Dirty Wars

by Jeremy Scahill

  While they opposed Anwar’s killing and believed that the United States had exaggerated its claims about his involvement with al Qaeda, Nasser told me that his family understood why he was killed. “My son believed in what he did,” Nasser said, “but I am really distressed and disappointed by the killing, the brutal killing, of his son. He did nothing against the US. He was an American citizen. Maybe one day he would have gone to America to study and live there, and they killed him in cold blood.”

  The CIA claimed that it had not carried out the strike, asserting that the supposed target, Ibrahim Banna, was not on the Agency’s hit list. That led to speculation that the strike that killed Abdulrahman and his relatives was a JSOC strike. Senior US officials told the Washington Post that “the two kill lists don’t match, but offered conflicting explanations as to why.” The officials added that Abdulrahman was an “unintended casualty.” A JSOC official told me that the intended target was not killed in the strike, though he would not say who the target was. On October 20, 2011, military officials presented a closed briefing on the JSOC strike to the Senate Armed Services Committee. With the exception of the statements from anonymous US officials, the United States offered no public explanation for the strike. The mystery deepened when AQAP released a statement claiming that Banna was, in fact, still alive. “These lies and allegations announced by the government...are not unusual...the government has falsely declared the death of mujahedeens many times,” the statement declared. The Awlakis began to wonder if perhaps Abdulrahman was, in fact, the target of the strike.

  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, one of the handful of US lawmakers who would have access to all intelligence on the strike, seemed to suggest that was the case when asked about the killing of the two Awlakis and Samir Khan. “I do know this,” he said on CNN, “the American citizens who have been killed overseas...are terrorists, and, frankly, if anyone in the world deserved to be killed, those three did deserve to be killed.” When asked specifically about Abdulrahman’s killing by my colleague, journalist Ryan Devereaux, Representative Peter King, who also sits on the Intelligence Committee, said, “I’m convinced, and I meet on a regular basis with General Petraeus and the CIA and also military leaders, that every attack that’s been carried out in Yemen and Afghanistan, anywhere the US has been involved, I believe that the United States had reason to carry them out and I support them,” adding, “I’m satisfied they’ve done the right thing.” Asked whether he had specifically reviewed the Abdulrahman strike, King replied, “Yeah, that would be a logical deduction. You’re trying to get me in trouble.” Despite Representative King’s assertion that he had reviewed the case, he later falsely portrayed Abdulrahman as having been with his father when he was killed. “If the kid was killed when he was with him, that’s the breaks,” King said.

  Robert Gibbs, Obama’s former White House press secretary and a senior official in the president’s 2012 reelection campaign, was also asked about the strike that killed Abdulrahman. “It’s an American citizen that is being targeted without due process of law, without trial. And, he’s underage. He’s a minor,” reporter Sierra Adamson told Gibbs, during a press gaggle after a presidential debate where Gibbs was serving as a surrogate for Obama. Gibbs shot back: “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their children. I don’t think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.”

  The Awlakis were left only with questions about why their grandson had been killed. They wondered if somehow the US government had used Abdulrahman to find Anwar. Perhaps, as had happened with the killing of the Yemeni regime’s political opponents in the past, the United States had been fed false intelligence about Abdulrahman’s age and connections to al Qaeda. While emphasizing that they were not prone to conspiracy theories, they told me it was difficult to imagine why Abdulrahman would have been killed, especially if Banna was not there. Who, then, was the target? “It is up to the US government to be sure about the kind of information they get before they make any action against anybody. So I don’t believe it was just an accident. They must have followed him,” Nasser said. “But they wanted to cover up the story, and that’s why they claimed that he was twenty-one years old, in order to justify his killing. Or maybe, as they mentioned, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He paused before adding, “I don’t think we can buy this argument.”

  An anonymous US official later told the Washington Post that Abdulrahman’s killing was “an outrageous mistake...They were going after the guy sitting next to him.” But no one ever identified who that someone was. As far as the family knows, their son was sitting next to his teenage cousins, none of whom were affiliated with al Qaeda. Decisions on “targets, drones, these are made only by the highest US government authorities, the CIA and all that. Why did they specifically target these guys?” Nasser demanded. “I want answers from the United States government.”

  The Obama administration would fight passionately to keep those answers secret, invoking the State Secrets Privilege repeatedly—just as President Bush had done throughout his eight years in office. The killings of Anwar and Abdulrahman Awlaki represented a watershed moment in modern US history.

  EPILOGUE: PERPETUAL WAR

  ON JANUARY 21, 2013, Barack Obama was inaugurated for his second term as president of the United States. Just as he had promised when he began his first campaign for president six years earlier, he pledged again to turn the page on history and take US foreign policy in a different direction. “A decade of war is now ending,” Obama declared. “We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war.”

  Much of the media focus that day was on the new hairstyle of First Lady Michelle Obama, who appeared on the dais sporting freshly trimmed bangs, and on the celebrities in attendance, including hip-hop mogul Jay-Z and his wife, Beyoncé, who performed the national anthem. But the day Obama was sworn in, a US drone strike hit Yemen. It was the third such attack in that country in as many days. Despite the rhetoric from the president on the Capitol steps, there was abundant evidence that he would continue to preside over a country that is in a state of perpetual war.

  In the year leading up to the inauguration, more people had been killed in US drone strikes across the globe than were imprisoned at Guantánamo. As Obama was sworn in for his second term, his counterterrorism team was finishing up the task of systematizing the kill list, including developing rules for when US citizens could be targeted. Admiral McRaven had been promoted to the commander of SOCOM, and his Special Ops forces were operating in more than one hundred countries across the globe.

  After General David Petraeus’s career was brought to a halt as a result of an extramarital affair, President Obama tapped John Brennan to replace him as director of the CIA, thus ensuring that the Agency would be headed by a seminal figure in the expansion and running of the kill program. After four years as Obama’s senior counterterrorism adviser, Brennan had become known in some circles as the “assassination czar” for his role in US drone strikes and other targeted killing operations.

  When Obama had tried to put Brennan at the helm of the Agency at the beginning of his first term, the nomination was scuttled by controversy over Brennan’s role in the Bush-era detainee program. By the time President Obama began his second term in office, Brennan had created a “playbook” for crossing names off the kill list. “Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it,” noted the Washington Post. Brennan played a key role in the evolution of targeted killing by “seeking to codify the administration’s approach to generating capture/kill lists, part of a broader effort to guide future administrations through the counterterrorism processes that Obama has embraced,” the paper added. “The system functions like a funnel, starting with input from half a dozen agencies and narrowing through
layers of review until proposed revisions are laid on Brennan’s desk, and subsequently presented to the president.”

  Obama’s counterterrorism team had developed what was referred to as the “Disposition Matrix,” a database full of information on suspected terrorists and militants that would provide options for killing or capturing targets. Senior administration officials predicted that the targeted killing program would persist for “at least another decade.” During his first term in office, the Washington Post concluded, “Obama has institutionalized the highly classified practice of targeted killing, transforming ad-hoc elements into a counterterrorism infrastructure capable of sustaining a seemingly permanent war.”

  In early 2013, a US Department of Justice “white paper” surfaced that laid out the “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen.” The government lawyers who wrote the sixteen-page document asserted that the government need not possess specific intelligence indicating that an American citizen is actively engaged in a particular or active terror plot in order to be cleared for targeted killing. Instead, the paper argued that a determination from a “well-informed high level administration official” that a target represents an “imminent threat” to the United States is a sufficient basis to order the killing of an American citizen. But, the Justice Department’s lawyers sought to alter the definition of “imminent,” advocating what they called a “broader concept of imminence.” They wrote, “The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons will take place in the immediate future.” The government lawyers argued that waiting for a targeted killing of a suspect “until preparations for an attack are concluded, would not allow the United States sufficient time to defend itself.” They asserted that such an operation constitutes “a lawful killing in self-defense” and is “not an assassination.”

  Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU called the white paper a “chilling document,” saying that “it argues that the government has the right to carry out the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen.” Jaffer added, “This power is going to be available to the next administration and the one after that, and it’s going to be available in every future conflict, not just the conflict against al-Qaeda. And according to the [Obama] administration, the power is available all over the world, not just on geographically cabined battlefields. So it really is a sweeping proposition.”

  In October 2002, as the Bush administration prepared to invade Iraq, Barack Obama gave the first major speech of his national political career. The then–state senator came out forcefully against going to war in Iraq, but he began his speech with a clarification. “Although this has been billed as an anti-war rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances....I don’t oppose all wars.” Obama declared, “What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.” During his first campaign for president, Obama had blasted the Bush administration for fighting the wrong war—Iraq—and repeatedly criticized his opponent, Senator John McCain, for not articulating how he would take the fight to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.

  As his first term in office wound down, the overwhelming majority of US military forces had been withdrawn from Iraq and plans for a similar drawdown in Afghanistan in 2014 were being openly discussed. The administration had succeeded in convincing the American public that Obama was waging a smarter war than his predecessor. As he ran for reelection, Obama was asked about charges from his Republican opponents that his foreign policy was based on appeasement. “Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 out of 30 top al-Qaida leaders who have been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement,” Obama replied. “Or whoever is left out there, ask them about that.”

  As the war on terror entered a second decade, the fantasy of a clean war took hold. It was a myth fostered by the Obama administration, and it found a ready audience. All polls indicated that Americans were tired of large military deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan and the mounting US troop casualties that came with them. A 2012 poll found that 83 percent of Americans supported Obama’s drone program, with 77 percent of self-identified liberal Democrats supporting such strikes. The Washington Post–ABC News poll determined that support for drone strikes declined “only somewhat” in cases where a US citizen was the target.

  President Obama and his advisers seldom mentioned the drone program publicly. In fact, the first known confirmation of the use of armed drones by the president came several years into Obama’s first term. It was not in the form of a legal brief or a press conference, but rather on a Google+ “Hangout” as the president took questions from the public. Obama was asked about his use of drones. “I want to make sure that people understand actually drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties,” Obama said. “For the most part, they have been very precise, precision strikes against al-Qaeda and their affiliates. And we are very careful in terms of how it’s been applied.” He rejected what he called the “perception” that “we’re just sending in a whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly” and asserted that “this is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists, who are trying to go in and harm Americans, hit American facilities, American bases and so on.” Obama added: “It is important for everybody to understand that this thing is kept on a very tight leash. It’s not a bunch of folks in a room somewhere just making decisions. And it is also part and parcel of our overall authority when it comes to battling al-Qaeda. It is not something that’s being used beyond that.”

  Michael Boyle, a former adviser in the Obama campaign’s counterterrorism experts group and a professor at LaSalle University, said that one of the reasons the administration was “so successful in spinning the number of civilian casualties” was the use of signature strikes and other systems for categorizing military-aged males as legitimate targets, even if their specific identities were unknown. “The result of the ‘guilt by association’ approach has been a gradual loosening of the standards by which the US selects targets for drone strikes,” Boyle charged. “The consequences can be seen in the targeting of mosques or funeral processions that kill non-combatants and tear at the social fabric of the regions where they occur.” No one, he added, “really knows the number of deaths caused by drones in these distant, sometimes ungoverned, lands.”

  Using drones, cruise missiles and Special Ops raids, the United States has embarked on a mission to kill its way to victory. The war on terror, launched under a Republican administration, was ultimately legitimized and expanded by a popular Democratic president. Although Barack Obama’s ascent to the most powerful office on earth was the result of myriad factors, it was largely due to the desire of millions of Americans to shift course from the excesses of the Bush era. Had John McCain won the election, it is difficult to imagine such widespread support, particularly among liberal Democrats, for some of the very counterterrorism policies that Obama implemented. As individuals, we must all ask whether we would support the same policies—the expansion of drone strikes, the empowerment of JSOC, the use of the State Secrets Privilege, the use of indefinite detention, the denial of habeas corpus rights, the targeting of US citizens without charge or trial—if the commander in chief was not our candidate of choice. But beyond the partisan lens, the policies implemented by the Obama administration will have far-reaching consequences. Future US presidents—Republican or Democratic—will inherit a streamlined process for assassinating enemies of America, perceived or real. They will inherit an executive branch with sweeping powers, rationalized under the banner of national security.

  In 2012, a former US constitutional law professor was asked about the US drone and targeted killing program. “It’s very important for the president and the entire culture of our national security team to continually ask tough questions about ‘Are we doing the right thing? Are we abiding by the rule of law? Are we abiding by due proce
ss?’” he responded, warning that it was important for the United States to “avoid any kind of slippery slope into a place where we’re not being true to who we are.”

  That former law professor was Barack Obama.

  The creation of the kill list and the expansion of drone strikes “represents a betrayal of President Obama’s promise to make counterterrorism policies consistent with the US constitution,” charged Boyle. Obama, he added, “has routinized and normalized extrajudicial killing from the Oval Office, taking advantage of America’s temporary advantage in drone technology to wage a series of shadow wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Without the scrutiny of the legislature and the courts, and outside the public eye, Obama is authorizing murder on a weekly basis, with a discussion of the guilt or innocence of candidates for the ‘kill list’ being resolved in secret.” Boyle warned:

  Once Obama leaves office, there is nothing stopping the next president from launching his own drone strikes, perhaps against a different and more controversial array of targets. The infrastructure and processes of vetting the “kill list” will remain in place for the next president, who may be less mindful of moral and legal implications of this action than Obama supposedly is.