the times | Monday November 16 2020 1GT 3
Obama in his own wordstimes
COVER: KEVIN WINTER/GETTY IMAGES. BELOW: PETE SOUZA/WHITE HOUSE VIA GETTY IMAGES; MANDEL NGAN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES; OBAMA-ROBINSON FAMILY ARCHIVES
about Brennan was his thoughtfulness
and lack of bluster (along with his
incongruously gentle voice). Although
unwavering in his commitment to
destroy al-Qaeda and its ilk, he
possessed enough appreciation of
Islamic culture and the complexities
of the Middle East to know that guns
and bombs alone wouldn’t accomplish
that task. When he told me he had
personally opposed waterboarding
and other forms of “enhanced
interrogation” sanctioned by his boss, I
believed him; and I became convinced
that his credibility with the intel
community would be invaluable to me.
Still, Brennan had been at the
CIA when waterboarding took place,
and that association made him a
nonstarter as my first agency director.
Instead, I offered him the staff position
of deputy national security advisor
for homeland security and
counterterrorism. “Your job,” I told
him, “will be to help me protect this
country in a way that’s consistent
with our values, and to make sure
everyone else is doing the same. Can
you do that?” He said he could. For
the next four years, John Brennan
would fulfill that promise, helping
manage our efforts at reform and
serving as my go-between with a
sometimes sceptical and resistant
CIA bureaucracy. He also shared my
burden of knowing that any mistake
we made could cost people their lives,
which was the reason he could be
found stoically working in a
windowless West Wing office
below the Oval through weekends
and holidays, awake while others
were sleeping, poring over every
scrap of intelligence with a grim,
dogged intensity that led folks
around the White House to call
him “the Sentinel.”I
T BECAME CLEAR pretty quickly
that putting the fallout from past
CT practices behind us and
instituting new ones where needed
was going to be a slow, painful
grind. Closing Gitmo meant we
needed to figure out alternative means
to house and legally process both
existing detainees and any terrorists
captured in the future. Prompted by
a set of Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA) requests that had worked their
way through the courts, I had to
decide whether documents related
to the CIA’s Bush-era waterboarding
and rendition programs should be
declassified (yes to legal memos
justifying such practices, since both
the memos and the programs
themselves were already widely
known; no to photos of the practices
themselves, which the Pentagon and
State Department feared might trigger
international outrage and put our
troops or diplomats in greater danger).
Our legal teams and national security
staff wrestled daily with how to set up
stronger judicial and congressional
oversight for our CT efforts and
how to meet our obligations for
transparency without tipping off New
York Times-reading terrorists. Rather
than continue with what looked to the
world like a bunch of ad hoc foreign
policy decisions, we decided I’d deliver
two speeches related to our anti-
terrorism efforts. The first, intended
mainly for domestic consumption,
would insist that America’s long-term
national security depended on fidelity
to our Constitution and the rule of
law, acknowledging that in the
immediate aftermath of 9/11 we’d
sometimes fallen short of those Wneeded fixing, rather than tearing it
out root and branch to start over.
One such fix was closing Gitmo, the
military prison at Guantánamo Bay
— and thus halting the continuing
stream of prisoners placed in indefinite
detention there. Another was my
executive order ending torture;
although I’d been assured during my
transition briefings that extraordinary
renditions and “enhanced
interrogations” had ceased during
President Bush’s second term, the
disingenuous, cavalier, and sometimes
absurd ways that a few high-ranking
holdovers from the previous
administration described those
practices to me (“A doctor was always
present to ensure that the suspect
didn’t suffer permanent damage or
death”) had convinced me of the
need for bright lines. Beyond that,my highest priority was creating
strong systems of transparency,
accountability, and oversight — ones
that included Congress and the
judiciary and would provide a credible
legal framework for what I sadly
suspected would be a long-term
struggle. For that I needed the fresh
eyes and critical mindset of the mostly
liberal lawyers who worked under me
in the White House, Pentagon, CIA,
and State Department counsels’
offices. But I also needed someone
who had operated at the very centre
of U.S. CT efforts, someone who could
help me sort through the various
policy trade-offs that were sure to
come, and then reach into the bowels
of the system to make sure the needed
changes actually happened.
John Brennan was that person. In his
early fifties, with thinning grey hair, a
bad hip (a consequence of his dunking
exploits as a high school basketball
player), and the face of an Irish boxer,
he had taken an interest in Arabic in
college, studied at the American
University in Cairo, and joined the
CIA in 1980 after answering an ad in
The New York Times. He would spend
the next twenty-five years with the
agency, as a daily intelligence briefer,
a station chief in the Middle East,
and, eventually, the deputy executive
director under President Bush, charged
with putting together the agency’s
integrated CT unit after 9/11.
Despite the résumé and the tough-
guy appearance, what struck me mostPresident Barack
Obama in the Oval
Office in 2009. Left:
with Saudi King
Abdullah bin Abdul
Aziz al-Saud in 2009.
Below: Barack Obama
with his mother, Ann
Dunham (left) and
grandmother, Madelyn
Lee Payne Dunhamweren’t amenable to negotiations or
bound by the normal rules of
engagement; thwarting their plots
and rooting them out was a task of
extraordinary complexity. In the
immediate aftermath of 9/11, President
Bush had done some things right,
including swiftly and consistently
trying to tamp down anti-Islamic
sentiment in the United States —
no small feat, especially given our
country’s history with McCarthyism
and Japanese internment — and
mobilizing international support for
the early Afghan campaign. Even
controversial Bush administration
programs like the Patriot Act, which
I myself had criticized, seemed to
me potential tools for abuse more
than wholesale violations of
American civil liberties.
The way the Bush administration
had spun the intelligence to gain
public support for invading Iraq (not
to mention its use of terrorism as a
political cudgel in the 2004 elections)
was more damning. And, of course, I
considered the invasion itself to be as
big a strategic blunder as the slide into
Vietnam had been decades earlier. But
the actual wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq hadn’t involved the indiscriminate
bombing or deliberate targeting of
civilians that had been a routine part
of even “good” wars like World War II;
and with glaring exceptions like Abu
Ghraib, our troops in theatre had
displayed a remarkable level of
discipline and professionalism.
As I saw it, then, my job was to fix
those aspects of our CT effort thatdevelopments and ensure
coordination. The Bush administration
had developed a ranking of terrorist
targets, a kind of “Top 20” list
complete with photos, alias
information, and vital statistics
reminiscent of those on baseball
cards; generally, whenever someone
on the list was killed, a new target was
added, leading Rahm [Emanuel] to
observe that “al-Qaeda’s HR
department must have trouble filling
that number 21 slot.” In fact, my
hyperactive chief of staff — who’d
spent enough time in Washington to
know that his new, liberal president
couldn’t afford to look soft on
terrorism — was obsessed with the list,
cornering those responsible for our
targeting operations to find out what
was taking so long when it came to
locating number 10 or 14.
I took no joy in any of this. It didn’t
make me feel powerful. I’d entered
politics to help kids get a better
education, to help families get
healthcare, to help poor countries
grow more food — it was that kind of
power that I measured myself against.
But the work was necessary, and it
was my responsibility to make sure
our operations were as effective as
possible. Moreover, unlike some on the
left, I’d never engaged in wholesale
condemnation of the Bush
administration’s approach to
counterterrorism (CT). I’d seen
enough of the intelligence to know
that al-Qaeda and its affiliates were
continuously plotting horrific crimes
against innocent people. Its members
Each month,
I chaired a
meeting in the
Situation Room