In case you’ve heard about Obama backing the Bush total-surveillance program, there is a lot to learn. In short, Obama has always backed this program, which is disappointing but unsurprising. More importantly, though, is that these actions are taking place under the initiative of Bush’s old DOJ, which hasn’t been swapped out because Obama’s Attorney General hasn’t been confirmed yet.

…And guess what? That confirmation is being stalled in order to allow the statute of limitations to lapse on certain periods of time during which Bush’s surveillance was flat-out illegal. They have mostly covered their asses, but for the next few weeks, we could potentially hold the last administration accountable.

RTFA: http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/01/23/the-o…

A number of you have emailed to ask about this report–that Obama has supported Bush’s request for a stay pending appeal in the al-Haramain case.

The Obama administration fell in line with the Bush administration Thursday when it urged a federal judge to set aside a ruling in a closely watched spy case weighing whether a U.S. president may bypass Congress and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants.

…continuing…

On its face, this looks like really horrible news–a spineless attempt on Obama’s part to play along with Bush’s efforts to run out the clock on Bush’s alleged crimes in wiretapping al-Haramain and other Americans. And frankly, this should not be surprising news; Eric Holder said in his confirmation hearing that–unless he finds anything unexpected–he would continue the Bush Administration’s support for retroactive immunity, a case that is also before Judge Vaughn Walker. So it would be unsurprising that the Obama Administration would be cautious in this case as well.

That said, there is some confusion about the whole decision.

RTFA: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM…

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama moved to reshape U.S. international policy Thursday, ordering the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison camp closed within a year and naming new envoys to the Middle East and Afghanistan-Pakistan.

“We have no time to lose,” he said as he welcomed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to help forge what he called “a new era of American leadership” in the world.

It was a day in which Mr. Obama sought to reverse some of the most contentious policies of his predecessor.

“I can say without exception or equivocation that the United States will not torture,” he said in a visit to the State Department on his second full day in office.

RTFA: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM…

GENEVA — Former detainees, human-rights advocates and government officials around the world welcomed President Barack Obama’s decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detention centre, saying Thursday it helped restore their faith in the United States.

The UN’s torture investigator, Manfred Nowak, said news that Mr. Obama will order the prison closed, review military trials of terror suspects and end harsh interrogations was a sign of goodwill by the new American administration. But he warned that shutting the prison will require difficult decisions and said freed inmates should be allowed to sue the United States if they were mistreated.

“Justice also means to look into the past,” Mr. Nowak told The Associated Press. Mr. Nowak, an Austrian law professor, has previously said he had reliable accounts to indicate that Guantanamo detainees have been tortured.

Pentagon official Susan Crawford told The Washington Post in an interview published last week that the United States tortured one inmate, a Saudi named Mohammed al-Qahtani, in 2002. She was the first senior Bush administration official to make such a statement.

We are emerging from the Dark Ages into the light.

RTFA: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/12/feds-eff-…

The Bush administration on Tuesday will try to convince a federal judge to let stand a law granting retroactive legal immunity to the nation’s telecoms, which are accused of transmitting Americans’ private communications to the National Security Agency without warrants.

At issue in the high-stakes showdown – set to begin at 10:00 a.m. PST – are the nearly four dozen lawsuits filed by civil liberties groups and class action attorneys against AT&T, Verizon, MCI, Sprint and other carriers who allegedly cooperated with the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program in the years following the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The lawsuits claim the cooperation violated federal wiretapping laws and the Constitution.

In July, as part of a wider domestic spying bill, Congress voted to kill the lawsuits and grant retroactive amnesty to any phone companies that helped with the surveillance; President-elect Barack Obama was among those who voted for the law in the Senate. On Tuesday, lawyers with the Electronic Frontier Foundation are set to urge the federal judge overseeing those lawsuits to reject immunity as unconstitutional. At stake, they say, is the very principle of the rule of law in America.

“I think it does set a very frightening precedent that it’s okay for people to break the law because they can just have Congress bail them out later,” says EFF legal director Cindy Cohn. “It’s very troubling.”

I watched the FISA debate on the Senate floor, and although I was sometimes encouraged by the discussion, I was equally disappointed by the arguments I heard.

Retroactive Immunity is unacceptable if only because there were some phone companies that refused to comply, on the basis that they suspected it was illegal. Let’s be clear: certain companies proactively determined this would be illegal. This is a perfect case for a … what do you call it? Oh yeah: a Judge. See, a Judge would clear up the uncertainty because there’d be a record of the judgment. This could later be overturned, but that’s a world apart from the current situation.

The whole idea about warrants (or the FISA court, for that matter) is to determine if an action is legal BEFORE you commit that action.