War on terror continues
(Image by CNE CNA C6F)   Details   DMCA

IN FEBRUARY 2009 -- just one month after Obama's inauguration -- a series of policy announcements from the new administration startled and angered civil liberties activists because they amounted to a continuation of some of the most controversial Bush/Cheney war on terror programs. That led New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Charlie Savage to observe that "the Obama administration is quietly signaling continued support for other major elements of its predecessor's approach to fighting al Qaeda," which was "prompting growing worry among civil liberties groups and a sense of vindication among supporters of Bush-era policies."

In response, I wrote that while I believed "Savage's article is of great value in sounding the right alarm bells, I think that he paints a slightly more pessimistic picture on the civil liberties front than is warranted by the evidence thus far (though only slightly)." Yes, that's correct: Very early on in his administration, I defended Obama from the "he's-just-like-Bush" critique as premature. But six months later, the evidence piled up higher and higher that there was far more continuity with the Bush/Cheney model than almost anyone expected. As a result, I wrote in July that "in retrospect, Savage was right and I was wrong: His February article was more prescient than premature."

Over the years, Savage has become one of the most knowledgeable and tireless reporters chronicling the civil liberties and war powers controversies under the Obama administration. The way in which that continuity has solidified what were once regarded as right-wing aberrations into bipartisan consensus -- strengthening the Bush/Cheney template far beyond what the GOP by itself could have achieved -- is easily one of the most significant, and one of the most disturbing, aspects of the Obama legacy.

Savage has written a book that will clearly be the comprehensive historical account of these controversies. Titled Power Wars: Inside Obama's Post-9/11 Presidency, the book provides exhaustive detail on each of these questions (the book also early on recounts the exchange he and I had on these questions to help set the framework for the ensuing debates). Its most valuable contribution is the access Savage has to some of the key legal and policy officials responsible for these decisions, and the book thus provides a full account of their thinking and self-justifications.

That makes his book simultaneously illuminating but also infuriating. Many of these officials are administration lawyers and their excuses for following Bush/Cheney -- or their denials that they have done so -- are often tendentious: dubious lawyer parsing at its worst. But Savage is an extremely diligent narrator of the thinking behind these debates, and the book really is essential for understanding Obama officials' (often warped) thinking and rationale that led to these policies.

Click Here to Read Whole Article

Authors Bio:

[Subscribe to Glenn Greenwald] Glenn Greenwald is a journalist,former constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times bestselling books on politics and law. His most recent book, "No Place to Hide," is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. His forthcoming book, to be published in April, 2021, is about Brazilian history and current politics, with a focus on his experience in reporting a series of expose's in 2019 and 2020 which exposed high-level corruption by powerful officials in the government of President Jair Bolsonaro, which subsequently attempted to prosecute him for that reporting.

Foreign Policy magazine named Greenwald one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. He was the debut winner, along with "Democracy Now's" Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work breaking the story of the abusive detention conditions of Chelsea Manning.

For his 2013 NSA reporting, working with his source Edward Snowden, he received the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting; the Gannett Foundation Award for investigative journalism and the Gannett Foundation Watchdog Journalism Award; the Esso Premio for Excellence in Investigative Reporting in Brazil (he was the first non-Brazilian to win); and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award. The NSA reporting he led for The Guardian was also awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. A film about the work Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras did with Snowden to report the NSA archive, "CitizenFour," directed by Poitras, was awarded the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary.

In 2019, he received the Special Prize from the Vladimir Herzog Institute for his reporting on the Bolsonaro government and pervasive corruption inside the prosecutorial task force that led to the imprisonment of former Brazilian President Lula da Silva. The award is named after the Jewish immigrant journalist who was murdered during an interrogation by the Brazilian military dictatorship in 1977. Several months after the reporting began, Lula was ordered released by the Brazilian Supreme Court, and the former President credited the expose's for his liberty. In early 2020, Brazilian prosecutors sought to prosecute Greenwald in connection with the reporting, but the charges were dismissed due to a Supreme Court ruling, based on the Constitutional right of a free press, that barred the Bolsonaro government from making good on its threats to retaliate against Greenwald.

After working as a journalist at Salon and The Guardian, Greenwald co-founded The Intercept in 2013 along with Poitras and journalist Jeremy Scahill, and co-founded The Intercept Brasil in 2016. He resigned fromThe Intercept in October, 2020, to return to independent journalism.

Greenwald lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil with his husband, Congressman David Miranda, their two children, and 26 rescue dogs. In 2017, Greenwald and Miranda created an animal shelter in Brazil supported in part through public donations designed to employ and help exit the streets homeless people who live on the streets with their pets.