by Oliver Stone
Obama’s commitment to transparency did not last long. By summer 2010, the ACLU was warning about the “very real danger that the Obama administration will enshrine permanently within the law policies and practices that were widely considered extreme and unlawful during the Bush administration. There is a real danger, in other words, that the Obama administration will preside over the creation of a ‘new normal.’ ”33
That was precisely what Obama has done—a far cry from his campaign promises to defend the Constitution against Bush’s trespasses. He had, for example, criticized Bush’s repeatedly invoking state secrets to block lawsuits. In office, he reversed himself, impeding prosecution of Bush-era torture and other abuses and advancing what the New York Times described as “a sweeping view of executive secrecy powers.” He has invoked the “state secrets privilege” more often than any previous president to halt lawsuits involving torture, extraordinary rendition, and illegal NSA wiretapping. He has continued the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, denied habeas corpus rights to Afghan prisoners, sanctioned military commissions, and authorized, without due process, the CIA killing of a U.S. citizen in Yemen who was accused of having ties to Al-Qaeda.34 His refusal to investigate and prosecute those in the Bush administration guilty of torture was itself a violation of international treaties.
Bush Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith quickly recognized that Dick Cheney’s rebuke of Obama for reversing the Bush-era terrorism policies was flat out wrong. In fact, Goldsmith wrote in the New Republic, “The truth is closer to the opposite: The new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expanded some of it, and has narrowed only a bit. Almost all of the Obama changes have been at the level of packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric. . . . The Obama strategy,” he concluded, “can thus be seen as an attempt to make the core Bush approach to terrorism politically and legally more palatable, and thus sustainable.”35
Civil libertarians were appalled, expecting so much more from this former professor of constitutional law. His University of Chicago law school colleague Geoffrey Stone, chairman of the board of the American Constitutional Society, decried the gap between Obama’s policies and his campaign promises, regretting Obama’s “disappointing willingness to continue in his predecessor’s footsteps.” George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley observed disappointedly that “the election of Barack Obama may stand as one of the single most devastating events in our history for civil liberties.”36
In many respects, Obama has been more secretive than the pathologically secretive Bush-Cheney administration. His government has classified more information and responded more slowly to Freedom of Information Act requests than his predecessor. It has prosecuted more government whistle-blowers than all previous administrations, employing the 1917 Espionage Act in six separate cases, compared to a total of three in the ninety-two years before he took office.
The most notorious case is that of Private Bradley Manning, a twenty-two-year-old army intelligence analyst in Iraq. Manning has been accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks and was indicted on thirty-four counts, including violating the Espionage Act and “aiding the enemy,” which was potentially punishable by death. Some of the leaked documents, allegedly including the “Collateral Murder” video that showed U.S. troops coldly and calculatingly gunning down a dozen Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters journalists, revealed U.S. war crimes. Manning also allegedly leaked Iraq War logs that detailed atrocities and civilian death tolls far in excess of official government figures.
Despite not having been convicted of any crime, Manning was kept naked for days and in solitary confinement for nine months in conditions that many considered torture. Among those who bristled at Manning’s horrendous treatment was P. J. Crowley, the State Department’s top spokesman. Crowley described the treatment of Manning to students at MIT as “ridiculous and stupid and counterproductive.” Three days later, Crowley resigned after thirty years of government service.37
Finally, in December 2011, after nineteen months in military custody, Manning was given a military hearing to determine whether there was sufficient evidence to proceed with a court-martial. That the Obama administration had decided to prosecute Manning for disclosing the truth but to let Bush, Cheney, and their associates off the hook for lying, torture, invading sovereign nations, and committing other war crimes was a clear though sad indication of this administration’s sense of justice and transparency. As law professor Marjorie Cohn observed, “If Manning had committed war crimes instead of exposing them, he would be a free man today.”38
Equally outrageous was the Obama administration’s reaction to Julian Assange’s release through WikiLeaks of over 250,000 diplomatic cables that he allegedly got from Manning. Assange made the mistake of not redacting names on the first batch released. But the intense reaction was due to the fact that the cables exposed the depths of U.S. government mendacity on a broad range of crucial issues, including the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Additional revelations of corruption and repression by U.S. allies helped spark the uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Tunisia that spurred what’s become known as the Arab Spring. The impact on international journalism and public opinion was unprecedented. Articles based on the leaked documents appeared almost daily in leading newspapers throughout the world. As Glenn Greenwald correctly observed, “WikiLeaks easily produced more newsworthy scoops over the last year than every other media outlet combined.” In recognition of this contribution, in November 2011, WikiLeaks received the award for “Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism,” Australia’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, from the Walkley Foundation. The Foundation trustees applauded WikiLeaks for revealing “an avalanche of inconvenient truths in a global publishing coup. Its revelations, from the way the war on terror was being waged, to diplomatic bastardry, high-level horse-trading and the interference in the domestic affairs of nations, have had an undeniable impact.”39
Yet the Justice Department has been exploring ways to punish Assange and other individuals associated with the WikiLeaks release, possibly under the Espionage Act. Among the strongest backers of the “get Assange” campaign were some who had earlier decried China and other repressive societies for limiting Internet access and freedom of the press. Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein demanded that Assange “be vigorously prosecuted for espionage.”40 Joe Lieberman agreed. Newt Gingrich called him an “enemy combatant.” Sarah Palin wanted him targeted as if he were Al-Qaeda and hunted as an “anti-American operative with blood on his hands.”41 James Goodale, former New York Times general counsel in the Pentagon Papers case, described the corrosive effect such a prosecution would have on American press freedoms. “Charging Julian Assange with ‘conspiracy to commit espionage,’ ” he warned, “would effectively be setting a precedent with a charge that more accurately could be characterized as ‘conspiracy to commit journalism.’ ”42
Obama has tenaciously pursued whistle-blowers and “leakers.” But his efforts were dealt a serious blow in June 2011, when the prosecutors dropped felony charges under the Espionage Act against Thomas Drake, an NSA employee who had courageously revealed to the Baltimore Sun that the NSA had wasted over a billion dollars on a flawed Trailblazer system for surveilling digital communications. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for unauthorized use of a government computer and received no fine or jail time. The Drake case was the first the Obama Justice Department had brought under the Espionage Act. The Defense Department’s internal watchdog issued a report exonerating Drake and upholding his allegations. The administration vowed to press on with its other cases, even though most were of equally dubious merit.43
Its vendetta against Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter James Risen, who broke the story about massive NSA wiretapping in 2005, sent a chilling message to all reporters who refused to name confidential sources—the lifeblood of information that the government wished to hide from the public. Furious w
ith the embarrassing disclosures, Cheney had pressured the Bush Justice Department to investigate Risen’s activities but failed to secure an indictment. Obama, once again, took a stalled Bush initiative and looked to pursue it in ways that the ham-fisted Bush administration only dreamed about. In April 2010, the Justice Department subpoenaed Risen to testify. Risen made clear that he would go to jail rather than divulge his sources. In January 2011, the administration indicted former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling for allegedly leaking classified information to Risen about a bungled 2000 operation to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program, which Risen reported on in his 2006 book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. Greenwald, a stalwart defender of civil liberties, condemned Obama’s unparalleled assault. “As in so many other instances,” Greenwald averred, “the Obama administration appears on the verge of fulfilling Dick Cheney’s nefarious wish beyond what even Cheney could achieve.”44
Political leaders and journalists around the world mocked America’s democratic pretensions. Writers at London’s Guardian, which, like the New York Times and Der Spiegel, had published the documents, led the assault. John Naughton assailed the “delicious irony” of trying to shut WikiLeaks down. Seumas Milne wrote that official U.S. reaction “is tipping over toward derangement.” “Not much truck with freedom of information, then, in the land of the free,” he chortled. Naughton observed that Hillary Clinton’s 2009 rebuke of China for interfering with Internet freedom “reads like a satirical masterpiece.”45
Nor did Obama do anything to restrain the enormous and rapidly proliferating security complex. In 2010, in a sobering four-part series, the Washington Post published the results of a two-year investigation into what it described as “an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight.” In this world, 854,000 people with top-secret security clearances operate out of 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies in about 10,000 U.S. locations, working on programs involving counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence. The Pentagon ran two-thirds of the programs. The intelligence budget reached well over $75 billion in 2009, more than two and a half times its size before 9/11. The NSA intercepts and stores an astounding 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls, and other communications each day.46
In the final installment of the series, the Post’s Dana Priest and William Arkin reported that “the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators,” and many of the targets of the probe “have not been accused of any wrongdoing” but were turned in for acting suspiciously. The monitoring was being done by 3,984 local, state, and federal organizations, often using methods introduced in Iraq and Afghanistan. The FBI had also collected 96 million sets of fingerprints at its data campus in Clarksburg, West Virginia.47
During the May 2011 congressional debate over extending the Patriot Act, Senate Democrats Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, both of whom were members of the Intelligence Committee, expressed outrage over the way the administration was interpreting certain provisions of the act. “When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry,” Wyden warned, citing reactions to past abuses like 1970s domestic spying, the Iran-Contra affair, and Bush’s warrantless surveillance.48
The American people weren’t paying sufficient attention. Congress extended the Patriot Act’s surveillance powers until 2015. The FBI significantly expanded the investigative powers of some 14,000 agents. The Supreme Court extended search and surveillance powers. Overall, Fourth Amendment guarantees of privacy and protections against unreasonable search and seizure, protections that were considered sacrosanct by the Founding Fathers, were being severely eroded.49
Civil libertarians were justifiably aghast at the new powers that the U.S. government had acquired since 9/11. Jonathan Turley listed ten: 1) presidential power to order the assassination of U.S. citizens; 2) indefinite detention; 3) presidential power to decide whether prisoners will be tried in federal courts or military tribunals; 4) warrantless surveillance; 5) use of secret evidence in detentions and trials and invoking the government’s right to secrecy to force dismissal of cases against the United States; 6) refusal to prosecute war criminals; 7) increased use of secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts; 8) immunity from judicial review for companies involved in warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens; 9) monitoring of citizens without court orders; 10) extraordinary renditions of individuals to other countries, including those that commit torture. While Obama has disavowed use of some of these powers, his forbearance would in no way constrain future occupants of the Oval Office. And, as Turley aptly noted, “An authoritarian nation is defined not just by the use of authoritarian powers, but by the ability to use them. If a president can take away your freedom or your life on his own authority, all rights become little more than a discretionary grant subject to executive will.”50
As much of a disappointment as Obama was on domestic and security policy, his foreign policy may have been worse. His initial foreign policy advisors consisted primarily of Clinton Administration veterans, including National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, Assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice, Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin’s chief of staff Michael Froman, and State Department official Gregory Craig. Also playing a significant role was Jimmy Carter’s rabidly anti-Communist national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. The Washington Post reported, however, that closest to Obama during the campaign were two newcomers—Samantha Power, a professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and retired Air Force Major General Scott Gration. Gration, a fighter pilot for most of his years in uniform, served as director of strategy and planning under Marine General James Jones when he was supreme allied commander in Europe.51 Hopes for fresh thinking centered mostly on Power, who was best known for her book “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, which made a liberal interventionist argument in cases where genocide was occurring, and on Obama himself. Power was forced to resign from the campaign after calling Hillary Clinton a “monster” but returned as a senior aide on the National Security Council and aggressively pushed for U.S. intervention in Libya.
Obama’s own foreign policy experience was quite limited and his views were conventional, if sometimes muddled. He told one campaign audience in Pennsylvania, “The truth is that my foreign policy is actually a return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush’s father, of John F. Kennedy, of, in some ways, Ronald Reagan.”52 While untangling precisely what Obama meant by that bizarre conflation would be a challenge, what was clear was that he was not offering a decisive break with over a century of imperial conquest. His was a centrist approach to better managing the American empire rather than advancing a positive role for the United States in a rapidly evolving world. He intended to reduce U.S. involvement in the Middle East and increase U.S. engagement with Asia, where American hegemony was being challenged by a resurgent and ever more potent China. “We’ve been on a little bit of a Middle East detour over the course of the last ten years,” Kurt Campbell, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, noted. “And our future will be dominated utterly and fundamentally by developments in Asia and the Pacific region.” “The project of the first two years has been to effectively deal with the legacy issues that we inherited, particularly the Iraq war, the Afghan war, and the war against Al-Qaeda, while rebalancing our resources and our posture in the world,” Benjamin Rhodes, one of Obama’s deputy national security advisors, said. “If you were to boil it all down to a bumper sticker, it’s ‘Wind down these two wars, reestablish American standing and leadership in the world, and focus on a broader set of priorities, from Asia and the global economy to a nuclear-nonproliferation regime.’ ”5
3
With this in mind, Obama quickly moved to redress some of the more egregious aspects of Bush’s policies. On his first day in office, he held discussions on withdrawal from Iraq and made clear his plans to be actively involved in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. He signed orders preventing people in the executive branch from accepting gifts from lobbyists and from lobbying the executive branch upon leaving government. His second day was even better. He barred enhanced interrogations, closed the CIA’s “black site” prisons and announced plans to shut the military prison at Guantánamo within one year.
For a variety of reasons, Obama would fail to deliver on many of these promises. Opposition would come from lockstep Republicans, conservative Democrats, and sometimes even his own advisors. The Washington Post described Obama’s incoming foreign policy team as “experienced and centrist.”54 His chief advisors—Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, Bush Republican holdover Robert Gates as secretary of defense, General James Jones, a John McCain ally, as national security advisor, and Admiral Dennis Blair, the former chief of U.S. Pacific Command, as director of national intelligence (DNI)—may have been experienced but, unfortunately, “centrist” would prove to be a stretch.
