Abstract
Just over two years into the Obama administration, what have been its achievements in relation to the abuses formerly committed by the Bush administration under the rubric of the ‘war on terror’? On his first full day in office, Obama, a former scholar of constitutional law, signed an order to close Guantánamo within one year. However, as the record of the past two years examined here shows, that early promise has not been fulfilled. Instead, the ‘global war on terror’ has continued to be prosecuted by his administration, and, in some areas, the extension of executive power, in apparent defiance of the US Constitution, has gone even further.
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References
1.Jonathan Turley, ‘Obama administration claims right to kill Americans suspected of terrorism’ (2 February 2010), available at: http://www.jonathanturley.org .
2.Nancy Murray, ‘Profiling in the age of total information awareness’, Race & Class (Vol. 52, no. 2, October 2010), pp. 3–24 .
3.Dana Priest and William Arkin, ‘A hidden world, growing beyond control’, Washington Post (18 July 2010). The Post ’s ‘Top Secret America’ investigative series is available at: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/ .
4.Coleen Rowley, ‘We’re conflating proper dissent and terrorism’, Star Tribune (15 January 2011) .
5.Jane Mayer, ‘The secret sharer: is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state?’, New Yorker (23 May 2011) .
6.Ibid., p. 48 .