Bush and Obama: birds of a feather on the military (revisited)

From Jacob Sullum in Reason...

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama criticized the Bush administration for its excessive secrecy, noting that it had "invoked a legal tool known as the 'state secrets' privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court." Obama also promised to end "extraordinary rendition," a practice through which "we outsource our torture to other countries."

But last week the Obama administration used the state secrets privilege to block a lawsuit by five former captives who say they were tortured as a result of extraordinary rendition. Although candidate Obama surely would have been outraged, President Obama is for some reason less concerned about abuses of executive power.

"To build a better, freer world," Obama the candidate wrote in a 2007 Foreign Affairs essay, "we must first behave in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people. This means ending the [practice] of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries."

It turned out Obama meant that he, like his predecessor, would seek assurances that detainees transferred to other countries would not be mistreated. After all, why would governments that routinely torture their prisoners lie about it?...

An administration that was truly concerned about excessive secrecy would have waited to see if either side in the lawsuit actually needed privileged information to make its case. Instead Obama, like George W. Bush before him, insisted that the mere possibility was enough to deprive torture victims of a legal remedy...

Given President Obama's plans to continue extraordinary rendition under a different name, you can see why he'd rather not delve into questions like these. But candidate Obama told us to be wary of presidents who use national security as a cover for violating people's rights.