Exit
sation around these issues.
There’s a lot to talk about.
What should the rules be for cyberwarfare? When is targeted
killing OK? Can U.S. citizens be
snuffed out by the state without
any judicial due process? Does
indefinite detention ever end?
And another question: What
ever happened to Obama the liberal
civil libertarian? While the authors
themselves don’t come off as particularly concerned, a close reading
of the two books, especially taken
together, paints a very disturbing picture of expanded and unrestrained power in an environment
where politics trumps principle.
Sanger, for instance, chronicles
Obama’s shift on indefinite detention — from calling it a “loaded
weapon” he’d never want in the
hands of a Mitt Romney to signing
an executive order establishing it
as a power of the presidency.
He also notes that “the expansion of drone and cyber technology” plus use of special forces “dramatically expanded the president’s
ability to wage nonstop, low-level
conflict, something just short of
war, every day of the year.”
Klaidman’s book, while less
thorough than Sanger’s, describes
the extraordinary, unilateral pro-
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HUFFINGTON
07.22.12
cess Obama follows before deciding
to have someone killed, which he
does frequently, while apparently
remaining in denial about the ensuing civilian casualties.
Klaidman also focuses on issues
from which Sanger averts his eyes,
such as the lack of a plausible “capture” policy to go along with the
“kill” one, and the “perverse incentives” that created. The problem
has been that the obvious thing to
A close reading of the
two books, especially taken
together, paints a very
disturbing picture of expanded
and unrestrained power in
an environment where
politics trumps principle.”
do — bring a captured terror suspect to the U.S. to face criminal trial — is a nonstarter with Obama’s
easily cowed political team.
Indeed, Klaidman’s book vividly
depicts a national security decision-making process that almost
always culminates in Obama siding
with the Republican-appeasing and
often-wrong political “pragmatists”
on his team. The few remaining
aides willing to stand up for the