Barack Obama, who said that he doesn't want to look back at the crimes -- or the alleged crimes -- of the George W. Bush administration, wants to look forward and move forward and, in effect, has decriminalized torture, a war of agression, warantless wiretapping -- obviously criminal under both the Fourth Amendment and American domestic law at that time -- years of criminal activity. Renditions, kidnappings, indefinite detention, the suspension of Habeaus Corpus in effect meaning, which most people really don't have a very clear idea of that, meaning detention without charges indefinitely. We now have a president actually who has declared the right to keep detained people indefinately that he suspects should not be out, even if they've been acquitted, he can keep them. In other words, as well as before without charges, following in the foot steps of George W. Bush in virtually all those respects. He claims that torture has ended but there is lots of evidence that it has not ended in Bagram and probably other secret sites at various places. The rendention, the kidnapping. Still. He's gone actually further than Bush in terms of open claims, the claim of the right -- through his intelligence chief at that time, Dennis Blair, who announced that the president had a hit list of American citizens and others that he felt -- that he'd given orders to kill, to assasinate, to execute, to murder abroad American citizens basically. But I just happened to read the words of the Magna Carta of 1215 today. I'd seen it before, I looked it up, but somebody else was referring to it. And the words are: "No free man shall be deprived -- shall be harmed, shall be destroyed or deprived of freedom except by a jury of his peers." In other words, this is a wiping out of rights that go back to 1215 -- almost 800 years right now. In short, in these Constitutional matters, we have an administration -- and in the foreign affairs matters, we have an administration that is a third term of George W. Bush. I'm not saying that's true in every respect. I'm not saying that the Republicans are not much, much worse. Actually they are in domestic matters. Actually Obama has not been strikingly better or different in matters of foreign affairs or Constitutional policy. In fact, we thought we were getting something here with a Constituational lawyer, a teacher of Constitutional law, Barack Obama, I haven't seen any opinions his Dept of Justice has been putting out [with] any difference in the opinion of Berkeley tenured professor John Yoo.
-- Daniel Ellsberg, Thursday in Oakland at a fundraiser for Bradley Manning.