ECH, HE WAS ALWAYS WHINING ABOUT W TOO:

The Cheney Offense: The former vice president isn't a challenge to Obama -- he is helpful cover for how little this administration has changed when it comes to national security. (Adam Serwer, December 23, 2009, American Prospect)

The Obama administration's national security policies differ in substance from those of the Bush administration's second term mostly at the margins. Like the Bush administration, Obama has chosen to preserve a "hybrid legal system" for trying suspected terrorists that will utilize civilian courts for "slam-dunk" cases and revised military commissions for those in which the evidence is less than certain. While campaigning as a civil libertarian, Obama has reneged on his promises to reform FISA and the PATRIOT Act, using congressional Republicans to block civil liberties protections from being added to the proposed renewal bills.

The administration has expanded the drone war in Pakistan, prompting the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings to wonder aloud if the attacks might be war crimes. It has maintained the Bush-era FBI guidelines on racial profiling and surveillance that Muslim leaders say are alienating American Muslims. Despite boasting of a new era of transparency, the president signed into law a bill giving the defense secretary the ability to suppress photos depicting detainee abuse on the grounds that it might harm the U.S. reputation abroad, effectively giving the government veto power over disclosing its own illegal behavior.

The administration has invoked the state secrets doctrine as frequently and eagerly as its predecessor, a policy that is having a profound effect on the ability of civil liberties groups to acquire a "binding definitive determination" from the courts that will outlaw U.S. mistreatment of detainees once and for all. As Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU put it, while "the Bush administration constructed a legal framework for torture, the Obama administration is constructing a legal framework for impunity."