[Peace-discuss] Gee, ya think?

[C. G. Estabrook]

[In spite of the laughably tentative headline (reporters don't write headlines), 
here we have one of the more courageous US reporters (he exposed Bush's signing 
statements when he was with the Boston Globe) making a simple and obvious point. 
  It's a tribute to propaganda control in the US that it takes a particularly 
courageous reporter to do it.  --CGE]

	Obama’s War on Terror May Resemble Bush’s in Some Areas
	By CHARLIE SAVAGE
	February 18, 2009

WASHINGTON — Even as it pulls back from harsh interrogations and other sharply 
debated aspects of George W. Bush’s “war on terrorism,” the Obama administration 
is quietly signaling continued support for other major elements of its 
predecessor’s approach to fighting Al Qaeda.

In little-noticed confirmation testimony recently, Obama nominees endorsed 
continuing the C.I.A.’s program of transferring prisoners to other countries 
without legal rights, and indefinitely detaining terrorism suspects without 
trials even if they were arrested far from a war zone.

The administration has also embraced the Bush legal team’s arguments that a 
lawsuit by former C.I.A. detainees should be shut down based on the “state 
secrets” doctrine. It has also left the door open to resuming military 
commission trials.

And earlier this month, after a British court cited pressure by the United 
States in declining to release information about the alleged torture of a 
detainee in American custody, the Obama administration issued a statement 
thanking the British government “for its continued commitment to protect 
sensitive national security information.”

These and other signs suggest that the administration’s changes may turn out to 
be less sweeping than many had hoped or feared — prompting growing worry among 
civil liberties groups and a sense of vindication among supporters of Bush-era 
policies.

In an interview, the White House counsel, Gregory B. Craig, asserted that the 
administration was not embracing Mr. Bush’s approach to the world. But Mr. Craig 
also said President Obama intended to avoid any “shoot from the hip” and “bumper 
sticker slogans” approaches [like "End the War"-CGE] to deciding what to do with 
the counterterrorism policies he inherited.

“We are charting a new way forward, taking into account both the security of the 
American people and the need to obey the rule of law,” Mr. Craig said. “That is 
a message we would give to the civil liberties people as well as to the Bush 
people.”

Within days of his inauguration, Mr. Obama thrilled civil liberties groups when 
he issued executive orders promising less secrecy, restricting C.I.A. 
interrogators to Army Field Manual techniques, shuttering the agency’s secret 
prisons, ordering the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, closed within a year and 
halting military commission trials.

But in more recent weeks, things have become murkier.

During her confirmation hearing last week, Elena Kagan, the nominee for 
solicitor general, said that someone suspected of helping finance Al Qaeda 
should be subject to battlefield law — indefinite detention without a trial — 
even if he were captured in a place like the Philippines rather than in a 
physical battle zone.

Ms. Kagan’s support for an elastic interpretation of the “battlefield” amplified 
remarks that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. made at his own confirmation 
hearing. And it dovetailed with a core Bush position. Civil liberties groups 
argue that people captured away from combat zones should go to prison only after 
trials. [Which leaves open the question of illegal wars: did the Germans have 
aright to imprison Poles indefinitely in WWII? --CGE]

Moreover, the nominee for C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, opened a loophole in 
Mr. Obama’s interrogation restrictions. At his hearing, Mr. Panetta said that if 
the approved techniques were “not sufficient” to get a detainee to divulge 
details he was suspected of knowing about an imminent attack, he would ask for 
“additional authority.” [Typical Obama prevarication.  --CGE]

To be sure, Mr. Panetta emphasized that the president could not bypass 
antitorture statutes, as Bush lawyers claimed. And he said that waterboarding — 
a technique that induces the sensation of drowning, and that the Bush 
administration said was lawful — is torture.

But Mr. Panetta also said the C.I.A. might continue its “extraordinary 
rendition” program, under which agents seize terrorism suspects and take them to 
other countries without extradition proceedings, in a more sweeping form than 
anticipated.

Before the Bush administration, the program primarily involved taking indicted 
suspects to their native countries for legal proceedings. While some detainees 
in the 1990s were allegedly abused after transfer, under Mr. Bush the program 
expanded and included transfers to third countries — some of which allegedly 
used torture — for interrogation, not trials.

Mr. Panetta said the agency is likely to continue to transfer detainees to third 
countries and would rely on diplomatic assurances of good treatment — the same 
safeguard the Bush administration used, and that critics say is ineffective. [!]

Mr. Craig noted that while Mr. Obama decided “not to change the status quo 
immediately,” he created a task force to study “rendition policy and what makes 
sense consistent with our obligation to protect the country.” [What?!]

He urged patience as the administration reviewed the programs it inherited from 
Mr. Bush. That process began after the election, Mr. Craig said, when military 
and C.I.A. leaders flew to Chicago for a lengthy briefing of Mr. Obama and his 
national security advisers. Mr. Obama then sent his advisers to C.I.A. 
headquarters to “find out the best case for continuing the practices that had 
been employed during the Bush administration.”

Civil liberties groups praise Mr. Obama’s early executive orders on national 
security, but say other signs are discouraging.

For example, Mr. Obama’s Justice Department last week told an appeals court that 
the Bush administration was right to invoke “state secrets” to shut down a 
lawsuit by former C.I.A. detainees who say a Boeing subsidiary helped fly them 
to places where they were tortured.

Margaret Satterthwaite, a faculty director at the human rights center at the New 
York University law school, said, “It was literally just Bush redux — exactly 
the same legal arguments that we saw the Bush administration present to the court.”

Mr. Craig said Mr. Holder and others reviewed the case and “came to the 
conclusion that it was justified and necessary for national security” to 
maintain their predecessor’s stance. Mr. Holder has also begun a review of every 
open Bush-era case involving state secrets, Mr. Craig said, so people should not 
read too much into one case.

“Every president in my lifetime has invoked the state-secrets privilege,” Mr. 
Craig said. “The notion that invoking it in that case somehow means we are 
signing onto the Bush approach to the world is just an erroneous assumption.”

Still, the decision caught the attention of a bipartisan group of lawmakers. Two 
days after the appeals court hearing, they filed legislation to bar using the 
state-secrets doctrine to shut down an entire case — as opposed to withholding 
particular evidence.

The administration has also put off taking a stand in several cases that present 
opportunities to embrace or renounce Bush-era policies, including the 
imprisonment without trial of an “enemy combatant” on domestic soil, Freedom of 
Information Act lawsuits seeking legal opinions about interrogation and 
surveillance, and an executive-privilege dispute over Congressional subpoenas of 
former White House aides to Mr. Bush over the firing of United States attorneys.

Addressing the executive-privilege dispute, Mr. Craig said: “The president is 
very sympathetic to those who want to find out what happened. But he is also 
mindful as president of the United States not to do anything that would 
undermine or weaken the institution of the presidency [viz., his or Bush's 
--CGE]. So for that reason, he is urging both sides of this to settle.”

The administration’s recent policy moves have attracted praise from outspoken 
defenders of the Bush administration. Last Friday, The Wall Street Journal’s 
editorial page argued that “it seems that the Bush administration’s antiterror 
architecture is gaining new legitimacy” as Mr. Obama’s team embraces aspects of 
Mr. Bush’s counterterrorism approach. [That's right, but that anterior 
architecture included the sort of thing that people were exeuted for at 
Nuremberg --CGE]

Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, 
said the sequence of “disappointing” recent events had heightened concerns that 
Mr. Obama might end up carrying forward “some of the most problematic policies 
of the Bush presidency.”

Mr. Obama has clashed with civil libertarians before. Last July, he voted to 
authorize eavesdropping on some phone calls and e-mail messages without a 
warrant. While the A.C.L.U. says the program is still unconstitutional, the 
legislation reduced legal concerns about one of the most controversial aspects 
of Mr. Bush’s antiterror strategy.

“We have been some of the most articulate and vociferous critics of the way the 
Bush administration handled things,” Mr. Craig said. “There has been a dramatic 
change of direction.” [No, there hasn't; see Chomsky on "change of course":

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company