Civil liberties: Obama’s flip-flop

last updated 8 January 2015

Barack Obama’s “civil-liberties honeymoon” is already over, said Eli Lake in The New Republic. During last year’s campaign, Obama repeatedly promised to end the “dark side” policies that President Bush instituted in his war on terror. Since the inauguration, however, the new president and his staff have been quietly carving out some “wiggle room.” Administration officials are admitting that although Guantánamo Bay is to be closed, dozens of dangerous prisoners will simply be moved to other jails, without any hope of a trial. While U.S. interrogators are once again bound by the Geneva Conventions, Obama has commissioned a study into whether harsher interrogation techniques may occasionally be justified for “high-value detainees” with specific knowledge of ongoing plots. Perhaps most surprisingly, administration lawyers last week asked a judge to dismiss a lawsuit by Guantánamo detainee Binyam Mohammed, who claims he was kidnapped by the U.S. and tortured in Egypt, on the dubious grounds that a trial might reveal “state secrets.”

What a relief, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. We were worried that the new president might actually follow through on his campaign promises to, in essence, “disarm the country’s counterterrorism arsenal” in the name of political correctness. Now that he’s in office, though, receiving the same chilling daily briefings as his predecessor, Obama has understandably found a new “anti-terror maturity,” and is quietly embracing the policies of a man he once seemed to think was “uniquely wicked.” It’s one thing to promise a cheering crowd of Democrats that you’ll reverse all Bush policies, said Nicholas Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. But when you’re actually the president, and the CIA director begs you to keep certain information secret to protect American lives, “maybe it’s not quite so easy to say no.”

So once again, said Glenn Greenwald in Salon.com, we have a White House that says the ends justify the means. Invoking the State Secrets privilege is legitimate when your goal is to protect important intelligence information. But the Bush administration routinely used that privilege to legally block exposure of its torture of prisoners, its use of “black box” jails overseas, and its systematic abrogation of both the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions. For Obama to embrace this policy is “indefensible,” said The New York Times. Unless the president follows through on his pledge to make government transparent and accountable to the law, “voters have good reason to feel betrayed.”