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11 Feb 2009 08:34 pm

When Greenwald Attacks

He pounces on Marc and me. Marc responds here. Money quote:

My informed guess is that the Obama Administration will find cases to revoke the privilege's assertion. They will do so publicly and with great fanfare. They will simultaneously announce a new set of restrictions on when and how the privilege should be invoked. They will do so on their own timetable (to the extent that the courts don't force their hands), and they will do so in conjunction with the broader ideal of reconciliation and accountability. They're just not ready to do so 22 days in, and the particulars of this case weren't, in any case, ideal for them.

For my part, I have not changed my mind and never, pace Glenn, stated that the Obama administration was complicit in torture. I said it should be very careful to avoid that. I would prefer that this evidence be released, but I understand that there may be some serious reasons for a holding pattern in the first weeks of a new administration. I'm going to watch this carefully; and I'm happy that Feingold is asking for a briefing. Ta-Nehisi weighs in here. Dahlia Lithwick's take:

One possible answer is that water-boarding and Guantanamo were so awful as to be indefensible, whereas the state-secrets privilege at least sounds plausible. Another possibility is that the Obama administration just hasn't had time to look carefully at the state-secrets doctrine and was buying itself a little time Monday by both continuing the policy and announcing a massive review. A third possibility is that Obama is less willing than he seemed before the election to shed the great dark cloak of secrecy fashioned by his predecessor.

My sense is the second, but we'll see. There is now a suggestion that Obama himself may not have been allowed to see the full evidence. If that's true, who, one wonders, kept it from him?

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