President Obama has been jet-setting around the Middle East this week in an effort to convince Muslims that the United States doesn’t hate them. It’s no easy task, but, given his family background and reputation for reasoned rhetoric, he’s certainly the man for the job.

But there’s a problem. For all of Obama’s admirable accomplishments in foreign policy thus far, the man’s positions regarding torture and the legal framework of the War on Terror are nothing short of despicable. Maintaining the worst of Bush-era government secrecy and Big Brother intimidation techniques, our constitutional-scholar-in-chief has left many hopefully progressives scratching their heads.

The crimes against humanity committed by our government since Sep. 11 are no secret. Victims of our disgusting interrogation techniques in places like Guantanamo and Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan have spoken up around the world, and even our former vice president admitted on national television this year that he supported waterboarding. Our sins — actions which, in a just world, would land some of the previous administration’s highest officials in prison — are undeniable.

What is under debate, however, is the attitude we should take towards these crimes. A self-righteous few continue to defend torture, breathlessly arguing that brutalizing terrorists (and, unavoidably, people mistaken for terrorists) can save lives by providing valuable information — the kind of reasoning that helped lead to our invasion of Iraq and ensures a degradation of our values. Others advocate a congressional investigation into our war crimes and a guarantee of punishment for the perpetrators — though these optimists are still woefully sparse in government circles.

Then there’s the crowd with Obama at its head. These rational souls proclaim that we should let bygones be bygones and focus instead on what’s really important — as though preserving our Constitution and what’s left of our honor were a pastime for more carefree days. They assume that our new boss isn’t the same as the old boss, and that time will heal all wounds.

The absurd naïveté of this position aside (withholding punishment doesn’t stop criminals, it encourages them), we show no signs of following even this undignified route. Obama has ordered Guantanamo closed and has made great show of adhering to international treaties banning torture, but all the while his minions at the Department of Justice and the Pentagon are up to the same old dirty tricks as their predecessors.

Glenn Greenwald — a blogger at Salon.com who specializes in constitutional law and has recently been focusing on the scandal of Obama’s torture policies (and who, incidentally, was in town last week to accept an Izzy Award for achievement in independent media) — has done much to expose these shameful practices. In early February, he tracked the DOJ’s unbelievable use of the State Secrets privilege, a legal statute designed to prevent sensitive security information from being disclosed in court proceedings. The Bushites distorted this well-intentioned tool to throw out entire cases against the government, ensuring that their illegal programs were free from judicial scrutiny.

Two months ago, in the first test of their civil rights mettle, Obama’s lawyers pulled the same play, arguing that a suit against a company who helped shuttle torture victims to black sites should be shut down altogether. It wasn’t just that a few sensitive pieces of evidence should be omitted — the whole issue was deemed too sensitive to even see the light of day.

The case involved one Binyam Mohamed, whose story Greenwald has been following closely for some time. Mohamed is a British citizen who was detained in Pakistan in 2002 and tortured under the auspices of the United States there and in Morocco, Kabul and Guantanamo. He refused a deal last year to remain silent about his treatment in exchange for freedom, but was eventually released to the U.K. on Feb. 23 of this year. Since then, he has publicly discussed his experiences.

You’d think the Obama administration would want to wash their hands of this guy. But when Mohamed’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, attempted to write a letter to Obama specifically outlining his plaintiff’s treatment in detention — knowledge that men much lower than the president are privy to — the details of his note were blacked out by the sketchy Privilege Review Team (membership secret), which oversees such communications by Guantanamo lawyers. Smith was understandably perplexed — why would administration officials block such information (probably already well-known) from being passed to the President? Smith sent his letter anyway, adding that the Privilege Review Team had tried to stop him. Now Smith is to appear in court on criminal charges that could land him in prison for six months.

No matter your opinion of Obama, this stinks. Democratic governments do not shield themselves from sensitive cases or prosecute lawyers who try to discuss them. Turning a blind eye to our criminal activities of the past decade is bad enough, but active complicity in their cover-up is something closer to tyranny. If this is a harbinger of what is to come with this administration, we’re in for trouble.

And yet there’s more at stake here than the credibility of the One. If we fail to punish the crimes of the last administration — and, moreover, if we actively work to cover them up — we will be sending a message to the rest of the world and those that follow us that our Constitution and the rule of law mean nothing to us. At best, we will be cowards. At worst, we will be accomplices.