MSM finally notices Obama lip service to civil liberties

The Washington Post finally rights about how Obama is BushCo light, or even just plain BushCo, on state secrets — and civil liberties issues that relate to that.

The story — only a month or so after Glenn Greenwald, among others — focuses on the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation suit. There, Team Obama has made the same use of the “state secrets” claim as BushCo did, essentially claiming, “We’ll let you the court know what you get to read and when.”

Even the most ardent Obamiacs haven’t offered much defense of what amounts to a claim for authoritarian government. And, the Obama Administration doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on:

“There has to be other ways to protect secret information without having to block accountability,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine. He said that “state secrets” has become a sort of “talismanic phrase” uttered by government officials who want to dispose of inconvenient or troubling challenges to their authority.

In fact, the story rightly argues that, in some matters, the Obama Administration may be worse than BushCo.

Otherwise, if you’re NOT familiar with some of the issues at hand, the article does a good job connecting the basic dots.

And, if your blog reading has been confined to mainstream liberal blogs like Washington Monthly or Talking Points Memo, you’re probably NOT too familiar with what’s up here.

Court may have declared Bush a felon

So argues one of the attorneys for the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation Inc., noting that on July 3, Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that President Bush lacks the authority to disregard FISA.

Even if that sticks, though, Shrub could pardon himself along with everybody else.

Back to the main article, though. Jon B. Eisenberg’s “burst of healthy paranoia” is certainly understandable, given the Kafkaesque use of the “state secrets privilege” argument by this administration.

Not so understandable, though, is the degree to which Eisenberg knuckled under. He was and is part of a seven-lawyer team, and one of the other counsels, Tom Nelson, was specifically nixed by Department of Justice attorneys from sitting in on some negotiations about how to handle statements related to a top-secret document the FBI accidentally gave to al-Haramain’s attorneys.

No, let me rephrase that.

Nelson was NOT nixed by the DOJ. He was nixed by Eisenberg knuckling under to the DOJ. Eisenberg also consented to having his hard drive physically destroyed by the DOJ, which Nelson refused — without further DOJ attempts to do so.