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The joint Post/Obama defense of the Patriot Act and FISA
...That's because what happened here is obvious: the administration wanted to issue a Press Release exploiting the fear surrounding the Zazi case to justify Obama's Bush-copying civil liberties policies (including its current demands for full Bush-era Patriot Act renewal and FISA continuation) while depicting Obama as our careful yet forceful protector. So they dispatched an official (or officials) to dictate the sanctioned administration line to Anne Kornblut. She then unquestioningly wrote it all down (after granting them anonymity) and The Post uncritically published it as a "news article." That's what Washington journalists typically mean by "reporting": we dutifully write down what government officials tell us to say -- while letting them hide behind anonymity -- and then we publish it. This morning's Post article is as egregious as it gets.

But far worse than the Post's indiscriminate use of anonymity and exclusive reliance on government sources spouting the official line are the numerous claims it advances which are, at best, highly dubious. The Post claims Obama is "attempt[ing] to turn the page on Bush-era anti-terrorism policies"; that "Obama discarded the term 'global war on terror,' along with some of its most controversial tools"; and "the Obama administration is increasingly confident that it has struck a balance between protecting civil liberties, honoring international law and safeguarding the country." But this is just plainly false. What has characterized the Obama administration's approach to terrorism and civil liberties, far more than anything else, is a full-scale embrace of the defining Bush/Cheney approach. The only two examples Kornblut cites to justify these claims -- that Obama jettisoned "enhanced interrogation techniques and secret prisons" -- prove little, since the formal authorization for such interrogation techniques was already withdrawn when Obama took office and secret prisons were already empty.

But even granting the significance of those first-week measures, the Obama administration has aggressively defended, justified and embraced the overwhelming bulk of Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies -- the exact ones that caused liberals and Democrats to object so vehemently over the last eight years: imprisonment with no trials, maintaining a legal black hole at Bagram, military commissions, renditions, warrantless eavesdropping, claims of state secrets to prevent judicial review of presidential lawbreaking, legal immunity for all but the lowest-level war criminals, abuse-guaranteeing Patriot Act powers, impenetrable walls of secrecy in the national security context. The very idea that Obama has been "attempt[ing] to turn the page on Bush-era anti-terrorism policies" is ludicrous: blatant administration propaganda. Even among huge numbers of Obama-supporting progressives, there has long been a consensus that Obama's Terrorism approach is defined by a full-scale embrace of the Bush/Cheney mentality. Civil liberties groups have been astonished and horrified in equal parts by the Obama record in this area. And even the Right has acknowledged that Obama has followed most of the Bush/Cheney Terrorism polices...