According to Bruce Fein, Pres. Obama has done an about-face on torture policy, now arguing in court to uphold the same principles espoused by Bush/Cheney.
If true, this is very alarming on so many levels.
Is there anyone out there who can talk me down on this? And, please, don't bother telling me that Bruce Fein is a right-wing hack. That doesn't address the apparent facts surrounding the Obama DoJ's posture in court.
More below the fold...
A timeline:
On Monday, Feb. 9, a DoJ lawyer presented what must have been a surprising case to judges at the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. In arguing the government's case in the matter of torture victim Binyam Mohamed, this attorney moved forward with an argument for preserving state secrets originally developed -- by the Bush administration.
Bruce Fein:
Last week before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, President Obama echoed the position of Bush-Cheney that the state secrets privilege required dismissal of Mr. Mohammed's suit. In other words, individual constitutional rights of the highest order should be sacrificed on the altar of national security. At the same time, Mr. Obama was deciding to defend the arch-defender of torture, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, from a suit brought by Jose Padilla. The complaint alleges that Mr. Yoo concocted the legal justification for detaining and harshly interrogating Padilla as an "enemy combatant" without accusation or trial. (The United States later recanted its enemy combatant allegation).
Recap: dismissal of Mr. Mohamed's suit, defense of John Yoo -- by Obama DoJ. Got that?
But wait, there's more: on Feb. 11, a diary here at dKos stated the following:
Binyam Mohamed's attorney Clive Stafford Smith, who is also director of the legal charity Reprieve, reports that "substantial parts" of a memo, attached to a letter to Barack Obama, documenting evidence of Mohamed's torture at the hands of CIA agents and their extraordinary rendition proxies, were blanked out so the president could not read them.
The referenced letter (with attached redacted memo) was dated Feb. 10. Since then....crickets.
A week has passed. We're now being lectured to by Bruce Fein, the same guy who spoke out strongly against the Bush/Cheney abuses of power.
And to add annoyance to outrage, BarbinMD linked to the piece by Fein making it sound like Fein was an over-reaching moonbat (if America doesn't end its infatuation with Obama, "presidential powers will soon be indistinguishable from King George III.")
Unfortunately, in reading the comments to that link, I found no one able to defend the Obama administration's actions in court thus decried by Fein -- and that speaks volumes.
Look: I really only have a couple of deal-breakers when it comes to the president -- any president. And one of them is that they don't torture.
The other one is...well, here's Fein again:
Mr. Obama invoked the state secrets privilege a second time last week to block litigation challenging the legality of the Bush-Cheney "Terrorist Surveillance Program" (TSP) that he had assailed as a senator. For five years, the TSP targeted American citizens on American soil for electronic surveillance on the president's say-so alone to gather foreign intelligence in contravention of the warrant requirement of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Intentional violations are federal felonies.
This diary (complete with a whopping 6 comments) provided additional details.
So there you have it. Obama sides with Bush DoJ and we get lectures -- from right-wingers like Bruce Fein.
Gah.