By JO BECKER and SCOTT SHANE
Published: May 29, 2012
WASHINGTON This was the enemy, served up in the latest chart from the intelligence agencies: 15 Qaeda suspects in Yemen with Western ties. The mug shots and brief biographies resembled a high school yearbook layout. Several were Americans. Two were teenagers, including a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years.
President Obama, overseeing the regular Tuesday counterterrorism meeting of two dozen security officials in the White House Situation Room, took a moment to study the faces. It was Jan. 19, 2010, the end of a first year in office punctuated by terrorist plots and culminating in a brush with catastrophe over Detroit on Christmas Day, a reminder that a successful attack could derail his presidency. Yet he faced adversaries without uniforms, often indistinguishable from the civilians around them.
How old are these people? he asked, according to two officials present. If they are starting to use children, he said of Al Qaeda, we are moving into a whole different phase.
It was not a theoretical question: Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret nominations process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values; the chart, introducing people whose deaths he might soon be asked to order, underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be.
Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding kill list, poring over terrorist suspects biographies on what one official calls the macabre baseball cards of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises but his family is with him it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.
He is determined that he will make these decisions about how far and wide these operations will go, said Thomas E. Donilon, his national security adviser. His view is that hes responsible for the position of the United States in the world. He added, Hes determined to keep the tether pretty short.
Nothing else in Mr. Obamas first term has baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressive counterterrorism record. His actions have often remained inscrutable, obscured by awkward secrecy rules, polarized political commentary and the presidents own deep reserve.
In interviews with The New York Times, three dozen of his current and former advisers described Mr. Obamas evolution since taking on the role, without precedent in presidential history, of personally overseeing the shadow war with Al Qaeda.
They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing. While he was adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relations with the Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and dangerous lands. When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was an easy one.
