Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

by James Risen

  Since General Atomics is privately held, the precise figures for the profits earned by the firm—and the wealth generated for the Blue brothers—are not publicly known. But the real costs to the nation of its dependence on General Atomics cannot be measured only in dollars. America’s moral standing has been severely damaged by the Obama administration’s addiction to drone warfare.

  Compared to George W. Bush, in fact, Barack Obama has had a love affair with drones. By 2012, the CIA had conducted six times more drone strikes in Pakistan during the three years of the Obama administration than the agency had conducted under the entire eight years of George W. Bush, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a British journalism group that has reported extensively on American drone campaigns in Pakistan and other countries. By May 2013, there had been a total of 368 American drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, killing between 2,541 and 3,533 people, according to the journalism group. Those figures include between 411 and 884 civilians—with somewhere between 168 and 197 children among them. The vast majority of the drone strikes—316—have been conducted during the Obama administration.

  The Obama administration acknowledged in 2013 that four American citizens had also been killed in drone strikes overseas, including some who were not intended targets. That admission highlighted the fact that the government was choosing the targets of its drone strikes with secret standards of evidence. There was no legal due process provided to the intended targets, even for American citizens.

  As the drone strikes have intensified under Obama, international opinion has finally begun to turn against them. In late 2012, for example, a researcher affiliated with the United Nations launched an investigation of the civilian casualties caused by the American drones. “The exponential rise in the use of drone technology in a variety of military and nonmilitary contexts represents a real challenge to the framework of established international law,” said Ben Emmerson, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism. In October 2013, Emmerson issued a report that identified thirty-three incidents in Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, and other nations in which drone strikes resulted in civilian casualties. The new scrutiny of drones from the United Nations could be the first sign that international restrictions on the use of drones in combat may someday be imposed, much like the limits on chemical weapons or those that have been sought on cluster bombs.

  More troubling is the resentment against the United States that the drone strikes have stoked in the Muslim world. Many experts warn that anger will mean that the numbers of Islamic extremists will keep growing much faster than the drones can kill them.

  That is particularly true since the Obama administration has been employing drones to target suspected militants far beyond the al Qaeda leaders who were the program’s original targets. McClatchy Newspapers reported in 2013 that U.S. intelligence reports showed that drone strikes in Pakistan had been used to kill a wide range of Afghan and Pakistani militants, some of whom belonged to groups that didn’t even exist at the time of the 9/11 attacks. A number were low-level militants with no identified affiliation. McClatchy also determined that the U.S. intelligence reports it had reviewed revealed that U.S. drone pilots were not always sure whom they were killing.

  The International Crisis Group, an independent nonprofit organization, warned that drone strikes were a short-term fix that could not solve the fundamental political problems fueling militancy in Pakistan’s northwest frontier region. Pakistan needs to end the second-class status of its tribal areas but is unwilling or incapable of doing so, and America isn’t pushing for political reform, the group observed. “Drone strikes alone will not eliminate the jihadi threat in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas,” the group said in a 2013 report. “Extension of Pakistani law and full constitutional rights to the region is the only long-term solution.”

  The drone campaign is already having a deep political impact in Pakistan, where it has become an issue of national sovereignty. But it is increasingly seen as a human rights issue as well. In late 2012, Imran Khan, one of Pakistan’s most famous celebrities, a cricket star turned politician, led thousands in a protest march against the drones. The march was so large it had to be blocked from entering Waziristan by the Pakistani Army. “The drones are inhumane,” Khan said. “Are these people not humans?” he pleaded. “These humans have names.”

  In a major national security speech in May 2013, President Obama finally acknowledged the growing criticism both at home and overseas of his drone policies, and vowed to impose new limits on drone strikes. In addition to vowing to move drone operations from the CIA to the U.S. military, he discussed ways in which he might make decision-making on target selection more open and transparent. But Obama provided few details, and his vague promises left him plenty of flexibility to continue strikes wherever and whenever he sees fit.

  In fact, so little changed that in October 2013, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both issued reports claiming that U.S. drone strikes were killing far more civilians than the Obama administration was willing to admit, and that the United States’ drone campaign was in violation of international law.

  It is never a good sign for a corporation when its chairman has to write a book to defend the firm’s reputation—even worse when the book has to refute charges that the company’s personnel were involved in torture. But for J. Phillip London, executive chairman of CACI, a defense and intelligence contractor based in northern Virginia, the war on terror has been a battle of extremes. London has fought for years to cleanse his company’s reputation from the stain of Abu Ghraib. In the meantime, CACI and London have also been making loads of money.

  CACI is a multibillion-dollar defense contractor and Fortune 500 company. It is best known, at least on the Internet, for its infamous role at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq, CACI sent contractors to serve as interrogators at Abu Ghraib. One of those interrogators was later caught up in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal that broke in 2004 with the release of graphic photographs of abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American guards. While the low-ranking soldiers involved in the scandal faced punishment from the military justice system, the senior military and intelligence officers who oversaw the prison emerged from the scandal largely unscathed. And so did the outside contractors who worked alongside the military and intelligence personnel inside the prison.

  But there was still plenty of bad publicity. And prolonged legal action.

  CACI was mired in the Abu Ghraib scandal after an army investigation concluded that Steven Stefanowicz, a CACI contractor working as an interrogator at the prison, had played a role in the detainee abuse. In the army report, Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba determined that Stefanowicz had “allowed and/or instructed MPs, who were not trained in interrogation techniques, to facilitate interrogations by ‘setting conditions’ which were neither authorized [nor] in accordance with applicable regulations/policy. He clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse.” Taguba also found that Stefanowicz had made a false statement to investigators about his interrogations and knowledge of abuses.

  The involvement of CACI and another contractor, Titan, in the Abu Ghraib scandal raised new questions about outsourcing in the war on terror, and exposed for the first time the degree to which U.S. intelligence was using outside contractors to perform some of its most sensitive tasks. Indeed, the contractors had greater legal exposure to the fallout from Abu Ghraib than did the federal government, which could claim sovereign immunity to avoid lawsuits brought by the victims at Abu Ghraib. Lawyers for those victims skirted the sovereign immunity obstacle by targeting CACI and Titan, turning them into proxies for the government.

  J. Phillip London decided to respond to the allegations about Abu Ghraib by going on the offense. Rather than apologize or explain its real role with the U.S. intelligence community, CACI aggressively took on news organizations that wrote about it and Abu Ghraib, and issued statements claiming that the media portrayal of CA
CI’s role was highly inaccurate and biased. In 2008, London even wrote a book, published by a conservative publishing house, that he claimed was designed to correct the record about CACI. It was entitled Our Good Name.

  The CACI counteroffensive didn’t stop the press from writing about CACI, and certainly didn’t stop legal actions from being brought against the company. After a drawn-out legal process in the U.S. courts, Titan’s corporate successor, Engility, agreed in 2012 to pay more than $5 million to former detainees at Abu Ghraib to settle their lawsuit. But CACI showed no willingness to settle and fought on. Its refusal to settle was finally rewarded in 2013, when a federal judge dismissed the Abu Ghraib lawsuit against it, nine years after the prisoner abuse scandal erupted.

  CACI’s aggressive attempts to change the public’s narrative about the firm apparently did help with the government, because CACI’s work for the defense and intelligence communities continued with little interruption after Abu Ghraib. It has actually grown remarkably ever since. In the immediate aftermath of the scandal, the Los Angeles Times reported that the government might ban CACI from further contracts. But by August 2004, just months after the Abu Ghraib scandal erupted, CACI reported sharply higher profits. A company executive told the Washington Post at the time that Abu Ghraib had generated “a lot of noise,” but that it had not had a significant impact on CACI’s bottom line.

  The negative headlines have faded since Abu Ghraib, and CACI has boomed since. By 2012, revenue had surged to $3.7 billion, up from $2.4 billion in 2008. London is almost certainly not as rich as the Blue brothers, but he does own more than 192,000 shares in CACI stock as of 2012, according to the firm’s SEC filings. He has thus benefited handsomely from the firm’s post–Abu Ghraib resurgence.

  Robert McKeon was a man of Wall Street, not the Pentagon or the CIA. He was a New Yorker, a graduate of Fordham University who went to Harvard Business School and made it big in private equity, founding his own firm, Veritas Capital. But while he wasn’t a creature of Washington, McKeon was smart enough to realize that the war on terror was throwing off cash in a big way. There had to be a play in that. And so Veritas, which had started investing in defense contractors in the 1990s, went after Dyncorp International.

  Dyncorp was not a sexy buy, but it had a steady flow of revenue from large government contracts for police training in Afghanistan and other mundane tasks. One of Dyncorp’s biggest assets was that it wasn’t named Blackwater, and so it stood to benefit when Blackwater became radioactive in Washington.

  To be sure, Dyncorp had its share of controversies, and in fact had been in trouble long before Blackwater landed in headlines about contractor scandals. When Dyncorp worked on a State Department contract to handle police training in Bosnia in the late 1990s, its personnel were accused of involvement in sex trafficking—a scandal so rich that it later formed the basis for a movie starring Rachel Weisz. Yet despite its track record, Dyncorp was given contracts to provide police training in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Afghanistan, Dyncorp was caught up in another scandal when its contractors reportedly paid for young “dancing boys” to entertain Afghan policemen, an incident that was described in a State Department cable released by WikiLeaks.

  But fortunately for Dyncorp, these allegations of misdeeds by its personnel were overshadowed by Blackwater. After Blackwater’s guards were involved in a 2007 shooting incident in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in which at least seventeen Iraqi civilians were killed, pressure mounted in Washington for the government to dump Blackwater and give its business to other firms. Dyncorp was there to pick up the pieces.

  McKeon’s private equity firm, Veritas Capital, acquired Dyncorp in a leveraged buyout in 2005. Forbes magazine, which provided excellent coverage of McKeon and Dyncorp, later called it “the most lucrative deal of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” (But precisely because Dyncorp was such a sweet deal, it led to a split between McKeon and one of his closest business partners and friends, who accused McKeon of squeezing the partner out in order to keep more for himself, leading to acrimony and lawsuits.)

  McKeon was able to ride the surge in spending by the State Department and Pentagon in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then adroitly sold the firm for a huge profit just as the American involvement in Iraq was winding down in 2010. When McKeon sold out to another Wall Street player, Stephen Feinberg of Cerberus Capital, Forbes once again lauded McKeon’s move, saying that, “for all the talk about Blackwater and Houston oil industry firms connected to Dick Cheney, it took a Wall Street player to truly figure out how to play the war game.” Forbes estimated that McKeon reaped a windfall, turning his own $48 million initial investment into as much as $320 million.

  Sadly, for whatever reason, it wasn’t enough for McKeon. In 2012, just two years after scoring one of the biggest paydays of the war on terror, McKeon committed suicide at his multimillion-dollar Connecticut home. No explanation has ever been made public. In 2013, McKeon’s estate began selling off his holdings, offering a glimpse into the glittered world of the oligarchs of the war on terror. McKeon’s estate sold two homes in Darien, Connecticut, with a combined price tag of more than $13 million; listed a Fifth Avenue co-op apartment in Manhattan for $11.5 million; and sold a 10,000-square-foot beachfront home in the Hamptons for $60 million.

  More than a decade after 9/11, the war imperative, the war economy, and the war lobby all remain powerful in Washington. The transfer of power from one political party to another seems to have had little effect. But the homeland security gravy train will someday have to come to an end. With trillion-dollar annual federal deficits and a mountainous national debt, the country cannot sustain this spending on counterterrorism, and political leaders in Washington will eventually have to say “Enough.”

  In late 2012, just before he resigned his post, Jeh Charles Johnson, the Pentagon’s general counsel, gave a speech at Oxford University. It was one of the first efforts by a top American official to raise the possibility of bringing the war on terror to a close. Johnson’s speech presaged the themes that President Obama used in his national security address in May 2013. Al Qaeda’s leadership has been so decimated, Johnson said, that the United States should begin to think about when it can call off the war on terror. Victory could be declared, and the remnants of al Qaeda could be dealt with as a law enforcement problem. That would mean returning to a pre-9/11 normalcy.

  “I do believe that on the present course, there will come a tipping point—a tipping point at which so many of the leaders and operatives of al Qaeda and its affiliates have been killed or captured, and the group is no longer able to attempt or launch a strategic attack against the United States, such that al Qaeda as we know it, the organization that our Congress authorized the military to pursue in 2001, has been effectively destroyed,” Johnson said. “At that point, we must be able to say to ourselves that our efforts should no longer be considered an ‘armed conflict’ against al Qaeda and its associated forces; rather, a counterterrorism effort against individuals who are the scattered remnants of al Qaeda, or are parts of groups unaffiliated with al Qaeda, for which the law enforcement and intelligence resources of our government are principally responsible, in cooperation with the international community—with our military assets available in reserve to address continuing and imminent terrorist threats.”

  “‘War’ must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of affairs,” Johnson added. “War permits one man—if he is a ‘privileged belligerent,’ consistent with the laws of war—to kill another. War violates the natural order of things, in which children bury their parents; in war parents bury their children. In its twelfth year, we must not accept the current conflict, and all that it entails, as the ‘new normal.’ Peace must be regarded as the norm toward which the human race continually strives.”

  President Obama’s national security address five months later hit many of the same themes. He said that “America is at a crossroads” in its fight against terror, and warned that the nation “must define
the nature and scope of this struggle or else it will define us. We have to be mindful of James Madison’s warning that no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

  The speeches by Obama and Johnson raised an intriguing question—wealth can’t be generated from the war on terror forever, can it?

  But nervous defense and intelligence contractors put on edge by the Obama administration’s rhetoric could rest easy. In October 2013, just five months after Obama’s speech, General Atomics was awarded a contract worth up to $377 million to build twenty-four more Reaper drones for the air force. That same month, Obama named Jeh Johnson to be secretary of the Department of Homeland Security—less than one year after Johnson’s speech in which he tried to imagine an end to the war on terror.

  PART II

  POWER

  4

  Rosetta

  New York. Humid, overcast July weather. The narrow streets of lower Manhattan are nearly empty. In courtroom 21D of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, in the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Federal Building at 500 Pearl Street, the Honorable George B. Daniels presiding, a patent case drones on.

  The arcane case has an unusually large audience of esteemed lawyers listening in, but only because they are waiting patiently on the back benches of the courtroom for the next case on Judge Daniels’s docket, In re Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001, MDL 1570.

  Judge Daniels, a balding man with glasses, a moustache, and a gravel-voiced New York accent, spars with the patent lawyers, and then, having exhausted the minutiae of patent law, calls for a break. When he returns, he says he will hear about September 11, and so the lawyers in the back of the courtroom spring to life. More than a dozen file awkwardly forward to their familiar tables. They know their places from long practice. They have all been here many times before.