Is Obama listening to Dick Cheney?

http://www.zanesvilletimesrecorder....24/1014/OPINION

NAT HENTOFF • April 17, 2009

Very soon after taking office, President Barack Obama ringingly pledged: "My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented openness in government. ... Openness will strengthen our democracy." However, as with an increasing number of his promises to repair the Bush-Cheney administration's deep cracks in our rule of law, Obama is giving defenders of the Constitution less and less hope they can believe in.

For a glaring example, with regard to the pervasive secrecy of his predecessors, Obama has stunningly not only continued to invoke "state secrets" to order judges to close down lawsuits. He has gone further than Bush by actually claiming total government immunity from litigation by citizens protesting illegal spying on our communications by the National Security Agency.

On April 3, Obama's Department of Justice filed an answer to a federal lawsuit against warrantless wiretapping of Americans brought by the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been the lead litigator concerning lawless Bush, and now Obama, violations of our privacy.

In Jewel v. NSA, five plaintiffs charge that their telecommunications carrier, AT&T, gave the National Security Agency - with its vast surveillance technology - information about their communications. (There are also other lawsuits by indignant Americans in state courts against telecoms cooperating with NSA.)

Attorney General Eric Holder - who certainly didn't act on his own initiative - began Obama's response by insisting that just allowing the case to continue "would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security." But Obama, during his presidential campaign, vigorously complained that the Bush administration "invoked a legal tool known as the 'state secrets' privilege more than any other administration to get cases thrown out of civil court."

But now the Obama administration - explains Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation - "has for the first time claimed sovereign immunity against the privacy-protecting Wiretap Act and the Stored Communications Act. In other words, this administration is arguing that the U.S. can NEVER be sued for spying that violated federal surveillance statutes, whether the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Wiretap Act or the Stored Communications Act."

Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional lawyer, has become a persistently valuable analyst of the insatiable unconstitutional overreaching of the executive branch for the past eight years - and during Obama's first few months. On April 6 in salon.com, Greenwald confronted this "brand-new 'sovereignty immunity' claim of breathtaking scope - never before advanced even by the Bush administration - that the Patriot Act: Bars any lawsuits of any kind for illegal government surveillance unless there is 'willful disclosure' of the illegally intercepted communications" by the government.

What does that mean? We have to prove somehow that the Obama team has "willfully" disclosed information it has lawlessly obtained on us? But how can we know that it has? All of this dragnet electronic surveillance is secret!

Another startled analyst of this brand-new Obama invention, Marc Ambinder on the April 7 Atlantic Web Site, reminds us that "domestic communications are monitored holistically, with computers searching for patterns among the metadata. ... The NSA continues to work with telephone companies; it has enlisted the cooperation of companies that operate major Internet hubs, as a good chunk of foreign Internet traffic flows through routers controlled by American companies."

As James Bamford documents in "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping of America" (Doubleday), hundreds of thousands (at least) of our calls are continually monitored and, if "patterns" indicate, are put into bottomless government databases.

Obama's solemn vow that his administration will be the most "transparent" in our history qualifies him, through his trumping of George Orwell's "1984" - in this and other invocations of absolute government secrecy - for the Donald Rumsfeld Obfuscation Prize. For another example of this "new' Obama, to be followed up here later, we still have CIA "renditions" of terrorism suspects to other countries - with their assurance they won't torture the suspects we send.

That's the very same false promise Condoleezza Rice used to ritualistically intone.