by Tyler Cullis
Earlier this month the UN Special Rapporteur for Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights, Ben Emmerson, released his annual report to the UN Human Rights Council (the “Emmerson report”). He had been charged with determining best practices for States to respect human rights while engaging in counter-terrorism operations and highlighting [...]]]>
by Tyler Cullis
Earlier this month the UN Special Rapporteur for Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights, Ben Emmerson, released his annual report to the UN Human Rights Council (the “Emmerson report”). He had been charged with determining best practices for States to respect human rights while engaging in counter-terrorism operations and highlighting human rights violations when and where they occurred. While these two elements were fully on display in the report, the Special Rapporteur left us both with more questions than answers and made an urgent appeal that the legal uncertainties surrounding counter-terrorism efforts (especially those of the United States) be resolved so that the rule of law can take root and be observed.
Much attention has been given to the Emmerson report’s determination that States have an obligation to undertake an impartial investigation into civilian deaths, as a matter of human rights and humanitarian law, when those deaths were not expected. The report sifts through 30 cases, most involving the United States, where civilian deaths have been reliably alleged and where the dual duties of investigation and transparency have thus been triggered. Whatever the merits of this conclusion (and I have doubts as to whether the law of armed conflict contains within it a legal requirement for States to undertake investigation into civilian deaths), it is an important one and will go a long way to granting legal advocates another argument to force the Obama administration to be more transparent over its drone program and the civilian deaths that are alleged to have resulted in specific instances. It remains a disconcerting feature of the post-September 11 world that President Barack Obama has not only the power to determine who is a target and to strike at that target, but to do so without any substantive oversight.
But perhaps the most consequential feature of the Emmerson report is its outline of the legal uncertainties that surround not just the US’ drone program, but also its entire “War on Terror.” The lack of consensus on the law applicable to the US conflict with al-Qaeda — whether it is an armed conflict triggering the laws of war or whether it fails to meet the requisite threshold for armed conflict and instead remains a captive of human rights law — has permitted the US to define the rules of the game for itself. In some ways, Bush administration lawyers, who claimed that the traditional way of doing business was rendered an anachronism thanks to the threat posed by transnational terror groups like al-Qaeda and who were rightly derided for the aggressiveness with which they upended basic principles of international law, have won the day. What once seemed like settled law is no longer, and the Emmerson report is a measure of how much we’ve allowed consecutive US administrations to set the parameters of the debate.
Some major areas of international law that remain or have become ambiguous (thanks to US practice) as outlined in the Emmerson report, are:
- Is the United States in an armed conflict with al-Qaeda? This question is central to determining both the extent of US presidential authority (such as whether the White House has the power to include US citizens on a “kill list”) and what constraints are placed upon US activities abroad.
- If the US is in an armed conflict with al-Qaeda, are members of al-Qaeda to be regarded as combatants, civilians, or some third category of persons as the International Committee of the Red Cross has advocated? How we define a member of al-Qaeda under the laws of war determines the conditions under which the President can use force against them. If regarded as combatants, for instance, then all members of al-Qaeda and their affiliates would be legitimate targets of the US, and criticism over drone operations would lose much of its force.
- Is the “unwilling or unable” test that the United States has put forward to justify its intervention in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia a new exception to the traditional prohibition on the use of force in the territory of another State? If so, what precedential value does this set for other States, and how does it undo the constraints the UN Charter placed on recourse to war?
These are critical questions. Prior to September 11 and for some time thereafter, the answers were clear. Many did not believe the United States could regard itself as in an armed conflict with a transnational terror group. Many believed that members of al-Qaeda should be regarded as civilians, targetable only for self-defense purposes or when directly participating in hostilities against the United States. Few were attuned to the argument that the prohibition on the use of force contained an exception for when a State proved “unwilling or unable” to end cross-border attacks from an insurgent group. It was only over time (and largely thanks to US practice) that the question arose as to whether the law was not as clear, coherent, and complete as international legal practitioners had believed.
Quite adeptly, the Emmerson report centers this legal uncertainty and urges States, legal scholars and practitioners, and human rights groups to build consensus on these questions. Absent a global consensus, the United States is granted de facto authority to lead by the sheer force of example. And as we’ve seen for more than a decade now, that example has proven to be an exceptionally troubling one.
Photo: A protest in Peshawar, Pakistan against drone strikes on Sept. 13, 2012. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS.
]]>by Tyler Cullis
Earlier this week the European Parliament passed a resolution condemning the US drone program and expressing its concern over the desire of some European states to build a program of their own. Here in the US few have paid attention. But if the resolution signals a [...]]]>
by Tyler Cullis
Earlier this week the European Parliament passed a resolution condemning the US drone program and expressing its concern over the desire of some European states to build a program of their own. Here in the US few have paid attention. But if the resolution signals a more serious commitment on the part of Europe to publicly disclaim the legal and policy architecture of the US’s “targeted killing” program, then the White House’s legal footing, which is already on thin ice, could become untenable in the face of near-unanimous global opposition.
The resolution, which is non-binding as a matter of European law, “expresses…grave concern over the use of armed drones outside the international legal framework,” which goes against US pretensions of acting within the bounds of law in conducting its “targeted killing” program. In doing so the European Parliament rejects the novel legal doctrines that the US has used to support its activities in the “global war on terror,” arguing that traditional jus ad bellum and jus in bello rules do not need to be revised in light of the threat posed by transnational terror groups (as the US has long alleged). This is a striking challenge to the United States and its claims to compliance with international norms, and is a sharp reminder of the twin reports from UN Special Rapporteurs last year (whose work is cited in the resolution itself).
This also comes on the heels of a New York Times report that the US is considering adding a US citizen, Abdullah al-Shami, to the White House’s “kill list”. Besides the significant constitutional issues at stake in a unilateral presidential decision to kill a US citizen without due process, international human rights law is implicated as well. The focus on human rights law as the appropriate legal frame, which is evident throughout the Parliament’s resolution, thus takes on added significance in the wake of this report.
More importantly, the resolution signals to other EU bodies that now is the time for unified European action to publicly oppose the US’s “targeted killing” program; to limit the use of drones both globally and in a distinctly European context; and to hold criminally responsible those that assist what the Parliament regards a potentially criminal action on the part of the United States. In fact, as part of its “action program” the Parliament’s resolution “urges the [European] Council to adopt an EU common position on the use of armed drones,” which would be binding on all EU member-states. Such a legislative gambit could include provisions providing for “judicial review of drone strikes…and effective access to remedies [for victims].” Both have thus far largely been barred in European courts.
Such would spell serious trouble for the United States and its continued ability to conduct drone warfare across international borders. It is one thing for official criticism to be done in private and for US and European legal scholars to haggle over applicable laws in the US’s conflict with al-Qaeda. It is entirely another thing for the US’s closest allies to so publicly rebuke the White House (especially one that professes to care as much about toeing the line of the law as this one does) and to threaten to open its court system to the victims of what it regards as “unlawful drone strikes.” While legislative action from the European Council and Commission remains unlikely, the vote count on the Parliament’s resolution (534-49) suggests that sentiment against “targeted killings” has begun to overcome Europe’s squeamishness about upsetting its powerful ally.
This week also saw the respected British human rights organization, Reprieve, submit a communication to the International Criminal Court to start an investigation of NATO personnel complicit in the CIA drone program. Of course, none of this bodes well for the United States. Whereas the Bush administration expressed contempt towards international law and thus was treated in kind from its practitioners, the Obama administration has at least demonstrated concern for international norms and struggled to describe its drone policies as compliant with the law. But as US allies and human rights NGOs close in on the White House, the Obama administration will be forced to either proclaim its adherence to international law and end its “targeted killing” policies, or abandon any pretension to international law-compliance altogether. The sooner the better, too, because the growing outcry against the US’ drone policies shows no signs of losing steam.
]]>by Tyler Cullis
Today Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a rather harrowing report on a US drone strike on an alleged Yemeni wedding convoy this past December:
The [December 12] strike . . . killed at least 12 men ages 20 to 65 and wounded at least [...]]]>
by Tyler Cullis
Today Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a rather harrowing report on a US drone strike on an alleged Yemeni wedding convoy this past December:
The [December 12] strike . . . killed at least 12 men ages 20 to 65 and wounded at least 15 others, according to survivors, relatives of the dead, civil society members, and multiple media reports. The relatives said the dead included the son of the groom from his previous marriage. They said shrapnel grazed the bride under one eye, and blew her trousseau to pieces.
For advocates of the US drone program, one convenience is that areas under siege often prove inaccessible to both journalists and other civil society activists. This allows US officials to at first plausibly deny knowledge of/or participation in individual strikes and later leak to the press rosy-colored, post-hoc assessments of the strikes, without much challenge. In this way, the US public is rendered relatively immune to the human consequences of the drone program, as the victims are silenced and thus removed from the ongoing legal, ethical, and policy debates surrounding the U.S.’ targeted killing program.
Some organizations have made it a point to name the nameless. For instance, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which has performed important work on tracking US drones strikes and calculating its victims, started up a project in September 2013 called “Naming the Dead,” which is aimed at recording the names of drone victims. Others, like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have undertaken in-depth research and reporting to both accurately assess the civilian toll of US drone strikes and question the legal underpinnings of the US’ drone program as a whole. This work has proved vital for placing pressure on the Obama administration to declare publicly the legal and policy foundations on which its program is based.
The pressure, however, has not proven altogether successful. Despite successive rounds of official statements regarding the drone program — the latest being President Obama’s May 2013 speech at the National Defense University — the White House’s legal rationale for drone strikes remains murky at best. Also, a wide chasm continues to divide the administration’s targeted killing policy (such as the promise that civilians will go unharmed) from what is actually taking place in the field from Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia. The White House has, to this day, refused to offer the legal rationale for individual strikes, as human rights groups have requested, and official post-hoc assessments of the strikes. This makes it impossible to adequately assess the administration’s compliance not only to international legal norms but also to its own “targeted killing” policies.
The initial US reaction to media reports of the drone strike now documented by HRW in Yemen was textbook. Officially, Washington denied any knowledge of or participation in the strike. Unofficially, US officials leaked to the press that all those killed in the strike were militants, targetable under the administration’s drone policy. Yemen’s government contributed to this narrative, likewise alleging that all those killed were “terrorists.” In neither case was any evidence offered to justify the characterization, but transparency was beside the point. Rather, the intended effect was to preempt allegations that civilians had been struck in the attack.
Nonetheless, protests in Rad’a, the capital of the province where the strike took place, as well as the work of Yemeni activists, pushed hard against this narrative, arguing that what was believed to be a military convoy was, in fact, nothing but a wedding procession, and that those struck were neither militants nor terrorists as US and Yemeni government officials alleged. Instead, this event was another case of a US drone strike gone terribly awry, and one that ran directly counter to US drone policy.
With its latest report, entitled, “A Wedding That Became a Funeral,” HRW confirms the basic facts of the case as they have been represented by Yemeni activists: this was indeed a wedding procession en route to the groom’s hometown for additional celebration. Whether members of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) were in attendance is unclear, though as HRW astutely notes, “the burden is on the attacker” [i.e., the US] to justify the resort to lethal force and thus the lawfulness of the attack, not vice versa.
Despite US promises to undertake a review of the strike, HRW found no evidence of an ongoing internal investigation. This is particularly troubling, for as the organization notes, “the attack may have violated the laws of war . . . [and]raises serious questions as to whether US forces are complying with [US]policy requirements on targeted killings.” Following the release of the report, a Pentagon spokesperson referred reporters to statements from the Yemeni government alleging that the targets were “dangerous senior al-Qaida militants.”
The Human Rights Watch report is an important read, and one that hopefully will be widely distributed and closely parsed. So long as the pressure remains on the Obama administration to not just enunciate a restrictive targeted killing policy but to ensure internal compliance with that policy and accountability for officials who deviate from it, we are likely to see the administration take additional action to dampen public criticism. The December 12 strike in Yemen looks to be a serious case of non-compliance with both the laws of war and the US’s own drone policies, and justice for its victims will thus require strict accountability here at home.
Photo: Mousid al-Taysi near a vehicle destroyed on Dec. 12, 2013 in an alleged US drone strike. Credit: Rooj Alwazir/Al Jazeera
]]>by Tyler Cullis
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that January was the first month without a U.S. drone strikein the Pakistani tribal areas since 2011. The Washington Post argues that this is the result of a request from Pakistan’s government after ongoing peace talks with the Taliban, though some suggest [...]]]>
by Tyler Cullis
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that January was the first month without a U.S. drone strikein the Pakistani tribal areas since 2011. The Washington Post argues that this is the result of a request from Pakistan’s government after ongoing peace talks with the Taliban, though some suggest that President Obama’s new rules on targeting, released simultaneously with his National Defense University speech in May 2013, have limited the range of actors that would have earlier been targetable by the CIA and Defense Department.
It is likewise unclear whether this development will continue in the months ahead. Good reasons, however, suggest so as the war in Afghanistan draws down and the U.S. (potentially) loses access to bases in the country and to human intelligence. Below I detail some key issues we will need to pay attention to in the days ahead to see whether the White House will tilt away from the war-everywhere posture that the United States has assumed since Sept. 11.
Will the Afghan War come to a close?
It is becoming increasingly clear that President Hamid Karzai will not sign the U.S.-Afghan Bilateral Security Agreement before presidential elections in April. This poses a major dilemma for the White House, which must decide whether to make contingency plans for a small residual force should Afghan approval be forthcoming at a later date or plan a full withdrawal. But the implications run much deeper as to both the U.S.’s legal rationale for its war on al-Qaeda and the U.S.’s ability to carry out drone operations in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
If the White House is forced to commit to a total withdrawal by the end of 2014, the U.S. will lose its last remaining zone of active hostilities in its war with al-Qaeda. In this way, the legal rationale for drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia will be completely untethered from any traditional war theater. This bodes ill for the continued ability of the Obama administration to wage drone warfare without incurring massive reputational damage to the United States.
Moreover, as the New York Times reported, a total withdrawal would mean the loss of basing operations in Afghanistan and thus the loss of staging grounds for CIA drone flights into Pakistan’s tribal areas. Without good options elsewhere, U.S. drone operations in the tribal areas will be seriously circumscribed, if not altogether curtailed.
How will the White House interpret its own policy guidelines?
During his May speech, President Obama outlined new targeting rules to be effective outside areas of active hostilities. These rules provide that “the United States will use lethal force only against a target that poses a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons.” In the absence of such a threat, the U.S. will forgo the use of lethal force (i.e., drone strikes).
However, a leading human rights lawyer, Sarah Knuckey, caught a discrepancy between the President’s policy guidelines and the justification provided by an administration official for last week’s drone strike on an al-Shabaab commander in Somalia. Instead of posing a “continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons,” as is mandated, the U.S. official said that Ahmed Abdi Godane, the target, posed an “imminent threat to U.S. interests in the region.” Intended or not, the switch in the operative language is cause for concern, as “U.S. interests” could be stretched indefinitely to render a much wider swath of individuals targetable for drone strikes.
What is important, however, is whether the administration adopts an expansive or narrow interpretation of its own policy guidelines. With such elastic concepts as “imminence” and “U.S. interests” determining who is targetable, the White House can opt to keep the U.S. on permanent war footing long past the Iraq and Afghan Wars if it so chooses. Transparency in how the U.S. targets individuals and conducts drone strikes will be crucial to determining which of the two paths the President has chosen.
Will the U.S.’s traditional allies continue to cooperate on intelligence?
In a major policy speech at the Harvard Law School in 2011, CIA Director John O. Brennan argued that “when the [U.S.] upholds the rule of law, governments around the globe are more likely to provide us with intelligence we need to disrupt ongoing plots.” However, U.S. allies, especially in Europe, have long castigated the U.S. for its “global war on terror” and parted ways with successive White Houses over the applicable legal framework. Nonetheless, NATO allies have continued to share intelligence regarding foreign terrorist organizations, up to and including locational data for U.S. drone strikes.
Last week, however, a leading UK barrister published legal advice for a British parliamentary group concerning the legality of GCHQ surveillance, as well as intelligence cooperation with the United States. This legal advice included the striking conclusion that should a UK person share intelligence with the U.S. with the knowledge that such intelligence could be used for a drone strike, that person might be criminally liable as an “accessory to murder” under UK law. Already, a case was pressed on such grounds (though it failed for different reasons).
This was well-publicized in the British press and received much attention in U.S. legal circles. What effect it will have on intelligence cooperation is unclear, but the implications of “business as usual” have been rendered transparent. The White House can put forth dubious legal justifications for its drone operations, but that will not prevent close allies from risking criminal liability should they continue to cooperate with the U.S.
]]>via IPS News
Responding to growing criticism by human rights groups and foreign governments, U.S. President Barack Obama Thursday announced potentially significant shifts in what his predecessor called the “global war on terror”.
In a major policy address at the National Defense University here, Obama said drone strikes against [...]]]>
via IPS News
Responding to growing criticism by human rights groups and foreign governments, U.S. President Barack Obama Thursday announced potentially significant shifts in what his predecessor called the “global war on terror”.
In a major policy address at the National Defense University here, Obama said drone strikes against terrorist suspects abroad will be carried out under substantially more limited conditions than during his first term in office.
He also renewed his drive to close the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which currently only holds 166 prisoners.
In particular, he announced the lifting of a three-year-old moratorium on repatriating Yemeni detainees to their homeland and the appointment in the near future of senior officials at both the State Department and the Pentagon to expedite the transfer the 30 other prisoners who have been cleared for release to third countries.
In addition, he said he will press Congress to amend and ultimately repeal its 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) against Al-Qaeda and others deemed responsible for the 9/11 attacks “(in order) to determine how we can continue to fight terrorists without keeping America on a perpetual war-time footing.”
The AUMF created the legal basis for most of the actions – and alleged excesses — by U.S. military and intelligence agencies against alleged terrorists and their supporters since 9/11.
“The AUMF is now nearly 12 years old. The Afghan War is coming to an end. Core Al-Qaeda is a shell of its former self,” he declared. “Groups like AQAP (Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves Al-Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States.”
“Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states,” he warned.
His remarks gained a cautious – if somewhat sceptical and impatient – welcome from some of the groups that have harshly criticised Obama’s for his failure to make a more decisive break with some of former President George W. Bush’s policies and to close Guantanamo, and his heavy first-term reliance on drone strikes against Al-Qaeda and other terrorist suspects.
“President Obama is right to say that we cannot be on a war footing forever – but the time to take our country off the global warpath and fully restore the rule of law is now, not at some indeterminate future point,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Romero especially praised Obama’s initial moves to transfer detainees at Guantanamo but noted that he had failed to offer a plan to deal with those prisoners who are considered too dangerous to release but who cannot be tried in U.S. courts for lack of admissible evidence. He also called the new curbs on drone strikes “promising” but criticised Obama’s continued defence of targeted killings.
Obama’s speech came amidst growing controversy over his use of drone strikes in countries – particularly Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia – with which the U.S. is not at war. Since 9/11, the U.S. has conducted more than 400 strikes in the three countries with a total death toll estimated to range between 3,300 and nearly 5,000, depending on the source. The vast majority of these strikes were carried out during Obama’s first term.
While top administration officials have claimed that almost all of the victims were suspected high-level terrorists, human rights groups, as well as local sources, have insisted that many civilian non-combatants – as well as low-level members of militant groups — have also been killed.
In a letter sent to Obama last month, some of the country’s leading human rights groups, including the ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights First, questioned the legality of the criteria used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) to select targets.
Earlier this month, the legal adviser to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Harold Koh, also criticised the administration for the lack of transparency and discipline surrounding the drone programme.
In his speech Thursday, Obama acknowledged the “wide gap” between his government and independent assessments of casualties, but he strongly defended the programme as effective, particularly in crippling Al-Qaeda’s Pakistan-based leadership, legal under the AUMF, and more humane than the alternative in that “(c)onventional airpower or missiles are far less precise than drones, and likely to cause more civilian casualties and local outrage.”
“To do nothing in the face of terrorist networks would invite far more civilian casualties – not just in our cities at home and facilities abroad, but also in the very places – like Sana’a and Kabul and Mogadishu – where terrorists seek a foothold,” he said.
According to a “Fact Sheet” released by the White House, lethal force can be used outside of areas of active hostilities when there is a “near certainty that a terrorist target who poses a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons” is present and that non-combatants will not be injured or killed. In addition, U.S. officials must determine that capture is not feasible and that local authorities cannot or will not effectively address the threat.
The fact sheet appeared to signal an end to so-called “signature strikes” that have been used against groups of men whose precise is identity is unknown but who, based on surveillance, are believed to be members of Al-Qaeda or affiliated groups.
If the target is a U.S. citizen, such as Anwar Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric who the administration alleged had become an operational leader of AQAP and was killed in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen, Obama said there would be an additional layer of review and that he would engage Congress on the possibility of establishing a secret court or an independent oversight board in the executive branch.
On Wednesday, the Justice Department disclosed that three other U.S. citizens – none of whom were specifically targeted – have been killed in drone strikes outside Afghanistan.
On Guantanamo, where 102 of the 166 remaining detainees are participating in a three-month-old hunger strike, Obama said he would permit the 56 Yemenis there whose have been cleared for release to return home “on a case-by-case basis”. He also re-affirmed his determination to transfer all remaining detainees to super-max or military prisons on U.S. territory – a move that Congress has so far strongly resisted. He also said he would insist that every detainee have access to the courts to review their case.
In addition to addressing the festering drone issue and Guantanamo, however, the main thrust of Thursday’s speech appeared designed to mark what Obama called a “crossroads” in the struggle against Al-Qaeda and its affiliates and how the threat from them has changed.
“Lethal yet less capable Al-Qaeda affiliates. Threats to diplomatic facilities and businesses abroad. Homegrown extremists. This is the future of terrorism,” he said. “We must take these threats seriously, and do all we can to confront them. But as we shape our response, we have to recognise that the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11.”
“Beyond Afghanistan,” he said later, “we must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror’ – but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.”
Obama also disclosed he had signed a Presidential Policy Guidance Wednesday to codify the more restrictive guidelines governing the use of force.
White House officials who brief reporters before the speech suggested that, among other provisions, the Guidance called for gradually shifting responsibility for drone strikes and targeted killings from the CIA to the Pentagon – a reform long sought by human-rights groups.
]]>by Jasmin Ramsey
Yesterday a Senate hearing was held on the Obama administration’s “targeted killing” program, which you can watch here. It resulted in headlines like this. To date, discussions about President Obama’s use of “kill lists” and assassinations of those deemed as threats to US national security have mostly ranged [...]]]>
by Jasmin Ramsey
Yesterday a Senate hearing was held on the Obama administration’s “targeted killing” program, which you can watch here. It resulted in headlines like this. To date, discussions about President Obama’s use of “kill lists” and assassinations of those deemed as threats to US national security have mostly ranged from criticism and reform recommendations to outright support. But operating independently of the constraints associated with Washington think tanks and Congress is award-winning journalist Jeremy Scahill, who remains a sharp throne in the sides of those who claim that drone warfare enables the US to engage in clean wars. Indeed, the shift towards robotic warfare with no oversight, which has also taken the lives of American citizens, may not be that clean at all, explained Scahill to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! yesterday:
I called it Dirty Wars because, you know, particularly in this administration, in the Obama administration, I think a lot of people are being led to believe that there’s—there is a such thing as a clean war and that the drone and what’s called targeted killing—I mean, I use that term myself, but it’s actually not—if you think about it, it’s actually not a very appropriate term for what’s going on, because it’s—as we know, these strikes are anything but targeted, in many cases, and we don’t know the—we don’t even know the identities of many of the people that we’re killing in intentional strikes. So, I called it Dirty Wars because there is no such thing as a clean war, and drone warfare is not clean, but also as a sort of allusion to how we’ve returned to the kind of 1980s way of waging war, where the U.S. was involved in all these dirty wars in Central and Latin America, in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and beyond. And we’re using—you know, we’re in a world right now where the U.S. is using proxies, that effectively are death squads, in Somalia to hunt down people that the U.S. has determined are enemies. We’re using mercenaries. President Obama continues to use mercenary forces in various wars, declared and undeclared, around the world. You also have the aiding of dictatorships and other, you know, right-wing governments around the world and propping them up. It’s very similar to what Reagan and company were doing in Central America.
I’m looking forward to reading Scahill’s book on this important topic, which is shaping how the world perceives the United States and perhaps impacting national security in a way that officials are not paying enough attention to. Scahill and filmmaker Rick Rowley have also made a Sundance-selected documentary on America’s covert wars that’s screening now. You can find out where on their website.
]]>by James A. Russell
The confirmation hearings of John Brennan for director of the Central Intelligence Agency serve as the latest searing reminder of the intellectual rigamortis gripping the national security establishment and how brain dead we have become as a country in addressing strategy and strategic issues.
The sole focus [...]]]>
by James A. Russell
The confirmation hearings of John Brennan for director of the Central Intelligence Agency serve as the latest searing reminder of the intellectual rigamortis gripping the national security establishment and how brain dead we have become as a country in addressing strategy and strategic issues.
The sole focus of these hearings has been the country’s ongoing love affair with targeted assassinations carried out by drones against our Islamic extremist adversaries.
Instead of engaging in a real debate over the efficacy of these assassinations as an element of counter-terrorism strategy, we are left with the voices of Republicans who see nothing wrong with the state drawing up its monthly assassination lists and those of Democrats who worry about civil rights issues and want judges to review who the government proposes to assassinate each month.
If ever there was an example of tactics in search of a strategy, this is it. Sadly, this is only the latest example of the national security establishment confusing the two.
This country has witnessed the substitution of tactics for strategy during the last decade as a series of military and civilian leaders have trumpeted the benefits of “counterinsurgency strategy” as the correct approach to our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet counterinsurgency is nothing more than a tactical approach on the battlefield, which, by the way, has mostly failed miserably when attempted by western militaries over the last century. It is not a strategy.
Killing terrorists by whatever means is also tactics masquerading as strategy — just like counterinsurgency. Our focus on assassinating suspected terrorist foes both by hellfire missiles from above and by Special Forces kicking in doors on the ground in fact reflects a specific approach to counter-terrorism called leadership decapitation. You won’t hear this mentioned in the hearings — but this is the strategic issue under discussion, without, of course, being discussed.
Leadership decapitation as a strategy is short-sighted, bound to ultimately fail, and may in fact increase threats to our country. What is the evidence to support this assertion and where has leadership decapitation been tried? The answer exists in almost every irregular war undertaken by occupying armies over the last century. The French perfected the technique during their occupation of Algeria in one celebrated example, though that war didn’t turn out well for them. Another current day example is Israel, which has routinely assassinated its adversaries in its futile attempt to prevent terrorist attacks over the last 60 years. Just as the French could not kill their way to victory in Algeria, Israel cannot kill its way to peace and security.
Although you might not realize it, the United States is by far the greatest modern day practitioner of leadership decapitation. How has this strategy worked out for us and why isn’t Brennan being asked about it in his confirmation hearings?
I recall sitting in on a briefing in Afghanistan back in 2010 and seeing the obligatory power point slide with all the red “X’s” through the Taliban’s leadership structure in the province I was visiting. Stupidly, of course, I mentioned to the briefer: “Well, we must be winning, then.” He laughed and responded: “You could have shown up here for every year for the last few years and seen the exact same slide. They just keep coming back.”
Therein lies the problem. The US has implemented the tactic of leadership decapitation on an industrial scale in Afghanistan over the last three years under the military leadership of General Stanley McChrystal and then his successor, David Petraeus. Both unleashed the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in Afghanistan just as they did in Iraq. In Iraq during 2007 and 2008, JSOC killed many Iraqis, which helped cover the US retreat but that’s about it. JSOC teams and the CIA drone mavens have also killed a lot of the Taliban, but has the Taliban given up?
Setting aside the moral and ethical issues related to state assassinations of people without due process, the broader strategic issue remains — we can’t kill our way out of disputes with Islamic militants that are currently on the receiving end of our hellfire missiles. They will keep coming back until a political settlement is reached or until they are all dead. Since we can’t kill them all, the war will go on.
Still worse, by intervening in what are essentially local political disputes in countries like Yemen, Mali and Afghanistan, we run the risk of provoking exactly the kind of attacks against us that we are supposed to be trying to forestall.
Leadership decapitation is a prescription for never ending war, which may be useful for political purposes in some US quarters (like it is in Israel), but remains a terrible strategy. Just ask the Israelis how it has worked out for them. Despite the comforting illusion of the cost-free, push-button war offered by our standoff drone strikes and our darkly clad soldiers jumping out of helicopters to gun down suspected terrorists, we are playing a dangerous game that may only increase threats to this country.
As much as we might want to believe otherwise, there is no military solution to the political problem of extremist violence. It is a square peg being inserted into a round hole. Al Qaeda-inspired militancy around the Islamic world is at heart a violent protest against modernity that commands no broadly based popular political support. Do we see Saudi citizens (or any citizens, anywhere, for that matter) mounting the barricades in a revolution supporting Al Qaeda’s call for a return to the caliphate? We should let Al Qaeda die its natural death. If anything, America’s military interventions in the developing world have prolonged the relevance of the handful of militants flocking to this banner.
At the very least, sound strategic thinking would deliver us the kind of debate that is so desperately needed on the strategic choices facing this country as we try to decide how best to protect ourselves. The recent confirmation hearings offered us the chance to explore these issues, but the silence from both the executive and legislative branches is deafening.
This country is tumbling into a de facto era of apparently endless drone wars with no critical assessment or alternative views being offered. It’s hard not to draw the parallel to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, with the United States ceaselessly lobbing missiles into an unpoliceable, dark, and impenetrable interior just as the ship did in Conrad’s story — firing away futilely at unseen targets in a world gone mad.
]]>The grandfather of the 16-year-old American-Yemeni boy who was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen last year is suing 4 US officials, including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Former CIA Director David Petraeus, over his son and grandson’s deaths.
The father of the Colorado-born Abdulrahman al Awlaki’s was an al [...]]]>
The grandfather of the 16-year-old American-Yemeni boy who was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen last year is suing 4 US officials, including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Former CIA Director David Petraeus, over his son and grandson’s deaths.
The father of the Colorado-born Abdulrahman al Awlaki’s was an al Qaeda leader. Rights groups and reporters have argued that the boy was extrajudicially killed for his father’s actions. The fact that he was an American civilian killed by the US military in a country with which Washington is not at war also raised legal and ethical questions.
But Americans appear to favor drone strikes over all. A February 2012 Washington Post/ABC poll says 83 percent of Americans support drone strikes and 79 percent approve even when US citizens are targeted. Interestingly, Americans appear far less supportive of drone technology used for domestic law enforcement targeting citizens.
]]>Election Day in the United States was — as it has been since 1845 — a Tuesday, which meant that it also coincided with “Terror Tuesday,” the label attached to the meetings held by President Obama and his inner national security circle to discuss and authorize drone strikes based on the Administration’s [...]]]>
Election Day in the United States was — as it has been since 1845 — a Tuesday, which meant that it also coincided with “Terror Tuesday,” the label attached to the meetings held by President Obama and his inner national security circle to discuss and authorize drone strikes based on the Administration’s secretive “targeted kill lists.” Shortly after the election results came in, it was reported that the US almost certainly carried out a targeted killing operation in Yemen against a reported al Qaeda target in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The individual targeted, ’Adnan al-Qadhi, who is said to have been killed along with 2 other AQAP suspects, was reportedly suspected of helping plan the 2008 Embassy Sana’a bombing.
As usual, there has been no independent verification for Yemeni claims that the three men were killed.
Yemen-watcher Gregory Johnson noted on his blog Waq al-Waq that the strike suggested there would be little reevaluation of the drone program — being carried out over Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and in the coming weeks, Mali and Libya — even though it continues to raise costs not wholly justified by reported successes:
So, even if the accusations against al-Qadhi were true and he was involved in the 2008 US Embassy attack and even if the US did have intelligence that he was about to carry out an attack on US personnel in Yemen or planning a strike against the US – did the US also have intelligence that all of the other individuals within the car were also involved?
This is important. The US has carried out, by my best estimate, between 37 – 50 strikes this year in an attempt to kill 10 – 15 people. Many of those 10 – 15 people are still alive (see: Nasir al-Wihayshi, Said al-Shihri, Qasim al-Raymi, Ibrahim Asiri and so on) but people are dying in Yemen.
And while we in the US may not feel or realize this, it is very real in Yemen. And this is causing problems and – I continue to say – is one of the key reasons behind the rapid growth of al-Qaeda in Yemen.
There are, however, some signs suggesting the program will be reevaluated by the President and his White House advisers as calls mount for greater scrutiny.
It would be difficult for the Administration to scale back a program it has invested so heavily in and touted without actually admitting to too much, Stephen Walt blogged, following Obama’s victory. He went on:
I fear that re-election will convince his team that they’ve basically got the right formula: drones, special forces, covert action, secrecy, etc., combined with a very cautious approach to diplomacy. This is certainly preferable to the follies of the Bush administration, but it also means that the U.S. will be engaged in lots of trouble spots but unable to resolve any of them.
Greg Miller, the author of the Washington Post‘s recent insider account of the intra-Administration debate on expanding the drone program, had also noted that the debate was rather circumscribed: “[t]here were a couple dissenters who had a seat at the table … They lost those seats at the table.”
The program has again received a full-throated endorsement from the Center for a New American Security — a think tank close to the Obama Administration — as the lesser evil in comparison to deploying Pakistani or American forces to to carry out ground offensives.
Spencer Ackerman, writing at Wired, suggests a debate could occur due to diplomatic considerations, but with few officially put-forward alternatives in play:
]]>“There is a recognition within the administration that the current trajectory of drone strikes is unsustainable,” [Michael] Zenko [of the Council on Foreign Relations] says. “They are opposed in countries where strikes occur and globally, and that opposition could lead to losing host-nation support for current or future drone bases or over-flight rights.” In other words, tomorrow’s America diplomats may find that drones overshadow the routine geopolitical agenda they seek to advance. The trouble is, the administration’s early search for less-lethal policies to supplement or supplant the drones isn’t promising.”
via Tom Dispatch
White is black and down is up. Leaks that favor the president are shoveled out regardless of national security, while national security is twisted to pummel leaks that do not favor him. Watching their [...]]]>
via Tom Dispatch
White is black and down is up. Leaks that favor the president are shoveled out regardless of national security, while national security is twisted to pummel leaks that do not favor him. Watching their boss, bureaucrats act on their own, freelancing the punishment of whistleblowers, knowing their retaliatory actions will be condoned. The United States rains Hellfire missiles down on its enemies, with the president alone sitting in judgment of who will live and who will die by his hand.
The issue of whether the White House leaked information to support the president’s reelection while crushing whistleblower leaks it disfavors shouldn’t be seen as just another O’Reilly v. Maddow sporting event. What lies at the nexus of Obama’s targeted drone killings, his self-serving leaks, and his aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers is a president who believes himself above the law, and seems convinced that he alone has a preternatural ability to determine right from wrong.
If the President Does It, It’s Legal?
In May 2011 the Pentagon declared that another country’s cyber-attacks — computer sabotage, against the U.S. — could be considered an “act of war.” Then, one morning in 2012 readers of the New York Times woke up to headlines announcing that the Stuxnet worm had been dispatched into Iran’s nuclear facilities to shut down its computer-controlled centrifuges (essential to nuclear fuel processing) by order of President Obama and executed by the US and Israel. The info had been leaked to the paper by anonymous “high ranking officials.” In other words, the speculation about Stuxnet was at an end. It was an act of war ordered by the president alone.
Similarly, after years of now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t stories about drone attacks across the Greater Middle East launched “presumably” by the U.S., theTimes (again) carried a remarkable story not only confirming the drone killings — a technology that had morphed into a policy — but noting that Obama himself was the Great Bombardier. He had, the newspaper reported, designated himself the final decision-maker on an eyes-only “kill list” of human beings the United States wanted to destroy. It was, in short, the ultimate no-fly list. Clearly, this, too, had previously been classified top-secret material, and yet its disclosure was attributed directly to White House sources.
Now, everyone is upset about the leaks. It’s already a real Red v. Blue donnybrook in an election year. Senate Democrats blasted the cyberattack-on-Iran leaks and warned that the disclosure of Obama’s order could put the country at risk of a retaliatory strike. Republican Old Man and former presidential candidate Senator John McCain charged Obama with violating national security, saying the leaks are “an attempt to further the president’s political ambitions for the sake of his re-election at the expense of our national security.” He called for an investigation. The FBI, no doubt thrilled to be caught in the middle of all this, dutifully openeda leak investigation, and senators on both sides of the aisle are planning an inquiry of their own.
The high-level leaks on Stuxnet and the kill list, which have finally created such a fuss, actually follow no less self-serving leaked details from last year’sbin Laden raid in Pakistan. A flurry of White House officials vied with each other then to expose ever more examples of Obama’s commander-in-chief role in the operation, to the point where Seal Team 6 seemed almost irrelevant in the face of the president’s personal actions. There were also “high five” congratulatory leaks over the latest failed underwear bomber from Yemen.
On the Other Side of the Mirror
The Obama administration has been cruelly and unusually punishing in its use of the 1917 Espionage Act to stomp on governmental leakers, truth-tellers, and whistleblowers whose disclosures do not support the president’s political ambitions. As Thomas Drake, himself a victim of Obama’s crusade against whistleblowers, told me, “This makes a mockery of the entire classification system, where political gain is now incentive for leaking and whistleblowing is incentive for prosecution.”
The Obama administration has charged more people (six) under the Espionage Act for the alleged mishandling of classified information than all past presidencies combined. (Prior to Obama, there were only three such cases in American history, one being Daniel Ellsberg, of Nixon-era Pentagon Papers fame.) The most recent Espionage Act case is that of former CIA officer John Kiriakou, charged for allegedly disclosing classified information to journalists about the horrors of waterboarding. Meanwhile, his evil twin, former CIA officer Jose Rodriguez, has a best-selling book out bragging about the success of waterboarding and his own hand in the dirty work.
Obama’s zeal in silencing leaks that don’t make him look like a superhero extends beyond the deployment of the Espionage Act into a complex legal tangle of retaliatory practices, life-destroying threats, on-the-job harassment, and firings. Lots of firings.
Upside Down Is Right Side Up
In ever-more polarized Washington, the story of Obama’s self-serving leaks is quickly devolving into a Democratic/Republican, he-said/she-said contest — and it’s only bound to spiral downward from there until the story is reduced to nothing but partisan bickering over who can get the most advantage from those leaks.
But don’t think that’s all that’s at stake in Washington. In the ever-skittish Federal bureaucracy, among the millions of men and women who actually are the government, the message has been much more specific, and it’s no political football game. Even more frightened and edgy than usual in the post-9/11 era, bureaucrats take their cues from the top. So expect more leaks that empower the Obama Superman myth and more retaliatory, freelance acts of harassment against genuine whistleblowers. After all, it’s all been sanctioned.
Having once been one of those frightened bureaucrats at the State Department, I now must include myself among the victims of the freelancing attacks on whistleblowers. The Department of State is in the process of firing me, seeking to make me the first person to suffer any sanction over the WikiLeaks disclosures. It’s been a backdoor way of retaliating for my book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, which was an honest account of State’s waste and mismanagement in the “reconstruction” of Iraq.
Unlike Bradley Manning, on trial under the Espionage Act for allegedly dumping a quarter million classified documents onto the Internet, my fireable offense was linking to just one of them at my blog. Just a link, mind you, not a leak. The document, still unconfirmed as authentic by the State Department even as they seek to force me out over it, is on the web and available to anyone with a mouse, from Kabul to Tehran to Des Moines.
That document was discussed in several newspaper articles before — and after — I “disclosed” it with my link. It was a document that admittedly did make the U.S. government look dumb, and that was evidently reason enough for the State Department to suspend my security clearance and seek to fire me, even after the Department of Justice declined to prosecute. Go ahead and click on alink yourself and commit what State now considers a crime.
This is the sort of thing that happens when reality is suspended in Washington, when the drones take flight, the worms turn, and the president decides that he, and he alone, is the man.
What Happens When Everything Is Classified?
What happens when the very definitions that control life in government become so topsy-turvy that 1984 starts looking more like a handbook than a novel?
I lived in Taiwan when that island was still under martial law. Things that everyone could see, like demonstrations, never appeared in the press. It was illegal to photograph public buildings or bridges, even when you could buy postcards nearby of some of the same structures. And that was a way of life, just not one you’d want.
If that strikes you as familiar in America today, it should. When everything is classified – according to the Information Security Oversight Office, in 2011 American officials classified more than 92,000,000 documents — any attempt to report on anything threatens to become a crime; unless, of course, the White House decides to leak to you in return for a soft story about a heroic war president.
For everyone else working to create Jefferson’s informed citizenry, it works very differently, even at the paper that carried the administration’s happy leaks.Times reporter Jim Risen is now the subject of subpoenas by the Obama administration demanding he name his sources as part of the Espionage Act case against former CIA officer Jeffery Sterling. Risen was a journalist doing his job, and he raises this perfectly reasonable, but increasingly outmoded question: “Can you have a democracy without aggressive investigative journalism? I don’t believe you can, and that’s why I’m fighting.” Meanwhile, the government calls him their only witness to a leaker’s crime.
One thing at stake in the case is the requirement that journalists aggressively pursue information important to the public, even when that means heading into classified territory. If almost everything of importance (and much that isn’t) is classified, then journalism as we know it may become… well, illegal.
Sometimes in present-day Washington there’s simply too much irony for comfort: the story that got Risen in trouble was about an earlier CIA attempt to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program, a plot which failed where Stuxnet sort of succeeded.
The End
James Spione, an Academy Award-nominated director who is currently working on a documentary about whistleblowers in the age of Obama, summed things up to me recently this way: “Beneath the partisan grandstanding, I think what is most troubling about this situation is the sense that the law is being selectively applied. On the one hand, we have the Justice Department twisting the Espionage Act into knots in an attempt to crack down on leaks from ‘little guys’ like Thomas Drake and John Kiriakou, while at the same time an extraordinarily detailed window into covert drone policy magically appears in the Times.
“Notwithstanding Mr. McCain’s outrage, I don’t believe this is about security at all. It is the unfair singling out of whistleblowers by a secrecy regime that is more than anything just another weapon in the state’s arsenal to bludgeon its enemies while vaunting its supposed successes — if you can call blowing up unsuspecting people, their families, and friends with a remote control airplane ‘success.’”
Here is the simple reality of our moment: the president has definitively declared himself (and his advisors and those who carry out his orders) above the law, both statutory and moral. It is now for him and him alone to decide who will live and who will die under the drones, for him to reward media outlets with inside information or smack journalists who disturb him and his colleagues with subpoenas, and worst of all, to decide all by himself what is right and what is wrong.
The image Obama holds of himself, and the one his people have beenaggressively promoting recently is of a righteous killer, ready to bloody his hands to smite “terrorists” and whistleblowers equally. If that sounds Biblical, it should. If it sounds full of unnerving pride, it should as well. If this is where a nation of laws ends up, you should be afraid.
Peter Van Buren, a 24-year veteran Foreign Service Officer at the State Department, spent a year in Iraq as Team Leader for two State Department Provincial Reconstruction Teams. Now in Washington and a TomDispatch regular, he writes about Iraq, the Middle East, and U.S. diplomacy at his blog,We Meant Well. Since his book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books), was published in 2011, the Department of State has begun termination proceedings against him, after reassigning him to a make-work position and stripping him of his security clearance and diplomatic credentials. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Van Buren discusses how Washington has changed when it comes to both leaking and stifling information, click here or download it to your iPodhere.
[Disclaimer: The views here are solely those of the author, expressed in his capacity as a private citizen.]
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Copyright 2012 Peter Van Buren
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