Obama and Bush: State Secrets

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Obama greatly admires former President George W. Bush.

From ABC:

President Obama's Justice Department didn't just disappoint some of his liberal supporters by arguing in support of the Defense of Marriage Act this week, disappointing if not angering supporters who also support same sex marriage and were appalled by the comparison of same sex marriage to incestuous ones. The president's lawyers also repeated some of the Bush administration's national security arguments.

The Obama Justice Department on Friday asked the full 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to review an earlier appeals court ruling to determine if details about CIA rendition flights coordinated by Jeppesen Dataplan -- a division of Boeing -- should be protected as "state secrets."

As a candidate, then-Sen. Obama faulted President Bush for using the "state secrets" argument too often, and too broadly, though as president he has used it in at least three cases:

1) Jewel v NSA, in which the Electronic Frontier Foundation is challenging the National Security Agency surveillance by suing on behalf of AT&T customers whose records may or may not have been caught up in the NSA "dragnet";

2) Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v Obama, in which the Islamic charity, investigated for terrorist financing out of its Oregon offices, sued the government alleging it was targeted illegally under the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program; and

3) Mohamed et al v Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., a case involving five men who claim to have been victims of extraordinary rendition -- including since-freed Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed, another plaintiff in jail in Egypt, one in jail in Morocco, and two now free. They sued a San Jose Boeing subsidiary, Jeppesen Dataplan, accusing the flight-planning company of aiding the CIA in flying them to other countries and secret CIA camps where they were tortured.

In April, a three-judge panel of the appeals court ruled that the Justice Department can only cite the "state secrets" privilege for certain evidence in the lawsuit and cannot use the state secrets defense to dismiss the suit altogether.

Friday's filing from Obama's Justice Department asks for an entire review by the appeals court.

Who knew Obama would desperately cling to the very techniques that he criticized President Bush for using?

The hypocrisy really doesn't come as a surprise to some of us. He's a fraud, more broken promises.

Obama certainly hasn't faced all that much media scrutiny for his many changes of heart since he was campaigning to be the president.