The dark side of Obama’s legacy

August 07, 2016 12:17 am | Updated December 04, 2021 11:07 pm IST

Facing the prospect of choosing as their leader either a vile, xenophobic racist or a qualified politician with trust deficit, the U.S. is at present infused with a miasma of wistfulness, despair and fear. The popular consensus is that Americans are going to miss President Barack Obama once he leaves the White House, and perhaps fuelled by nostalgia and gloom, most of the commentary in the mainstream press has drawn a positive picture of the Obama years. Obama, however, will go down in history as one of the most violent U.S. commanders-in-chief ever.

This aspect of the legacy of America’s first African-American President would have been lost amidst all the ballyhooing had it not been for journalist Jeremy Scahill. Scahill has been one of the few voices in the American media who has relentlessly written on U.S. government militarism.

l In his first book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army , Scahill explored the increasing privatisation of the U.S. national security and military apparatus after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the important role played by Blackwater in that regard. The picture Scahill painted was one of a corporation, with ties to neocons, profiting from a conflict that was started by a Republican President on the flimsiest of grounds.

l But it was not as terrifying as what he brought to light with his two subsequent books. In Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield , Scahill traced the evolution of U.S. counterterrorism policy and how Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney slowly consolidated executive power post-9/11 so that the Bush administration could have greater leeway to fight wars.

So, what did the professor of constitutional law, who rode a wave of hope straight to the Oval Office, do? While on the campaign trail in 2008, Obama promised to reverse Bush-era counterterrorism policies, but once in office, he expanded the country’s covert ops infrastructure that would allow it to act unilaterally across the globe without any accountability. However, his weapon of choice was weaponised drones, not humans. Scahill and his colleagues on ‘The Intercept’ website used documents provided by an anonymous whistle-blower to show how the programme — which involves a secret procedure that sentences people to death without any due process — actually works.

l The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program contains some additional reporting along with the original pieces of powerful journalism that laid bare how the U.S. lost whatever little of its moral standing it still possessed.

sattwick.b@thehindu.co.in

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