President Obama’s Counterterrorism Policy Speech Yesterday: “Let me be unclear…”

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The hands of President-elect Barack Obama are seen as he speaks to the media following a meeting with members of his future cabinet and economic advisors at his transition office in Washington January 6, 2009. REUTERS/Jason Reed
The hands of President-elect Barack Obama are seen as he speaks to the media following a meeting with members of his future cabinet and economic advisors at his transition office in Washington January 6, 2009.
REUTERS/Jason Reed
Just a roundup of a few analyses by others of the president’s counterterrorism policies speech that I believe are notable and astute; namely, two writers at Lawfare Blog (a series of posts by Benjamin Wittes and one post by John Bellinger).

Benjamin Wittes, Pt1 reaction:

If there was a unifying theme of President Obama’s speech today at the National Defense University, it was an effort to align himself as publicly as possible with the critics of the positions his administration is taking without undermining his administration’s operational flexibility in actual fact. To put it crassly, the president sought to rebuke his own administration for taking the positions it has—but also to make sure that it could continue to do so.

A great deal of the President’s speech was noise—noise in the form of broad, overarching accounts of his strategic vision, noise in the form of continuous veiled (or not-so-veiled) criticisms of his predecessor’s strategic vision and fidelity to American values, and noise in the form of apparent changes in policy that in actual fact change very little.

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The President presents himself throughout the speech as bringing this war to a close:

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Obama does not need Congress to narrow or repeal the AUMF or to get off of a war footing. He can do it himself, declaring hostilities over in whole or in part. And Obama, needless to say, did not do anything like that. To the contrary, he promised that “we must finish the work of defeating al Qaeda and its associated forces” and while he used a lot of nice words about law enforcement and a lot of disparaging words about perpetual states of war, he also promised to continue targeting the enemy with lethal force under the AUMF. In other words, he promised—without quite saying it directly—to keep waging war

Pt2, regarding Gitmo detainees:

Obama once again pontificated a fair bit about the need to close the site,

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The trouble is that, as Wells pointed out earlier, Obama proposes nothing—nothing—concerning how to deal with those whom his own review task force deemed too dangerous to release but not plausible to bring to trial. The only thing he could say on that subject was that “once we commit to a process of closing GTMO, I am confident that this legacy problem can be resolved, consistent with our commitment to the rule of law.”

And what basis for confidence could he possibly have on that score? It’s not as though these cases have never been reviewed before.

There is only one way to resolve this problem other than maintaining a group of people in custody whom one cannot try: That is not maintaing that group of people in custody. But is Obama really going to free Abu Zubayda–against whom I have not seen a criminal case materialize? What about Mohammed Qatani, the would-be 9/11 hijacker turned away from this country’s borders in Orlando with Mohammed Atta waiting for him on the other side of customs? What about the nearly 50 people whom the task force determined could not be tried but who pose real risks—and the additional people whom the task force believed could face trial but for whom that assessment proved optimistic? Until the president is willing to say that he means to set these people free, he should cut out the pieties about what sort of country we are—or would be if only a certain group of retrogrades would stop him from closing Guantanamo.

Pt3

Perhaps the most puzzling and opaque aspect of President Obama’s speech today involves the question of whether he did, or didn’t, narrow the criteria for targeting in drone strikes. The wording of the speech on this point is incredibly careful, and to parse it, one has to read it next to prior administration statements on targeting rules

Pt4:

There are a number of areas in the president’s speech yesterday in which Obama publicly aligns himself with critics of his administration, while promising in hard terms very little. As I described yesterday, he spent a lot of time criticizing the idea of endless war under the AUMF—while not concretely committing himself to ending hostilities. He criticized Guantanamo and indefinite detention, without promising to release detainees who pose a serious threat yet cannot face trial.

One of the more blatant of these areas is Obama’s comments about the idea of additional review mechanisms for drone strikes:

Going forward, I have asked my Administration to review proposals to extend oversight of lethal actions outside of warzones that go beyond our reporting to Congress. Each option has virtues in theory, but poses difficulties in practice. For example, the establishment of a special court to evaluate and authorize lethal action has the benefit of bringing a third branch of government into the process, but raises serious constitutional issues about presidential and judicial authority. Another idea that’s been suggested—the establishment of an independent oversight board in the executive branch—avoids those problems, but may introduce a layer of bureaucracy into national-security decision-making, without inspiring additional public confidence in the process. Despite these challenges, I look forward to actively engaging Congress to explore these—and other—options for increased oversight.

Notice here what the president is not promising. He is not promising to support a drone court. He is not promising to support proposals like Neal Katyal’s or Jen Daskal’s for an enhanced, court-like internal executive review mechanism. He is only promising to have his administration “review [such] proposals” and saying that he will “actively engag[ing] with Congress to explore” such ideas.

Nobody can possibly object to this, and I certainly don’t, but it is notable that the president nowhere hints what sort of outcome he expects from his engagement. This is a way of signaling respect for the ideas—and the underlying idea that he needs to be on the side of “increased oversight”—without actually committing his administration to doing anything concrete.

John Bellinger

the actions the President announced with respect to Guantanamo are simply to re-start actions that he had stopped, including appointing a special envoy at the State Department and Defense Department (two envoys?) to handle transfers; lifting the moratorium on transfers to Yemen; transferring detainees who have been cleared for release; and insisting on judicial review for every detainee. After four years, he still does not offer any suggestions for dangerous detainees who cannot be prosecuted. And the President’s stated desire to “ultimately repeal” the AUMF, while candy for the President’s political base, leaves unclear what authority he will rely on to continue to conduct drone strikes or to detain members of al Qaida who are not prosecuted.

The Ugly. Much of the speech is filled with platitudes and political bones for the base, such as the commitment to repeal the AUMF and to require the Attorney General to review guidelines for investigations of the media. Unfortunately, the President continued to go out of his way to blame and caricature the Bush Administration, including by repeating the canard that the Obama Administration is engaged in “a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks” as opposed to a “boundless ‘global war on terrorism.’” (In fact, I made clear in numerous speeches between 2005-2009 that the phrase “Global War on Terror” was a rhetorical term and that the Bush Administration considered itself to be a legal state of armed conflict with al Qaida and its affiliates.) Obama Administration officials have emphasized how Obama policies (especially drone policies) have evolved during the first term, while refusing to acknowledge the similar evolution in counterterrorism policies during the Bush Administration.

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It was only last year (in May) that we learned Obama maintained a KILL LIST of “baseball cards,” with the biographies and faces of targets for him to pick among and send drones after.
Now, all of a sudden, he is hinting (no promises) that perhaps somepne ought to OVERSEE this decision-making process.
Not near so much fun!
Last year we also learned that Obama cut down the supposed civilian casualties simply by the Leftist trick of redefining that term.
And so, ”all military-age males in a strike zone were labeled as combatants.”
After the drone strike we might find out a dead guy or two or three were NOT actual combatants, but, hey.
So, Obama killed Anwar al-Awlak, later killed his son.
In another case Obama made a deliberate decision to kill a combatant’s wife and in-laws along with him.
So how was this ”justified?”
Obama thought about it, or, as the Times put it: “The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel prepared a lengthy memo justifying that extraordinary step, asserting that while the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.”

So, now, Obama wants somebody else to think about it first, in addition to himself.
Maybe.

PS, any Gitmo detainees sent to be in prison in Yemen will be released either by state-sanctioned jail break OR by annual Muslim mercy opening all prison doors and letting them go.

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Orwell referred to this nonsensical logic as “Doublethink” in his novel “1984”. Americans were appalled at the concept in the early part of the second half of the 20th Century and were incredulous that people could be so naive to accept such bull crap at face value, but in the enlightened Age of Obama, people are in awe and listen to doublethink and the derivative doublespeak without a second thought.

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Bellinger sure gives Obama a great deal of credit which is misplaced and ill-considered, when he writes, “The most significant part of the speech was the President’s description of clearer standards for use of force against terrorists, including by drones. …. the speech and fact sheet set forth more restrictive standards, including that the same targeting standard applies to Americans and non-Americans”

Bellinger is making assumptions, and is taking at face value (possibly believing) the W.H. policy statement for ‘Use of Force.’ This is the Obama Administration he’s writing about. The speech was an embarrassment, but the published policy reads like an Axelrod/Ploufe PR proclamation. It is strictly a political statement for the ideological base, to be believed about as much as any other utterance from this W.H. – lies lathered in pablum for the great unwashed. No point giving examples here, as almost every paragraph is a farce.

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@James Raider:

…. the speech and fact sheet set forth more restrictive standards, including that the same targeting standard applies to Americans and non-Americans”

One wonders if Obama’s standards for drone use is specifically targeting (without due process of law we should note,) only Americans “working with al-Queada,” or if it has been expanded to include those Americans aligned with organisations Obama considers “terrorists” (IE. TEA Party members, Conservatives, Anti-Abortion groups, Republicans, Catholics and other Christians…)

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@Ditto: #4,
In the age of Obama insanity, conceit, deceit, Constitution desecration, and fraud, your notion of “wondering if” is not only a contemplation, it is a likelihood.

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Some other pieces I meant to link to earlier:

Tom Mahnken:

First, as expected, Obama used the platform to criticize the Bush administration. Quite frankly, however, I’ve gotten so used to that trope that I almost don’t pay attention to it anymore. But in criticizing America’s conduct of its conflict with al Qaeda and its affiliates, the president was also critiquing his own performance over the last four plus years. Listening to Obama’s speech, one cannot help but ask, “What were you doing over the past four years? Wasn’t it you who greatly expanded the scope and intensity of drone strikes during your first term?” Obama has hardly been a passive bystander as this drama has unfolded. The drone strike program was inaugurated by the Bush administration, but it has reached its zenith under Obama.

Which leads to my second observation: Obama’s speech was almost entirely about tactics. Indeed, Obama has presided over what my late friend and colleague Michael Handel termed the “tacticization of strategy.” Obama and his team have used a tactic — strikes on terrorists launched from unmanned air vehicles — as a substitute for the development and implementation of a comprehensive strategy. The same is true of the administration’s attitude toward interrogation and detention.

Third, in seeking to define the conflict more tightly, he actually muddied the waters. Obama’s call for limiting the use of force to al Qaeda and its affiliates is sensible. Indeed, I don’t know of anyone from the previous administration who would argue with that notion. The difficulty has always involved determining the criteria for affiliation with al Qaeda. Is it individuals or groups who have sworn an oath of fealty of al Qaeda central? Is it groups that share al Qaeda’s vision of violent jihad? Is it individuals who are inspired by al Qaeda’s preaching?

Obama appears to have difficulty with this himself. Consider the following paragraph from his speech:

And finally, we face a real threat from radicalized individuals here in the United States. Whether it’s a shooter at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, a plane flying into a building in Texas, or the extremists who killed 168 people at the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, America has confronted many forms of violent extremism in our history. Deranged or alienated individuals — often U.S. citizens or legal residents — can do enormous damage, particularly when inspired by larger notions of violent jihad. And that pull towards extremism appears to have led to the shooting at Fort Hood and the bombing of the Boston Marathon.

So Timothy McVeigh was a “violent extremist”, whereas violent extremism “appears to have led to” Major Nidal Hassan’s murderous rampage? The use of the passive voice in the latter case is telling.

We can — and should — debate how strong and how centralized al Qaeda is. Such a debate is crucial to understanding the nature of our adversary and the kind of war upon which we are embarked and thus to developing an effective strategy. Furthermore, scholars would be aided in this debate if they had access to more of the documents seized from Osama bin Laden’s house in Pakistan. Only seventeen have so far been released, and the president quoted from another yesterday. Would the thousands of documents that remain classified corroborate the president’s view of how we are doing? One wonders.

Fourth, and most importantly, just as President Bush was criticized for declaring a premature end to the 2003 Iraq War, Obama may very well be criticized for declaring an end to the war on terror.

It takes two to end a war. Indeed, it is the defeated party that determines when a war is over, because he holds the power to continue it. In the present instance, it is less than clear that al Qaeda’s leadership believes that it is defeated. Al Qaeda and its affiliates are if anything gaining new footholds in North Africa, West Africa, and Syria.

Obama’s NDU speech may thus prove to be his own “mission accomplished” moment. I hope that I am wrong but fear that I am right.

Peter Feaver:

Politically, declaring mission accomplished is a tantalizing risk. On the one hand, it is clear that Obama partisans are keen to wring maximum political benefit from the good fortune of killing bin Laden on their watch. The boast that they have “won” the “good” war that Bush started (the war on terror) and “ended” the “bad” war (Iraq) would, if true, cement Obama’s national security legacy. On the other hand, just as Bush paid a huge price for standing in front of a “mission accomplished” banner when the conflict in Iraq was anything but over, Obama would be at great risk if terrorists successfully struck after he had made the boast.

Shortly after the bin Laden raid, the Obama administration floated some “mission accomplished” trial balloons, with Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta suggesting that al Qaeda was near strategic defeat. As the presidential election campaign heated up in the summer of 2012, it looked as if the administration was considering a bolder declaration. If that is right, I bet they are glad they resisted the temptation because the Benghazi terror attacks were hard enough for the administration to spin as it was. It would have been a much more daunting task if the attacks came on the heels of a “mission accomplished” speech.

Perhaps that is why, when he finally gave it after the Benghazi terror attack and after the Boston terror attack, the president’s speech was so rhetorically unsatisfying. It sounded as if the president was personally and publicly wrestling with the tantalizing risk and never fully resolving where he came down. It seemed to be a compromise forged from two separate speeches, one drafted by the optimists and the other by the pessimists. Perhaps it was a sufficiently artful compromise to win one 24-hour news cycle, but that is probably its high water mark. The administration got some of the headlines it wanted — the Washington Post highlighted the notion of the United States at “a ‘crossroads'” in the war on terror, and the New York Times called the speech a “pivot,” perhaps enough to give the impression that there is a fundamental shift underway. But, in fact, as the president was at pains to admit in the speech, the threat remains and requires on-going extraordinary efforts, including efforts associated with war and not mere law enforcement.

And so it does. As Max Boot notes, the details laid out in Obama’s speech mostly take us back to the de facto policy he inherited from President George W. Bush — policies which have stood him in pretty good stead and made possible even having an internal debate about whether to declare the war on terror, or some crucial phase of it, over.

In news terms, the most important change appears to be a reduction in drone strikes from Obama-era levels back to Bush-era levels. Slowing down the pace of drone strikes is not a trivial change. For one thing, the drone strikes are deeply unpopular around the world, even — and perhaps especially — with our allies. They have become for Obama what “torture” was for the Bush administration and foreign discomfort with drone strikes is one important reason that the “soft power asset bubble” that Obama generated in his first few months in office has largely popped. So the evolution in drone policy is significant, but equally significant is that the president promised to continue to do drone strikes, as he deems necessary. The drone war has not ended.

Jack Goldsmith:

My reactions to the President’s speech can be found in this essay at the CFR page. The headline writers gave it the title of Obama Passes the Buck: The President’s Empty Rhetoric on Counterterrorism. The subtitle captures the basic thrust of the essay, which is a pretty cynical reaction to the President’s speech grounded mostly in my cynicism about the President’s pledges to work with Congress on counterterrorism policy.

A few additional reactions beyond what I say in the essay:

One increasingly important element in the Obama administration’s counterterrorism philosophy is a growing comfort level with reliance on inherent Article II power to address extra-AUMF threats. Jeh Johnson and Harold Koh were pretty clear about this in their Oxford Speeches, and the President’s speech implied as much. This is a remarkable development which deserves close scrutiny and on which I will have more to say later.

As Spencer Ackerman notes, a lurking contradiction in the President’s speech is that he says he prefers capturing detainees to killing them, but he has no good plan for detention. I think that civilian trials and military commissions can achieve more than Ackerman does, but I agree that they are not complete solutions.

Speaking of Commissions, one of the most consequential elements of the President’s speech was his support for Commissions. He thrice mentioned them as important tools. And his direction that DOD designate a site for Commissions inside the United States implied that they should be normalized into the USG’s set of available counterterrorism tools, even if confined to a narrow law of war jurisdiction alongside, and with review by, civilian courts. This might not seem like a big deal, but inside the Executive branch this vote of confidence by the President is enormously important.

I thought the President gave a strong defense of the use of drones. As for his drone policies, Joe Pappalardo notes that a remarkable aspect of the speech was its criticism of the very policies that the President himself designed and presided over. “The very precision of drones strikes, and the necessary secrecy involved in such actions can end up shielding our government from the public scrutiny that a troop deployment invites,” said the President. “It can also lead a President and his team to view drone strikes as a cure-all for terrorism,” he added. The President’s announcement of enhanced internal procedures and heightened targeting standards was a response to this self-criticism.

It is very hard to judge the significance of the new targeting standards because we don’t really have a firm grasp on how the old standards were applied. Ironically, the new standards accomplish most if we believe some of the broader previous reports about the administration’s signature strike policy, and they accomplish much less if we take seriously prior administration speeches about careful legal standards for targeting. The baseline matters and we don’t know the baseline.

This was a rich statement from the President whose administration has gone after national security journalists so aggressively: “Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs. Our focus must be on those who break the law.” It was a strong statement as well – depending on what it means for journalists to do their jobs, and what “break the law” means.

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