Obama to define narrower terror threat

WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama sought to move the US beyond the war effort of the past dozen years, defining a narrower terror threat from smaller networks and homegrown extremists rather than the grandiose plots of Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaida.

Obama also offered his most vigorous public defence yet of drone strikes as legal, effective and necessary.

“Neither I, nor any president, can promise the total defeat of terror,” the president said on Thursday in a speech at the National Defence University. “What we can do — what we must do — is dismantle networks that pose a direct danger, and make it less likely for new groups to gain a foothold, all while maintaining the freedoms and ideals that we defend.”

Obama also implored Congress to close the much-criticised Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba and pledged to allow greater oversight of the controversial unmanned drone program. But he plans to keep the most lethal efforts with the unmanned aircraft under the CIA’s control.

It is an awkward position for the president, a constitutional lawyer, who took office pledging to undo policies that infringed on Americans’ civil liberties and hurt the US image around the world.

“Now is the time to ask ourselves hard questions — about the nature of today’s threats and how we should confront them,” Obama said.

Obama’s address came amid increased pressure from Congress on both issues. A rare coalition of bipartisan lawmakers has pressed for more openness and more oversight of the highly secretive targeted drone strikes. Liberal lawmakers have pointed to a hunger strike of more than 100 prisoners at Guantanamo — the military earlier this month was force-feeding 32 of them — in pressing for stalled efforts to close the detention centre to be renewed.

The president cast the drone program as crucial in a counterterror effort that will rely less on the widespread deployment of US troops as the war in Afghanistan winds down. He said he is deeply troubled by the civilians unintentionally killed.

“For me, and those in my chain of command, these deaths will haunt us as long as we live,” he said. Before any strike, he said, “there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured — the highest standard we can set.”

In Pakistan alone, up to 3,336 people have been killed by drones since 2003, according to the New America Foundation, which maintains a database of the strikes. However, the secrecy surrounding the program makes it impossible for the public to know for sure how many people have been killed and how many were intended targets.