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Obama Rejects “War on Terror” Framework
Loading ...President Barack Obama firmly rejected President Bush’s deeply flawed notion of the war on terror in his first White House interview with Al Aribiya news network this week. Obama argued that Bush framed national security threats in unnecessarily broad terms and sent the wrong message to the world.
“And so you will, I think, see our administration be very clear in distinguishing between organizations like al Qaeda — that espouse violence, espouse terror and act on it — and people who may disagree with my administration and certain actions, or may have a particular viewpoint in terms of how their countries should develop,” the newly inaugurated President asserted in his interview.
Many welcomed Obama’s sharp break from the Bush administration as a significant shift in the posture of American foreign policy, but it should also be viewed as Obama’s desire for the rule of law, whether at home or abroad, even in the face of formidable and elusive threats.
Much of this was also affirmed in President Obama’s inaugural speech. “They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint,” he said.
This kind of specificity of purpose and principled understanding was utterly absent from George W. Bush’s definition of the war on terror and manner in which he exercised executive power.
Consider the history. George W. Bush first used the phrase “war on terror” to a joint session of Congress in the wake of the 9/11 attacks On September 20, 2001, Bush declared, “Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”
Such sweeping rhetoric led to American authorities casting a needlessly wide net at home and failed to distinguish eminent threats from imagined ones abroad. Bush administration officials soon followed suit. After 9/11, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the notion of the war on terror to initiate what amounted to a war on immigrants.
Foreign-born residents of the U.S. were needlessly targeted by authorities who rounded them up and deported them for routine technical violations, such as overstaying a visa, or they were detained indefinitely with limited access to a lawyer. Those same violations were used as a pretext to charge so-called “special interest” detainees with terrorist related crimes despite having little evidence to support the claim. Racial profiling, mandatory registration with local authorities for men from Middle Eastern Countries, and the creation of terror watch lists became a fact of life . Those who criticized such policies were deemed anti-American or unpatriotic.
Ashcroft told Senate Judiciary Committee in 2001, “To those who pit Americans against immigrants and citizens against non-citizens, to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies, and pause to America’s friends. They encourage people of goodwill to remain silent in the face of evil.”
Chilling words.
But the excesses of the Bush administration on the domestic front in the name of the war on terror did not stop there. Bush officials encouraged the intruding hand and watchful eye of government to infringe on the civil liberties of citizen and non-citizen alike.
With the expansion of powers granted by the ill considered passage of the U.S.A Patriot Act of 2001 (what passage is he talking about?), the Federal Bureau of Investigation used national security letters to covertly scrutinize the telephone and email records, financial and credit card data and travel records of thousands of U.S. citizens and residents.
Also, in clear violation of the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, President Bush also authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens and residents’ international communications without a warrant, including phone calls and email messages. The executive order allowed the NSA to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts, which ensure that such secret requests are done within the bounds of the law, including approval for detaining a certain class of suspects for an indefinite amount of time. Yet the NSA program had an expanding list of people and spied on about 500 people at any one time. What’s more, the law is silent, or unclear at best, on what should be expunged and retained after phone conversations and other records are gobbled up terabyte by terabyte.
Ostensibly, the program was approved to unearth terrorists’ plots and deter attacks, and perhaps it did disrupt some activities. But we now know that in addition to being illegal and overly broad, the intense data mining also targeted U.S. journalists and possibly their sources
But there are still some members of Congress who remain partial to the old regime’s excesses. President Obama’s series of executive orders to shut down Gitmo and the network of secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency within a year has not gone over well with many Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Representative Steven King has made the case that Obama’s plan amounts to granting terrorists a path to U.S. citizenship and a free pass to strike again. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham still wants to preserve the option of detaining of at least some war on terror suspects or enemy combatants indefinitely.
House Republican Leader John Boehner has even gone so far as to suggest that the well documented abuses at Gitmo are somehow exaggerated. Earlier this week, the Ohio Congressman told Politico, “I don’t know that there is a terrorist treated better anywhere in the world than what has happened at Guantanamo.”
He also went on to say, “We have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build a facility that has more comforts than a lot of Americans get. … I believe they have been treated fairly.”
That of course does not square with a recent bipartisan Senate Armed Services report which concluded:
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at Guantanamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there. Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 approval of Pentagon’s general counsel, William J. Haynes’s recommendation that most of the techniques contained in Gitmo’s October 11, 2002 request be authorized, influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques, which included military working dogs, forced nudity, and stress positions, in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Understanding the human dimension of the war on terror is important to appreciating why this chapter of the Bush administration’s legacy needs to be closed. In the January 15th issue of the New York Review of Books, Georgetown law professor David Cole quotes the U.S. Army log describing the tortuous interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani, the alleged 20th 9/11 hijacker, at Gitmo. The descriptions of the brutality are nothing short of harrowing.
Detainee began to cry. Visibly shaken. Very emotional. Detainee cried. Disturbed. Detainee began to cry. Detainee butted SGT R in the eye. Detainee bit the IV tube completely in two. Started moaning. Uncomfortable. Moaning. Turned his head from left to right. Began crying hard spontaneously. Crying and praying. Began to cry. Claimed to have been pressured into making a confession. Falling asleep. Very uncomfortable. On the verge of breaking. Angry. Detainee struggled. Detainee asked for prayer. Very agitated. Yelled. Agitated and violent. Detainee spat. Detainee proclaimed his innocence. Whining. Pushed guard. Dizzy. Headache. Near tears. Forgetting things. Angry. Upset. Complained of dizziness. Tired. Agitated. Yelled for Allah. Started making faces. Near crying. Irritated. Annoyed. Detainee attempted to injure two guards. Became very violent and irate. Attempted to liberate himself. Struggled. Made several attempts to stand up. Screamed….
Thankfully, 53 percent of the American public support using a system for handling detainees that is different than the military commissions process at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Another 58 percent support a complete ban on using torture as an interrogation technique, according to a recent ABC News poll.
Obama himself admitted that shutting down Gitmo “is more difficult than I think a lot of people realize” and that many of the so-called enemy combatants are still dangerous enough to pose a threat, but we can still try them in our own civil system or in the military courts-martial system for war crimes.
In sum, Bush’s war on terror created a situation in which we as a nation were forced to feel as if we were in a permanent state of war fearing a poorly understood enemy at the expense of our liberties and standing in the world.
But in rejecting the war on terror as we knew it during the Bush years, President Obama is at least determined to try to “to win [this fight] on our own terms.”
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