Rejecting the Torture Legacy

Shailagh Murray and Carol D. Leonnig write in The Washington Post that agency review teams for Obama, swarming into dozens of government offices, are "creating anxiety among some Bush administration officials" as they "rigorously examine programs and policies.

"Lisa Brown, who served as counsel to Vice President Al Gore and is helping manage the reviews, said typical questions include: 'Which is the division that has really run amok? Or that has run out of money? If someone is confirmed, what's going to be on their desk from Day One? What are the main things that need to happen, vis-a-vis Obama's priorities?'"

The Video Presidency

And how has the White House changed in the past eight years?

David E. Sanger writes in the New York Times that former Clinton staffers who are now part of the Obama transition team are amazed "chiefly at the sheer increase in the size of the defense and national-security apparatus. . . .

"Eight years ago, there were two deputy national security advisers; today there are a half-dozen, each with staff. In the downstairs suites of the West Wing and across the street in the Old Executive Office Building, the returnees tripped into the Homeland Security Council, created to keep order in the new, vast, often dysfunctional Homeland Security Department."

They're also struck by the transformative effect of video conferencing. "[T]hey have been surprised to see the degree of tactical detail about two wars and a handful of insurgencies -- from the tribal areas of Pakistan to Sudan and the Congo -- that surrounds [Bush]. Partly this is because the high-tech makeover of the Situation Room, completed about two years ago, makes instantaneous conversation with field commanders easier than ever.

"Both the transition officials and some White House insiders say it may make this communication too easy, sucking the commander-in-chief into a situation in which real-time, straight-from-the-battlefield discussions of tactics masquerade as a conversation about strategy."

And there are at least two more problems with that. Sanger writes that "several veterans of the White House have noted in conversations over the past two years that the secure video does not lend itself to open, vigorous debate. Instead, it can squelch it. The picture is being piped into too many places; field commanders don't want to speak their mind to the president if their immediate superiors at the Pentagon or Central Command are tuned in, too. There may be recordings for posterity, or presidential libraries."

And then there's the observation by a "recently departed National Security Council official . . . that the system is largely in the hands of war-fighters; only on a rare day, and only toward the end of his presidency, did members of Provincial Reconstruction Teams and other aid workers involved in nation-building pop up on Mr. Bush's screen."

Terror Czar?

Bryan Bender writes in the Boston Globe: "President-elect Barack Obama plans to appoint a new White House official to coordinate efforts to prevent terrorists from obtaining nuclear or biological weapons, advisers say, giving the highest priority to thwarting a catastrophic attack that a bipartisan panel warns could come in the next five years.

"Naming a top deputy whose sole mission is to oversee the government's wide-ranging programs to stop such an attack would mark a significant break with the Bush administration, which in resisting such a post has maintained that US efforts to reduce nuclear stockpiles and safeguard deadly pathogens are adequate.

"A law requiring the position, passed by Congress more than a year ago and signed into law by President Bush, has been ignored for more than 15 months, in part because Bush opposes giving the Senate the power to confirm the official.