Obama's First Press Conference: Repeating Old Lies, Dodging Old Truths

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In the past few years, newspapers and broadcast media around the world have print and aired details of a lawless US government policy of kidnapping civilians and flying them abroad for indefinite detention and torture at the hands of client governments or its own military and civilian officials.

Called “extraordinary rendition,” by the Bush Administration, which inherited it from its Democratic predecessor, this illegal practice has been the subject of a number of books reconstructing the flight plans and naming many of the so-called “black sites” which were the illegal jailings and tortures took place.

Despite the wealth of publicly available detail on these criminal practices, the Bush administration claimed that to be answerable in court for this illegal conduct would compromise “state secrets,” and found federal judges to agree with this ridiculous claim.

On his first full day in office, President Obama renewed his pledge to close the “black sites” without of course naming them and giving himself a full year to do so, and declared that the US government would observe legal norms from this point onward.

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