She was the best of nominees. He was the worst of nominees. The fates of Dawn Johnsen and John Brennan after the first attempts to put them into high levels of the Obama Administration tells us everything we need to know about Obama’s commitment to the rule of law.

The nomination of Dawn Johnsen to head the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice represented, in my opinion, the best possible candidate for a crucial position. During the Bush-Cheney years, OLC memos of incredibly shoddy workmanship were churned out in abundance in a blatant attempt to provide legal cover for torture and other lawbreaking by the Bush Administration. Here is Johnsen at the American Constitution Society in October, 2007, where she states that "OLC and the Attorney General have to be prepared to tell the President ‘no’; that’s what the law requires" in describing how OLC needs to be independent above all else in providing legal advice to the Administration:

Johnsen’s selection as head of OLC was announced by Obama on January 5, 2009. Her nomination has languished, with a hold placed by John Cornyn, and Obama has done nothing to move things along.

John Brennan served as Barack Obama’s primary advisor on intelligence policy during the campaign and very shortly after the election, his name was at the top of most lists to serve as either Director of National Intelligence or Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Fortunately, because Glenn Greenwald and others pointed out how much Brennan had supported torture and illegal surveillance, Brennan withdrew his name about a week after a barrage of information about Brennan’s views was made public. For example, Greenwald provided this quotation from Brennan to CBS News where Brennan is indistinguishable from Cheney:

SMITH: You know, this all becomes such a giant issue because the president has gone on record so many times saying the United States does not torture. If we acknowledge that this kind of activity [waterboarding] goes on, you know, what does that mean, exactly, I guess?

Mr. BRENNAN: Well, the CIA has acknowledged that it has detained about 100 terrorists since 9/11, and about a third of them have been subjected to what the CIA refers to as enhanced interrogation tactics, and only a small proportion of those have in fact been subjected to the most serious types of enhanced procedures.

SMITH: Right. And you say some of this has born fruit.

Mr. BRENNAN: There have been a lot of information that has come out from these interrogation procedures that the agency has in fact used against the real hard-core terrorists. It has saved lives. And let’s not forget, these are hardened terrorists who have been responsible for 9/11, who have shown no remorse at all for the deaths of 3,000 innocents.[Emphasis from Greenwald]

Despite removing his name from consideration as DNI or DCI, Brennan remained at a high advisory level to Obama within the National Security Council but at a position not requiring Senate confirmation. Last week, it was announced that Obama would form a new "interrogation team" that would take over the job of interrogation of high level detainees. Here is Andrea Mitchell reporting on the team:

Senior White House and Justice Department officials briefing reporters on a conference call just now insisted that the White House would not be involved in tactical decisions about the interrogation of detainees under new procedures approved by the president. Officials said the National Security Council interagency role would be "policy guidance" — only.

The new unit will be headquartered at the FBI and overseen by the NSC’s counter terror chief, John Brennan, who used to run the counter terror center at the CIA.

The briefers said they would also create a unit to do scientific studies of "best practices" of interrogation to find out what works.

They pledged that the U.S. would no longer "render" suspects to countries that torture prisoners and that renditions would be overseen by the State Department.

Given Brennan’s previous comments about rendition {Example from the Greenwald link:I think it allows us to have the option to move a person who is involved in terrorism or terrorism-related activities to a country where they can be effectively questioned or prosecuted.), I would think that we will have to watch carefully to see which countries are involved in this "new, improved" program.

"Civil liberties extreminsts" felt they had reason to celebrate when Barack Obama was elected President. We felt that the eight year nightmare of rampant lawlessness by our government would come to an end and that those who broke the law would be held to account. The nomination of Dawn Johnsen was particularly symbolic, as she would root out the corruption in the Office of Legal Counsel and set a tone for legal advice to the new Administration that falls squarely within the law. The sad facts that she has not yet been confirmed and that Obama is doing nothing of substance to get her confirmed while John Brennan has survived one derailed nomination attempt only to reappear in a position to continue his favored versions of lawlessness tell us that the nightmare continues.

If Obama truly cared about civil liberties and the rule of law, he would dismiss John Brennan from government service and make a recess appointment of Dawn Johnsen to head OLC. I’m not going to hold my breath on that happening.