Mr President, I don't like this. Can I lodge a complaint?

This was from Democracy Now!, and since I supported Obama for his stance on HUMAN RIGHTS mostly, I am putting this here so that it does not get buried, as happens far too often.

I am Quoting from an email received today from Democracy!Now:

"AMY GOODMAN: Jane Mayer, we’re also joined by Glenn Greenwald.

After a month in office, the Obama administration has surprised many of its supporters by embracing key parts of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism strategy. Obama’s nominee for Solicitor General, Elena Kagan, has publicly endorsed Bush’s policy of indefinitely detaining suspected al-Qaeda members, regardless of where they’re captured. And CIA Director Leon Panetta has said the CIA might continue its extraordinary rendition program. The Obama administration has used the state secrets doctrine, as you were saying, Jane, to urge a federal judge to toss out a lawsuit by former CIA detainees and to prevent a federal court from reviewing the Bush administration’s warrantless spying program.

To discuss this, we’re joined by Glenn Greenwald, constitutional law attorney and political and legal blogger for Salon.com, author of three books. His latest, Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics. He’s joining us by video chat from his home in Brazil. We hope the audio is good enough.

Hi, Glenn. I don’t know if you’ve heard Jane Mayer speaking, but talking about the issue of state secrets, can you talk about your concerns?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I think that the biggest concern is not so much that the Obama administration thought there might be legitimate secrets to protect in this case, whether it’s specific rendition agreements with Morocco, as Jane alluded to. The problem is that there are two ways to use the state secrets privilege.

One is the traditional way that had been used since before the Bush administration, since 1953, which is to assert, on a document by document basis, that specific pieces of information are too classified and too secret to be allowed to be used in a judicial proceeding, and therefore they ought to be deemed privileged, the way that, say, attorney-client documents are or doctor-patient communications are, very specific and focused assertions of privilege over a specific document. I don’t think anybody—the ACLU or civil libertarians—have a problem with the assertion of privilege when it’s used in that way.

The problem is, is that what the Bush administration did was they converted that state secrets privilege from a document-specific means of excluding pieces of evidence to a shield of immunity to compel courts to dismiss entire lawsuits before there’s any proceedings at all, any effort to find out whether specific documents really are classified, whether there’s a way that will allow the plaintiffs to proceed and have their day in court without using classified information. That’s been the controversy, over the use of the privilege as a shield of immunity to protect the President from judicial accountability.

And if the Obama administration’s embrace of that theory, of that use of the privilege as a weapon that has been so disserving—had they really been concerned about specific agreements with Morocco, they could have simply said, “Well, send the case back to the district court, and with regard to specific documents, we will assert the privilege over them.” That’s not what they did. They embraced what they had long said was the abuse of the privilege when in the hands of the Bush administration.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And in the case of Binyam Mohamed, you’ve written how specifically the Obama administration has even joined in in threatening Britain, in terms of its possible release of information about activities that have occurred in the past. Could you talk about that?

GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah. That might actually be the most disturbing episode yet. I mean, the British government has acknowledged that it has in its possession what it calls exculpatory evidence with regard to Mohamed, namely information that it obtained from the CIA that the confessions, on which the Bush administration previously was relying to prosecute Mohamed in the military commission, was—were concessions that were obtained by very brutal torture, not waterboarding, not forced nudity or hypothermia, but hardcore, violent, brutal torture, including things like having his *Edit: substituting a word.. nether parts* sliced and being severely beaten and threatened at gunpoint.

And the British government said that they had this in their possession, but they refused to turn it over. The American government had refused to give him access to any of the information so that he could defend himself. And so, Mohamed went to the British court, and the British court said that he’s absolutely entitled to these documents, that international law and British common law do not allow countries to conceal evidence of torture and to send somebody into a military commission, where the death penalty might be imposed, and conceal documents that they might use to defend themselves."

And I say, we had better get our stuff together here my, fellow Americans, and not allow anyone, however popular, to make anymore moves along this highly illegal road that Bush started us down. Don't forget this, they are acting in our names. All our names. Well, I don't like that. I'd rather not be connected to this sort of brutality anymore. No thank you Barack Obama!