Word: topness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...Avuncular and white-maned, Craig had at one time imagined he might steer foreign policy in the new Administration, possibly as National Security Adviser. Instead, he was named Obama's top lawyer. Craig lost no time creating one of the largest White House counsel's offices ever, with dozens of high-powered lawyers, compared with only a handful who served under Bush in early 2001. Staffed with brainy graduates of Yale and Harvard law schools, Craig's office was an instant power center in the White House, able to produce answers, memos and ideas seemingly overnight while other parts...
...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...
...trial, he told them, but he was also going to turn some of the detainees loose. Seventeen were Uighurs, members of an ethnic minority from northwestern China, whom Bush and the courts judged had been wrongly swept up in Afghanistan and Pakistan after 9/11. Obama's top national-security advisers - including Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others - had approved Craig's plan to release two Uighurs in northern Virginia...
...others to develop a plan to convince Congress and the public that it was a good idea. The Uighurs' lawyers agreed to a number of intrusive measures, including ankle bracelets, to assuage security concerns. "It was a matter of days, not weeks," until the Uighurs would arrive, says a top Defense official...