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Eli Lake

How Bush's War on Terror Ensnared Obama

The president adopted many approaches his supporters once called criminal.
A shared legacy.

A shared legacy.

Photographer: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
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Charlie Savage's new history of the Barack Obama administration's war on terror is the kind of book that should be quoted at outdoor "citizen tribunals" and read aloud to throngs waving papier-mâché puppets of Skeletor-Obama.

Such demonstrations are not my kind of thing. I don't think Obama is a war criminal. Neither does Charlie Savage. But in his new book, "Power Wars," the author makes a meticulous case that -- with few exceptions -- Obama preserved a long war on terror that many progressives in the 2000s regarded as criminal.