Actually, Hentoff's piece is about much more than that. He goes through the entire Obama policy towards civil liberties. Let's just say he isn't pleased:
I increasingly wonder whose Constitution Barack Obama was teaching at the University of Chicago. China's? North Korea's? Robert Mugabe's?....
I often disagree with ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero—though I'm almost always in synch with his lawyers in the field—but Romero is right about Obama creating "Gitmo North": "While the Obama administration inherited the Guantánamo debacle, this current move is its own affirmative adoption of those policies. It is unimaginable that the Obama administration is using the same justification as the Bush administration used to undercut centuries of legal jurisprudence and the principle of innocent until proved guilty and the right to confront one's accusers. . . . The Obama administration's announcement contradicts everything the president has said about the need for America to return to leading with its values. American values do not contemplate disregarding our Constitution and skirting the criminal justice system."
If Dick Cheney were a gentleman, instead of continuing to criticize this president, he would congratulate him on his faithful allegiance to many signature policies of the Bush-Cheney transformation of America.
But never let it be said that President Obama is neglecting the patriotic education of America's young. On December 13, Clint Boulton reported on eweek.com, "The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Berkeley's Samuelson Clinic have sued the Department of Justice and five other government organizations (including the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) for cloaking their policies for using Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks to investigate citizens in criminal and other matters. [The plaintiffs] want to know exactly how, and what kinds of information, the feds are accessing from users' social networking profiles."
Maybe Dick Cheney can ask Barack to confirm him as a friend on Facebook.
