Former Justice official: Obama worse than Bush on civil liberties [VIDEO]

Published: 1:38 AM 04/23/2012
By Grae Stafford
The Daily Caller

The Obama administration’s use of executive power has gone further than the Bush administration’s toward diminishing Americans’ civil liberties, author John Yoo told The Daily Caller.

“Somehow the Obama administration has increased the protections for terrorists, while at the same time reducing them for the rest of us law-abiding citizens in the United States,” Yoo said after a panel discussion on his new book “Taming Globalization” at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

Yoo was deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice during the Bush administration. During his tenure, he authored what came to be derided as the “torture memos,” which defined what techniques were acceptable to use during interrogations of terrorist suspects.

Anti-war organizations branded him and many others in the Bush administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush himself, as “war criminals.”

Yoo said the anti-war movement has not criticized President Barack Obama, despite his administration’s formalization of a process for “targeted killing[s]” of American citizens without trial.

“You don’t see the same critics who so thrashed President Bush, for allegedly thinking he was a king, making the same arguments and engaging in the same criticism of President Obama,” Yoo told TheDC.

“I think a reasonable person can only conclude that is because President Obama happens to be a Democrat, where as President Bush was a Republican.”