In 2007, five victims of Bush’s extraordinary rendition program filed a suit against Jeppesen, the Boeing subsidiary that helped the CIA send them overseas to be tortured. The Bush administration tried to block the suit by claiming the case would reveal state secrets and thus endanger national security — a blatant attempt to use executive privilege to cover up the crimes of the American state.

The case was still going when Obama took office. Within days of his inauguration, Obama signed orders shutting down secret prisons and banning torture. Surely, his supporters said, this showed that he was serious about ending the US government’s disregard for basic freedoms.

Sadly, no. In the Jeppesen case, Obama has explicitly and deliberately upheld Bush’s abuse of the state secrets privilege — much to the dismay of the ACLU:

It isn’t merely that the Obama DOJ is invoking the privilege for this particular case, which contains allegations of torture that are as brutal and severe as any. That’s bad enough. But worse is that they’re invoking the most abusive parts of the Bush theory: namely, that the privilege can be used to block the adjudication of entire cases (rather than, say, justify the concealment of specific classified documents or other pieces of evidence), and, worse still, can be used to prevent judicial scrutiny even when the alleged government conduct is blatantly illegal and, as here, a war crime of the greatest seriousness.

They’re embracing a theory that literally places government officials beyond the rule of law. No minimally honest person who criticized the Bush administration for relying on this instrument can defend the Obama administration for doing so here.

It gets worse. Not only is Obama upholding Bush’s drastic expansion of executive power, he’s continuing the rendition program:

Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States. [...]

The decision underscores the fact that the battle with Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups is far from over and that even if the United States is shutting down the prisons, it is not done taking prisoners.

“Obviously you need to preserve some tools — you still have to go after the bad guys,” said an Obama administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing the legal reasoning. “The legal advisors working on this looked at rendition. It is controversial in some circles and kicked up a big storm in Europe. But if done within certain parameters, it is an acceptable practice.”

How’s that for change we can believe in?