Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan said a person suspected of funding al-Qaeda and caught in the Philippines could be considered “part of the battlefield” and subject to indefinite detention without trial, which sounded a lot like Bushian legal theory. Similarly, when new Attorney General Eric Holder was asked if he agreed that a person who “commits to going to war against America” should “be held off the battlefield as long as they’re dangerous,” Holder answered: “I do.”
These answers contained the seeds of the now well-developed theory of borderless existential warfare that drives the belief that any and all means must be employed to stop “enemies of democracy.” We just didn’t notice at the time, because the Obama administration was so expert in applying a new cosmetic face to Cheney’s revolution. Instead of Dubya boasting about smoking trrsts out of their holes, Obama re-cast decisions to institutionalizetools like the “Kill List” as somber exercises of “hard choices.” This was how easy it was to con fans of Obama, like — me. I was one of millions of Americans who thought it meant something that the new president was at least frowning and affecting reluctance about the War on Terror in public appearances, as opposed to Bush’s Slim Pickens-style “Bring it on!” cowboy routine.
Obama also smartly moved away from Bush’s Manichean rambling about good and evil and began emphasizing technocratic terms like “necessity” and “legality” when describing what was now his War on Terror. When his Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta made public comments about drone assassination in 2013, he talked about satisfying “the legal requirements to ensure that we were doing this carefully,” a statement people took seriously, even though the administration essentially invented most of the “legal requirements” surrounding its policies. Holder, for instance, had by then come up with a novel hack of the 5th Amendment guarantee of due process rights, saying “‘due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same,” and “the Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.” In other words, “due process” according to the nation’s top law enforcement official could now be satisfied without the target’s participation, via secret deliberations within the Executive branch about who may and may not be assassinated.
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I would never have had a clue about any of this, except the Twitter Files forced people like Michael Shellenberger, Lee Fang, Paul Thacker and me to search for origins of the weird authoritarian concepts found in the documents. We were repeatedly led to that period between roughly 2010 and 2017, when politicians convinced themselves terrorism was old news and “great power competition” was the new thing. Former Time magazine editor Rick Stengel, the first head of the new counter-messaging agency Barack Obama created by Executive Order in 2016, the Global Engagement Center, was convinced it was all connected, man. This is from Stengel’s bookInformation Wars: