Bush and Obama: Side by Side at Ground Zero

Pool photo by Timothy A. Clary

President Obama, former President Bush and their wives near one of the memorial's fountains.

The presidents stood next to each other, with their wives, listening as the families of the victims read the names of lost loved ones. Above them, a vast American flag billowed from One World Trade Center, the tower that is rising where two fell a decade ago.

It was the first time President Obamaand former President George W. Bushhad stood together on this hallowed ground. Mr. Bush declined Mr. Obama’s invitation to join him at ground zero last May, days after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

But on this bright morning, they stood shoulder to shoulder behind a bulletproof screen — two commanders in chief whose terms in office are bookends for considering how the United States has changed since Sept. 11, 2001, particularly in its response to terrorism.

Mr. Obama read from Psalm 46: “God is our refuge and strength.” Mr. Bush read a letter from Abraham Lincoln to Lydia Bixby, a widow in Massachusetts who was believed to have lost five sons in the Civil War. Unlike Mr. Obama, Mr. Bush drew a brief cheer from the crowd before his reading.

The tableau was striking: the president who spent years hunting Bin Laden next to the one who finally got him. The president defined by his response to Sept. 11 standing alongside the one who has tried to take America beyond the lingering, complicated legacy of that day.

For Mr. Obama, Sept. 11 underpins what has become one of the great paradoxes of his presidency. A Democratic leader who opposed the Iraq war and is pulling troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan has, at the same time, notched up a record as a lethal, relentless hunter of terrorists.

Mr. Obama, a president who banned torture in theinterrogation of suspected terrorists and pledged (unsuccessfully, so far) to close the military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, carried out more drone strikes in Pakistan in his first year in office than Mr. Bush did in his eight years.

In the process, the White House said, it has killed more Al Qaeda officials in the last two-and-a-half years than were eliminated by the Bush administration in all the preceding years. Among the big names: two top Qaeda managers, Sheik Saeed al-Masri and Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, and one of its most feared field commanders, Ilyas Kashmiri.

“We have taken the fight to Al Qaeda like never before,” Mr. Obama said in his weekly address.

On Sunday, Mr. Obama moved quietly through the rituals of remembrance, laying a wreath at a memorial in Shanksville, Pa., where a United Airlines plane crashed after passengers fought with the hijackers. He was to attend another wreath-laying at the Pentagon later on Sunday, before speaking at a concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington in the evening.

While Mr. Obama has said little and kept his focus on national unity, other administration officials have been promoting the president’s counterterrorism record, saying that its success is owed in large part to the changes Mr. Obama put in place in January 2009.

And there is no question that in his intense use of drones and his laser focus on Al Qaeda and its affiliated groups, Mr. Obama did depart from the Bush administration’s broader “global war on terrorism.”

But there has been as much continuity as change in the Obama method, according to terrorism experts. Mr. Obama, for example, has continued the whole-of-government response to terrorism that the Bush administration eventually adopted. This approach — with the C.I.A. and F.B.I. working more collaboratively with agencies like the Treasury and State departments, especially in the field — culminated in the raid that killed Bin Laden.

“What you’ve seen from the Obama administration is fundamental continuity in the counterterrorism policies handed over in 2009, while sharpening the campaign to eliminate core Al Qaeda leadership and disrupt safe havens in Western Pakistan and Yemen,” said Juan Zarate, a top counterterrorism adviser in the Bush administration who has nevertheless criticized the Obama White House for its muddled detention policies.

To be sure, Mr. Obama made important refinements and changes. Most notably, and perhaps most surprising to his supporters, he has dramatically increased the use of covert and clandestine operations by C.I.A. paramilitary and Special Operations forces from the United States military.

In Mr. Obama’s first year in office, the Central Intelligence Agency carried out 53 drone strikes in Pakistan. The next year, it more than doubled that figure, to 117, according to The Long War Journal, a Web site that follows the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The pace is off a bit this year — 49 through late August — but the drone campaign is spreading to other countries.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/12/us/12obama.html