More evidence Obama is a lot like Bush
Though they are drastically different on the domestic front, Presidents Obama and Bush are eerily similar when it comes to their foreign policies. You can even make a compelling case that President Obama is more aggressive than Bush in the now defunct “Global War on Terror.”
Two recent articles examine the ever growing Predator War we are now waging in Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia and who knows where else. Proving that Obama and Bush are clones in many respects when it comes to fighting the never ending war against terror.
Jeff Stein of WaPo’s SpyTalk looks at an account from Bob Woodward’s new book; “Obama’s Wars“, detailing a meeting in New York between then CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden and Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari during which he acknowledges the killing of “U.S. passport holders” in Pakistan.
Hayden and his deputy, Stephen Kappes, had gone to meet with Zardari, elected only two months earlier, to gauge his reaction to the drone strikes, which were generating widespread protests in Pakistan.
According to Woodward’s unattributed account of the meeting, Zardari said, “Kill the seniors. Collateral damage worries you Americans. It does not worry me.”
Hayden had told Zardari that “many Westerners, including some U.S. passport holders, had been killed five days earlier on the Kam Sham training camp in the tribal area of North Warziristan,” Woodward writes. “But the CIA would not reveal the particulars due to the implications under American law.”
“A top secret CIA map detailing the attacks had been given to the Pakistanis,” Woodward continues. “Missing from it was the alarming fact about the American deaths … The CIA was not going to elaborate.”
The CIA declined to comment for the record or make Kappes, who resigned in April, available for comment. Hayden did not respond to requests for comment.
Piggybacking on Jeff’s post is Nick Baumann of Mother Jones who looks a bit closer at the legality of the drone strikes and how Obama is getting accustomed to invoking state secrets just like the Bush administration did when they were covertly spying on us. Though when it comes to killing U.S. citizens the Bush administration did not make it a point to reveal they had been killed, while the Obama Administration seems keen on letting us know and even highlighting their targeting of Anwar Al-Awlaki.
If Bush was having Americans killed in Pakistan in 2008, then it’s not surprising that President Barack Obama is ordering the CIA to kill American cleric and accused terrorist Anwar Al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2010, right? Not really—the cases are pretty different.
Much has changed since the Bush administration left office. Two years ago, the CIA was worrying about legal issues surrounding the killing of Americans at an alleged terrorist training camp in Pakistan. Now the Obama administration has apparently put American citizens on a “targeted killing” list.
The drone strikes described in Woodward’s book aren’t even the first example of the Bush administration worrying about the propriety of something the Obama administration seems comfortable with. Kamal Derwish (aka Ahmed Hijazi), a US citizen and alleged terrorist, was killed by a missile strike in Yemen in November 2002. At the time, US officials were quick to emphasize to reporters that Derwish was not the target of the attack.
By contrast, the Obama administration makes no bones about targeting Al-Awlaki or other US citizens. Dennis Blair, the former Director of National Intelligence, admitted that citizens are targeted for killing in a public congressional hearing in January. On Friday, the government responded to a lawsuit intended to obtain an injunction against killing Al-Awlaki without due process. The lawsuit, which was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of Al-Awlaki’s father, Nasser, has little chance of success.
At the end of its sixty page brief, as expected, the Obama administration brings out the big guns, its get-out-of-court-free card: the so-called “State Secrets” privilege. That, at least, is something the Bush administration could get on board with. During the Bush years, Justice Department lawyers repeatedly invoked the privilege to force courts to throw out lawsuits challenging Bush’s counterterrorism policies, including “enhanced interrogation” and widespread surveillance of Americans. The Obama administration has continued that practice.
This further exemplifies that Obama and Bush are the same in terms of foreign policy. The Bush administration began the covert drone war and the Obama administration has put it on steroids. We are in the midst of a forever war and need to evaluate all means by which we fight.
I agree with a bunch of what is being done and do think there is no “right” solution to the problem of terrorism. Education and understanding why terrorism occurs is by far and away one of the most important tools we have to address the situation. The arguments that “they hate us” and “they are monsters” just do not fly in any logical sense. There was a figure I heard the other day in regards to the FBI; there are only nine fluent Arabic speakers in the FBI, NINE!
As Lawrence Wright recently told the Economist; (h/t Andrew Sullivan)
Our intelligence community was extremely poorly prepared before 9/11. Since then it hasn’t done a good job of hiring the kind of people who speak and understand the languages and cultures of that region. One of the heroes of my book and my film, Ali Soufan, the FBI agent who came closer than anyone at stopping 9/11, was one of eight Arabic-speaking agents at the FBI on 9/11. Now there are nine. The really woeful thing about it is that if Ali Soufan tried to work in the FBI now, he probably couldn’t get security clearance. I talked to the guy who’s the head of the army translation corp, and he said that after 9/11 many Muslims and Arab-Americans came forward and offered their services to American intelligence and were spurned. The army picked up a number of them and they went to Iraq to become interpreters, which is the most dangerous imaginable assignment. He said after four years of serving their country they still can’t get a job in American intelligence because they can’t get past the security clearance. Well what other declaration of loyalty do you need to make?
We need to start to address the problems in a completely different manner and start to realize we are in a war that for the most part is one where no one understands one another. We have such an immense advantage over the terrorists in terms of resources and yet we squander and waste. Where do we go from here? I haven’t the faintest clue.
Until next time…
