Apr 10 2009
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
You gotta love Glenn Greenwald, blogger el supremo at Salon.com, when he starts a post by saying “I wasn’t able to post today, but…” and then goes on for nearly a thousand words on his topic. (Most newspaper op-eds are in the 700- to 850-word range.)
Joking aside, Greenwald is one of those folks to whom attention must be paid when he grabs onto a topic, like warrantless wiretapping, the unitary executive, abuse of the state secrets privilege, and so on. He hammered the Bush administration relentlessly on these topics, so much so that the national media was forced to timidly follow in his footsteps.
This past week, he was on all those topics again — only this time, the brunt of his criticism was directed at the Obama administration. A fair number of folks voted for Obama on the strength of his condemnations of his predecessor for abusing power on these and other topics. But as Glenn documented, the Obama Justice Department, in taking over control of court proceedings initiated under Bush, is continuing to push a state secrets privilege in cases where it is clear that the secrecy has less to do with national security and more to do with covering Bush administration ass.
And much to the bemusement of the conservative echo chamber, it is liberal blogs and news sources that are pushing this story. In addition to Glenn, blogs like Firedoglake and Talking Points Memo, along with MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, spent this past week highlighting this disappointing aspect of the Obama ascendancy.
Conservative news sources, of course, can’t lay a finger on this story because when the figurehead of these controversies was Dubya, they rolled out of their warm beds at 3 a.m. and rushed to defend every constitutional violation on the grounds that They’re Coming To Get Us and that folks like me who think we have a right to not have our conversations monitored without a warrant are naive terrorist-enablers. Oh, and Bush Good, Democrats Traitors.
I’m willing to offer this much of a fig leaf to the new administration: You can’t turn a federal department on a dime. All of the prep work in numerous Bush-era cases up to this point has been done, and you can’t switch sides in an argument when court proceedings are active — even if doing so gets you the result you want, it’s unethical.
Nevertheless, the fact remains, as Greenwald and others have documented, that Obama’s Justice Department isn’t even trying. They’re continuing to argue that the Electronic Freedom Foundation lawsuit on warrantless wiretapping needs to be thrown out on a state secrets basis, and that argument includes not divulging even the sketchiest of outlines to a federal judge in chambers.
We all know that a typical discovery motion would reveal things the government would rather the taxpayers not know. There may be legitimate state secrets buried in there, but the permanent government would not want ordinary folks jawing around the water cooler about just how pervasive warrantless wiretapping really is. That the feds have been hoovering up absolutely everything on a preemptive basis, not just going after obvious offenders. That anybody involved with this program can type your name into a proprietary intelligence search engine and pull up every e-mail you’ve sent or received since 2001; every phone call, cellular or landline; every credit or debit card transaction; and so on.
And all we have is the government’s word that nobody will actually do that with anybody who isn’t the target of a criminal investigation. Well, we’ve had people in the State Department idly poking around in the passport files of the last two Democratic presidents without permission — who’s to say future politicians won’t be informally “vetted” by their political opponents in this way?
