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Obama and the War on Terror: Where's the Change?

By Jeralyn

The New York Times has published its Sunday Magazine feature article, 9 pages long, by Peter Baker on President Obama's handling of the war on terror. Here's what you need to know:

While setting a one-year deadline to close Guantánamo and formally banning the interrogation methods that had already fallen out of favor, he left the surveillance program intact, embraced the Patriot Act, retained the authority to use renditions and embraced some of Bush’s claims to state secrets. He preserved the military commissions and national security letters he criticized during the campaign, albeit with more due-process safeguards. He plans to hold dozens of suspected terrorists without charges indefinitely. And he expanded Bush’s campaign of unmanned drone strikes against Al Qaeda in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Troop levels in Afghanistan are set to triple on his watch.

Bush Administration Veterans say Obama is not "Bush Lite", he is Bush. [More...]

Michael Hayden, the last C.I.A. director under Bush, was willing to say publicly what others would not. “There is a continuum from the Bush administration, particularly as it changed in the second administration as circumstances changed, and the Obama administration,” Hayden told me. James Jay Carafano, a homeland-security expert at the Heritage Foundation, was blunter. “I don’t think it’s even fair to call it Bush Lite,” he said. “It’s Bush. It’s really, really hard to find a difference that’s meaningful and not atmospheric. You see a lot of straining on things trying to make things look repackaged, but they’re really not that different.”

At a meeting at which civil libertarians were invited, Athony Romero of the ACLU told the President:

bq.Look, you’re the only politician I’ve ever believed in,” Romero said, according to people in the room. “When I was a gay Puerto Rican growing up in New York, I never thought I could identify with a political leader the way I identify with you. But this stuff really pains me.”

How did the president respond?

Obama pushed back, explaining the constraints he was under. It was a balancing act, he said; he had multiple obligations. Much of the discussion concerned the military commissions he decided to keep and the dilemma of what to do with the hardest cases at Guantánamo, those who could not be prosecuted because of tainted evidence or other reasons but were deemed too dangerous to release.

To which Romero replied:

Romero said he suspected Obama suffers from the “hubris” of wanting to preserve much of the power he inherited in the belief that he will use it more wisely. “He believes he can do it better and smarter and more in keeping with constitutional principles than his predecessor did,” Romero told me. “If he’s shown himself willing to adhere to some of the Bush policies in the absence of an attack, one worries about what he’ll do when an attack comes.”

And how do you call this anything but what it is: a flip-flop:

The activists left the meeting chilled that Obama seemed poised to continue holding terrorism suspects indefinitely without charges. Just a few years earlier, he wrote in his book that “when we detain suspects indefinitely without trial,” then “we weaken our ability to pressure for human rights and the rule of law in despotic regimes.” Now he was talking about seeking legislation that would permanently authorize such preventive detention.

As to what the loss of Greg Craig means:
"He was the one voice for a constant application of the rule of law in the White House,” Romero lamented. “The others either demur or mumble.” Craig’s ouster, he added, was “unfortunate because it means the likes of Rahm Emanuel will consolidate power in the White House.”

For critics who think Obama is too much of lightweight to order drones and killings, think again.

With information processed at NCTC and elsewhere, Obama has authorized the C.I.A. to greatly expand a program inherited from Bush using unmanned Predator and Reaper drones to launch missiles at suspected Al Qaeda hideouts along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Critics complain that such “targeted assassinations” are morally suspect and strategically dangerous because of the reaction among Pakistanis when civilians are killed. Obama had a searching conversation with Brennan and Denis McDonough, Catholics who oppose the death penalty, about whether to keep the program. “He was wrestling with it,” says one adviser. But in the end, there was no serious disagreement with the decision to continue the program. At one of his first Situation Room meetings as president, according to a participant, Obama said pointedly, “The C.I.A. gets what it needs.”

During his first year in office, he ordered the CIA to conduct 53 strikes -- more than Bush had ordered in his entire presidency.

When Obama found out that the NSA had wire intercepts up that could have led to Abmullatab, he got testy. He again instructed them , as had since day 1, that they must share this information with other agencies.

It seems like nothing has changed, we're still in Iraq, increasing our commitment in Afghanistan, worried about Pakistan, and now have Yemen and , to a lesser extent, Somalia to deal with. They shoud all take a milk and cookie break one afternoon and sing together, "War is not the Answer." It's not for the American people who didn't want the war in Iraq and are loathe to consider we're spendng big dollars on yet another country when we have people needing medical care and schools at home.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on January 05, 2010 (boomark / email).