WASHINGTON — For all of his liberal positions on the environment, taxes and health care, President Barack Obama is a hawk when it comes to the war on terror. From deadly drones to secret interrogations to withholding evidence in terror lawsuits, Obama's Democratic White House has followed the path of his predecessor, Republican President George W. Bush. The US detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, remains open, despite Obama's pledge to close it, and his administration has pursued leaks of classified information to reporters even more aggressively than Bush's. "They have maintained momentum in a lot of important areas that we were focused on, and they've continued to build in those areas," said Ken Wainstein, the White House homeland security adviser and a top Justice Department lawyer under Bush. John Brennan's confirmation hearing this week to be CIA director showed just how much Washington — and especially Democrats — has come to accept the same counter terrorism policies that drew such furor in the first years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Obama's embrace of many of Bush's counter-terror policies did not hurt him in his re-election bid last year. However, in a way that Bush did not, Obama has sought congressional approval of laws that he then uses as the basis of many of the counter-terror policies he has carried over from his Republican predecessor. He successfully lobbied Congress three times to renew the controversial USA Patriot Act, the 2001 law that lets the government put roving wiretaps on US citizens' phones with a secret court order and obtain other personal and financial records with no judicial approval at all. But Congress has grown increasingly uneasy with at least some of the authorities. Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee of California, a staunch Obama supporter, calls the military force law "overly broad" and has been seeking to overturn it for years. Lee is among the dovish Democrats who also are displeased with Obama's decisions to surge US troops to Afghanistan in 2009 and lead NATO military airstrikes at the height of the Libyan crisis in 2011. But, in a testament to his case-by-case deliberations on foreign policy and national security, Obama refused to similarly intervene or arm rebels in Syria and opposes a near-term military strike on Iran. He also ended the US war in Iraq by withdrawing all Americans troops by the end of 2011 as promised. Still, Obama's hawkish counter-terror bona fides are undeniable. The Determined to not bring any terror detainees to Guantanamo Bay, the government has begun interrogating suspects on Navy warships before they are given a chance to speak to a lawyer. The information gleaned from those interrogations is not allowed to be used in court but it can be used to pursue others. And the FBI can later question the terror suspects. The Obama administration also has fought for, and won, the right to withhold evidence in terror lawsuits that it says could threaten US security. The use of the so-called state secrets privilege gives the president limitless power to keep information from becoming public and hampers court oversight in cases that could be embarrassing to the government. Critics say Obama's use of the state secrets privilege represents a surprising reversal by the constitutional lawyer-turned-president and threatens American civil liberties. More than any other president in US history, Obama has invoked the Espionage Act to prosecute government officials accused of leaking classified information to reporters. His administration has used the law six times in leak investigations since 2009 — compared with three since it was enacted in 1917. “There has been a disturbing amount of continuity between this administration and the former one,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center Justice's Liberty and National Security Program. The center is a civil liberties program at the New York University law school. She noted that some of the most powerful players in Obama's national security circle were holdovers from Bush's administration. In his closing remarks at Thursday's hearing, Brennan somewhat emotionally described himself as someone who is neither Republican nor Democrat — but "who really understands that the value of intelligence, the importance of this intelligence, is not to tell the president what he wants to hear, not to tell this committee what it wants to hear, but to tell the policymakers, the congressional overseers what they need to hear." "It would be my intention to make sure I did everything possible to live up to the trust, confidence that this Congress, this Senate and this president might place in me," Brennan said. — AP
