Obama is preparing to take questions from reporters at the White House on December 18, before starti…
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President Barack Obama commuted Friday the sentences of 95 people serving time in federal prison for non-violent drug offenses and extended pardons to two others, a move aimed at highlighting the need to reform the USA criminal justice system. On Friday, the president said one key to stopping future attacks is to defeat the group in Iraq and Syria.
On the eve of an election year, Mr Obama said he believed the next Democratic presidential nominee would be strong and would ultimately be elected president.
“As Americans, we should not forget how good these patriots are”, Obama said Thursday of the USA intelligence and law enforcement officials responsible for preventing terror attacks.
“I said at the beginning of this year interesting stuff happens in the fourth quarter and we are only halfway through”.
“They’re all representative of the strength and the unity and the love that exists in the community and in this community”, Obama said.
“As we keep up the pressure, our air campaign will continue to hit ISIL harder than ever”, Obama added, using another acronym for the terror group. “Overall I think we’ve struck the right balance in protecting civil liberties and making sure U.S. citizens’ privacies are preserved”.
“In 2016, I’m going to leave it all out on the field”, he said in his last press conference of the year before flying off to Hawaii for a family Christmas holiday.
Even as he defended his own strategy, Obama also took a jab at Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying he had predicted that the Russian operation in the war-torn country would not change the shape of the battlefield between Moscow-backed President Bashar al-Assad and his internal foes.
“We will wait until Congress has definitely has said no to a well thought out plan with numbers attached with numbers attached to it before we say anything definite about my executive authority”, he said.
Republicans bristled at the president’s press conference.
Congress ended its chaotic year on a surprising note of bipartisan unity and productivity Friday, overwhelmingly approving a massive 2016 tax and spending package and sending it to President Barack Obama, who promptly…
“As I look back on this year, one thing I see is that so much of our steady, persistent work over the years is paying off for the American people in big, tangible ways”, he said in his opening remarks.
Obama says the detention center is a “magnet for jihadists”.
Asked about his seven-year-old promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, the U.S. president said he would try to shut the camp in his final year in the White House. “Since taking this office, I have never been more optimistic about the year ahead than I am right now”.
Obama’s acknowledgement that the country is vulnerable to continued attack is unlikely to settle an American public spooked by the prospect of fresh strikes by radical Islamists.
Despite the calls for more action from Obama, the most meaningful dent in the federal prison population will have to come from Congress.
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The difficulty of detecting terrorist threats like the one conducted in San Bernardino, Calif.
