The Lawfare Podcast: Charlie Savage on the Power Wars of the Obama Administration

The Lawfare Podcast

The Lawfare Institute

History, Military, International Relations, Government, Constitutional Law, News, International Law, Current Events, Politics, Rule Of Law, Law, Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, National Security, Intelligence, Terrorism

4.7 • 6.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 November 2015

⏱️ 57 minutes

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Summary

At the last Hoover Book Soiree—which if you haven’t attended one yet, you really should—Charlie Savage, New York Times national security reporter and author of the newly released book Power Wars: Inside Obama’s Post-9/11 Presidency, sat down with Lawfare’s Jack Goldsmith for a detailed discussion of the Obama administration’s national security legacy. The conversation, and so too the book, is chocked full of insider accounts of just about all of the most important Obama administration legal and policy decisions. We won't spoil the fun here, but Charlie walks Jack through how Abdulmutallab’s failed underwear bombing affected President Obama, and the two discuss exactly why a president who came into office critiquing Bush's national security policies ended up keeping so many of them. They even touch on whether he will actually shutter Guantanamo Bay.

It’s the Lawfare Podcast Episode #148: Charlie Savage on the Power Wars of the Obama Administration.

You can read Jack's review of Power Wars, mentioned in the podcast, here.

The third Hoover Book Soiree will be held on December 2nd, from 5:00-7:00 pm in Washington D.C. Ben Wittes will interview Edward Lucas of the Economist on his new book, Cyberphobia: Identity, Trust, Security, and the Internet. RSVP.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The following podcast contains advertising.
0:04.0	To access an ad-free version of the LawFair podcast,
0:08.0	become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash law fair.
0:14.0	That's patreon.com slash law fair.
0:18.0	Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings,
0:22.0	rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath.
0:30.0	The Obama administration is an extremely lawyerly administration.
0:35.0	They are extremely interested in the law, which doesn't mean the law dictates every outcome,
0:39.0	military, political, policy, concerns, are also factors,
0:43.0	but it means that they are very predisposed to have been the people who were making the rule of law
0:47.0	critique rather than the civil liberties critique.
0:50.0	And so so much had changed by January of 2009, Congress had passed the Pfizer-Meminist Act,
0:55.0	Congress had passed the Military Commission's Act,
0:57.0	the Pfizer-Cort had approved the pieces of the Stauro-Win program that we don't find out about until Edward Snowden leaks those details.
1:05.0	And from that vantage point, a lot of the problem had already been fixed.
1:09.0	There were still more to fix. They had a little bit more to do. They wanted to wind down things.
1:13.0	They certainly wanted to close the autonomous.
1:15.0	They certainly were not going to have a door open to torture, but it doesn't.
1:20.0	It does mean that when the ACLU says, why are you doing this?
1:24.0	This is acting like Bush. You have a warrantless wiretapping program.
1:27.0	The Obama mindset is, no, it's not having that program that's acting like Bush.
1:32.0	It's violating Pfizer to have that program.
	...

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