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HE MOST conspicuous
reaction in Washington to a series of astonishing national security revelations, many of which
emerged in two new books, has
come from prominent members
of Congress demanding investigations into who leaked them.
One member, California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, even
complained of learning more from
one of the books than she did in
her top oversight post over the
intelligence community.
But anybody upset about finding things out this way should be
angry at the people who didn’t tell
them what they needed to know —
not the ones who did.
In Confront and Conceal:
Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power,
New York Times reporter David E.
Sanger describes in quite extraordinary detail the Obama administration’s hitherto secret cyberwar
campaign against Iran, its targeted
drone strikes against Al Qaeda and
affiliates, and any number of other
covert ops, including of course the
raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
As he indicates in his subtitle,
Sanger concludes that the biggest
surprise of the Obama presidency
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is just how aggressive he has been
in his application of military power.
But a case can be made that
what’s even more surprising is
Obama’s abuse of secrecy. Publicly
an advocate of government transparency and oversight, Obama has
nevertheless hidden the most con troversial and unilateral aspects
of his presidency — including new
ways of waging acknowledged and
unacknowledged wars — more
thoroughly and effectively than
anyone might have imagined.
Sanger’s book, and longtime
Newsweek reporter Daniel Klaidman’s new book, Kill or Capture:
The War on Terror and the Soul of
the Obama Presidency, shine a bit
of light into the darkness, which is
good, in that they at least open up
the possibility of a national conver-
Confront
and Conceal
by David
E. Sanger,
left, and Kill
or Capture
by Daniel
Klaidman.