conduct in the Al-Haramain case -- the only remaining case against the Government with any real chance of resulting in a judicial ruling on the legality of Bush's NSA warrantless eavesdropping program.... ...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....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....Why is the Obama administration so vested 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?... Read more: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/02/28/al_haramain/ http://tinyurl.com/d42f9n
