While no one was looking

Yup, those high-profile executive orders banning torture, stopping the unconstitutional military commissions, and closing the secret C.I.A. prisons and Gitmo (sometime this year) sure looked great, didn't they?  But if you look a bit closer...

"In little-noticed confirmation testimony recently, Obama nominees endorsed continuing the C.I.A.'s program of transferring prisoners to other countries without legal rights, and indefinitely detaining terrorism suspects without trials even if they were arrested far from a war zone.

"The administration has also embraced the Bush legal team’s arguments that a lawsuit by former C.I.A. detainees [who say they were victims of extraordinary rendition and torture] should be shut down based on the 'state secrets' doctrine. It has also left the door open to resuming military commission trials.

"And earlier this month, after a British court cited pressure by the United States in declining to release information about the alleged torture of a detainee in American custody, the Obama administration issued a statement thanking the British government 'for its continued commitment to protect sensitive national security information.'”

And of course, since such a tiny fraction of Americans actually keep track of any of this, there won't be any meaningful political backlash just from a few news articles about it, probably buried in the back pages.  Sigh.  Time to start moving the ol' American Fascism Clock back toward midnight again.

P.S. Hooray for the stimulus package.  Guess what though--if it doesn't actually start creating jobs ASAP, the Democrats are going to be in deep trouble.