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Monday 2 March 2009

According to Obama, only the President has the power to decide what is done with classified information, and neither courts nor Congress have any power at all to do anything but politely request that the President change his mind. Therefore, the President has the unilateral, unchallengeable power to prevent any judicial challenges to his actions by simply declaring that the relevant evidence is a secret and refusing to turn it over to a court, even if ordered to do so. That’s the argument which the Obama DOJ is now aggressively advancing — all in order to block any judicial adjudication of Bush’s now-dormant NSA program. It was exactly these theories — and this behavior — that led to eight years of accusations of an “imperial presidency” and a “lawless administration” and the like. Glenn Greenwald

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