Dana Priest breathlessly catalogs the largely symbolic moves by the Obama Administration to set themselves apart from the Bush Administration in how they prosecute the war on terror. Closing GTMO (well, by the end of the year, at least), forbidding the CIA to run their own prisons overseas, and ending the trials at GTMO all are held out as evidence that there's a new sheriff in town.
Oh but Dana--facts can be so inconvenient, can't they? News this afternoon of 20 Pakistanis sent to their eternal reward by ordnance unleashed from a Predator Drone flown by some Air Force chap sitting in a shed in Nevada....yes that's right, the same thing George Bush was doing while HE was President. And let's not forget what that is...it is killing the citizens of a country with whom we are ostensibly an ally WITHIN THAT COUNTRY'S TERRITORY! This is an end to Bush's War on Terror? Hardly.
President Obama is performing a game of strategic jujitsu here. Publicly distancing himself from unpopular elements of the Bush approach, even as he reserves for himself the right to use them if necessary. The press fawns, the world applauds, and George Bush is proven right.
Actually if you want to get technical about it, President Obama suggested military action against militants in the NWFP during the primaries--long before Pres. Bush first authorized such an attack.
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