The permanent security state: presidents come and go, but the national security bureaucracy never leaves.

• Author: Glennon, Michael J.
• Position: 'Power Wars: Inside Obama's Post-9/11 Presidency,' by Charlie Savage - Book review

Power Wars: Inside Obama's Post-9/11 Presidency, by Charlie Savage, Little, Brown and Company, 784 pages, $30

"The national security bureaucracy is a powerful force," Charlie Savage writes in Power Wars. The influence of this permanent security state, the New York Times reporter shows, is subtle but nonetheless pervasive, and it does not disappear when a new president takes control: A remarkable number of officials held the same or similar jobs under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Key decisions are repeatedly made or influenced by hold-overs and careerists who fight to maintain the status quo. The laws governing their conduct is blurry and elastic, giving them broad power that's exercised with little accountability. They thrive on secrecy. "The permanent bureaucracy gets nothing from transparency and sees it only in terms of risk," an administration official tells Savage. Power Wars provides voluminous evidence of that bureaucracy's reach; a century from now, this will be the first book legal historians pick up when trying to understand the Obama administration's national security policy. No branch of government turns out to be immune from the influence of the permanent security state.

When it comes to national security matters, the president is more presider than decider. "For all the focus the media and historians tend to put on presidents as individuals--Bush did this, Obama did that--the world and the government are so complicated that a single person cannot pay attention to all of it," Savage explains. "Presidents set the tone and the priorities, and they usually are the ones who make the very biggest decisions. But the overwhelming majority of what an administration does takes place in the trenches of the executive-branch bureaucracy. Dozens or hundreds of officials whose names are unknown to the public and who rarely show up in history books make decisions every day about matters that most likely will never be brought to the president's personal attention or that may be discussed only briefly in the Oval Office at a ten-thousand-foot level."

Examples fill the book. In 2009,

Obama, sworn in only days before, was briefed for the first time on the security state's bulk surveillance programs. Officials assured him that these were not only vital to the nation's security but entirely legal. It meant nothing to anyone present that the programs were legitimated by a pseudo-court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or that they were barely understood by the intelligence committees--committees the 9/11 Commission had earlier labeled "dysfunctional" and John McCain would later describe as "co-opted." Obama turned to two of his appointees, Attorney General Eric Holder and White House Counsel Greg Craig, who were probably still trying to figure out where the men's rooms were. He asked what they thought, as though they could realistically raise any meaningful concerns. Not surprisingly, they didn't.

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