Today is Inauguration Day and the nation welcomes Barack Obama to four more years as President of the United States. The seminal event, according to the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, is a celebration of the peaceful transfer of power with the 2013 inaugural theme billed as “Faith in America's Future.” With the exception of a few protesters here and there, President Obama will peacefully enter his second term as president to rebuild America.
It has been reported
that President Obama will take his Oath of Office by swearing over
the Lincoln Bible as well as a Bible owned by Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr. The symbolic nature of the gesture undoubtedly leads many to
hope that a second Obama term will follow in King's legacy of
fighting for equality, freedom and social change.
Considering the past four years, it's questionable that the staunchly anti-war Dr. King – who once famously said that "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death" – would approve.
The continuation of the
war on terror – drone strikes, policies of indefinite detention,
prosecution of whistleblowers, targeted assassinations – is a
troubling legacy for the Nobel Peace Prize winning president. And,
looking at the trends from Obama's first term as the war on terror
wages on, what will the future look like?
Repeated promises to
close the prison at Guantánamo
– where over half of the 166 remaining prisoners have been cleared
for release by the Obama administration's Guantánamo Review Task
Force – are left unfulfilled. Since the signing of a 2009
executive order on Obama's first day of office that promised to close
the prison within one year, 66 men have been released
from the prison. Only five men have been released in the past two
years thanks to the passage of the National
Defense Authorization Act, which authorizes
$633 billion for military expenditures, contains provisions that ban
the use of funds for closing the prison. In spite of threatening a
veto due to the ban of prisoner transfers out of Guantánamo to other
facilities, Obama again signed the NDAA into law on January 3, 2013.
In a signing statement
issued by the White House, Obama said, “I
continue to believe that operating the facility weakens our national
security by wasting resources, damaging our relationships with key
allies and strengthening our enemies.”
It
costs approximately $133 million a year to run the prison – a cost
of nearly $850,000 per prisoner per year. To house an inmate in
federal prison costs about $33,000 a year but Congress has continued
to oppose efforts to close Guantánamo and Obama has largely allowed
Congress to direct the future of the prison.
The scope of indefinite
detention was further expanded by the passage of the NDAA. First
appearing the the 2012 NDAA and again in the 2013 NDAA are
police-state
provisions that allow for the military to
indefinitely detain U.S. citizens — on U.S. soil — without charge
or trial. While the practice of being held without charge, trial, or
recourse to challenge one's imprisonment raises clear constitutional
concerns for even amateur legal thinkers, the Obama administration
continues to litigate against challenges to the NDAA provisions.
While Obama has signed
into law new
protections for federal whistleblowers who
report on waste, fraud or abuse, when it comes to matters of national
security the Obama administration has prosecuted
more whistleblowers under the Espionage
Act that all previous presidents combined.
And in Afghanistan,
three times as many U.S. troops have been killed
since Obama took over as commander-in-chief than under Bush – and
in a quarter of the time. The president has promised massive troop
withdrawals by 2014 to wind down the war – or at least U.S.
military involvement in it, but options
remain to leave as many as 20,000 troops in Afghanistan after the
NATO mission ends in 2014. The White House has also suggested total
withdrawal of troops. Time will tell if this promise proves to be
true.
The Iraq troop
withdrawal, overseen by Obama, drastically cut-back on U.S. personnel
in Iraq but the State Department continues to operate, at $6 billion
a year, the largest, most expensive embassy
in the world in Baghdad. Is this the fate Afghanistan can expect?
In a recent meeting
between Obama and Hamid Karzai, it became clear that the U.S. will
continue to have an influential presence in Afghanistan in providing
military aid and hardware – including drones.
With the appointments
of John Kerry, Chuck Hagel, and John Brennan to key posts for foreign
policy and national security decisions – all of whom were staunch
supporters of the war in Iraq and then changed positions – is Obama
signaling to expect more of the same in the war on terror? Brennan,
in particular, was instrumentally involved
in Bush-era torture policies, amping up the drone programs, and in
compiling the kill lists.
All of this, along with
the recent interventions in Libya
and, now, Mali,
and the continued operations
in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan suggests we are in a global state of
permanent war. In contemplating a new American future – under the
leadership of President Obama for four more years – what can we
hope for from the so-called anti-war president at the helm of this
endless
war on terror?
If Dr. King were alive,
surely his voice would be among those pleading to end
the war on terror and dismantle its framework.
Bringing to an end more than a decade of war and slowing an
entrenched national security apparatus will, no doubt, take some time
and bold leadership. Can we really expect President Obama to lead us
to that future?
