Review: Charlie Savage's 'Power Wars' Dissects Obama's Evolution on National Security -... - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...tion-on-national-security.html
Obama counterterrorism civil rights civil liberties policy history
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In the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama repeatedly criticized President George W. Bush for his “war on terror,” including the use of torture, indefinite detention, warrantless surveillance, secrecy and expansive presidential power. Yet after nearly seven years of the Obama administration, many (though not all) of these Bush-era policies remain in effect.
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Charlie Savage addresses that question exhaustively, describing how President Obama, his top aides and, above all, his lawyers grappled again and again with the many questions about counterterrorism they inherited when they took office.
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in its 700-plus pages, the author catalogs virtually all the legal disputes over counterterrorism in the Obama era, all the justifications, procedural steps and bureaucratic battles, to the point where at times his book seems more like a compendium than a narrative
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With the exception of torture, which President Obama prohibited on his first day in office, his administration managed mostly to provide new legal underpinnings for many of the national-security policies (including warrantless surveillance, indefinite detention at Guantánamo Bay and drone strikes) that were first adopted under Mr. Bush
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President Obama will some day be seen “as less a transformative post-9/11 president than a transitional one.”
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in some areas like surveillance, the Obama team never planned to outlaw the policies, despite what some of his supporters on the left may have thought
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He has led a “lawyerly” administration, Mr. Savage writes, one that has added “an additional layer of rules, standards and procedures” to “the unsettling premise that the United States was still at war and would, of necessity, remain so with no end in sight.”
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Power Wars” opens with an incident that Mr. Savage considers a fundamental turning point for the Obama administration: the attempt by the so-called underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to detonate explosives aboard a plane heading for Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009.
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the political fallout from this incident, arguably including the Democrats’ loss of a Senate seat with Scott Brown’s upset victory in Massachusetts, effectively spooked the Obama team. It “profoundly hardened the Obama administration’s attitude towards counterterrorism,” he writes.
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there are alternative ways of interpreting the Obama administration’s policy steps on national security in its early years. One is that well before that time, the administration was already spooked: It had retreated on counterterrorism issues throughout the president’s first year in office.
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Gregory Craig, President Obama’s first White House counsel, who had pushed for quicker and more vigorous changes in counterterrorism policies, had already left the administration after a series of battles with other White House officials who were reluctant to take actions that might anger the C.I.A.
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In short, the Obama White House was from the outset under pressure from the military and intelligence communities not to veer too sharply from the policies and decisions of the Bush era
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during the Bush years, the Democrats mounted two strands of attack on the post-9/11 policies. The first was from the civil liberties perspective, to assert that policies like warrantless surveillance were inherently wrong. The second line of attack was to say that the Bush administration’s policies violated the rule of law because President Bush adopted them on his own without congressional or other legal authority.
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President Obama’s “specific complaints” about the Bush programs and his promises “were heavily tilted towards fixing the legal process.”
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the death of Osama bin Laden in a 2011 raid by Navy SEALs in Pakistan, a subject of renewed controversy
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He concludes that the lawyers’ activities and the memos they wrote fit with the Obama administration’s account of the raid and not with the revisionist theories about it.
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Mr. Savage writes that there is no simple judgment to be made on President Obama’s legacy on counterterrorism issues: His administration deeply disappointed defenders of civil liberties critics on the left but was also regularly attacked by hawks on the right.
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“Obama’s record was irreducibly messy and complex, not unlike the world in which he tried to govern,”