[Rebecca Roberts:] On the eve of his inauguration almost a year ago, three of President-elect Barack Obama's advisers shared some startling news. There was credible evidence that a group of extremists planned to cross the Canadian border and stage a terrorist attack on Inauguration Day. Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, writes about that incident in the forthcoming issue of The Times magazine. He also takes a close look at how the Obama administration has waged its war on terror as compared to policy under President George W. Bush. In just a minute, we'll speak with Peter Baker. If you have a question for him about the war on terror under President Obama, our number is 800-989-8255. Our email address is talk@npr.org. And you can join the conversation at our Web site. Go to npr.org and click on TALK OF THE NATION. You can also find a link to Peter Baker's piece, "Inside Obama's War on Terrorism." Peter Baker joins us now from a studio here in Washington. Welcome back to TALK OF THE NATION.
[Mr. Peter Baker:] Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
[Rebecca Roberts:] So let's start where you start in the magazine piece, with that scene the night before President Obama's inauguration. What happened?
[Mr. Peter Baker:] Well, the president-elect was getting ready to leave Blair House, where he was staying during the transition, to go to a bipartisan dinner at the Washington Hilton. And he was getting into his limousine and three advisers join him for the ride: John Brennan, who we've all seen now a lot in the last two weeks, who would become his chief counterterrorism adviser, and Denis McDonough and Mark Lippert, who are his foreign policy advisers, and they were out of breath because they have been running across the city. They couldn't find a cab in this sort of pre-inaugural craziness that Washington was enveloped at the time. And they wanted to brief him on the ride to his next event, to tell him the latest about a plot that the intelligence agencies of the United States had detected to potentially disrupt and attack the inauguration itself the next day. And I found it a really interesting moment because here is the first president to be sworn into office, to take over the White House in the post 911 sort of age of terrorism. And even as he's doing that, even at the very birth of his presidency, you know, terrorism or the threat of terrorism is sort of shadowing, you know, even that moment of celebration and jubilation.
[Rebecca Roberts:] Well, also there's all the logistical questions about who is responsible. Is it the transition team? Is it the outgoing administration? I mean, do you have any sense of who knew what when?
[Mr. Peter Baker:] Well, it was one of those remarkable moments of collaboration between the Bush team and the Obama team. For all of the partisan, you know, back and forth that we've seen over this last year and we had seen during that election, the Bush team and the Obama team got along pretty well. And, in fact, they met in the Situation Room in this same timeframe in the hours and days leading up to the inauguration. One side of the room was Obama's team: Hillary Clinton and Jim Jones, the national security adviser, on the other side was the outgoing team, Condoleezza Rice, Steve Hadley, and all of those guys talking together about what it means to take over White House at this moment, talking about this plot in particular. What would happen if these reports were true? In fact, Hillary Clinton, you know, ever the political figure, put her finger right on the point of it: What are we going to do if a bomb goes off some place on the mall in Washington? Is the Secret Service simply going to whisk Barack Obama off the stage? That's the first thing that people are going to see of their new president? She said, I don't think so. She understood that even beyond the specifics of an attack, just that very symbolism of a new president being, you know, whisked off the stage would be a devastating symbol to the rest of the world.
[Rebecca Roberts:] And so, what ultimately happened with that threat and how did the incoming administration choose to respond?
[Mr. Peter Baker:] Well, ultimately, it turned out to be what they call a poisoned pen. I mean, they went out and did a lot of rounding up of people and talking to people and checking all of the intelligent traps that they can do. And what they concluded was that it was what they call a poisoned pen, where one group of radicals understands that a rival group in this case, if Somalis were supposedly going to be in the United States and sort of rats them out, puts out bad information out there in the hopes that the Americans will end up, you know, rounding them up. So, you know, that, too, is a lesson for any new president who's taking over in the murky world of terrorism today. One of the biggest challenges for any president, any government, is figuring out what's real and what's not, what's a genuine threat and what's sort of vapors in the wind. And we've seen that again in the last two weeks in which we've reexamined how we missed the signs leading up to the attempted attack by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on the Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day.
[Rebecca Roberts:] And in addition to all the symbolism of this being on the eve of the Inauguration, all of that, do you have a sense that it became clear to the president-elect that this was now his responsibility? Not only was it him and his family at risk, but he was where the buck stopped.
[Mr. Peter Baker:] Right. Absolutely. Look, it's one thing to intellectually process this idea of terrorism unless you process the idea of being president. But until the moment you're actually in charge, I just don't think it's the same thing. And David Axelrod, who's his senior advisor, told me that the president-elect actually cancelled a practice session for the Inaugural speech the day before the ceremony, and that later, when he that is, David Axelrod learned about this inaugural plot, he, in his mind figured that that must have been due to President-elect Obama thinking about this potential disruption of the Inauguration and what it would mean. And he says, look, it's a very sobering moment. You can understand it all you want coming in, but when it's actually on your shoulders, the responsibility for security of the whole country, that's a very sobering thing.
[Rebecca Roberts:] Then-candidate Barack Obama on the campaign trail used a lot of rhetoric about how he would wage the war on terror differently and how he would change some of what he called the excesses of the Bush administration. What is your sense of how that view was implemented once he became the actual president?
[Mr. Peter Baker:] Sure. I mean, in a lot of ways, Barack Obama ran against the first term of President Bush's administration, but inherited the second term. You know, the war on terror, if we use that phrase, a phrase the president doesn't like, evolved quite significantly from the initial days after 911 through the end of President Bush's administration. By the end of his tenure, by the time he's turning over the reins to President Obama, President Bush, under pressure from the Supreme Court, from Congress, from media disclosures, had already begun to moderate a lot of the things that had been controversial. I mean, we talk a lot about waterboarding, but that hadn't actually been done in several years. You know, there had been the warrantless eavesdropping, surveillance on calls between the United States and foreign countries. Well, that was done in secret, without the consent of Congress. By the time President Bush left, they had worked out a deal with Congress to ratify that and bring everybody on board, including Barack Obama. So when he took over, President Obama found a counterterrorism program and strategy that was much closer to what he could embrace than what he ran against, in effect. And he's continued the evolution that had taken place in the second Bush term. He's continued to shave off some of what he sees as the extremes of the Bush program. But he's also kept a lot of the basics in place. And, in fact, in some cases, like the drone strikes in the Pakistani tribal areas, he's even expanded on it.
[Rebecca Roberts:] Well, you actually quote an expert from the Heritage Foundation in your piece who says that really, this administration and the Bush administration aren't all that different.
[Mr. Peter Baker:] Yeah. He said it's not just Bush light. It's actually Bush. Now, that's not to say that there aren't differences. There are. And there are some decisions that President Obama has made that have been quite controversial, particularly among the conservatives who served in some of the in the Bush administration, particularly, obviously, the Cheney camp. That would be, in particular, the decision to reinvestigate some of the abuses, alleged abuses by CIA officers in interrogating terror suspects a number of years back and the decision to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of 911, to New York to face trial in a civilian court, as opposed to a military commission. But aside from these sort of very big and obviously, there are big differences about Guantanamo, although if you remember correctly, President Bush himself had made it a goal to close Guantanamo. He simply wasn't able to accomplish it in his administration, did release around 500 release or transfer around 500 Guantanamo detainees in the effort to get to a place where Guantanamo might not be needed. So there is more continuity there than some people might like to describe it. At the same time, there's important differences, as well.
[Rebecca Roberts:] Well, let's turn this out to our callers. Do you see differences between the Obama administration's policies in the war on terror and the Bush administration's policies? 800-989-8255 is our phone number. Our email is talk@npr.org. My guest is Peter Baker. He's a White House correspondent for the New York Times. And his New York Times Magazine article, which is upcoming, is called "Inside Obama's War on Terrorism." We have an email from Timothy, who says: Is there any credence to Mr. Cheney's claims that we are less safe under President Obama's watch? Has the intelligence community, in fact, gotten worse?
[Mr. Peter Baker:] Well, you know, that's going to be something we're going to debate for a long time: Are we less safe? I mean, you know, what President Obama would say is that there doesn't have to be a choice between security and maintaining civil liberties and that the things he has done to change the Bush program have not been a big change in terms of endangering the country. He says he'll do what he has to do to protect the country. At the same time, he has said to the intelligence community, look. Some of the things I'm doing here may make your job a little harder, and that's going to have to be the case because we don't follow the same practices and standards that our enemies do, and that we do have to live up to what we consider to be American values. And what Vice President Cheney is talking about, of course, are some of these big issues that do divide this administration from the last one, particularly the idea of enemy combatants versus civilian trials and interrogation. But when Vice President Cheney talks about interrogations again, I mean, the harshest of these techniques that we often debate hadn't actually been used in the last few years. And President Bush himself had closed down or at least emptied the secret overseas CIA prisons, and so forth. So there had been an evolution in both the Bush administration handling of things and the nature and circumstances of the ongoing war on al-Qaida.
[Rebecca Roberts:] You mentioned that the president doesn't like the term the war on terror. How important are those rhetorical changes, do you think?
[Mr. Peter Baker:] Well, I think, that they are important. I mean, they're just language, obviously, just semantics, in some ways, in sort of a silly argument. But, you know, they end up being code for bigger things. President Obama doesn't like the phrase war on terror because he says terror is a tactic, not an enemy. He uses the phrase war on al-Qaida. That lends, you know, ammunition to those who say it. It means he doesn't really take it seriously enough. He doesn't really think we're at war, that he thinks of it as a law enforcement problem, something that he denies, you know, vigorously and he does use the war he does use the word war. He doesn't use the words war on terror. So we get into these sort of linguistic differences, but they're code words, I think, for these broader issues. And I think that a lot of what the complaints about President Obama are have less to do with some of he specific policy decisions he's made and more about people's sense of who he is, you know? Whereas President Bush was sort of a visceral fellow, a from-the-gut leader, as he liked to put it, had a certain Texas bravado and swagger to him, a certain robustness, favoring action and resolute behavior leadership, as he would put it. You have President Obama, who is a more of a cool, cerebral leader, somebody who doesn't seem to get very hot in public sessions, at least and therefore people look at that and say, well, does that mean he really understands that we're at war? And what he and his defenders would say is, yes, of course, we can understand that. It doesn't mean we have to give in to emotionalism, and that doesn't mean that we can't be smart about the way we fight this war.
[Rebecca Roberts:] You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. Going through your piece, you quote people who see President Obama's policy as a continuation of the Bush administration, as Bush light, as potentially dangerous, as finding a balance between civil liberties and security. How come so many people look at the same thing and come across with such different impressions?
[Mr. Peter Baker:] It is a Rorschach test, isn't it? I mean, here's a president who's being denounced on the one side by Vice President Cheney for being weak on terror, and denounced on the other side by the ACLU for being, you know, the second incarnation of Bush. And it's because it is a tough issue. And it does involve a mixture of policy issues and stylistic issues and, you know, rhetoric and tone, all of which lend different impressions. And, you know, President Obama has made a point of talking, you know, in Cairo, for instance, in the Muslim world, you know, setting a new stage, intending to try to undermine what he sees as some of the ingredients that fuel extremism. And, you know, the truth is, President Bush did some of that, as well, but President Obama has a different identity, has a different posture in which he can communicate with the outside world in a way that, by the time he left office, President Bush couldn't. So, you know, a lot of is just tonal. A lot of it are important differences in terms of this policies that people focus on. The ACLU is focused on, for instance, the fact that President Obama has agreed to continue to hold at least some of these terrorists suspects at Guantanamo without trial, without charge, something that, you know, he President Obama himself had objected to prior to becoming president, you know, whereas Vice President Cheney is focused on decisions that went the other direction.
[Rebecca Roberts:] How do you think the thwarted attack on Christmas Day has changed this decision?
[Mr. Peter Baker:] I think it has. I think, that, you know, you saw in the first year all the way up to Christmas, you know, President Obama didn't speak in public a lot about terrorism. He gave some talks from time to time, but it clearly wasn't defining issue. He doesn't want this to consume his presidency the way he believes it did President Bush's. He wants to talk about and focus on health care and the economy and other priorities. And to the extent that terrorism comes up, you know, it's he wants it to be one of, but not the most of vital issues confronting the country. In the last two or three weeks since the Christmas Day plot, he's had to focus a lot more public energy on reassuring the country and making clear that he understood there were screw ups in the way the intelligence was handled and the way the aviation security system worked, and that he was on top of that case. Now he's trying to pivot back to the economy and health care as we move further into January toward his State of the Union and toward final votes on the health care legislation. But, you know, this moment sort of exposed, once again, how fraught this issue is, how emotional it is, how people feel very strongly about it and how dangerous it is, particularly for a Democrat to be perceived as anything other than tough on terrorism.
[Rebecca Roberts:] Well, in addition to at least briefly refocusing the president's priorities, do you think it has changed public perception of his success in that area?
[Mr. Peter Baker:] Well, it's brought that issue more to the fore as something that people are thinking about when they think about him. If we'll see what happens later in the year with his mid-terms. If there continue to be more attempted attacks like this, particularly if there was a successful one, obviously, that will reshape everything overnight. If it turns out that, you know, the rest of the year goes through without a whole lot more public, you know, examples like this, it'll probably, you know, begin to fade again, as it had in the years, frankly, up until this event.
[Rebecca Roberts:] Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times. He joined us today from a studio here in Washington. His article, "Inside Obama's War on Terrorism," will be in the forthcoming issue of The New York Times Magazine. You can find a link to it at npr.org. Peter Baker, thanks very much.
[Mr. Peter Baker:] Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
[Rebecca Roberts:] And tomorrow, mental illness has become an American export. Journalist Ethan Watters joins us. His book is "Crazy Like Us." This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Rebecca Roberts, in Washington.