The newly released secret laws of the Bush administration

The newly released secret laws of the Bush administration - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com:

Yesterday, the Obama administration, to its credit, took steps towards fulfilling an important promise by disclosing -- in response to a long-standing, hard-fought ACLU lawsuit for disclosure -- multiple DOJ documents that contained Bush administration decrees with regard to government power (these are the documents that formed what, literally, was the regime of secret laws under which we were ruled for the last eight years).  Unlike the NYT front page which Digby examined yesterday, even a quick review of these newly disclosed documents leaves no doubt about their historical significance.  They are the grotesque blueprint for what the U.S. Government became, laid out so starkly that even the David Broders of the world could recognize their extremism.

The most vital point is that all of the documents released yesterday by the Obama DOJ comprise nothing less than a regime of secret laws under which we were governed.  Nothing was redacted when those documents yesterday were released because they don't contain any national security secrets.  They're nothing more than legal decrees, written by lawyers.  They're just laws that were implemented with no acts of Congress, unilaterally by the Executive branch.  Yet even the very laws that governed us were kept secret for eight years.

This is factually true, with no hyperbole:  Over the last eight years, we had a system in place where we pretended that our "laws" were the things enacted out in the open by our Congress and that were set forth by the Constitution.  The reality, though, was that our Government secretly vested itself with the power to ignore those public laws, to declare them invalid, and instead, create a whole regimen of secret laws that vested tyrannical, monarchical power in the President.  Nobody knew what those secret laws were because even Congress, despite a few lame and meek requests, was denied access to them.  What kind of country lives under secret laws?