Global Security Newswire

On Sept. 11, 2001, George W. Bush took America to war. On Jan. 20, 2009, Barack Obama took the helm of a war-weary nation. The armed forces are worn down by repeated deployments and more than 4,800 deaths. Law enforcement is frazzled by seven years in which the Homeland Security Department's color-coded level of alert has never dropped below "yellow: elevated: a significant risk of terrorist attacks."

As the recession crimps federal, state, and local budgets, no level of government can stay on a war footing forever. So, without letting security slide, President Obama must somehow convert his predecessor's "global war on terror" into a routine, sustainable function of governance.

"One of the downsides of using the term 'war' is that we see war as a finite undertaking with a beginning and an end," said Brian Michael Jenkins, a senior adviser at the RAND think tank. "The reality is, in some form, we are going to be dealing with this for the foreseeable future."

The challenge is defining that new normal. How far will Obama roll back the extraordinary powers of surveillance, secrecy, and detention that Bush claimed? Which of the many weak, ill-coordinated civilian agencies will step up to fill the gaps as an overbearing but now overburdened Defense Department steps back? And how will the balance shift between federal efforts that have concentrated strictly on counterterrorism and state and local efforts that prefer incorporating counterterrorism into an "all-crimes, all-hazards" approach to public safety? Not all of Obama's answers are as obvious as simply doing the opposite of what Bush did -- and some of his policies may be inconsistent with the lofty promises of his campaign.

Surveillance and Torture

On Jan. 11, Obama offered praise for, of all people, outgoing Vice President Dick Cheney -- and on counterterrorism, of all topics. In a lengthy discussion on ABC's This Week, host George Stephanopoulos played a clip from an earlier interview, in which Cheney advised the Obama team, "Before you start to implement your campaign rhetoric, you need to sit down and find out precisely what it is we did and how we did it, because it is going to be vital to keeping the nation safe and secure in the years ahead, and it would be a tragedy if [the Obama administration] threw over those policies simply because they've campaigned against them."

Obama told Stephanopoulos, "I think that was pretty good advice. ... I've got no quibble with that particular quote." Obama added, though, "If Vice President Cheney were here, he and I would have some significant disagreements." But, much like the decision to invade Iraq, many once-contentious questions are now moot.

Candidate Obama chastised Bush for authorizing electronic surveillance of U.S. citizens without warrants. But Senator Obama eventually voted for changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that gave legal sanction to much of what the Bush administration had been doing outside the law. The CIA has abandoned some of the most controversial interrogation tactics such as waterboarding -- essentially, half-drowning -- that it used against detainees. Yet human-rights groups and their allies are pressuring Obama to issue an immediate executive order explicitly defining waterboarding as torture and forbidding its use.

So emotional are these issues that Obama's top campaign adviser on counterterrorism, John Brennan, withdrew his name from consideration for CIA director after an uproar from the Left that he had not sufficiently distanced himself from Bush policies on torture and surveillance. Brennan will instead land at the National Security Council as a powerful senior adviser, and thus avoid Senate confirmation.

In splitting the difference on Brennan -- backing off on a high-profile post but keeping him on the team -- Obama has perhaps shown the limits of what he will do to appease the liberal base that made him a national figure. One of the most popular questions on Obama's Change.gov website has been whether he would appoint a special prosecutor or other independent investigator to look into Bush-era spying on Americans, torturing of foreigners, and other reported abuses. When Stephanopoulos pressed this point, Obama showed that he wants to close the book on the past instead of throwing it at Bush officials.

"We're still evaluating how we're going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth," Obama said. "That doesn't mean that if somebody has blatantly broken the law, that they are above the law. ... But my general belief is that when it comes to national security, what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past."

Slow-Rolling Guantanamo

No one word better sums up the bitterness over the Bush administration's approach to counterterrorism than "Guantanamo." The prison for suspected terrorists improvised on the grounds of the U.S. naval base leased from Cuba has become a global monument to the violation of human rights.

After taking office, Obama swiftly reversed Bush administration policies on detainees at Guantanamo and in CIA custody. One of his first official acts on Jan. 20 was to suspend the military tribunals at Guantanamo. Two days later, surrounded by retired military officers, he signed executive orders ending the CIA's secret prisons and "enhanced" interrogation techniques; bringing all detainee policies into compliance with international treaties; creating an interagency review of all remaining detainees; and closing Guantanamo within one year. "We are not," Obama said, "going to continue with a false choice between our safety and our ideals."

But if Guantanamo were easy to close, it would be gone by now. More than two years ago, in June 2006, none other than George W. Bush declared he wanted to shutter the prison but had no alternative place to put some "darn dangerous" men. Obama admitted the problem in his interview with Stephanopoulos, saying that any new approach to detainees must adhere to the "basic principles of the Anglo-American legal system, but doing it in a way that doesn't result in releasing people who are intent on blowing us up."

A concerted diplomatic and legal effort can reduce, though not erase, Guantanamo's population of about 250 detainees. The Bush administration's efforts to repatriate prisoners were stymied by a distinct lack of global goodwill and an inability to reach agreements with other countries about how great a threat particular detainees posed. Obama will need to leverage his star power into pressuring allies to find ways to resettle not only their own nationals but also third-country citizens at risk of torture by their own governments.

"For many detainees, we need to be moving the bar for where, under what conditions, we would transfer somebody home," said Matthew Waxman, a Columbia University Law School associate professor who worked on detainee issues at the National Security Council and in the Defense and State departments. "We may need to be willing to accept some risk and to push more of the risk-mitigation responsibility onto coalition partners."

For detainees against whom we have solid evidence, Obama has indicated he wants the federal courts to replace Bush's discredited military tribunals. And for a handful of hard-core prisoners who may be impossible to charge -- because, for example, they were tortured by American hands--the new administration still has to decide what to do.

Demilitarizing Counterterrorism

One of Bush's first acts as president was to abolish the elaborate apparatus of interagency coordination that the Clinton administration set up during eight years of often painful trial and error. After Sept. 11 -- with an ineffective system of coordination led by a weak national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice -- Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and their aides amassed unprecedented power over foreign policy, intelligence, and covert operations. Together, they ran the "global war on terror" as just that, a war.

Obama initially rose to fame for his denunciation of that war-making strategy in Iraq. Now he has chosen not only to appoint a powerful secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, but also to retain Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has actively fought for more money for the State Department. At the helm of the National Security Council is not an academic like Rice but a former four-star general, James Jones, who commanded both the Marine Corps and NATO forces in Europe.

"A strong NSC would be able to coordinate [policy]," said Ron Marks, a former CIA and Hill staffer. "A lot of this is going to be up to Jones and John" -- that is, John Brennan, the veteran CIA operative who will be Jones's deputy for counterterrorism at the NSC.

In a March 2008 interview with NationalJournal.com, Brennan called for a new approach to counterterrorism: "Since 9/11, understandably, we've been focused downstream, on those terrorists who might be in our midst or trying to kill us," he said. "[But] there needs to be much more attention paid to those upstream factors and conditions that spawn terrorists."

The problem is, there is no civilian agency with the money, personnel, or institutional heft to do "upstream" what the FBI and Pentagon have done "downstream." Congress tried to reorganize its way out of the problem, but its intended coordinators -- the Homeland Security Department in 2002, the national intelligence director in 2004 -- remain weak players in interagency turf wars. And despite efforts by Bush's first, much-steamrolled secretary of state, Colin Powell, to rebuild his department, State remains not only understaffed but also a house divided where Foreign Service diplomats feud with USAID workers. The military had to fill slots allocated for civilian State and USAID personnel on provincial reconstruction teams in Iraq because State just didn't have enough people.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration repeatedly gave public diplomacy short shrift. "For public diplomacy, the entire budget [per year] is what we spend in a month in Iraq," said Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert at Georgetown University. "We've been very successful in the short term in killing and capturing [terrorists]. Where we've been more remiss is in breaking the cycle of recruitment and regeneration that sustains these groups and ensures we're going to be fighting for a decade to come."

The Fusion Centers

Abroad, Bush emphasized military action -- intended to be short, sharp strikes -- instead of a multifront, long-term, interagency campaign. At home, Bush emphasized federal efforts, narrowly focused on counterterrorism, over the broader public safety agenda preferred by state and local government.

Understandably afraid that Congress would milk "homeland security" as a perpetual source of pork, Bush officials fought to keep grant money tied tightly to urgent improvements in counterterrorism. They went so far as to cut general-purpose grants for local agencies, such as the popular "COPS" program, passed under Clinton to hire 100,000 local police; at the same time they added money to more-targeted grants that explicitly forbade recipients to use the money for personnel.

So, around the country, police and fire departments binged on mobile command posts and chemical-warfare suits -- but they had to strip people from day-to-day public safety duties to cover their new homeland-security responsibilities. As seven years passed with numerous alerts but no attacks, and as the economy began to crumble, pressure has grown to shift ever-scarcer resources back from counterterrorism to everyday needs.

"The grant programs have always been so short-term and so sporadic that it just drives the chiefs crazy," said Richard Cashdollar, a senior adviser on homeland security to the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which represents 63 big-city police departments.

The focus of this fiscal tug-of-war are the so-called intelligence "fusion centers" that have sprung up in most major cities and in every state. "The thing about fusion centers is that everybody is at the table: military, federal, state agencies, local sheriffs, and police departments," explained David Huffman, sheriff of Catawba County, N.C., and chairman of the homeland-security committee of the National Sheriffs' Association. So successful is this information-sharing model that the Israelis -- the world's most practiced terrorist fighters -- invited Huffman to Jerusalem to explain it. "I got a call back about six months later," he said, "and they had set up a fusion center in Jerusalem."

Back in the United States, however, where terrorist threats are not a daily occurrence, the dilemma is whether fusion centers should handle information about other kinds of criminal activity as well, such as gangs and drug rings. The feds have fought to keep the centers focused on counterterrorism. State and local officials argue for an "all-crimes" approach. "It's just real hard for a local community or even a big city to sustain the costs of these facilities long-term," Cashdollar said. "It's good to be able to show the local community that they are getting value for investment in these centers on a day-to-day basis." Besides, he added, it is often routine investigations that turn up terrorist cells, such as the Hezbollah fundraisers busted in North Carolina for smuggling cigarettes -- or fail to, as when Florida sheriff's deputies picked up Sept. 11 architect Mohamed Atta for driving without a license and then, unaware that his name was on a federal watch list, let him go.

So far, state and local officials are optimistic about Obama, whose staff went out of its way to listen to them during both the campaign and the transition. "They repeatedly called back," said Trina Sheets, executive director of the National Emergency Management Association, adding that some draft policy documents from the Obama team "were a direct reflection of [our] recommendations."

Here, as elsewhere, Obama faces high expectations. His challenge will be to preserve the essential tools of counterterrorism developed during the Bush administration's "war" and wrap them into a new, sustainable framework of permanent vigilance.