Klaidman Post #3: An Irony
A correspondent who prefers to remain anonymous point out the following irony. In my recent post on Dan Klaidman's book, I quoted the following passage:
The discussion continued for close to two hours, with Obama often asking pointed questions and occasionally interjecting legal and tactical points of his own. There was one issue he was adamant about: he would not, as George Bush had, rely on his own inherent authority as commander in chief to detain suspects at Gauntanamo.
Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
A correspondent who prefers to remain anonymous point out the following irony. In my recent post on Dan Klaidman's book, I quoted the following passage:
The discussion continued for close to two hours, with Obama often asking pointed questions and occasionally interjecting legal and tactical points of his own. There was one issue he was adamant about: he would not, as George Bush had, rely on his own inherent authority as commander in chief to detain suspects at Gauntanamo. “I don’t think it makes sense for me alone to decide, just because I’m the president, who should be detained,” he told his lawyers, according to several participants. “I’m not comfortable exerting that authority.”The recent New York Times "kill list" article, by contrast, contains this passage:
It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die. This secret “nominations” process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia. . . . The nominations go to the White House, where by his own insistence and guided by Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama must approve any name. He signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan — about a third of the total.
Benjamin Wittes is editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books.
