A few days ago, this news report came out citing an attorney for the US Government who had pushed to dismiss charges made by five former Guantanamo Bay detainees that they had been tortured while in captivity.



Immediately those warning bells of heightened awareness that we had all so keenly developed during the dark days of the Bush Administration went off. And The ever-vigilant left wing took aim at Obama.



And our beloved Rachel also did a segment on this, asking us to talk her down..



I'm not gonna link to all the various blog postings that are out there. For one, a bunch of 'em are over at a website that I no longer visit (that's a story for another time). And there's too many to count really - Greenwald, HuffPo, TPM, The Times (LA and NY), and The Guardian UK to name a few sources all have various opinion pieces proclaiming the end of the f'n world.



I'll admit it. This shit has got me downright depressed. But not for the reason you may suspect. You see, I have this virtue/failing where I trust people a lot. I take people at their word, and I hold them to it most of the time. Of course with Bush we all figured out that the stupid goon or any of his cronies couldn't be trusted, so of course I make an exemption in my own moral code. But he's gone now, and while some cautious optimism remains I've mostly put away that exemption and am willing to let Obama have some breathing room before I start cursing him up & down the wall.

So a while back, when Obama himself said that his administration would review all of Bush's policies to determine what needed to be reversed or changed, I accepted that at face value. Now this comes along. And I remember another recent piece of news I saw the same day as this rendition case thing...



Then today, there's this one:



So follow me here for a second. If this is happening in the Defense Department, where a Bush appointee is still running the show, is it reasonable that there could be other such people pushing Bush-era policies in other places, like Justice? Add to that the fact that Eric Holder wasn't confirmed by the Senate until Feb. 2 and hasn't even named who the new US Attorneys will be yet (that should happen today I think).

And then there's an argument that Obama's transition team had months to review these policies before taking office. Sure, they did. However I'm sure the economic crisis took away a good amount of the focus on other matters, and again it's fair to say that the Bushbots that were still running things weren't as forthcoming with transitional officials as anyone might have hoped.

Until these people are filtered out and replaced, and until the new guys finish their review of prior policies and pass the word on, there are going to be mixed signals at various levels of authority and it's fair to say that the folks at the bottom, like the trial attorney in this case, just hasn't gotten the word yet. Or, he's a mole himself and needs to get cleansed.

So to all the people out there on the blogs and in the papers and on the teevee - go smoke a doob and have a couple glasses of wine. I know that constant vigilance is a good thing, but you're all being way too paranoid about the wrong thing here.

Update: In response to a comment over at FSZ, I am not saying that people should stop pushing the government just because there's been a change in who's running the show, or in the speed at which these things get changed. If it comes off sounding that way I apologize. I'm trying to raise concern here that there are people leftover and hidden who standing in the way of changing policy, and that we need to also focus attention on this problem.