"I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs," Obama said Friday.
Especially since they were being practiced by his predecessor.
As Trotsky once said to a companion, after the companion had made a distasteful remark about the new Red Army: "yes, but it's our army now."
But he said the value in disrupting terrorism outweighed any "modest encroachments on privacy. . . . You know, net, it was worth us doing."
Obviously off-teleprompter.
U.S. officials, civil liberties groups and security experts said the revelations show that, as much as Obama has sought to distance himself from the counterterrorism policies of his predecessor, he has embraced and in some cases expanded controversial programs that originated under Bush.
"If you think about the president's speeches, there has been an attempt to articulate a discontinuity" from Bush on a range of issues, including prisoner interrogations and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, said Steven Aftergood, at the Federation of American Scientists. "But when it comes to surveillance," Aftergood said, "there's no clear repudiation. On the contrary, there appeared to be an embrace and an endorsement all the way through."
Bush loyalists made similar points in ways that at times bordered on gloating. I'll only gloat when he is excoriated by the press, like Bush was.
"Drone strikes. Wiretaps. Gitmo. O is carrying out Bush's 4th term," said former Bush administration spokesman Ari Fleischer.
Statistics released by the Justice Department indicate that some surveillance operations authorized by the court have expanded under Obama and that others have remained at levels established under Bush. Requests for warrants under the provision used to compel Verizon to turn over data have surged, from 13 in 2008 to 212 last year.
Just as the use of political power to cow opponents has surged!
Meanwhile, Obama has fought legal attempts to force the government to disclose Justice Department opinions that provide the legal basis for NSA surveillance programs. In 2011, the administration released two heavily redacted memos that had been in effect under Bush, but it has yet to produce any of its own.
The most transparent
Since 2008, "the administration has changed, Congress has changed, leadership of intelligence agencies has changed," said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been involved in the effort to obtain the memos. But surveillance, Jaffer said, "grows steadily bigger and less accountable every year."
I never thought I'd say this, but - Go, ACLU!
"I think it's interesting that there are some folks on the left, but also some folks on the right who are now worried about it who weren't worried about it when it was a Republican president," Obama said.
Ironic, isn't it? He used to be worried about it, but now he's not. I suppose narcissists can't appreciate irony?