So it turns out that the cop who pepper-sprayed the nonviolent protesters at UC Davis is an exemplary officer – a “hero” who once saved the life of a fellow officer. Clearly, there’s a discrepancy between the overzealous role he played on Friday afternoon and his normal routine. I think, however, that in order to understand why police in full riot gear will violently attack nonviolent protesters who pose no threat, you only have to drive 100 miles south to Stanford, California.

I’m referring to the Psychology 101 (and probably Police Academy 101) lesson about the Stanford Prison Experiment, where “normal” individuals were brought to a simulated prison and assigned roles of either prisoner or prison guard. It only took a day for the experiment to go awry: as the subjects began to internalize their roles, the prison guards began abusing the prisoners while the prisoners began to “act up” and feel powerless at the hands of the guards.  The experiment deteriorated so rapidly that the planned 14 day experiment was cut off at 6 days – and even then, the lead investigator took a lot of heat from the academic community for allowing it to go on as long as it did.

With this experiment in mind, it should come as no surprise that police who are dressed for battle will battle. Armed with shields, helmets, batons, and “non-lethal” weapons, we have watched this scene play out time and time again. Protesters who could easily be subdued by a non-militarized police officer with two bare hands and a pair of handcuffs (I’ve seen it done on COPS before) are instead brutally taken down by the use of weapons, chemical agents, and flash grenades. Why is this? Because the riot police have been sent in to act out their roles with the props given to them.

Norm Stamper, who was chief of the Seattle Police during the WTO protests of 1999 that became known as the the “Battle in Seattle,” would know something about the dynamics between protesters and riot police. In a recent editorial in The Nation magazine, he wrote:

…Seattle might have served as a cautionary tale, but instead, US police forces have become increasingly militarized, and it’s showing in cities everywhere: the NYPD “white shirt” coating innocent people with pepper spray, the arrests of two student journalists at Occupy Atlanta, the declaration of public property as off-limits and the arrests of protesters for “trespassing.”

The paramilitary bureaucracy and the culture it engenders—a black-and-white world in which police unions serve above all to protect the brotherhood—is worse today than it was in the 1990s. Such agencies inevitably view protesters as the enemy. And young people, poor people and people of color will forever experience the institution as an abusive, militaristic force—not just during demonstrations but every day, in neighborhoods across the country.

This Us versus Them mentality is invariably the outcome of the police playing military dress-up. The real question is whether we will accept the continuation of this disruptive role-playing game that pits law enforcers against the values they are responsible for upholding.

It’s been reported that two of the police officers who were involved in the pepper-spraying incident have now been placed on paid administrative leave for their actions. I think we’re delusional if we think that suspending a couple officers for lack of personal discipline is going to prevent this episode from happening again.

UPDATE (11/23/2011):

It turns out that the cop has been a douche prior to this incident. According to a report by the Daily Mail:

…an alleged anti-gay slur by Pike also figured in a racial and sexual discrimination lawsuit a former police officer filed against the department, which ended in a $240,000 settlement in 2008.

Officer Calvin Chang’s 2003 discrimination complaint against the university’s police chief and the UC Board of Regents alleged he was systematically marginalized as the result of anti-gay and racist attitudes on the force, and he specifically claimed Pike described him using a profane anti-gay epithet.

I really want to disclaim that I’m not talking about some conspiratorial Black Helicopter shit, except for the fact that in its most basic essence this was literally Black Helicopter shit.

Case in point:

The New York Times, “After an Earlier Misstep, a Minutely Planned Raid”:

Police officials planned the operation for weeks. They watched how the occupations in other cities played out. They held conference calls with colleagues in other cities. They increased so-called disorder training — counterterrorism measures that involve moving large numbers of police officers quickly — to focus on Lower Manhattan.

The last training session was on Monday night, on the Manhattan side of the East River. The orders to move into Zuccotti Park came down at the “last minute,” said someone familiar with the orders, which referred to the assignment only as “an exercise.”

“The few cops that I know that were called into this thing, they were not told it was for going into Zuccotti Park,” said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The only people who were aware of them going into Zuccotti Park were at the very highest levels of the department.”

Vs.

The New Yorker, “Getting Bin Ladden”:

Brian, James, and Mark selected a team of two dozen SEALs from Red Squadron and told them to report to a densely forested site in North Carolina for a training exercise on April 10th. (Red Squadron is one of four squadrons in DEVGRU, which has about three hundred operators in all.) None of the SEALs, besides James and Mark, were aware of the C.I.A. intelligence on bin Laden’s compound until a lieutenant commander walked into an office at the site. He found a two-star Army general from JSOC headquarters seated at a conference table with Brian, James, Mark, and several analysts from the C.I.A. This obviously wasn’t a training exercise. The lieutenant commander was promptly “read in.” A replica of the compound had been built at the site, with walls and chain-link fencing marking the layout of the compound. The team spent the next five days practicing maneuvers.

The New York Times published an unflattering article yesterday on the practice of the government contracting out services to private companies. The article examined the findings of a study done by a nonprofit organization called the Project of Government Oversight, and found,

in 33 of 35 occupations, the government actually paid billions of dollars more to hire contractors than it would have cost government employees to perform comparable services. On average, the study found that contractors charged the federal government more than twice the amount it pays federal workers.

No surprise here — We’ve just finished a decade of reckless and wasteful spending that has been symbolized by the no-bid cost-plus tax-free contracts of the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan. Two weeks ago, a congressional panel looked at the results of this practice and estimated that

the U.S. has wasted or misspent between $31 billion and $60 billion contracting for services in Iraq and Afghanistan, or as much as one out of every four dollars spent on wartime contracting in the past decade.

Meanwhile, the very same Republicans who voted for this excess that led us into the deficit now act like they are the financially responsible ones and refuse to do anything to help the country recover.

If you missed the PBS documentary film “Better This World” last night, I highly recommend that you check your local PBS listings and catch it on a second run or simply watch it online.

The documentary, produced by filmmakers Kelly Duane de la Vega and Katie Galloway, captures the workings of the government’s post-9/11 security apparatus by following the case of two young protestors, David McKay and Brad Crowder, who were essentially lured by an FBI informant into creating Molotov Cocktails during the 2008 Republican National Convention in Saint Paul, Minnesota. It’s a good primer about the often overlooked and controversial (and in a pre-9/11 world, illegal) methods the FBI uses to follow and catch those who they suspect to be domestic terrorists. 1115 highly recommends it.

Pakistani security officials are expressing frustration that they have not been included in Afghan President Hamid Karzai‘s recent overtures to the Taliban, warning that a sustainable peace agreement will not be possible without their support.

In interviews, army and intelligence officers here also said they were skeptical of assertions by U.S. military leaders that coalition forces have turned the corner in their fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan and that reconciliation talks are at hand, calling that narrative a “desperate” attempt to convince the American public that there is progress in the war.
[...]
Another high-ranking security official cautioned that the Americans must be careful that their “desperate push to produce results … does not become strategically unacceptable to our side. We cannot be insignificant in this war. If somebody is trying to keep us out and is striving for sustainable peace, good luck to them.”

These, of course, are Pakistani security officials speaking, a bunch of high-ranking army and intelligence officers. Not the Pakistani government. Because the Pakistani government is our friend, our very valuable front-line ally in the War Against Terror. Whereas Pakistani security officials are just a bunch of loose cannons, a law unto themselves, neither acting on behalf of the government, nor answerable to it.

But let’s not digress into the internal anarchies of this semi-failed state that we know and love so much (and support with so many billions of dollars a year).

These Pakistani security officials want in on reconciliation talks that they doubt very much are even really taking place. The U.S. position is that “the Afghan government must lead the peace process without interference.”

It is, of course, a little late for us to be making pious statements about Pakistan not interfering in Afghanistan. We have cheerfully looked the other way and allowed that to happen for far too long to have any credibility on the subject:

Pakistan is thought to have significant leverage over key insurgent factions. Pakistan heavily supported the Taliban during the group’s five years in power in Afghanistan before the 2001 U.S.-led invasion, and insurgent leaders now shelter in Pakistan. Elements of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services have allegedly maintained assistance to the Taliban, envisioning the group as a tool for exerting influence after U.S. and other foreign forces have left Afghanistan.

So now, as we hope that the Taliban and the Karzai government can make peace and live happily ever after, and Pakistan starts to mutter “Over my dead body, dear BFF!”, it’ does feel very much like we are only reaping what we sowed.

In a nutshell, it seems that the Pakistanis are very keen that Taliban leader Mohammad Omar is involved in the reconciliation talks. It has something to do with the fact that Mohammad Omar is their main man.

This time around, Pakistani army and intelligence officials said the Americans have not told them which Taliban leaders have been involved in meetings with the Afghans. And media reports that the Taliban’s top leader, Mohammad Omar, will be excluded from any reconciliation talks have added to the Pakistanis’ frustration. American officials consider Omar to be closely tied to Pakistan’s main intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI.

“We have been hearing that some Taliban commanders have been meeting the officials in Kabul without the consent of Mullah Omar,” said a brigadier general in the ISI, using an Islamic honorific with Omar’s name. “If that’s true, we believe it would be a fatal mistake, because the Taliban supreme commander still holds sway over the ranks of the Taliban and no one could defy him.”

Pakistan is just too used to being allowed to meddle in Afghanistan. And they don’t seem to have any intention of kicking the habit any time soon.

The CIA has videotapes, after all, of interrogations in a secret overseas prison of admitted 9/11 plotter Ramzi Binalshibh.

Discovered in a box under a desk at the CIA, the tapes could reveal how foreign governments aided the United States in holding and interrogating suspects. And they could complicate U.S. efforts to prosecute Binalshibh, who has been described as one of the “key plot facilitators” in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
[...]
The two videotapes and one audiotape are believed to be the only existing recordings made within the clandestine prison system and could offer a revealing glimpse into a four-year global odyssey that ranged from Pakistan to Romania to Guantanamo Bay.

The tapes depict Binalshibh’s interrogation sessions in 2002 at a Moroccan-run facility the CIA used near Rabat, several current and former U.S. officials told The Associated Press. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the videos remain a closely guarded secret.

How closely guarded? The tapes were discovered in 2007, and we’re only just hearing about them:

When the CIA destroyed its cache of 92 videos of two other al-Qaida operatives, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Nashiri, being waterboarded in 2005, officials believed they had wiped away all of the agency’s interrogation footage. But in 2007, a staff member discovered a box tucked under a desk in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and pulled out the Binalshibh tapes.

How inconvenient is it that the Binalshibh tapes exist?

Apparently the tapes do not show harsh treatment — unlike videos the agency destroyed of the questioning of other suspected terrorists.

Imagine that! The only tapes known to have survived do not show harsh treatment.

Note that we’re implicitly being asked to believe that, for some reason known only to the CIA — and, maybe, to God, though that’s doubtful — the CIA made interrogation tapes only of these three detainees. There were the tapes of Zubaydah and Abd al-Nashiri that were oh so regrettably destroyed. And there are the tapes of Binalshibh that we have just learned about. And the CIA never made tapes of any other detainees.

Because, like, what was the point? After taping three detainees, they had a top-secret eyes-only meeting, and they decided: “Been there. Done that. Enough.” Of course, they took a vote. The outcome? “The eyes have it.” And that was that. Henceforth, all interrogations were eyes-only.

The AP story has one statement that baffled me:

With military trial commissions on hold while the Obama administration figures out what to do with a number of terror suspects, Binalshibh has never had a hearing on whether he is mentally fit to stand trial.

I could have sworn that a military commission trial started just the other day. Last week, wasn’t it? Here’s Dahlia Lithwick from last Friday (a really eloquent piece; well worth your while reading the whole thing):

But instead of subjecting the so-called “worst of the worst” to a military tribunal, this past week the Obama administration fired up the tribunal system to try Omar Khadr, a child soldier. Khadr’s defense counsel, Jon Jackson, collapsed Thursday while questioning a witness and was airlifted back to the United States for treatment. There will be at least a 30-day delay in the proceedings. Maybe we can use this small break to look again at what Guantanamo has become and to acknowledge that Omar Khadr represents everything we shouldn’t be trying before a secretive military commission.

But just because the AP was totally wrong about military commission trials being on hold doesn’t mean the rest of their story isn’t 100% accurate.

The part about the CIA’s lies — first brazen, then tortured — certainly rings true:

The CIA first publicly hinted at the existence of the tapes in 2007 in a letter to U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema in Virginia. The government twice denied having such tapes, recanting once they were discovered. …

At the time, the CIA played down the significance of the videos, saying they were not taken as part of the agency’s detention program and did not show CIA interrogations.

But that case can be made only because of the unusual nature of the Moroccan prison, which was largely financed by the CIA but run by Moroccans, the former officials said. The CIA could move detainees in and out, and oversee the interrogations, but officially Morocco had control.

Let’s hope that the Ramzi Binalshibh tapes don’t become too controversial. Because what the CIA found yesterday can just as easily go missing again tomorrow. The CIA already knows there aren’t any real consequences for such shenanigans. Not beyond having to listen to Congressional fulminations, and having to keep a straight face while pretending to be extremely redfaced.

Feisal Abdul Rauf has a perfect right to build an Islamic community center 2 blocks from Ground Zero. He has a legal right, and he has a moral right. He has a fundamental constitutional right.

Nobody has any right to stop him from building that community center. Not even the family and friends of 9/11 victims. Neither a legal right, nor a moral right.

And it may be true that some family members of 9/11 victims who have made a name for themselves as professional exploiters of 9/11 have opposed the Cordoba House community center. However, that is hardly even close to being — as the media would have you believe — a majority opinion among family and friends of 9/11 victims.

For example, September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, a group of more than 250 families, has “strongly” supported the community center. Funny how you never heard about that, isn’t it?

Josh Marshall points out that “none of the 9/11 Families groups who actually seem to be membership organizations made up of families of the victims seem to have taken positions on the mosque issue at all.”

Michael Daly of the New York Daily News, had five friends who were New York city firemen. All five were at the twin towers on 9/11. Four died; one survived, and he has filed a lawsuit against the Cordoba House community center project. Daly wrote an emotional piece for the New York Daily News, explaining why he strongly disagrees with his surviving friend:

As I stood at the planned site of the mosque near Ground Zero Saturday morning, I remembered nights laughing at a big round table in Zinno’s restaurant, a newspaper guy with five friends from the Fire Department, the finest, bravest and most fun people I ever knew.

I could see them all, intensely alive in the way of the FDNY’s very best, Mychal Judge, Pat Brown, Terry Hatton, Dennis Mojica and Tim Brown.

All save Tim were killed on 9/11. Tim was a brother to Pat not by blood, but spirit, as he was to the four others.

Tim and Terry embraced just before Terry headed up into the north tower. Tim went to the south tower, where he saved lives and somehow escaped with his own.

Since then, Tim has retired from the FDNY, but continued to be a brother to his comrades, honoring their memory and doing whatever he possibly could for their families.

With the truest of hearts and the protectiveness of a brother, he has remained suspicious of those planning to build the mosque near Ground Zero. He has asked why they want to put it there and where the money is coming from. He has not been satisfied with the answers.

After the city Landmarks Preservation Commission approved the project, Tim filed a lawsuit to stop it. He remains one of the leading voices in opposition.

How I wish I did not so strongly disagree with him and agree with our mayor and now our President.

Nobody could sway me more than Tim when it comes to Ground Zero. But I cannot help feeling that if we block this mosque we will not only be doing what Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh want, we will also be doing exactly what Osama Bin Laden wants.

On the day it murdered Mychal and Pat and Terry and Dennis and so many others, Al Qaeda was looking to hijack more than jetliners. The killers’ ultimate goal was and is hijacking Islam itself.
[...]
…to reach its ultimate goal, it still needs us to convince the majority of Muslims that the war on terror is really a war on Islam.

We are only helping the bad guys if we declare that the religious freedom at the core of our democracy does not apply to a mosque too close to Ground Zero.

Maybe it is my own anger at the murder of my friends that gives me such a visceral reaction against doing what it seems clear the killers want us to do.

Of course, the likes of Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh don’t care if they end up doing Osama bin Laden’s work for him. Palin cares only about exploiting this for divisive political purposes and for raising money. Limbaugh cares only only about exploiting this for higher ratings and making more money. And they are perfectly willing to fan the flames of stupid and idiotic bigotry in order to achieve their ends.

The study didn’t make much of a splash at the time, but it has suddenly hit the liberal blog circuit this week.

The contrast between how waterboarding was covered before the Bush administration embraced it as official policy, and after, is not at all unexpected, but pretty stark, nevertheless (pdf):

From the early 1930’s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002-2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.

In a statement to Michael Calderone of Yahoo! News, The New York Times was moved to defend its waterboarding coverage practices thusly:

A spokesman told Yahoo! News that the paper “has written so much about the waterboarding issue that we believe the Kennedy School study is misleading.”

However, the Times acknowledged that political circumstances did play a role in the paper’s usage calls. “As the debate over interrogation of terror suspects grew post-9/11, defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush administration) insisted that it did not constitute torture,” a Times spokesman said in a statement. “When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves. Thus we describe the practice vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and in American tradition as a form of torture.”

The Times spokesman added that outside of the news pages, editorials and columnists “regard waterboarding as torture and believe that it fits all of the moral and legal definitions of torture.” He continued: “So that’s what we call it, which is appropriate for the opinion pages.”

Perhaps in gratitude for that fine statement, Michael Calderone was inspired to whitewash the NYT‘s whitewashing of torture with this fine piece of journalistic commentary:

Clearly, the Times doesn’t want to be perceived as putting its thumb on the scale on either side in the torture debate. That’s understandable, given traditional journalistic values aiming for neutrality and balance. But by not calling waterboarding torture — even though it is, and the paper itself defined it that way in the past — the Times created a factual contradiction between its newer work and its own archives.

So, all the NYT guilty of is “a factual contradiction between its newer work and its own archives”, which may be mildly deplorable but is perfectly understandable, especially since it was clearly motivated by the lofty and high-minded desire not “to be perceived as putting its thumb on the scale on either side in the torture debate”?

That’s called taking the NYT‘s minima culpa, and becoming its water-carrying poster child.

Someone not inclined to curry favor with the NYT might say that “by not calling waterboarding torture, even though it is”, the NYT very clearly did, to its everlasting shame, put its big fat thumb on the scale in the torture debate. On the side of whitewashing the practice thereof by the President of these here United States.

But, of course, saying stuff like that doesn’t do a whole lot for your future job prospects at the NYT.

And who can blame someone who is currently employed by Yahoo! News for nursing dreams of perhaps moving to the NYT one day?

(Michael Calderone’s byline describes him as “the media reporter for Yahoo! News“. But there is, of course, an inherent conflict of interest when a reporter who wants to remain in the reporting business covers a story like this one.)

This is far from the first time that Obama has been in the spotlight for seamlessly continuing the Bush era philosophy that in The War Against Terror it’s perfectly okay to cheerfully trample all over the Constitution, and then come back and jump on it with hob-nailed boots for good measure.

As a 26-year-old Muslim American man who spent 18 months in Yemen before heading home to Virginia in early May, Yahya Wehelie caught the attention of the F.B.I. Agents stopped him while he was changing planes in Cairo, told him he was on the no-fly list and questioned him about his contacts with another American in Yemen, one accused of joining Al Qaeda and fatally shooting a hospital guard.

For six weeks, Mr. Wehelie has been in limbo in the Egyptian capital. He and his parents say he has no radical views, despises Al Qaeda and merely wants to get home to complete his education and get a job.

But after many hours of questioning by F.B.I. agents, he remains on the no-fly list. When he offered to fly home handcuffed and flanked by air marshals, Mr. Wehelie said, F.B.I. agents turned him down.
[...]
On Tuesday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based group that has been working with Mr. Wehelie’s family, wrote to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to protest what its executive director, Nihad Awad, called “apparently illegal pressure tactics” against Muslim American travelers.

“If the F.B.I. wishes to question American citizens, they should be allowed to return to the United States, where they will be able to maintain their constitutional rights free of threats or intimidation,” Mr. Awad wrote.

Mr. Awad noted that Yahya Wehelie’s younger brother, Yusuf, 19, who was stopped with him in Cairo, faced a shorter but even more harrowing time in Egypt. Questioned first by the F.B.I., Yusuf was later held for three days by Egyptian security officers, blindfolded, chained to a wall and roughed up before being allowed to travel home May 12, he said in an interview.

The American Civil Liberties Union says it has been contacted by a dozen people who say they have been improperly placed on the no-fly list since December, half of them Americans abroad.

“For many of these Americans, placement on the no-fly list effectively amounts to banishment from their country,” said Ben Wizner, a senior staff attorney with the A.C.L.U. He called such treatment “both unfair and unconstitutional.”
[...]
The no-fly list gives the American authorities greater leverage in assessing travelers who are under suspicion, because to reverse the flying ban many are willing to undergo hours of questioning.

But sometimes the questioning concludes neither with criminal charges nor with permission to fly. The Transportation Security Administration has a procedure allowing people to challenge their watch list status in cases of mistaken identity or name mix-up, but Mr. Wehelie does not fit those categories.
[...]
The American authorities in Cairo canceled his passport and issued a new one Sunday with the notation, “valid only for return to the United States before Sept. 12, 2010,” Mr. Wehelie said. That is his goal, he said, but he has no idea how to get home.

How beautiful is that? Without even the most perfunctory kind of legal proceeding, the Obama administration has taken away an American citizen’s passport, and given him a “passport” that is good only for one-way travel to the US, expiring in three months’ time, but refused him permission to actually use that “passport” to fly to the US, not even in handcuffs sandwiched between armed US marshals.

And the real beauty of the situation is that he has no way, none at all, to challenge any of this. (The FBI, incidentally, has proclaimed that it has carefully protected Yahya Wehelie’s civil rights, because “In conducting such investigations … the F.B.I. is always careful to protect the civil rights and privacy concerns of all Americans.” Indeed. And we have just finished eating the pudding that contained the proof of that statement, haven’t we?)

Because when President Obama’s homeland security apparatus intercepts you in Cairo, you ain’t got no damn rights at all. And that’s how President Obama likes it, apparently. And that prime defender of the laws of the land, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., too.

And why exactly has all of this happened to Yahya Wehelie? Well, God presumably knows. God, and some nameless bureaucrat, who in the time of Obama, is authorized to arbitrarily sentence American citizens to exile, no questions asked.

This, incidentally, is Yahya Wehelie’s family background:

At a news conference in Washington on Wednesday, Wehelie’s parents spoke of their patriotism and their disavowal of Islamic extremists; they noted that Yahya’s older brother served in Iraq with the U.S. Army and that members of their extended family work at the Department of Homeland Security.

Yahya Wehelie has been intensively interrogated : “he has spoken with the FBI 10 times and submitted to a polygraph test.” No charges of any kind have been brought. There is no evidence at all — or, at least, none has been adduced — that he is actually guilty of anything, or that there is a reasonable suspicion at this time that he might be involved in terrorist activities of any kind.

Will even the John Roberts Supreme Court be willing to sign off on something as blatantly outrageous as this?

If so, what happens to Yahya Wehelie on September 13, if his name has not yet been lifted from the no-fly list, and he is still stranded in Cairo? At that point, will he cease to be a citizen of the United States? Egypt will be free to clap him in jail, and do whatever they want with him, because he will literally be a man without a country?

Here’s a perfectly representative example of the hosannas that greeted every key appointment, from Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel:

If you needed any further proof that things are different–very different–today, there’s this: Balkinization blogger Marty Lederman will take John Yoo’s former position, Deputy Assistant Attorney General for OLC.

As of today, the commencement of the Obama Administration, he begins work as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel. There he will be joined by two of his former OLC colleagues, Dawn Johnsen, nominated to be head of the office; and David Barron, who will serve as the Principal Deputy (and as the Acting AAG while the Senate considers Dawn’s nomination).

We’ve replaced the guy who did Bush and Cheney’s evil bidding with a blogger-prof and Constitutional champion, Marty Lederman.

Welcome to a new day, America.

It wasn’t just bloggers, either. The Washington Post gushed thusly:

President Obama has made fine choices in tapping Dawn E. Johnsen as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel and Martin S. Lederman and David Barron as her deputies. His selection of David S. Kris to head the department’s National Security Division is another excellent move. The appointments signal a return to the best traditions of the Justice Department …
[...]
Ms. Johnsen, Mr. Lederman and Mr. Barron, OLC lawyers during the Clinton administration and law professors since, have been leading and thoughtful critics of Bush administration policies on detention and national security.

And McClatchy brought us:

In filling four senior Justice Department positions Monday, President-elect Barack Obama signaled that he intends to roll back Bush administration counterterrorism policies authorizing harsh interrogation techniques, warrantless spying and indefinite detentions of terrorism suspects.

That was then.

After a long and disappointing succession of cases in which the Obama Justice Department Dream Team not only supported Bush-era positions but in several instances cheerfully outBushed the Bush Justice Department, this, sadly, is now:

A federal appeals court ruled Friday that three men who had been detained by the United States military for years without trial in Afghanistan had no recourse to American courts. The decision was a broad victory for the Obama administration in its efforts to hold terrorism suspects overseas for indefinite periods without judicial oversight.

The detainees, two Yemenis and a Tunisian who say they were captured outside Afghanistan, contend that they are not terrorists and are being mistakenly imprisoned at the American military prison at Bagram Air Base.

But a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled unanimously that the three had no right to habeas corpus hearings, in which judges would review evidence against them and could order their release. The court reasoned that Bagram was on the sovereign territory of another government and emphasized the “pragmatic obstacles” of giving hearings to detainees “in an active theater of war.”

The ruling dealt a severe blow to wider efforts by lawyers to extend a landmark 2008 Supreme Court ruling granting habeas corpus rights to prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A lower court judge had previously ruled that the three Bagram detainees were entitled to the same rights, although he had found that others captured in Afghanistan and held there were not.

A lawyer for the detainees, Tina Foster, said that if the precedent stood, Mr. Obama and future presidents would have a free hand to “kidnap people from other parts of the world and lock them away for the rest of their lives” without having to prove in court that their suspicions about such prisoners were accurate.

“The thing that is most disappointing for those of us who have been in the fight for this long is all of the people who used to be opposed to the idea of unlimited executive power during the Bush administration but now seem to have embraced it during this administration,” she said.

Here’s the crux of the matter:

The men’s case was originally heard by Judge John D. Bates of the Federal District Court, an appointee of former President George W. Bush. The Bush and Obama administrations had both urged Judge Bates not to extend habeas corpus rights beyond Guantánamo, arguing that courts should not interfere with military operations inside active combat zones.

But in April 2009, Judge Bates ruled that there was no difference between the three men who had filed suit and Guantánamo prisoners. His decision was limited to non-Afghans captured outside Afghanistan — a category that fits only about a dozen of the roughly 800 detainees at Bagram, officials have said.

In urging the appeals court to let Judge Bates’s decision stand, lawyers for the detainees argued that reversing it would mean that the government would be able “to evade judicial review of executive detention decisions by transferring detainees into active combat zones, thereby granting the executive the power to switch the Constitution on or off at will.”

Those who we once naively celebrated as champions of the Constitution are now fighting for the government’s right to switch the Constitution on or off at will. And winning.