Obama to Bush: your secrets are safe with me (especially the ones about torture)

No one can touch Glenn Greenwald when it comes to exposing not only the unconstitutional actions of the U.S. government but the complicity of those journalists who provide cover for the officials who carry them out. So I hope I won't be considered a lazy blogger if I turn you over to Glenn and his highly detailed analysis of the Obama administration's continuing to use the state secrets argument to prevent a case concerning torture of detainees to move forward in Federal court. Especially important is Greenwald's demolition of the excuses that Obama's apologists have used to try to paper over and justify this outrageous decision. And as a constitutional lawyer, he is the perfect person to do it.

Glenn's Salon piece also cites the New York Times' editorial on this subject today, entitled "Continuity of the Wrong Kind," which is equally scathing:

The Obama administration failed — miserably — the first test of its commitment to ditching the extravagant legal claims used by the Bush administration to try to impose blanket secrecy on anti-terrorism policies and avoid accountability for serial abuses of the law.

Is that clear enough for everyone? It would have been worse with McCain, sure, and I am willing to cut Obama some slack on certain issues, but this goes too far--way too far.

More on this topic. From Dahlia Lithwick at Slate.

Do we all have the capacity for inhuman cruelty? An excellent post by Liliana Segura about the meaning of Stanley Milgram's famous electric shock experiments and their more recent replication by Jerry Burger at Santa Clara University. Please give it a read (with thanks to PG for the link.)