ProPublica’s excellent investigative piece on the Department of Justice’s deceiving the public regarding federal judge Henry Kennedy Jr.’s court opinion that ordered the release of Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman, a Yemeni national held at Guantánamo Bay without charges for nearly eight years, shows how the status quo of the Bush regime has not changed since President Obama took office.

Although President Obama inherited many aspects of U.S. detention policy from his predecessor, Guantánamo detainees have been fighting their detentions in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia almost entirely on his watch.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June 2008, as Obama was campaigning for president, that detainees could challenge their detentions in federal court under the constitutional doctrine of habeas corpus, which protects individuals from unlawful imprisonment by the government.

Obama, still a senator then, issued a statement calling the ruling “an important step toward re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law, and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus. Our courts have employed habeas corpus with rigor and fairness for more than two centuries, and we must continue to do so as we defend the freedom that violent extremists seek to destroy.”

And yet, Obama’s DoJ continues to undermine habeas corpus and rule of law, failing to protect freedom and fairness, and turning the President into a bald-faced hypocrite.