Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Too much like Bush: The fall of Greg Craig and the rise of Rahm Emanuel's Obama


Yesterday, quoting Andrew Sullivan, I noted that I remain bullish on Obama -- though I also noted my own rather significant reservations.

Well, those reservations deepened when I read Time's excellent piece on the fall of Greg Craig, Obama's ex-counsel. Craig, a Clintonite turned Obama advisor, was the man tasked with undoing the dark side of Bush's war on terror, including torture and Gitmo. At first, he and Obama were pretty much on the same side. In time, with partisan politics trumping principle, Obama moved away from some of the commitments he made during the campaign and sided increasingly with Rahm Emanuel and his political, as opposed to legal, advisors. Here's a key passage:

Obama needed to regain control quickly, and he started by jettisoning liberal positions he had been prepared to accept — and had even okayed — just weeks earlier. First to go was the release of the pictures of detainee abuse. Days later, Obama sided against Craig again, ending the suspension of Bush's extrajudicial military commissions. The following week, Obama pre-empted an ongoing debate among his national-security team and embraced one of the most controversial of Bush's positions: the holding of detainees without charges or trial, something he had promised during the campaign to reject.

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