BY_MATHEW DELUCA
FROM_ THE DAILY BEAST
JUN 2 2012
Daniel
Klaidman has reported extensively for Newsweek and The Daily Beast on Obama’s
hunt for terrorists. Read seven of the key moments in his new book on the
subject, Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama
Presidency.
President
Barack Obama may have inherited the war on terrorism from his predecessor, but
in some ways the stakes have only grown since he took the decision maker’s seat
in the Oval Office. In his new book, Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the
Soul of the Obama Presidency, Newsweek and Daily Beast reporter Daniel Klaidman
draws on extensive research, including interviews with more than 200 sources,
including current and former officials in the Obama administration, to work his
way into the president’s mind as Obama learned what it meant to fight a shadowy
enemy in the 21st century.
In the
aftermath of 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, America’s enemies
seemed both everywhere and nowhere. Some of the tactics that would prove most
effective over the following years, such as drone strikes and cross-border
raids, drew criticism at home and abroad. Obama the former constitutional law
scholar has demonstrated a willingness to continually rethink the way America
is dealing with the threat posed by religious extremists.
The Daily
Beast collects seven moments in the wartime education of Barack Obama.
1. Faces to the Names
The war
against a global enemy in the information age has meant that the president can
know more than ever before about the persons against whom he chooses to
authorize a strike. Klaidman recounts an early meeting between the
then-Democratic candidate and Richard Clarke, a principal counterterrorism
adviser from the Bush administration. “As president, you kill people,” Clarke
said to the senator from Illinois. An inscrutable Obama looked back at Clarke,
Klaidman writes, not betraying any emotion. “I know that,” Obama told Clarke in
an even tone. “He didn’t flinch,” Clarke later said of the meeting.
Early in his
term, Obama became incensed upon learning about “signature strikes”—the
practice of eliminating targets who bore the characteristics of terrorists but
about whom there was little other information. Targets were not necessarily
positively identified before the strikes took place, and people in Pakistan in
particular, where many of the strikes occurred, were furious. “That’s not good
enough for me,” Obama said when the practice was explained to him.
2. Kill or Capture: The
False Choice
George W.
Bush may have said that Osama bin Laden was wanted “dead or alive,” but the
many issues raised by the prospect of capturing the terrorist and bringing him
to justice meant that there was really only one option. The Obama
administration found that the same was true of its hunt for other top
terrorists, Klaidman reports. “We never talked about this openly, but it was
always a back-of-the-mind thing for us,” a top Obama counterterrorism adviser
told Klaidman regarding the administration’s deliberations over whether it
should focus on detaining or eliminating targets. “Anyone who says it wasn’t is
not being straight.”
One
terrorist Obama was reportedly particularly set on seeing killed or captured
was Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen and radical cleric who was killed by a
drone in Yemen last September. Al-Awlaki obsessed Obama after the success of
the attack on bin Laden, Klaidman reports, telling advisers at a weekly
counterterrorism meeting, “I want Awlaki. Don’t let up on him.” According to
sources, the president even considered allowing for some collateral damage if
it meant taking out Awlaki, asking that advisers keep him apprised of any
opportunity to eliminate the cleric.
3. A White House Divided
As the Obama
administration went head-to-head with terrorists, fault lines within the White
House began to appear as senior officials moved to protect their own
bailiwicks. After an incident that involved efforts by the White House to place
a political operative named Chris Sautter on Attorney General Eric Holder’s
staff, Obama adviser and campaign strategist David Axelrod heard that Holder
was spreading word of Sautter’s hiring. “I’m not Karl Rove,” Axelrod growled at
Holder in a hallway confrontation. Valerie Jarrett had to step in to keep the
feud from escalating.
The close
relationship between the president and the attorney general became the subject
of envy for the other cabinet-level advisers, sources told Klaidman. “Of all of
the 12 cabinet members, why does the boss like Eric the most?” one of the
administration’s advisers asked sarcastically. “We should all throw him in a
pit and kick him.”
4. ‘Baseball Cards’
The hunt for
an elusive enemy took its toll on Harold Koh, the former Yale Law professor and
State Department legal adviser who shuffled through what were called “baseball
cards”—the presidentially authorized hit list. “It was an unlikely turn for one
of the more respected human-rights lawyers of his generation,” Klaidman writes.
“At Yale Law he has memorized the names and faces of his students, bright-eyed
idealists who wanted to use the law to improve the world. Now he was studying
government hit lists, memorizing the profiles of young, vacant-eyed militants,
and helping determine which ones could be put to death.”
Koh would be
presented with the classified PowerPoint slides, and would often have less than
an hour to flick through them and determine whether or not the government had
the legal authority to take out the target. Apart from the militants’ physical
characteristics, a photo, and other basic data, the slides detailed whether the
intelligence on them came from HUMINT or SIGINT–human or electronic
surveillance. They also detailed the specific terrorist actions in which the
target was believed to have taken part.
‘Kill or
Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency,’ by Daniel
Klaidman. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 304 pp. $18.29
5. The Hitch Strikes
Again
The late
Christopher Hitchens scored a hit with his Vanity Fair piece recounting what it
was like to be waterboarded, reaching Attorney General Holder and influencing
his decision to launch an investigation into the way the U.S. interrogated its
detainees. In his 2008 column “Believe Me, It’s Torture,” the polemicist wrote
about his staged abduction at a location tucked away somewhere in North
Carolina. After reading the article, Holder was reportedly entranced by the
accompanying video, which showed the (rather out-of-shape) Hitchens hold out
for a little more than10 seconds before breaking under the torture technique.
“Watching the video,” Klaidman writes, “Holder was both mesmerized and
repulsed.”
The article
and video spurred Holder to look more closely at the interrogation tactics of
the Bush era, and he was “increasingly convinced that he would need to launch
an investigation, or at least a preliminary inquiry to determine whether a
full-blown probe was warranted.”
6. Clinton Sticks to Her
Guns
Obama has
been faulted for not, as president, maintaining the optimism he embodied on the
campaign trail. In at least one instance, however, Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton rebuked high-ranking national-security officials for the way they were
handling the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged architect of the 9/11
attacks and a Guantánamo detainee.
Obama had
pledged to close Guantánamo and to try suspects, whenever possible, in civilian
trials and not in front of military commissions. With the officials wavering on
these points, Clinton reportedly got tough. “We would be throwing the
president’s commitment to close Guantánamo into the trash bin,” she said at a
White House meeting. “We are doing him [the president] a disservice by not
working harder on this.”
7. Transfer of Power
A president
must weigh the power of precedent. In a 2009 meeting with advisers, Obama
voiced concerns about what a future president may do with the power to
indefinitely detain suspected terrorists. Alluding to the FDR-era Supreme Court
decision that allowed the president to intern American citizens of Japanese
descent during World War II, Obama worried about the powers his actions may
place in the hands of a future president.
“You never
know who is going to be president four years from now,” Obama said. “I have to
think about how Mitt Romney would use that power.”