Obama as bad as worse than Bush on civil liberties, state secrets, executive power.

You know, most are up in arms over economic issues, but I have to say it's the civil liberties, torture, assassination, executive power & state secrets issues that have most profoundly disappointed me. Shame on me for buying some of the rhetoric on hope/change/ending the wars/closing Gitmo/etc.

Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com:

"At this point, I didn't believe it was possible, but the Obama administration has just reached an all-new low in its abysmal civil liberties record. In response to the lawsuit filed by Anwar Awlaki's father asking a court to enjoin the President from assassinating his son, a U.S. citizen, without any due process, the administration late last night,according to The Washington Post, filed a brief asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit without hearing the merits of the claims. That's not surprising: both the Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly insisted that their secret conduct is legal but nonetheless urge courts not to even rule on its legality. But what's most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is "state secrets": in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are "state secrets," and thus no court may adjudicate their legality."

Tyranny | The Agitator:

"There are no mitigating factors, here. Obama is arguing the executive has the power to execute American citizens without a trial, without even so much as an airing of the charges against them, and that it can do so in complete secrecy, with no oversight from any court, and that the families of the executed have no legal recourse."

Sullivan's defense of presidential assassinations - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com:

"During the Bush-era torture debates, I was never able to get past my initial incredulity that we were even having a 'debate' over whether the President has the authority to torture people. Andrew Sullivan has responded to some of the questions I posed about his defense of Obama's assassination program, and I realize now that throughout this whole assassination debate, specific legal and factual issues aside, my overarching reaction is quite similar: I actually can't believe that there is even a 'debate' over whether an American President -- without a shred of due process or oversight -- has the power to compile hit lists of American citizens whom he orders the CIA to kill far away from any battlefield. The notion that the President has such an unconstrained, unchecked power is such a blatant distortion of everything our political system is supposed to be -- such a pure embodiment of the very definition of tyrannical power -- that, no matter how many times I see it, it's still hard for me to believe there are people willing to expressly defend it."

Assassinations Done Wrong - Reason Magazine:

"At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I just wonder: If a president—any president—has the authority to order the assassination of a U.S. citizen without oversight, what exactly can't a president do?

Now, as a matter of foreign policy, I am quite comfortable when Islamic extremists, militants, and terrorists meet their atomized ends through the work of unmanned flying contraptions operated remotely by the U.S. government.

Then again, I can also unequivocally state that the thought of an American citizen's being placed on one of these terrorist hit lists without due process of law or any oversight is one that I find disconcerting.

My unease over the case of Anwar Awlaki—an American citizen penciled in for targeted assassination by the Obama administration—isn't based on any conspiratorial daydreams about Barack Obama's wanting to randomly knock off citizens. There is no doubt, in fact, that Awlaki is a despicable character, a member of radical Islamic networks, dangerous, and deserving of a gruesome fate.

In other words, the administration has a straightforward case to make. Yet when Awlaki's father asked a court to enjoin the president from killing his despicable son, the administration asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit without hearing the merits of the case by invoking "state secrets."

With that, the Obama administration argued that the president should be empowered to order the execution of a U.S. citizen—outside a war zone and without exhibiting an imminent threat to other citizens—without any oversight from the judicial or legislative branch of government. And by using the protection-of-state-secrets argument, the administration is also asserting that the public has no right to know why."