The Obama administration failed — miserably — the first test of its commitment to ditching the extravagant legal claims used by the Bush administration to try to impose blanket secrecy on anti-terrorism policies and avoid accountability for serial abuses of the law. On Monday, a Justice Department lawyer dispatched by Eric Holder, the new attorney general, appeared before a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco. The case before them involves allegations of torture by five victims of President Bush’s extraordinary rendition program. The five were seized and transported to US prisons abroad or to countries known for torturing prisoners. For one thing, there is ample public information available about the CIA’s rendition, detention and coercive interrogation programs. The fact that some of the evidence might be legitimately excluded on national security grounds need not preclude the case from being tried, and allowing the judge to make that determination.

More fundamentally, the Obama administration should not be invoking state secrets to cover up charges of rendition and torture. President Obama has taken some important steps to repair Bush’s damaging legacy. It would have been good if he and Holder had shown the same determination in court.