by Scott Shane
In Dreams from My Father, Obama describes his “fitful interior struggle” as he grappled with how to interpret his own mixed ancestry. “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.” As he tried on the trappings of racial identity—learning to “curse like Richard Pryor,” trying out the dance moves from Soul Train, spending hours on the basketball court—Obama acknowledges that he “was living out a caricature of black male adolescence, itself a caricature of swaggering American manhood.” His small circle of black friends, “teenagers whose confusion and anger would help shape my own,” endlessly mulled over the mysteries of discrimination in the minutiae of their lives. He simmered over the “trap” that American life seemed to have set for him: “Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony: Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger.” It is a striking description. Reading about the frustration of powerlessness, and the decision to lash out, it is hard not to think of Awlaki’s post-9/11 transformation, and of those he would inspire.
In the end, that was the road Obama did not take. He spent time as a teen with an older black man, Frank Marshall Davis, who had been a leftist firebrand but had mellowed by the time young Obama paid his visits. He delved through the riches of African American literature and memoir, taking particular interest in Malcolm X and his turn away from racial hatred at the end of his life. Of course, Awlaki was also a fan of Malcolm X, and in a brief window after 9/11 he overtly embraced the African American struggle for civil rights as a model for Muslim Americans. But Awlaki left that model behind when he abandoned the United States and embarked on a steadily more militant career. Obama’s talent and enterprise, and the encouragement of many powerful and admiring mentors, swept him forward on a path to success, prestige, and power.
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Sorting through Obama’s early career for anything that might shed light on the counterterrorism policies he would adopt as president is a futile mission. In the work of a community organizer, a Chicago lawyer, and an Illinois state senator, there is little that touches on the subjects that would later engross Obama at the Tuesday terrorism meetings in the Situation Room.
But in Obama’s part-time work teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago law school there is territory worth exploring. As president, in the Awlaki case, he would be forced to make a decision on grave constitutional questions, and some civil libertarians would accuse him of violating the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. He would draw on the government’s top lawyers to consider the legality and constitutionality of killing Awlaki, and he would accept and act on their advice. And critics of the decision would use his status as, in the sarcastic phrase of journalist Jeremy Scahill, “the constitutional-law-professor-president,” to suggest that he must know better and that his actions therefore carried a whiff of hypocrisy.
Between graduating from Harvard Law School and running for the US Senate in 2004, Obama spent about a dozen years teaching part-time at Chicago as “lecturer” and then “senior lecturer.” He taught courses on constitutional law and voting rights and a seminar called “Current Issues in Racism and the Law.” Former students recall an engaged, informal, and Socratic professor who was less interested in pushing his own views than in challenging students to express their own. “You rarely got his opinion or his view,” said Salil Mehra, who took Obama’s seminar and is now a law professor at Temple University. “If we got a direct statement, it was biographical or observational—part Dreams from My Father, part Seinfeld.”
That was true, he and other former students said, when the class discussed an intriguing essay Obama assigned for the racism seminar in 1994: “Is It Right and Wise to Kill a Kidnapper?” by Frederick Douglass. It was Douglass’s commentary on a riveting drama that was playing out in 1854 in the abolitionist hotbed of Boston. An antislavery mob tried to free an escaped slave, nineteen-year-old Anthony Burns, who was to be returned to bondage in Virginia under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. In the ensuing riot, a “truckman” or driver for the US marshal named James Batchelder was stabbed to death. A few days later, Douglass published his audacious commentary in his newspaper, posing a fundamental moral question: Might it be justified to kill a man whose vicious crime undermined the security and well-being of an entire society?
Society has the right, Douglass argued, to protect itself against those who would endanger it: “This right of society is essential to its preservations; without it a single individual would have it in his power to destroy the peace and the happiness of ten thousand otherwise right minded people. Precisely on the same ground, we hold that a man may, properly, wisely and even mercifully be deprived of life. Of course life being the most precious is the most sacred of all rights, and cannot be taken away, but under the direst necessity; and not until all reasonable modes had been adopted to prevent this necessity, and to spare the aggressor.”
A century and a half later, Obama would wrestle with the targeted killing of suspected terrorists. Douglass’s argument was a striking precursor to those he would embrace. The right of a society to “peace and happiness” in the face of a threat from a supremely dangerous individual; the condition that the malefactor be killed only under “direst necessity”; the requirement that “all reasonable modes” be tried short of killing—all would be recognizable as the Obama administration faced the Awlaki threat in 2010.
Anyone returning a free man to bondage, Douglass had written, “labeled himself the common enemy of mankind,” and killing such a person was a positive moral good. “We hold that he had forfeited his right to live,” Douglass wrote of the driver in the essay the young law professor had assigned. Nearly two decades later, Obama would echo Douglass’s reasoning in justifying killing by drone.
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If slavery and abolition were the animating moral issues of American life in the mid-nineteenth century, then terrorism and the response to it were surely the equivalent in the early twenty-first century. In the years after 9/11, those of us covering the American campaign against Al Qaeda repeatedly found ourselves confronting moral and legal issues of gravity and consequence: secret detention; interrogation and torture; leaks to the press and the unprecedented crackdown on them; the targeted killing of suspected terrorists. Terrorism and the fear it generated pressed on elected and unelected officials weighty questions of right and wrong, sometimes in excruciating tangles. Again and again, the United States would drop principles that had defined it on the world stage, embracing practices it had long condemned.
In his Chicago years, Obama’s natural interests mostly lay elsewhere. As he taught his law school courses and made the endless trips between Chicago and Springfield to serve in the Illinois Senate, his steadily growing political ambitions focused mainly on the deep troubles of America at home. But when the World Trade Center towers fell, he surely knew that the tragedy would cast a shadow for many years over the future of American politics. He had just turned forty, and he had been a state legislator for nearly five years, with his eye always on national office. He was asked by the Hyde Park Herald, his neighborhood newspaper in Chicago, to offer a written comment on the attacks by Al Qaeda. His sweeping and authoritative tone—almost comically overweening from a lowly state senator—revealed his poorly disguised ambition. He wrote as if he had already been rehearsing in his mind just what he might have said were he already in the White House: “Certain immediate lessons are clear, and we must act upon those lessons decisively.” Along with the obvious calls for tougher airport security and better intelligence, he made a tough statement about Al Qaeda’s plotters: “We must be resolute in identifying the perpetrators of these heinous acts and disman
tling their organizations of destruction.”
But though it was barely a week after the attacks, Obama added some less conventional, more far-sighted notes. He talked about the need to understand what motivated the attackers—“the sources of such madness”—which he speculated was “a fundamental absence of empathy” that was not “innate” in any religion or culture but could be “channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics.” He wrote of American “rage” but cautioned that US military action in response must consider “the lives of innocent civilians abroad” and that Americans must avoid “bigotry” in their response. In the long run, he wrote, the country must “devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of embittered children” around the globe who might be tempted by such apocalyptic violence.
In the years between 9/11 and his presidential campaign, Obama was rarely asked about terrorism, even after his election to the US Senate in 2004. But shortly after crushing Republican Alan Keyes in the Senate race, hoping to keep riding the publicity wave to sell his memoir, Obama embarked on a promotional blitz for the reissued Dreams from My Father. In the unlikely setting of a Barnes & Noble in New York City, he gave a long, thoughtful answer to a question about the nature and causes of the terrorist threat. The video is still viewable on YouTube, and again Obama tried to broaden the perspective on terrorism beyond the use of force. He spoke of how children in Pakistan without real prospects and trained in a fundamentalist madrasa might turn to extremism “not only for advancement but just some sense of meaning in their lives.” The American response, said the senator-elect, had to address root causes:
Our foreign policy and our perspective with respect to how to deal with terrorism has to reflect not only the interest in stopping the immediate threat of terrorism but also in creating a foreign policy that promotes justice, that promotes economic development, that promotes the rights of women. Those are all central aspects to dealing with terrorism. Ultimately terrorism is a tactic—we’re not fighting terrorists, we’re fighting people who engage in terrorism but have a whole host of rationales and excuses for why they do this, and to the extent that we can change the sense of opportunity in many of these countries and we can change the manner in which we function in these countries in more positive, proactive ways, then we’re not going to eliminate terrorism entirely, but we’re at least going to be able to make more of a dent then if all we’re resorting to is military firepower.
His answer drew enthusiastic applause from the huge crowd. This was no ordinary book tour. Dreams had sold a modest nine thousand copies initially, but Obama’s Democratic National Convention speech and Senate race had made him famous, and the new edition leapt onto bestseller lists. He hired Robert Barnett, the Washington agent and lawyer favored by presidents, to shop around a new book project and got a $1.9 million advance for three books, a contract that would vault him for the first time into the ranks of the truly wealthy. The first book to result, The Audacity of Hope in 2006, was a far more cautious, far less original work than Dreams, and one patently designed to fill out his portrait for a national audience. It reflected his most heartfelt interests—the index had three times as many references to “health care” as to “terrorism”—but it also gave him a chance to sketch his views on the Al Qaeda problem more thoroughly. He took an easy shot at the Bush administration’s legal calisthenics over detention and torture, saying he believed that “we have played fast and loose with constitutional principles in the fight against terrorism.” He declared that “the battle against international terrorism is at once an armed struggle and a contest of ideas, that our long-term security depends both on a judicious projection of military power and increased cooperation with other nations.” In reminiscing about Indonesia, where he had lived as a child, he expressed regret at “the growth of militant, fundamentalist Islam” there. Most significant, perhaps, was Obama’s discussion of when the United States could and should unilaterally use force against terrorists. He called the post-9/11 attack on Al Qaeda and the Taliban “entirely justified” and elaborated in a lawyerly statement of doctrine worth quoting at length:
I would argue that we have the right to take unilateral military action to eliminate an imminent threat to our security—so long as an imminent threat is understood to be a nation, group, or individual that is actively preparing to strike U.S. targets (or allies with which the United States has mutual defense agreements), and has or will have the means to do so in the immediate future. Al Qaeda qualifies under this standard, and we can and should carry out preemptive strikes against them wherever we can. Iraq under Saddam Hussein did not meet this standard, which is why our invasion was such a strategic blunder. If we are going to act unilaterally, then we had better have the goods on our targets.
It was a striking shift of emphasis. Though he would base his presidential run in part on criticism of the Bush security record, Obama endorsed the Bush notion of “preemptive” strikes, even when they were unilateral. It presaged Obama’s splashy vow the following year in his big national security speech that he would “not hesitate to use military force to take out terrorists who pose a direct threat to America.”
Many Americans, and many foreigners, would later be surprised by Obama’s decision to escalate drone strikes. But his intentions were hidden in plain sight. His emphasis on the imminence of a threat, as well as his insistence that we “have the goods” on strike targets to avoid blunders, raised issues that would become flash points in his presidency.
In the Muslim world, any attention to candidate Obama’s vow to go after terrorists was overwhelmed by the spectacular possibility that a black man whose middle name was Hussein and who was sharply critical of many Muslims’ nemesis, George W. Bush, might become the American president. Mohammed al-Asaadi, the Yemeni newspaper editor and activist, happened to be in Maryland in 2007 at an American Federation of Teachers gathering when AFT officials introduced him to the stumping Obama. The two men chatted for a few minutes, and Asaadi was struck by the candidate’s knowledge of Yemen, then not at the top of the news. Obama asked him about the conflict with the Houthis, the Shiite rebels involved in a slow-burning insurgency near the Saudi border. “He asked, literally, ‘How are those rebels doing up there in the north?’ I told him I was shocked he would ask such a specific question. The guy knows Yemen already, which is really good. He asked, ‘How is the situation overall?’ I said, ‘The rebels are in the north and Al Qaeda is in the south and people are sandwiched in between.’ He laughed at that.” Like many Yemenis, Asaadi said, “I had high hopes.”
On election night, at the barricaded American embassy in Sanaa, the affable ambassador, Stephen Seche, hosted a reception for Yemenis. Some of the local guests were in tears, so moved were they by the promise of an Obama presidency.
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A few weeks before that presidency officially began, on December 9, 2008, Obama visited a secure room in the Kluczynski Federal Building in Chicago for his fullest briefing so far on the CIA and its covert action programs, notably the drone program. A SCIF, or sensitive compartmented information facility, has to be eavesdropping-proof, and this one was a cramped, windowless room in the Mies van der Rohe skyscraper. There was a media frenzy in the city that day: the pugnacious Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, had just been arrested on corruption charges. But Obama’s focus was far from the Chicago political scene where he had gotten his start.
On one side of the table were Obama, vice president-elect Joe Biden, retired general Jim Jones, who would be Obama’s national security adviser, and two security aides to Obama and Biden, Mark Lippert and Tony Blinken. On the other side were Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, and Michael Hayden, the CIA director, and aides to both men. Starting when he became the Democratic nominee, Obama had received limited intelligence briefings. But as president-elect he was now being let in on the most sensitive secrets of all, the CIA’s covert action programs. Hayden led Obama through some of the CIA programs that
he had repeatedly blasted on the campaign trail: secret detention and brutal interrogation for Al Qaeda suspects. Waterboarding and the harshest of the rest of the methods that had so stained the United States’ reputation had been dropped, but the CIA program still officially existed. Hayden laid out its purpose and limits, trying once again to defend it: fewer than one hundred prisoners had passed through the secret black sites, he said; just one-third had been subjected to any kind of “enhanced” interrogation methods; and just three had been waterboarded. (Evidence would later surface that more than one hundred prisoners had been held at the black sites and that waterboarding had in fact been used on more than three prisoners.) Obama asked about the six “enhanced interrogation techniques” that were still authorized, and Hayden demonstrated them on David Shedd, a deputy to McConnell who played the captive terrorist: facial slap, belly slap, facial hold, attention grasp, dietary manipulation, and sleep deprivation. Obama’s stony stare and lack of questions suggested what would soon become clear: he was already determined to shut the program down. But Biden, more loquacious, engaged in some dueling with Hayden, asserting that the CIA’s rendition program had deliberately sent prisoners to other countries “to be roughed up,” a charge Hayden denied.