Word: formerly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Interviews with two dozen current and former officials show that Obama's public decision to reverse himself and fight the release of the photographs signaled a behind-the-scenes turning point in his young presidency. Beginning in the first two weeks of May, Obama took harder lines on government secrecy, on the fate of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and on the prosecution of terrorists worldwide. The President was moving away from some promises he had made during the campaign and toward more moderate positions, some favored by George W. Bush. At the same time, he quietly shifted responsibility...
...Revolt of the CIA Directors Four days after the 2008 election, Obama tasked Craig with dismantling Bush's interrogation and detention policies. Craig seemed the logical choice. An Ivy League-trained lawyer and former top staffer for Ted Kennedy, he had taken on politically unpopular causes over the years, including representing Elián González's father in his effort to return his son to Cuba. Craig helped defend his law-school classmate Bill Clinton against impeachment, but he broke from the Clintons in 2007 to back Obama and became a key player in his meteoric rise...
...Hayden didn't give up. He helped organize a group of former CIA directors to lobby Obama aides against the release. George Tenet, the CIA chief who presided over the harshest techniques, called his former aide John Brennan, now Obama's top counterterrorism adviser; Clinton CIA chief John Deutch called Deputy National Security Adviser Tom Donilon. Inside the West Wing, the former directors found that a small group of like-minded allies close to Obama was already forming in opposition to Craig. One was National Security Council (NSC) aide Denis McDonough, a former Senate staffer who has a windowless...
...Craig, it turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory. Four days later, former Vice President Dick Cheney attacked Obama on Fox News Channel for dismantling the policies he and Bush had put in place to keep the country safe. More significant was the reaction within Obama's camp. Democratic pollsters charted a disturbing trend: a drop in Obama's support among independents, driven in part by national-security issues. Emanuel quietly delegated his aides to get more deeply involved in the process. Damaged by the episode, Craig was about to suffer his first big setback...
...gestures. At almost every stage, Obama has tried to avoid blunt confrontation in favor of something more cooperative. He stopped short of offering an unabashed defense of human rights the way Hillary Clinton did on her 1995 visit to China or a hard-line demand for democracy the way former Vice President Dick Cheney did in Lithuania in 2006. Instead, he has sought at every meeting to focus on common ground, hoping for what he once described as a clearing away of "old preconceptions or ideological dogmas" so that nations will be more likely "to cooperate than not cooperate...