Thanks for staying on top on this, Destor. I agree.

Obama's responses to any issue resonate, either because they are the responses we anticipated, or because they leave an uneasy chill in the air of our expectations.
This issue is disquieting. As is his response to the banks.
We, you and I, are not so far apart on what we think as I once thought.
Namaste, Destor.

Though not on "spying,", there are sections in the Air Force One interview with New York Times in today's paper that might interest those interested in civil liberties issues:

....The president spoke at length about the struggle with terrorism in Afghanistan and elsewhere, staking out positions that at times seemed more comparable to those of his predecessor than many of Mr. Obama’s more liberal supporters would like. He did not rule out the option of snatching terrorism suspects out of hostile countries.

[....more on Afghanistan....]

During the interview, Mr. Obama also left open the option for American operatives to capture terrorism suspects abroad even without the cooperation of a country where they were found. “There could be situations — and I emphasize ‘could be’ because we haven’t made a determination yet — where, let’s say that we have a well-known Al Qaeda operative that doesn’t surface very often, appears in a third country with whom we don’t have an extradition relationship or would not be willing to prosecute, but we think is a very dangerous person,” he said.

“I think we still have to think about how do we deal with that kind of scenario,” he added. The president went on to say that “we don’t torture” and that “we ultimately provide anybody that we’re detaining an opportunity through habeas corpus to answer to charges.”

Aides later said Mr. Obama did not mean to suggest that everybody held by American forces would be granted habeas corpus or the right to challenge their detention. In a court filing last month, the Obama administration agreed with the Bush administration position that 600 prisoners in a cavernous prison on the American air base at Bagram in Afghanistan have no right to seek their release in court.

Instead, aides said Mr. Obama’s comment referred only to a Supreme Court decision last year finding that prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have the right to go to federal court to challenge their continued detention.

Mr. Obama signaled that those on the left seeking a wholesale reversal of Mr. Bush’s detainee policy might be disappointed. Mr. Obama said that by the time he got into office, the Bush administration had taken “steps to correct certain policies and procedures after those first couple of years” after the Sept. 11 attacks.

He credited not Mr. Bush but the former Central Intelligence Agency director Michael V. Hayden and the former director of national intelligence Mike McConnell, who “really had America’s security interests in mind when they acted, and I think were mindful of American values and ideals.”....

from
Obama Ponders Outreach to Elements of the Taliban
By HELENE COOPER and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

Note on the left menu there, there is a link to a full transcript, I haven't read it yet.

And I am still hopping mad. And I am not getting any less mad this this latest news on the domestic spying front. Not only does it need to be stopped and never done again but the whole program needs to be investigated with possible prosecutions of people involved in it if laws were broken.

I guess you might expect thre Executive to become overly enthralled with the powers of the Executive that are handed to him upon coming to office. Which is why we have three supposedly equal branches of government.

Inasmuch as there are ANY questions regarding the ability of Presidential acts or policies to pass Constitutional muster, it is Congress' duty to act. They can get past the "State Secrets" defense and determine what in fact is going on, challenging any questionable activities on their own.

I would hope Pelosi, Reid and Company would have the cajones to convene committee/conference hearings as necessary. It would be a way to show that at last we had proceeded past the partisanship of these last eight years that allowed Bush/Cheney to rule as unchecked despots for no other reason than that they had an "R" behind their name.

Recommending this post because it's an important issue.

Having said that, I would only note the following.

(1) We're still only about six weeks in, and we've had an Attorney General for maybe a month. AFAIK, Holder doesn't even have any DAG's on staff yet.

I suspect that, on many of the more controversial issues, the DOJ will argue for maintaining the status quo at least until they can review all of the available information, case law, existing opinions, etc.

Of course, I do expect many of those official Administration positions to change. But it won't happen in the first few months. In the meantime, they still have to deal with real-time legal proceedings while simultaneously working through the underlying issues.

(2) It is unusual for an incoming chief executive to voluntarily relinquish power. This is one of those things where additional pressure from supporters would probably do the most good. If we don't keep the heat on about issues like warrantless wiretaps and domestic spying, we're creating the perfect conditions for Obama to keep hold of those powers.

Destor, the sad truth seems to be that Obama is embracing the vast majority of Bush's tactics and strategy with respect to the domestic police state and our imperialist adventures abroad and they go hand in hand.

This is not to say he hasn't done a couple of good things in this arena, but he is clearly maintaining most of the rotten apparatus Bush built and there will be no end to it under Obama. Neither will there be an end to the Iraq War but there will be a fruitless escalation of the failed war in Afghanistan. I don't think Obama is a tyrant as Bush was and intended to be, but he is making some massive errrors in judgment on these issues.