STEVE INSKEEP, Host:
Lawyers for the Obama administration argue in court today that detainees at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan should not have the same court access as those held at Guantanamo. That turns out to be the same position the Bush administration lawyers took. We have more this morning from NPR's Ari Shapiro.
ARI SHAPIRO: As soon as President Obama took office, he sent a strong public message that it was a new day for America's national security policy.
BARACK OBAMA: This morning I signed three executive orders. First, I can say without exception or equivocation that the United States will not torture.
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SHAPIRO: Ken Gude of the liberal think-tank Center for American Progress says President Obama had no choice.
KEN GUDE: It was vital. In fact, America's global leadership depended, and the credibility of America's political leadership depended on demonstrating a significant change from the Bush administration.
SHAPIRO: Almost immediately, Republicans accused the Obama administration of making Americans less safe. In May, former Vice President Dick Cheney put it this way...
DICK CHENEY: You can look at the facts and conclude that the comprehensive strategy has worked and therefore needs to be continued as vigilantly as ever. Or you can look at the same set of facts and conclude that 9/11 was a one-off event - coordinated, devastating, but also unique and not sufficient to justify a sustained wartime effort.
SHAPIRO: Both characterizations of dramatic change may be false, according to Juan Zarate of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He was a counter-terrorism advisor to President Bush.
JUAN ZARATE: I don't think the administration has helped themselves, or frankly helped the country, by trying so hard to paint their policies as being so radically different from the past, when in fact they're not, and for the sake of the country they shouldn't be.
SHAPIRO: On CNN, White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan pointed out that President Bush released many more Guantanamo detainees than President Obama.
JOHN BRENNAN: And let me put some facts out here. The last administration released 532 detainees from Guantanamo. During this administration we have transferred, in fact, 42 of these individuals overseas.
SHAPIRO: And when Republicans criticized President Obama for indicting the alleged Christmas Day bomber rather than sending him to a military trial, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs pointed to a similar incident from the Bush years. In a briefing yesterday, Gibbs mentioned Richard Reid, who tried to blow up an airplane in 2001.
ROBERT GIBBS: Decisions were made by the previous administration, after looking at all of the factors involved, to enter Richard Reid into our civil justice system.
SHAPIRO: This heightened emphasis on similarities to the Bush administration should not be a surprise, says Ken Gude of the Center for American Progress.
GUDE: The Obama administration is just facing withering attacks from the right. It's quite reasonable that the Obama administration says, hey, wait a minute - yes, we've made some changes, but here are some areas where we're doing things in similar ways from the previous administration.
SHAPIRO: Kate Martin, who directs the Center for National Security Studies, says that's the wrong focus. She says when you emphasize similarities and differences, you fall into a political trap that misses whether a policy is fundamentally good or bad.
KATE MARTIN: And it makes it, I think, very difficult to have the kind of public conversation we need to have about is this a wise policy, is it working, you know, in what direction does the United States want to move, because it's been so politicized.
SHAPIRO: Besides, says Martin, there's no such thing as the country's national security policy. There are thousands of specific policy decisions.
MARTIN: You know, the world is very complex, and in order to deal with the world we have to understand the complexities of it.
SHAPIRO: Ari Shapiro, NPR News, Washington.