By embracing and defending numerous Bush/Cheney policies he once deplored, "Obama hasn't changed, just adjusted." He's learned secret things that he can't tell you about but which -- you should accept -- do justify his "adjustments." Whenever Bush followers would run out of arguments to defend their leader's actions, that's the same rationale they'd resort to: he knows secret things that you don't know and therefore we should trust him. So Obama has "learned" things that caused him to abandon his vehement condemnations of indefinite detention, state secrets, military commissions and denial of habeas corpus as unjust and un-American travesties and come to embrace them as important and necessary policies? Wow: that must have been quite an education.

I'm not sure I agree with this assessment very much. I agree that the Spinglish about not changing but adjusting is junk.

But beyond that, I think that President Obama learned something very much in the public domain, not something secret, that caused his change in policy. He learned that the Republicans and Dick Cheney's dark forces, and their allies amongst his holdover staff (John Brennan, Michael Hayden, etc.) could mobilize quickly, gain the public attention, establish the metaphors, and even rally people to demonstrations, however ridiculed.

He also learned that the civil libertarians, the ACLU, the so-called liberal wing of the party, those who pushed back against the Dark Side, the netroots and whatever, could not, or would not, do the same.

It's actually not surprising that things have turned out this way. Torture and enforced disappearance are things that once they take hold are very difficult to uproot without enormous political and social upheaval. That's because they ultimately derive from the will of the people, even though the same people abhor them. Tough on crime, keep the American public safe from terrorism, not in my back yard, fear of foreigners or foreign religions, these are all memes that are very easy to stir, and require leadership to combat. It was always going to be hard to rid ourselves of Guantánamo, but too many people acted like the ridiculous dark siders, what was it, the New York Times had printed political maps showing them confined to the backwaters of Appalachia and predicted a "regional party" by 2010, too many people saw the fight as being so obvious it demanded no effort.

Nobody rallied in the streets to any great degree, perhaps a testimony to what happens when the ACLU, as one example but hardly alone, relegates its membership at large to envelope and ATM stuffing and ignores them in favor of those with prestigious law credentials. Lawyers don't do popular movements, they turn the slow wheels of law. Call your senator, call your congressman, but never, ever, go back to those bad old 1960s days and go to the streets. The old NCLB had done the opposite: During Sacco and Vanzetti they organized marches.

When I talked to an ICRC deputy head of delegation at a conference a couple of months after President Obama announced the Guantánamo closings, he was still ecstatic. No one had ever made the promises that the Obama administration had made to the ICRC before, opening up a dark regime had always required regime change. When I happened to have the opportunity to talk to another person from the ICRC just recently, the mood was quite a bit different, more like they were very busy. That didn't seem like such a good sign to me.

President Obama learned no secrets. He learned the very public fact that unless someone disabuses the American public of their notions of total safety, tough on crime, and fear of foreigners, nobody is going to be stopping the Bush era abuses very soon. So how does it feel? He was everybody's hope, many peoples' second or third choice, and now he isn't strong enough to withstand the negative forces within his government. When the president of Afghanistan displayed those exact qualities, he was dismissed here as a puppet of the Empire. But it seems it isn't a quality only a corrupt tribal never-even-a-real-country puppet comes up with, is it? Maybe we can dig around in President Obama's past and find something to prove that it's only this guy that's the problem. Maybe we can figure out which Empire has it's boot on our necks, maybe the Fed or Big Oil or the IPCC or something. Or maybe it isn't really the elite that are causing this downward spiral.

Aafia Siddiqui was shot in Ghazni, moved to Craig Field Hospital at Bagram, operated on and then placed in a four point restraint bed, with video cameras and lights 24/7 for recovery. Her interrogation began the next day according to court documents, and continued every day until the day she was put on a plane and flown to New York. The FBI conducted the interrogations, she was not given information about the whereabouts of her son who had been separated from her (and was in custody of the U.S. and then the Afghan NDS). One or both of the interrogators was among those present when and where she was shot, i.e. they are among the federal agents she is charged with attempting to shoot, and those who wrestled with her according to their affidavits (she was shot by an Army warrant officer). Of course, the Ghazni police say there was no struggle, she had no gun, and no shots were fired prior to the two shots she took in the front torso.

She was Mirandized when she got to New York.

All of the above, plus the interrogation records, has been in use by the District Court. I don't know whether that clears up anyting about Miranda, but it sure points to the courts not dismissing information because it was obtained without Mirandizing someone outside the U.S.