The garbage we’ve seen from the Obama administration and his vaunted Justice Department team in recent weeks and months with respect to the state secrets privilege or warrantless wiretapping lawsuits has been bad enough.
Not only has Obama supported every single assertion of the state secrets privilege by the Bush administration (here’s a partial recitation), the Obama Justice Department managed to come up with
a brand new “sovereign immunity” claim of breathtaking scope — never before advanced even by the Bush administration — that the Patriot Act bars any lawsuits of any kind for illegal government surveillance unless there is “willful disclosure” of the illegally intercepted communications.
Meanwhile, despite everything his Justice Department has actually done, Obama has (with a perfectly straight face) managed to spout magnificent rhetoric about the purity of his administration’s state-secrets intentions, and claim that his administration is “nearing completion of a thorough review” of the state secrets privilege (after which, presumably, all will be well in the best of all possible worlds).
With regard to the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, the Obama administration has not just tenaciously attempted to squash every single lawsuit which threatens to challenge the legality of the program, once again they have come up with things that even the Bush administration had never tried. From filing “a brief with a federal district court in California challenging the court’s power to carry out its own order” to warning a federal district judge that if he doesn’t do what he was pretty-please asked to do, “government lawyers might take classified documents from the court’s custody” (by force, presumably; exerted presumably by some Justice Department storm troopers we haven’t yet heard about).
Last week, Barack Obama diversified his my-middle-initial-should-be-W portfolio with a full-body-embrace of the Bush administration’s position with respect to the non-combatant Uighurs we continue to detain at Guantanamo:
The Obama administration, picking up the argument of its predecessor, is opposing the release of Chinese Muslim detainees at Guantanamo Bay into the United States.
In papers filed with the Supreme Court late Friday, the administration says a group of Uighurs (pronounced WEE’-gurz) are being lawfully held at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba even though they are not considered enemy combatants.
The administration says a federal appeals court ruling that blocked the Uighurs’ release in the United States should be upheld.
Solicitor General Elena Kagan justified her appointment to that post by producing this gem of intellectual dishonesty:
Petitioners’ continued presence at Guantánamo Bay is not unlawful detention, but rather the consequence of their lawful exclusion from the United States…
(I’d love to hear her on the subject of what enhanced interrogation techniques are the consequence of. One of these days, I suspect, I’ll get my wish, too. The day cannot be far off when the Obama administration is suddenly overcome by a compelling need to defend enhanced interrogation techniques.)
And Kagan managed to top even that:
They are free to leave Guantanamo Bay to go to any country that is willing to accept them.
Free to leave, indeed!
Finally, Kagan is not above employing blatant, bald-faced dishonesty in the service of her President:
Petitioners would like the federal courts to order that they be brought to the United States, because they are unwilling to return to their home country.
As Registan.net points out, this is a “a gross mischaracterization of the reasons why their continued imprisonment is such an issue: the U.S. is, if I have read the case correctly, legally prohibited from repatriating them into China, since they face torture and summary execution.”