![]() That was an extremely dangerous argument, and one that the courts ultimately rejected. Their argument was that the president gets to decide what our national-security policies are, and if Congress has legislated in the area of national security, the president has the authority as commander in chief to ignore that legislation. The Bush administration argued that the president had the authority to ignore statutory law with respect to surveillance, interrogation, and torture. They also abandoned, or at least downplayed, arguments relating to the president’s authority as commander in chief. They deserve credit for the transparency decisions they made very early on in 2009 relating to the interrogation of prisoners. They deserve credit for the disavowal of torture, the shuttering of the CIA’s black sites, and the commitment to close Guantanamo and the significant progress they made toward that goal. Jameel Jaffer: The administration has a mixed record. It’s broad, but how well do you think this claim holds up? Here’s the first: His administration “put the fight against terrorism on a firm legal footing.” That’s kind of hard to parse, but seems to be a reference to policies put in place during the Bush administration. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.Įmma Green: Let’s go through each of Obama’s claims. Jaffer currently leads the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and is an executive editor for the blog Just Security. Now, Trump will inherit the “firm legal footing” Obama helped created.ĭuring his time at the ACLU, Jaffer led litigation against the Obama administration on a number of national-security and transparency issues, and he recently wrote a book on the legal memos that enabled the administration’s policy on drone strikes. But in doing so, he also gave his policies, many of which were extensions of the Bush era, a sense of permanence and legitimacy. It may be true that Obama worked to create a sound legal basis for his administration’s national-security and surveillance policies, Jaffer said. It is not yet clear what Trump’s policies on these issues will be, although his comments on the campaign trail suggest he supports the use of torture, keeping Guantanamo Bay open, and surveilling mosques and certain American citizens, among other things.īut anything Trump does will be built on legal “infrastructure” created by the Obama administration, argues Jameel Jaffer, the former deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Surveillance, indefinite detention, counterterrorism, and torture have emerged as prominent issues during the Senate hearings about Donald Trump’s administration picks. ![]() He argued that protecting the American “way of life” means “ against a weakening of the values that make us who we are,” highlighting his administration’s work “to put the fight against terrorism on a firm legal footing.” He went on: “That’s why we’ve ended torture, worked to close Gitmo, and reform our laws governing surveillance to protect privacy and civil liberties.” He used forms of the word “democracy” 27 times. Offering a clear message to his successor, he spoke about the importance of civil liberties and rejecting discrimination against Muslims. President Obama’s farewell speech was an exercise in marking norms. ![]()
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