But I think you should credit Glenn Greenwald, who cited this exact passage exactly two months earlier, after the Obama DoJ’s first big demonstration of their commitment to the Bush abuse of the state secrets privilege:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/02/10/obama/

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To the Obama apologists: Greenwald has never denied that the state secrets privilege pre-existed Bush; he has been entirely clear that the Bush innovation was to abuse it, repeatedly and consistently, to dismiss whole cases rather than to assert it during trials on specific pieces of evidence. That abuse is what the Feingold bill (which Biden and Obama supported when they were in the Senate) seeks to ban, and is what Obama pledged to end as President.

Neither Greenwald nor Feingold supports ending the ability of an administration to assert state secrets privilege at all. But it should be clear to everyone who thinks about it for a few minutes that giving the executive branch the ability to make legal cases disappear by means of a broad, unreviewable assertion of state secrets privilege is an enormous expansion of power.

I am not willing to cede that kind of power to any president — Barack Obama, George W. Bush, or George Washington. Unless Congress pares back this unaccountable power, blessing Obama’s (and Bush’s) abuse of it is equivalent to kissing goodbye the separation of powers and the system of checks and balances.

The problem is when it is a mindless, default position. As an example, there are lawyers who, in the course of civil discovery or other document/information production situations, automatically, as a matter of course, assert the attorney-client privilege over a document if it has a lawyer’s name anywhere on it. This is particularly the case with e-mails — if a lawyer is anywhere in the “To” or “CC” lines (or the “From” line), it is privileged, according to this type of lawyer. These lawyers assert the privilege in rote fashion, without actually considering the elements of a proper privilege claim (for a decent discussion, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attorney-client_privilege).

On the other hand, there are lawyers that take a more narrow view of the privilege, and consider issues like the content of the communication, the number of parties to the communication, the identities of the parties to the communication, etc. If the lawyer thinks that, after considering all of these facts and circumstances, the communication is one that fits within the scope of the attorney-client privilege, he or she asserts the privilege, and, to my mind, that assertion is defensible.

My understanding of President Obama’s objections to the previous administration’s claims of “state secret privilege” is that he objected to the same sort of rote, grossly overinclusive (or at least grossly underconsidered) claims of the privilege made by the Bush Administration. That is not to say that there are not appropriate state secret privilege claims, only that there are certainly INappropriate ones.

All of this is to say that I don’t take Obama’s objections to have been to the CLAIM of privilege per se, but to the justifications (or lack thereof) underlying those claims. I certainly don’t approve of a lawyer mindlessly asserting privilege over any document that mentions a lawyer’s name, but I DO approve of a properly-made claim that fits squarely within the concept of privilege set down in law.

If I’m correct, you really need to stop wringing your hands about this.

This is bullshit.

You people don’t know **** about the law, obviously. That doctrine has been used by: Reagan, Clinton, Carter, Bush I, Bush II and now Obama.

IT IS AN ESTABLISHED LEGAL DOCTRINE, dammit.

The solution is simple. Act as if the law was broken (it WAS). Prosecute the offenders, and let the convicts take it to the SCROTUMS, I mean SCOTUS.