The American Civil Liberties Union has released a report tracking the erosion of U.S. civil liberties in the decade since the 9/11 attacks. The report concludes President Obama has continued a number of key Bush administration policies in the so-called “war on terror,” putting the United States “at risk of enshrining a permanent state of emergency in which core values must be subordinated to ever-expanding claims of national security.” In his first-ever televised interview, the former top lawyer at the CIA, John Rizzo, said the Obama administration has changed “virtually nothing with respect to existing CIA programs and operations.”
John Rizzo: “His people were signaling to us, I think partly to try to assure us that they weren’t going to come in and dismantle the place, that they were going to be just as tough, if not tougher, than the Bush people. Authorities were continued that were originally granted by President Bush beginning shortly after 9/11. Those were all picked up, reviewed and endorsed by the Obama administration.”