That was Mel Brooks’s line in History of the World as his subjects bowed down to him, brought him anything he wanted, and allowed him to have his way with them. I’m afraid it’s the same sort of thought that Barack Obama and his team of advisers might be having right about now.

Why do I say that? Because President Obama and his administration are defending and continuing the Bush administration’s most sweeping assertions of executive power. In this case, it’s the power of the executive to detain people indefinitely without charges and to prohibit them from challenging their detention in court. You may recall that “quaint” old custom known as habeas corpus, a right so crucial and fundamental that it’s enshrined in the actual Constitution itself (as opposed to the Bill of Rights).

The Obama administration argued on Friday that persons held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan have no right to challenge their detention in U. S. courts:

“They’ve now embraced the Bush policy that you can create prisons outside the law,” said Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who has represented several detainees.

Obama has pledged to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay within the year, but what of the facility at Bagram? It holds more people (600+) than Guantánamo, and it’s used for precisely the same purpose: to hold people indefinitely without access to a lawyer, and to administer “enhanced” interrogations beyond the reach of American courts. And while many of those held at Bagram were captured in Afghanistan, the four men in the case discussed here were captured outside Afghanistan and brought to Bagram for detention.

And speaking of those “enhanced” interrogation techniques – another lawsuit in the Federal courts right now involves the Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen, who cooperated with the CIA by flying people kidnapped around the world to nations like Egypt and Jordan, where the detainees suffered horrible abuses. (I wrote about it earlier this week.) The Obama Justice Department is sticking to the Bush regime’s argument that for the court even to hear the case would reveal vital state secrets and threaten the security of the nation. Note: the Obama/Bush argument is not that certain evidence must be withheld, or viewed in camera by the judges hearing the case; rather, it is that the case itself must be dismissed on the grounds of state secrets. They argue this with a straight face, even though the basic facts of the case have been widely reported in news media around the world.

Once again, we see those in power conflating the National Interest with their own Narrow Self-Interest. It would certainly embarrass two Presidential Administrations, the CIA, and the military to have a U. S. court declare that an American company is liable for assisting in the kidnapping and torturing of foreign nationals. But such an action is required if we are to be a nation of laws, rather than simply a nation of men.

It’s distressing to see the Obama administration continue some of the most dangerous policies of the Bush regime. And it’s depressing to watch the “progressives” give Obama a free ride.