Whereas Feldman is mild in his critique:
By overreaching in its claims of executive power, the Bush administration found itself repeatedly rebuffed by the Supreme Court. Each of these reversals had foreign-policy consequences because each made the Bush administration look like a habitual rule-breaker in both the domestic and foreign spheres. Ending the confrontation between the executive branch and the Supreme Court over executive power at least removed a recurring, public set of embarrassments, even if it had little other purpose internationally.
At the same time, however, Obama's team has preserved, whether by necessity or choice, many of the controversial programs that brought criticism to Bush. Obama ordered so-called "black sites" closed, but it is difficult for anyone without access to highly classified information to know how much has actually changed about how the intelligence services capture and detain suspected terrorists. The Guantánamo military commissions are beginning again. Some large number of the nearly 200 remaining detainees will not be tried. They will continue to be held as, essentially, prisoners of war, until hostilities between the United States and al Qaeda end -- an uncertain, open-ended time frame that many critics consider inadequate. Secret surveillance has not ended, though it is now expressly authorized by Congress.
In each case, the legal basis is substantially firmer than it was under the previous administration. But because the programs are the same, global perceptions of U.S. national security probably have not changed in any significant way, even if what the president is doing is now technically more legal.Greenwald goes for the jugular right away:
for the moment, I wanted to highlight the first paragraph from The New York Times article on this ruling, written by Charlie Savage. Just marvel, in particular, at the last sentence (click on image to enlarge):It is all tweedledum and tweedledee.
"The ruling handed a major victory to the Obama administration in its effort to advance a sweeping view of executive secrecy power." That says it all.
The distorted, radical use of the state secret privilege -- as a broad-based immunity weapon for compelling the dismissal of entire cases alleging Executive lawbreaking, rather than a narrow discovery tool for suppressing the use of specific classified documents -- is exactly what the Bush administration did to such extreme controversy.
On my part, I made sure I renewed my ACLU membership!
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