Obama not reversing course on intelligence agency policies?
In a move that has the potential to upset the far left and “civil/human rights activisits,” the Wall Street Journal has a story up today that talks about how Obama is sending signals during the transition phase that it’s “unlikely” that he will make any major changes to our intelligence policy (via Memeo):
WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama is unlikely to radically overhaul controversial Bush administration intelligence policies, advisers say, an approach that is almost certain to create tension within the Democratic Party.
Civil-liberties groups were among those outraged that the White House sanctioned the use of harsh intelligence techniques — which some consider torture — by the Central Intelligence Agency, and expanded domestic spy powers. These groups are demanding quick action to reverse these policies.
Mr. Obama is being advised largely by a group of intelligence professionals, including some who have supported Republicans, and centrist former officials in the Clinton administration. They say he is likely to fill key intelligence posts with pragmatists.
“He’s going to take a very centrist approach to these issues,” said Roger Cressey, a former counterterrorism official in the Clinton and Bush administrations. “Whenever an administration swings too far on the spectrum left or right, we end up getting ourselves in big trouble.”
On the campaign trail, Mr. Obama criticized many of President George W. Bush’s counterterrorism policies. He condemned Mr. Bush for promoting “excessive secrecy, indefinite detention, warrantless wiretapping and ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ like simulated drowning that qualify as torture through any careful measure of the law or appeal to human decency.”
As a candidate, Mr. Obama said the CIA’s interrogation program should adhere to the same rules that apply to the military, which would prohibit the use of techniques such as waterboarding. He has also said the program should be investigated.
Yet he more recently voted for a White House-backed law to expand eavesdropping powers for the National Security Agency. Mr. Obama said he opposed providing legal immunity to telecommunications companies that aided warrantless surveillance, but ultimately voted for the bill, which included an immunity provision.
The new president could take a similar approach to revising the rules for CIA interrogations, said one current government official familiar with the transition. Upon review, Mr. Obama may decide he wants to keep the road open in certain cases for the CIA to use techniques not approved by the military, but with much greater oversight.
The intelligence-transition team is led by former National Counterterrorism Center chief John Brennan and former CIA intelligence-analysis director Jami Miscik, say officials close to the matter. Mr. Brennan is viewed as a potential candidate for a top intelligence post. Ms. Miscik left amid a slew of departures from the CIA under then-Director Porter Goss.
The article goes on to note that, obviously, it’s still too early to tell for sure what course of action he’s going to take with respect to our intelligence gathering capabilities, but considering his party’s known weakness on issues related to counterterrorism, he may seek to change that image as president by not undertaking a significant overhaul of our intelligence agencies. Not only that but, as I’ve mentioned previously, he’s going to be privy to a lot of formerly-unknown-to-him information in the coming weeks from intelligence officials and President Bush himself that could very well sober him up a bit and make him realize that the pledges he made on the campaign trail were idealistic rather than realistic.
Considering he voted with his party 98% while serving a half a term as a Senator from Illinois, it’s hard for me to believe that he’s not going to make a concerted effort to honor those pledges, but time will tell. If Obama’s the uber-intelligent guy we’ve been led to believe he is, he’ll understand that the election didn’t give him a mandate to govern liberally but to instead govern from the center, which means not bowing down to the base every chance he gets.
He’s already throwing them some meaty bones, if you consider the stories coming about how Obama will likely undo a lot of Bush’s executive orders as they relate to embryonic stem cell research, “global warming,” and funding for international abortions. But these are the “easy” things he can undo with a stroke of a pen. But on foreign policy, so far, the Obama transition team is either being non-committal or in some cases are sending mixed signals, like on the issue of closing Gitmo, for example.
I look at the fact that they’re not as yet indicating a push to the far left on foreign policy (as opposed to domestic policy) as a slight signal of “hope” that there’s a stronger possibility than pre-election promises indicated that Obama is looking at the global war on terror challenges that we face from the standpoint of President-Elect rather than as a starry-eyed presidential hopeful and is perhaps coming to the conclusion that maybe many of those Bush-era counterterrorism policies he slammed during his run for president are more vital and necessary than he and his party were ever willing to give him credit for.
We’ll see.