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Sebastian Ritscher
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POWER WARS

Charlie Savage

Inside Obama's Post-9/11 Presidency

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie Savage's penetrating investigation of the Obama presidency and the national security state.
Barack Obama campaigned on a promise of change from George W. Bush's "global war on terror." Yet from indefinite detention and drone strikes to surveillance and military tribunals, Obama ended up continuing-and in some cases expanding-many policies he inherited. What happened?

In Power Wars, Charlie Savage looks inside the Obama administration's national security legal and policy team in a way that no one has before. Based on exclusive interviews with more than 150 current and former officials and access to previously unreported documents, he lays bare their internal deliberations, including emotional debates over the fates of detainees held on torture-tainted evidence and acts of war that lacked congressional authorization. He tells the inside stories of how Obama came to order the killing of an American citizen, preside over an unprecedented crackdown on leaks, and keep a then-secret National Security Agency program that collected records of every American's phone calls.

Savage also pieces together the first comprehensive history of how American surveillance secretly developed over the past thirty-five years, synthesizing recent revelations and filling in gaps with new reporting. And he provides lucid explanations of legal dilemmas in a way that non-lawyers can understand. Highlighted by new information about the pivotal aftermath to the failed Christmas underwear bombing and the planning for the Osama bin Laden raid, Savage's own eyewitness reporting at Guantánamo, and detailed accounts of closed-door meetings at the highest levels of government, Power Wars equips readers to understand the legacy of Obama's presidency.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie Savage is a Washington correspondent for the New York Times and has been covering post-9/11 legal-policy issues since 2003. A native of Fort Wayne, Indiana, he graduated from Harvard College and holds a master's degree from Yale Law School. His first book, Takeover, a bestselling and award-winning account of the Bush-Cheney administration's efforts to expand presidential power, was named one of the best works of 2007 by the Washington Post, Slate, and Esquire.
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Book

Published 2015-11-05 by Little, Brown and Company

Book

Published 2015-11-05 by Little, Brown and Company

Comments

...the most comprehensive account to date of the Obama administration’s approach to national security law and policy-making. Matthew Waxman Read more...

Power Wars "will almost certainly stand as the most comprehensive account of the Obama administration's policies, views, theories and bureaucratic battles over national security laws and the legacy of the 2001 attacks. His account is thoughtful and consistently fair-minded... no small achievement. James Mann

Power Wars “builds considerably on his earlier reporting to present a rich blow-by-blow account of how and why the Obama administration determined the legality of its war-on-terrorism policies. Read more...

Glenn Greenwald calls Charlie Savage “one of the most knowledgeable and tireless reporters chronicling the civil liberties and war powers controversies under the Obama administration.” They discuss Charlie’s new book POWER WARS in a lively interview on Glenn’s podcast.