ACSBlog

by Jeremy Leaming

President Obama has come a long way since he declared during his first term that in fighting the so-called war on terror we should safeguard our fundamental values “as vigilantly as we protect our security.”

During his much touted counterterrorism speech at the National Defense University in Washington, Obama tried to return to that lofty rhetoric and even suggested an end would come to the indefinite war on terror. At other times, Obama sounded a bit too much like his predecessor in defending an aggressive approach by the CIA and military to hunt down and kill suspected terrorist overseas by way of drone strikes, even if those actions happen to take out a few American citizens and innocent civilians.  

“America’s actions are legal,” Obama said. “We were attacked on 9/11. Within a week, Congress overwhelmingly authorized use of force. Under domestic law, and international law, the United States is at war with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces. We are at war with an organization that right now would kill as many Americans as they could if we did not stop them first. So this is a just war – a war waged proportionally, in last resort, and in self-defense.”

Regarding drone strikes, which the Department of Justice finally acknowledged have killed some American citizens, Obama offered an equally staunch defense.

Obama said the “use of drones is heavily constrained. America does not take strikes when we have the ability to capture individual terrorists – our preference is always to detain, interrogate, and prosecute them, America cannot strike wherever we choose – our actions are bound by consultations with partners, and respect for state sovereignty. America does not take strikes to punish individuals – we act against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people, and when there are no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat. And before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured – the highest standard we can set.”

The New York Times reported that the president would supposedly start “shifting control” of the drone strikes from the CIA to the military. But deeper in The Times story, it’s noted that the president “may not explicitly announce the shift in drones from the Central Intelligence Agency in his speech, since the agency’s operations remain formally classified ….” In a piece for Salon, Alex Pareene notes that formal classification, saying, “Maybe the president’s next policy shift can involve the absurd and ridiculous over-classification of everything to do with national security and the actions of our intelligence agencies.”   

Reporting for The Times in April, Scott Shane said since the start of the Obama administration, nearly 3,000 people have been killed by the drone strikes. As noted here, McClatchy Newspapers also provided an extensive study, based on U.S. intelligence reports revealed that the drone strikes killed thousands of people in Pakistan and Afghanistan and very few were top al Qaeda operatives. 

by Jeremy Leaming

Some legal scholars and defenders of the indefinite war on terror are coming, mostly with strained arguments, to the defense of the Obama administration’s abuse of freedom of speech. The First Amendment’s speech clause includes protection for a free press, a fairly fundamental way people communicate.

But the Obama administration, which has carried on some of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism tactics, and escalated others, such as the drone war, is obsessed with going after public officials and others suspected of leaking important details of counterterrorism activities and other national security concerns.

The Department of Justice has trolled the phone records of Associated Press reporters in a leak investigation of the AP’s coverage of a foiled terrorist plot in Yemen, and spied on the work of Fox News correspondent James Rosen, in another leak case involving a 2009 story about North Korea’s announcement of launching a nuclear missile. The Washington Post reported that the DOJ “used a security badge to access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department… and “traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report.” The DOJ, The Post continues, obtained a search warrant for Rosen’s personal e-mails. The DOJ didn’t stop there. It’s arguing that Rosen may have been a co-conspirator in the leak. So now you have the federal government using the Espionage Act to go after alleged leakers, and a journalist, whose job partly entails keeping the public informed about its government.

Gabe Rottman for the ACLU’s Blog of Rights says “never before has the government argued that newsgathering – in this case, asking a source to provide sensitive information – is itself illegal. That would, quite literally, make virtually any question by a reporter implicating classified information a potential felony.”

Last week, when taking questions about his administration’s leak investigation involving secretly culling AP phone records, Obama said no apologies were necessary and provided a tired defense of his administration’s obsession with investigating and prosecuting leaks. Essentially Obama said trust the executive branch and leakers are bad.

But as noted here before war, as George Orwell once wrote has the effect of not meshing terribly well with individual liberties. In Homage to Catalonia about the Spanish Civil War, Orwell wrote, “The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.”