Dirty Wars

by Jeremy Scahill

  On June 23, President Obama, flanked by Biden, Admiral Mullen, Defense Secretary Gates and General Petraeus, announced that “with considerable regret,” he had accepted McChrystal’s resignation. “It is the right thing for our mission in Afghanistan, for our military and for our country,” Obama said outside the White House. “I believe that it is the right decision for our national security,” he added. “The conduct represented in the recently published article does not meet the standard that should be set by a commanding general.” Obama thanked McChrystal “for his remarkable career in uniform.”

  “This is a change in personnel,” Obama declared. “But it is not a change in policy.”

  That point was driven home as the president announced that General Petraeus, one of the key architects of the expansion of the global US battlefield, would be taking over for McChrystal. Almost as soon as Petraeus took command of the war, the pace of night raids increased and air strikes resumed. As the civilian death toll mounted, the Afghan insurgency intensified. The US “targeted” killing program was fueling the very threat it claimed to be fighting.

  The Year of the Drone

  YEMEN AND THE UNITED STATES, 2010 —As thousands of US troops deployed and redeployed to Afghanistan, the covert campaign in undeclared battlefields elsewhere was widening. US drone strikes were hitting Pakistan weekly, while JSOC forces were on the ground in Somalia and Yemen and pounding the latter with air strikes. All the while, al Qaeda affiliates in those countries were gaining strength. When I met again with Hunter, who worked with JSOC under Bush and continued to work in counterterrorism under the Obama administration, I asked him what changes had taken place from one administration to the next. He quickly shot back, “There’s no daylight. If anything, JSOC operations have intensified under this administration, there’s been a greater intensity in what they’re being asked to do, where they’re being asked to do it and how they’re being asked to do it,” he told me. “There are things that are transpiring now, around the globe, that would be unthinkable to the Bush administration, not just because of vocal opposition within the cabinet, or within the Pentagon, but because they would not have the ultimate support of the president. In this administration, the president has made a political and military calculation—and this is his prerogative—that it is best to let the Joint Special Operations Command run wild, like a mustang, in pursuit of the objectives that [Obama] has set.”

  The Obama administration, Hunter told me, worked diligently to bring an end to the CIA-JSOC divide and to bring all forces together in a unified global antiterrorist campaign, though it would be an uphill task. What became clear in the first year of the Obama administration was that JSOC had won the decade-long war of ideas within the US counterterrorism community. Its paramilitary-focused direct actions would become the central strategy in the new administration’s various small wars, not just Afghanistan. “The operations have been institutionalized to a point where it is an integral part of any campaign, in any theater, and at some point we crossed a threshold where Joint Special Operations Command is the campaign,” Hunter told me. “In places like Yemen, it is Joint Special Operations Command, and that’s it. And they make the rules. It’s their house, and they do what it is that they need to do.” As the JSOC-ization of US counter terrorism policy spread, the CIA was steadily increasing its paramilitary capabilities and expanding its drone strikes and target lists. In a way, it resembled a mini turf war between JSOC and the CIA over who would mow through the kill lists faster.

  By early 2010, there were at least three entities within the US government that were maintaining kill lists: the National Security Council, which Obama dealt with directly during weekly meetings; the CIA; and the US military. The CIA had its own “parallel, more cloistered process” for selecting targets and executing strikes, which were for the most part in Pakistan. The NSC and the DoD had little oversight of that process. Obama exercised final authority over “more complex and risky strikes” in Pakistan. At least twice a month, the CIA’s top lawyer would receive a file from the Counterterrorism Center (often no more than two to five pages long) containing targeting recommendations and intelligence. The lawyer would hold small meetings that included CTC lawyers and the head of the National Clandestine Service, formerly known as the Directorate of Operations, which coordinates the CIA’s covert operations across the globe. Lawyers from the White House and the National Security Council would review the CIA’s list, and the Gang of Eight on Capitol Hill would have to approve it, as well.

  The military list, according to reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin, “was really more than one, since the clandestine special operations troops” from JSOC had their own internal list. These lists often overlapped, but as Priest and Arkin noted, “even these highly classified kill lists were not coordinated among the three primary agencies involved in creating them.”

  A YEAR INTO HIS PRESIDENCY, Obama and his counterterrorism team were fully committed to formalizing the process for conducting assassinations against terror suspects and other “militants.” They had, in their own way, embraced the neoconservative vision of the world as the battlefield, and the kill lists they built would encompass the globe. Unlike President Bush, who often delegated decisions on assassinations to commanders and CIA officials, Obama insisted on personally signing off on most strikes. On Tuesday afternoons, the president would preside over meetings that senior officials dubbed “Terror Tuesdays,” during which proposed targets would be “nominated” for spots on the kill list. Many of them were known operatives in Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia, but at times they were only loosely affiliated with other suspects or were simply residents of a particular region of a country.

  “This secret ‘nominations’ process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia,” reported the New York Times. “The nominations go to the White House, where by his own insistence and guided by Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama must approve any name. He signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan,” the Times noted. The Terror Tuesday meetings would take place after a larger group—sometimes more than 100 of the administration’s national security lawyers and officials—debated names to be added or subtracted from the list. JSOC, according to sources knowledgeable about the meetings, would dominate the process and “groomed” State Department, CIA and administration officials, in the words of one JSOC source, to accept a targeted killing campaign that would hit the “infrastructure” of the networks to move much further down “the food chain” in a variety of countries.

  Although Obama had campaigned, in part, on a pledge to unilaterally use US force in pursuit of known terrorists, he had kept its scope narrowed to Osama bin Laden and his top deputies. Once in office, the system he was building would be far more sweeping. In essence, the kill list became a form of “pre-crime” justice in which individuals were considered fair game if they met certain life patterns of suspected terrorists. Utilizing signature strikes, it was no longer necessary for targets to have been involved with specific plots or actions against the United States. Their potential to commit future acts could be a justification for killing them. At times, simply being among a group of “military-aged males” in a particular region of Pakistan would be enough evidence of terrorist activity to trigger a drone strike. In Yemen, Obama authorized JSOC to hit targets even if the mission planners did not know the identities of those they were bombing. Such strikes were labeled Terrorist Attack Disruption Strikes, or TADS.

  While Obama chaired the Terror Tuesday meetings, the administration’s assassination policy was being coordinated by two key architects with vast experience in targeted killing: John Brennan and Admiral William McRaven. Brennan had worked extensively on the kill program under the Bush administration; McRaven had helped develop the post-9/11 version when
he worked for Bush’s National Security Council. Under Obama, both men were now in a position to formalize and streamline the kill programs they had worked on in the shadows for much of their careers.

  In Pakistan, the CIA would take the lead on drone strikes and Obama granted the Agency a wider authority for strikes and supplied it with more drones to do so. By late 2009, Leon Panetta had declared that the CIA was “conducting the most aggressive operations in our history as an agency.” Most of the rest of the world would belong to JSOC, which had been empowered under Obama with far greater latitude to strike across the globe. Although some of the behind-the-scenes conflicts that raged between JSOC and the CIA under the Bush administration would continue, both McRaven and Brennan saw an opportunity to move forward with more of a unified counterterrorism front than had been possible in the previous eight years. President Obama’s credentials as a popular, liberal Democrat and a constitutional lawyer who pledged to end the excesses of the Bush war machine would be of tremendous value in selling their cause.

  In interviews with the New York Times and other major media outlets, senior White House officials consistently hit on the themes of the “just war” theory that Obama had embraced in his Nobel Prize speech, noting that Obama was a fan of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. “If John Brennan is the last guy in the room with the president, I’m comfortable, because Brennan is a person of genuine moral rectitude,” State Department lawyer Harold Koh said. Koh, who had been a major critic of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies, had changed his tune. “It’s as though you had a priest with extremely strong moral values who was suddenly charged with leading a war.”

  On a counterterrorism front, Obama’s first year in office was marked by an aggressive embrace of assassination as a centerpiece of US national security policy. In part, the preemptive strikes were motivated by fear of another attack against the United States. Politically, Obama’s advisers knew that a successful terrorist attack could damage his presidency, and they expressed this quite bluntly to reporters. But expanded use of JSOC operatives and drones also bolstered the narrative that Obama was waging a “smarter” war than his predecessor. Obama could say that he was taking the fight to the terrorists while simultaneously claiming he was winding down the Iraq occupation he had opposed. Although Obama received praise from many Republicans for his aggressive counterterrorism policies, others saw it as a way of circumventing the controversial issue of how to lawfully detain terror suspects. “Their policy is to take out high-value targets, versus capturing high-value targets,” declared Senator Saxby Chambliss, the most senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “They are not going to advertise that, but that’s what they are doing.” Very few Democrats spoke in opposition to Obama’s emerging global kill campaign. “It is the politically advantageous thing to do—low cost, no U.S. casualties, gives the appearance of toughness,” said Admiral Dennis Blair, Obama’s former director of national intelligence, explaining how the administration viewed its policy. “It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.”

  The administration heavily utilized the State Secrets Privilege and claims of protecting national security to keep the details of its kill program concealed from the public. When convenient, the administration would leak details of operations to journalists. In doing so, it continued many of the same practices that liberal Democrats had railed against when Bush and his team were steering the ship. Jack Goldsmith, the former Bush administration lawyer, asserted that “perhaps the most remarkable surprise of his presidency” was that “Obama continued almost all of his predecessor’s counterterrorism policies.” When Obama conducted a review of the proposed assassination of Anwar Awlaki, one of his senior advisers recalled the president declaring, “This is an easy one.” Easy as it may have been, the Obama administration refused to release its findings on how such an operation would be legal. “This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president, and that’s not sustainable,” former CIA director Michael Hayden told the New York Times. “I have lived the life of someone taking action on the basis of secret O.L.C. [Office of Legal Counsel] memos, and it ain’t a good life. Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memos locked in a D.O.J. [Department of Justice] safe.”

  Obama and his team created a system “where people are being killed, you don’t know what the evidence is, and you have no way to redress the situation,” former CIA case officer Phil Giraldi told me. “It’s not that there aren’t terrorists out there, and every once in a while one of them is going to have to be killed for one good reason or another, but I want to see the good reason. I don’t want to see someone in the White House telling me, ‘You’ll have to trust me.’ We’ve had too much of that.”

  BY MID-2010, the Obama administration had increased the presence of Special Operations Forces from sixty countries to seventy-five countries. SOCOM had about 4,000 people deployed around the world in countries besides Iraq and Afghanistan. “The Special Operations capabilities requested by the White House go beyond unilateral strikes and include the training of local counterterrorism forces and joint operations with them,” the Washington Post reported at the time. “Plans exist for preemptive or retaliatory strikes in numerous places around the world, meant to be put into action when a plot has been identified, or after an attack linked to a specific group.”

  John Brennan laid out the new counterterrorism vision under the Obama administration: We “will not merely respond after the fact” to terrorist attacks. We will “take the fight to al-Qaeda and its extremist affiliates wherever they plot and train. In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond.”

  Well-placed special operations sources told me that among the countries where JSOC teams had been deployed under the Obama administration were: Iran, Georgia, Ukraine, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Peru, Yemen, Pakistan (including in Baluchistan) and the Philippines. These teams also at times deployed in Turkey, Belgium, France and Spain. JSOC was also supporting US Drug Enforcement Agency operations in Colombia and Mexico. But the two greatest priorities outside of Afghanistan and Pakistan were Yemen and Somalia. “In both those places, there are ongoing unilateral actions,” a Special Operations source told me in 2010.

  One senior military official told the Washington Post that the Obama administration had given the green light for “things that the previous administration did not.” Special Operations commanders, the paper reported, had more direct communication with the White House than they did under Bush. “We have a lot more access,” a military official told the paper. “They are talking publicly much less but they are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly.” Under Obama, Hunter told me, JSOC was able to hit “harder, faster, quicker, with the full support of the White House.”

  While the Obama administration ratcheted up its drone strikes and targeted killing campaign, al Qaeda affiliates were growing stronger, emboldened in part by the US escalation. Although the Obama administration boasted that it had al Qaeda on the ropes, its global assassination program was becoming a recruitment device for the very forces the United States claimed to be destroying.

  Driving Anwar Awlaki to Hell

  YEMEN, 2010 —In early February 2010, AQAP leader Said Ali al Shihri, whom the Yemenis had claimed to have killed multiple times, released an audiotape. “We advise you, our people in the Peninsula, to prepare and carry your weapons and to defend your religion and yourselves and to join your mujahideen brothers,” he declared, adding that US “espionage planes,” presumably drones, had been killing women and children.

  On March 14, the United States struck again. Air strikes hit Abyan in southern Yemen, killing two alleged AQAP operatives, including its southern chief, Jamil al Anbari. As it did after the al Majalah bombing, Yemen took credit for a US attack while Washington remained silent. AQAP leader Qasim al Rimi confirmed the deaths in an audio recording released
soon after the strikes. “A US strike targeted our brother,” he declared. “The attack was carried out while our brother Jamil was making a phone call via the Internet.” As for Yemen’s claims to have carried out the strike, Rimi said, “This nonsense is similar to their allegations” in the December 2009 strikes. “May God disgrace lying and liars.” A few months later, AQAP would avenge the deaths by launching a brazen attack against a government security compound in Aden, killing eleven people. The claim of responsibility was signed: “Brigade of the martyr Jamil al-Anbari.”

  A week after the March 14 strike, one of the key US officials running the Obama administration’s covert war in Yemen, Michael Vickers, accompanied then-undersecretary of defense for intelligence James Clapper for talks with President Saleh and other Yemeni officials. The US Embassy released a brief statement on the meeting, saying only that they were there “to discuss the ongoing counterterrorism cooperation” between the two countries and “to express the appreciation of the United States for Yemen’s continuing efforts to counter” AQAP. A month later, Vickers gave a closed-door briefing to the Senate Armed Services Committee on covert US action in Yemen and Somalia. An internal e-mail circulated within Vickers’s office at the time, and provided to me in confidence, acknowledged that “a task force operating in Yemen has helped Yemeni forces kill terrorism suspects, but it has also carried out unilateral operations,” adding: “The intelligence community, including the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency vets the lists of targets and decides who needs to be captured for the purposes of intelligence collection, or who can be killed.”

  While JSOC forces continued to operate inside Yemen, at times training Yemeni forces and, at others, conducting kinetic actions, the air strikes continued. In late May, General James “Hoss” Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, briefed President Obama on a High Value Target that JSOC had a lock on. The president green-lit a strike. On May 24, a US missile hit a convoy of vehicles in the Marib Desert that “actionable intelligence” had concluded was heading to a meeting of al Qaeda operatives. The intelligence was only partly correct. The men inside the vehicle were not al Qaeda members but prominent Yemeni local mediators in the government effort to demilitarize members of AQAP. Among those killed was Jabir al Shabwani, the deputy governor of Marib Province. Shabwani was in a key position to negotiate, given that his cousin Ayad was the local AQAP leader whom US and Yemeni forces had tried to take out in a pair of strikes in January. Shabwani’s uncle and two of his escorts were also killed in the attack. A local official said the “deputy governor was on a mediation mission to persuade al-Qaeda elements to hand themselves over to the authorities.”