John Brennan Says All the Bad Reports about CIA Are Inaccurate

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Kudos to Jan Schakowsky, who used today’s hearing on global threats to ask John Brennan some of the questions he so rarely gets asked.

She started by asking him generally about drones and his previous public comments about them. He responded by noting that he was a White House figure then, now he’s CIA Director (implying, I guess, that he shouldn’t be held to his previous comments).

She then asked specifically about Jonathan Landay’s reporting on the drone strikes — which, as you’ll recall, is reported directly from intelligence reports on drone strikes. Brennan responded, “A lot of things in press are reported inaccurately, in my opinion.” (Mind you, Landay’s reports did give Brennan an excuse for having lied so blatantly about civilian casualties in the past, so I guess his reporting is inaccurate, even though it helps Brennan!)

Schakowsky then asked about the difference between targeted and signature strikes. Brennan pointed back to the earlier dog and pony show on drones, which pretended signature strikes didn’t exist.

Schakowsky then asked for an update on the torture report. Brennan revealed he had spoken with Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss earlier this week. He told them he was in the process of reviewing the report (keep in mind, the original response to SSCI was due February 15, almost two months ago) and was doing a “thorough” review of some things he believed the committee did not report accurately.

If you’re John Brennan, if internal reports on drones make the CIA look bad, and if internal reports on torture make the CIA look bad, they are by definition inaccurate.

HuffPost Live on Drone Strikes

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Yesterday, Jonathan Landay, Gregory McNeal, Steve Bucci, and I joined Alyona Minkovski to talk about Landay’s latest reporting on drone strikes, which I wrote about here.

Why is it that I’m the one who makes a career out of cataloging the things Congress gets lied to about?

CIA’s Drone Lies and Congressional Oversight

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Remember when House Intelligence Chair Mike Rogers said that public reports of civilian drone casualties are wildly wrong?

“I think that you would be shocked and stunned how wrong those public reports are about civilian casualties,” Rogers said on the House floor.

“Those reports are wrong. They are not just wrong, they are wildly wrong. And I do believe that people use those reports for their own political purposes outside of the country to try to put pressure on the United States,” Rogers said.

Remember when Senate Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein said that civilian casualties have been in the single digits (and then went on to admit that she didn’t know about the “military aged male” standard)?

I’ve also been attempting to speak publicly about the very low number of civilian casualties that result from such strikes. I’ve been limited in my ability to do so. But for the past several years, this committee has done significant oversight of the government’s conduct of targeted strikes, and the figures we have obtained from the executive branch, which we have done our utmost to verify, confirm that the number of civilian casualties that have resulted from such strikes each year has typically been in the single digits.

These statements from members of the Gang of Four who have gotten the most unfettered sharing of intelligence on the drone strikes are why Jonathan Landay’s reports on what CIA’s own reporting shows are so important.

As I noted, Landay’s confirmation that CIA self-reported only one civillian casualty in the 12 months before September 2011 make it clear that CIA did not count any of the 40-something dead killed on May 17, 2011 at Datta Khel as civilian casualties.

At least 265 of up to 482 people who the U.S. intelligence reports estimated the CIA killed during a 12-month period ending in September 2011 were not senior al Qaida leaders but instead were “assessed” as Afghan, Pakistani and unknown extremists. Drones killed only six top al Qaida leaders in those months, according to news media accounts.

Forty-three of 95 drone strikes reviewed for that period hit groups other than al Qaida, including the Haqqani network, several Pakistani Taliban factions and the unidentified individuals described only as “foreign fighters” and “other militants.”

During the same period, the reports estimated there was a single civilian casualty, an individual killed in an April 22, 2011, strike in North Waziristan, the main sanctuary for militant groups in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

CIA reported no civilian casualties at Datta Khel even in spite of Mark Mazzetti’s report that “many American officials believed that the strike was botched, and that dozens of people died who shouldn’t have.”

Nor did the CIA count any of the (by my count) 51-176 civilian casualties reported by The Bureau on Independent Journalism for that period (2010; 2011; note, I counted September 1 to September 1).

In short, these reports prove that the CIA — and the intelligence community generally, given that these are described as US intelligence reports — are doing precisely what they did with the torture program: “repeatedly provid[ing] inaccurate information” to Congress.

Nevertheless, even as DiFi, at least, was seeing volumes and volumes of evidence that CIA had lied to Congress about torture in the very recent past, Gang of Four member staffers apparently didn’t read the public reporting on drones closely enough to realize that that public reporting was more credible than CIA reporting.

As a result, in spite of all the boasts of close oversight, CIA’s lies have turned the Gang of Four into propagandists for a program that they’re less well-informed about than many outside observers.

The intelligence oversight committees have become a classic case of Garbage In, Garbage Out, not only defying the entire point of oversight, but serving instead as a legally protected source of propaganda.

As we discuss releasing the torture report, we should also be discussing the larger issue of how CIA has perverted the only oversight structure it has. Because it has clearly become a pattern.

The Extra Drone Dead: Covert Actions or Side Payments?

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As I noted earlier, McClatchy has seen a slew of documents that — while obviously false on the topic of civilian casualties, at a minimum — show that hundreds of the people we’re killing are not legitimate targets under the AUMF.

The U.S. intelligence reports reviewed by McClatchy covered most – although not all – of the drone strikes in 2006-2008 and 2010-2011. In that later period, Obama oversaw a surge in drone operations against suspected Islamist sanctuaries on Pakistan’s side of the border that coincided with his buildup of 33,000 additional U.S. troops in southern Afghanistan. Several documents listed casualty estimates as well as the identities of targeted groups.

McClatchy’s review found that:

– At least 265 of up to 482 people who the U.S. intelligence reports estimated the CIA killed during a 12-month period ending in September 2011 were not senior al Qaida leaders but instead were “assessed” as Afghan, Pakistani and unknown extremists. Drones killed only six top al Qaida leaders in those months, according to news media accounts.

Forty-three of 95 drone strikes reviewed for that period hit groups other than al Qaida, including the Haqqani network, several Pakistani Taliban factions and the unidentified individuals described only as “foreign fighters” and “other militants.”

During the same period, the reports estimated there was a single civilian casualty, an individual killed in an April 22, 2011, strike in North Waziristan, the main sanctuary for militant groups in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

– At other times, the CIA killed people who only were suspected, associated with, or who probably belonged to militant groups.

As I’ve suggested, this report is perhaps most interesting for the fact that CIA, in its own documents, claims that none of the 40-some people killed at Datta Khel on May 17, 2011 were civilians.

In other words, the CIA is lying — even internally — about drone strikes as blatantly as it did about torture.

But given that this report is generating more attention to the excuses we use for killing people, it would be useful if people review this post from Gregory McNeal. In it, he reveals that — regardless of what the drone people say publicly — there are actually three categories that will get you on a targeting list.

Many have already analyzed the potential legal rationales offered by the U.S. government in support of its targeted killing campaigns (the subject of Part I of the paper), therefore let me just offer this summary with regard to categories of targets.   There are three basic categories of targets who might find their way onto a kill-list: (1) Targets who fall within the AUMF, and its associated forces interpretations [AUMF Targets], (2) targets who fall within the terms of a covert action finding [Covert Action Targets], and (3) targets provided by allies in a non-international armed conflict in which the U.S. is a participant. [Ally Targets or derisively “side payment targets.”]   These categories will oftentimes overlap, however there also may be circumstances where a target rests exclusively within one category.

So there are two reasons people who are obviously not in the categories listed in self-serving speeches might be killed. Either, because they’re targeted under the Gloves Come Off Memorandum under Article II Authority, or because we’re murdering people as a favor for our allies.

OLC’s Overseers Will Get to See Their Handiwork

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The Hill reports that the Senate Judiciary Committee will get to read the Office of Legal Counsel memos authorizing the targeting of Anwar al-Awlaki tomorrow.

Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) told The Hill that he and other members of the panel will be given access to the detailed Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos, which lay out the administration’s legal support for targeting U.S. citizens who are suspected of being terrorists, pose an “imminent threat” to U.S. national security and for whom capture is not an option.

On Tuesday Leahy said the administration was planning to make documents available for committee members to read on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the panel’s ranking member, is also planning to attend, according to his spokeswoman.

It appears that this will be one of those quickie reviews, where Senators are not allowed to share with lawyers who will conduct more in-depth analysis.

Also no word on whether the House Judiciary Committee will laso get to glimpse these memos.

They really don’t want people to really scrutinize these memos, I guess.

Which Came First, Unilateral Strikes or Signature Strikes?

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I realized something as I was writing this post on Mark Mazzetti’s latest installment from his book. Signature strikes — those strikes targeted at patterns rather than identified terrorists — purportedly preceded our unilateral use of drone strikes in Pakistan.

At least that’s what appears to be the case, comparing this article, which dates General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani’s approval of signature strikes to a January 9, 2008 meeting with DNI Mike McConnell and Michael Hayden.

The change, described by senior American and Pakistani officials who would not speak for attribution because of the classified nature of the program, allows American military commanders greater leeway to choose from what one official who took part in the debate called “a Chinese menu” of strike options.

Instead of having to confirm the identity of a suspected militant leader before attacking, this shift allowed American operators to strike convoys of vehicles that bear the characteristics of Qaeda or Taliban leaders on the run, for instance, so long as the risk of civilian casualties is judged to be low.

[snip]

The new agreements with Pakistan came after a trip to the country on Jan. 9 by Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, and Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director. The American officials met with Mr. Musharraf as well as with the new army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and offered a range of increased covert operations aimed at thwarting intensifying efforts by Al Qaeda and the Taliban to destabilize the Pakistani government. [my emphasis]

With Mazzetti’s latest, which dates unilateral strikes to a July 2008 meeting with Kayani (note, Mazzetti doesn’t say whether Hayden and Stephen Kappes, or someone else, “informed” Kayani).

While the spy agencies had had a fraught relationship since the beginning of the Afghan war, the first major breach came in July 2008, when C.I.A. officers in Islamabad paid a visit to Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Pakistani Army chief, to tell him that President Bush had signed off on a set of secret orders authorizing a new strategy in the drone wars. No longer would the C.I.A. give Pakistan advance warning before launching missiles from Predator or Reaper drones in the tribal areas. From that point on, the C.I.A. officers told Kayani, the C.I.A.’s killing campaign in Pakistan would be a unilateral war.

The decision had been made in Washington after months of wrenching debate about the growth of militancy in Pakistan’s tribal areas; a highly classified C.I.A. internal memo, dated May 1, 2007, concluded that Al Qaeda was at its most dangerous since 2001 because of the base of operations that militants had established in the tribal areas. That assessment became the cornerstone of a yearlong discussion about the Pakistan problem. Some experts in the State Department warned that expanding the C.I.A. war in Pakistan would further stoke anti-American anger on the streets and could push the country into chaos. But officials inside the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center argued for escalating the drone campaign without the I.S.I.’s blessing. Since the first C.I.A. drone strike in Pakistan in 2004, only a small number of militants on the C.I.A.’s list of “high-value targets” had been killed by drone strikes, and other potential strikes were scuttled at the last minute because of delays in getting Pakistani approval, or because the targets seemed to have been tipped off and had fled.

So, in July 2008, when the C.I.A.’s director, Michael Hayden, and his deputy, Stephen Kappes, came to the White House to present the agency’s plan to wage a unilateral war in the mountains of Pakistan, it wasn’t a hard sell to a frustrated president. [my emphasis]

Now, Mazzetti dates the urgency to use unilateral strikes to a May 1, 2007 report that said al Qaeda was reconstituting in the tribal lands. The report was likely an early draft of or precursor to the July 17, 2007 NIE on “The Terrorist Threat to the Homeland.”

Let’s take a step back and contextualize that.

Read more →

Ray Davis as a Stand-In for the War between CIA, ISI, and State

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In another installment of his book, Mark Mazzetti describes the Ray Davis episode as the signature (pun intended) event that turned Pakistan against the US. Certainly the Davis episode provides a nice hook for a description of the way the US-Pakistani relationship has declined, but it seems Mazzetti presents Davis as being an almost penultimate event of that decline (in this excerpt, he doesn’t get around to describing the 20-some Pakistani soldiers killed by NATO helicopters at the end of 2011).

In his first book excerpt, recall, Mazzetti described how the US killed Nek Muhammad in June 2004 as a quid pro quo with Pakistan for the authority to target al Qaeda figures within Pakistan.

But as Mazzetti explains in this excerpt, our drone strikes in Pakistan didn’t do much good: we didn’t get many high value targets, in part because some of them were seemingly tipped off.

Since the first C.I.A. drone strike in Pakistan in 2004, only a small number of militants on the C.I.A.’s list of “high-value targets” had been killed by drone strikes, and other potential strikes were scuttled at the last minute because of delays in getting Pakistani approval, or because the targets seemed to have been tipped off and had fled.

Then, in 2007, the CIA determined that al Qaeda had reconstituted in the tribal lands of Pakistan. So the CIA’s counterterrorism folks lobbied for escalating the drone war.

[A] highly classified C.I.A. internal memo, dated May 1, 2007, concluded that Al Qaeda was at its most dangerous since 2001 because of the base of operations that militants had established in the tribal areas. That assessment became the cornerstone of a yearlong discussion about the Pakistan problem. Some experts in the State Department warned that expanding the C.I.A. war in Pakistan would further stoke anti-American anger on the streets and could push the country into chaos. But officials inside the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center argued for escalating the drone campaign without the I.S.I.’s blessing.

So after a year of debate, the CIA told General Kayani that they were going to operate unilaterally in Pakistan.

[I]n July 2008, when C.I.A. officers in Islamabad paid a visit to Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Pakistani Army chief, to tell him that President Bush had signed off on a set of secret orders authorizing a new strategy in the drone wars. No longer would the C.I.A. give Pakistan advance warning before launching missiles from Predator or Reaper drones in the tribal areas. From that point on, the C.I.A. officers told Kayani, the C.I.A.’s killing campaign in Pakistan would be a unilateral war.

Side note: Mazzetti’s original story described the initial drone strikes as an agreement between ISI and CIA. Here, Kayani plays a central role, though the rest of this installment affirms the later central role of Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the head of the ISI. I’m interested in whether we played Pakistan’s military off of ISI.

At this point of his story, Mazzetti only describes this as an escalation, followed by a declining relationship with CIA.

So, in July 2008, when the C.I.A.’s director, Michael Hayden, and his deputy, Stephen Kappes, came to the White House to present the agency’s plan to wage a unilateral war in the mountains of Pakistan, it wasn’t a hard sell to a frustrated president. That began the relentless, years-long drone assault on the tribal areas that President Obama continued when he took office. And as the C.I.A.’s relationship with the I.S.I. soured, Langley sent station chiefs out to Islamabad who spent far less time and energy building up good will with Pakistani spies than their predecessors had. From 2008 on, the agency cycled a succession of seasoned case officers through Islamabad, and each left Pakistan more embittered than the last. One of them had to leave the country in haste when his identity was revealed in the Pakistani press. The C.I.A. suspected the leak came from the I.S.I.

Many paragraphs in his story later, he describes signature strikes and the associated “military aged male” standard. Mazzetti doesn’t describe how the two developments both exacerbated the problem. In fact, according to Mazzetti’s NYT colleagues’ reporting from 2008, the decision to use signature strikes actually precedes this change by six months. And as Greg Miller laid out last year, the impetus for the change in both strategies came from “Roger,” the abrasive guy who took over the counterterrorism center in 2006. And Roger’s campaign to make these changes preceded the 2007 report that said al Qaeda was reconstituting itself in the tribal lands.  Read more →

Obama on Drones: Silence

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Karen DeYoung wonders something I have been wondering.

The Obama administration is still struggling with how to make good on the president’s promise to ensure that its counterterrorism programs, including drone strikes, are “even more transparent to the American people and to the world.”

After President Obama’s pledge in his State of the Union address in mid-February, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told a Senate hearing in early March that the president would publicly address the issue “in a relatively short period of time.”

In the ensuing silence, only one U.S. drone attack has been reported, in Pakistan nearly a month ago.

[snip]

Remarks by Obama and Holder led many to think that the president was preparing to make a major speech on counterterrorism and drones. The president himself, senior administration officials have said, ordered a series of public speeches by Brennan and others in recent years outlining the drone program’s legal framework and the care with which targets are chosen.

The question now is how much more the administration can say without violating secrecy restrictions on its own covert actions.

But she doesn’t consider some of the possible explanations for Obama’s silence.

First, Congress and the public got a look at the Administration’s rationale for killing an American citizen. Not even the NYT’s best efforts could make that look very good. Once I finally get done traveling I plan to lay out some evidence showing that that case is still more fragile than has been made public so far. So at the very least, I would imagine the Administration isn’t going to let the President speak on this until they have a plan in place — perhaps a drone court, perhaps more friendly leaks to the press to pretend there’s more evidence — that will make the case look less shitty.

Then there’s the Administration’s recent FOIA set-back in the courts. While I’m more skeptical than many that this will bring about real disclosures, I do think the Administration is trying to map out a new legal strategy in response to that set-back. And at the very least, the FOIA set-back increases the chance that we’ll get to fact-check whatever Obama says publicly. Which is not how the Most Transparent Administration Evah™ prefers to work; they prefer pure information asymmetry on national security issues, with rampant leaks but no ability to check their rampant leaks.

And finally there are the pictures we’ll get from Mark Mazzetti and Jeremy Scahill’s new books, with Mazzetti’s Way of the Knife officially released tomorrow and Scahill’s Dirty Wars coming out April 23. The public understanding of drones and other counterterrorism programs will likely change significantly with these two books, with not just an enhanced understanding of the quid pro quo murders we committed to be able to drone our own targets, but also the real inefficacy of the drone war generally.

Back when Holder promised a speech from Obama, I think he — and the Administration — had an overconfident belief in their their legal and political stance with drones. That may be changing amid all the silence.

Once Again, Congress Reads Stuff It Should Have Received from the Administration in NYT

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Remember the excuse an anonymous Administration source Senator gave to explain why the Administration was not sharing some of the OLC memos on drone killing with the intelligence committees that by law oversee them?

Because the agreements with Pakistan and Yemen were too sensitive.

A senator who sits on the Intelligence Committee and has read some of the memos also said that the still-unreleased memos contain secret protocols with the governments of Yemen and Pakistan on how targeted killings should be conducted. Information about these pacts, however, were not in the OLC opinions the senator has been allowed to see.

In a preview of his new book, Mark Mazzetti describes what is surely in one of them: the “side payment” strikes — targeting Pakistan’s enemies, not our own — we carried out so as to gain access to Pakistani airspace so we could target others.

Mr. [Nek] Muhammad [a Pakistani Taliban ally] and his followers had been killed by the C.I.A., the first time it had deployed a Predator drone in Pakistan to carry out a “targeted killing.” The target was not a top operative of Al Qaeda, but a Pakistani ally of the Taliban who led a tribal rebellion and was marked by Pakistan as an enemy of the state. In a secret deal, the C.I.A. had agreed to kill him in exchange for access to airspace it had long sought so it could use drones to hunt down its own enemies.

[snip]

Pakistani officials had, for several years, balked at the idea of allowing armed C.I.A. Predators to roam their skies. They considered drone flights a violation of sovereignty, and worried that they would invite further criticism of Mr. Musharraf as being Washington’s lackey. But Mr. Muhammad’s rise to power forced them to reconsider.

The C.I.A. had been monitoring the rise of Mr. Muhammad, but officials considered him to be more Pakistan’s problem than America’s. In Washington, officials were watching with growing alarm the gathering of Qaeda operatives in the tribal areas, and George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director, authorized officers in the agency’s Islamabad station to push Pakistani officials to allow armed drones. Negotiations were handled primarily by the Islamabad station.

As the battles raged in South Waziristan, the station chief in Islamabad paid a visit to Gen. Ehsan ul Haq, the ISI chief, and made an offer: If the C.I.A. killed Mr. Muhammad, would the ISI allow regular armed drone flights over the tribal areas?

In secret negotiations, the terms of the bargain were set. Pakistani intelligence officials insisted that they be allowed to approve each drone strike, giving them tight control over the list of targets.

[snip]

The ISI and the C.I.A. agreed that all drone flights in Pakistan would operate under the C.I.A.’s covert action authority — meaning that the United States would never acknowledge the missile strikes and that Pakistan would either take credit for the individual killings or remain silent.

So in the name of the war on al Qaeda we’re killing non-al Qaeda so as to win the ability to kill al Qaeda.

And the Administration didn’t want to explain all that to the intelligence committees.

The Warsame Model

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I’ll have more to say about the unsealing of the Ahmed Warsame guilty plea as the week goes forward.

But for the moment I wanted to note a few details of this story describing how the government plans to use the Warsame case as a model for other alleged terrorists — captured, interrogated under law of war conditions for months, and then clean-teamed by the FBI for prosecution in US civilian courts.

Family affairs?

First, note the terse comment from Warsame’s attorney:

Priya Chaudhry, an attorney for Warsame, said she could not comment on his cooperation. She said she was “working very hard to keep his family safe,” adding that the U.S. government was helping.

The impression I’ve gotten from my scant access to the coverage of this case is that this concept — our promise to keep Warsame’s family safe as one reason he cooperated — has been interpreted as keeping the family safe from al Qaeda associates. And the plea agreement actually talks about the Witness Security Program, suggesting Warsame’s family could be resettled in the US or elsewhere in exchange for his cooperation. Kudos to us if we in fact used Warsame’s family solely as some guarantee that his cooperation wouldn’t get them killed.

But remember there’s also been an increasing trend of using threats against family members to coerce cooperation from alleged terrorists and the like, from the kidnapping of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s kids to the detention of Faisal Shahzad’s family. Given that history, I’d suggest we might ask whether we’re protecting Warsame’s family from al-Shabaab or from the US?

I look forward to learning more about this, because if the US has finally returned to using carrots as well as — or even better, when innocent family members are involved, instead of — threats against the family, that would be a worthwhile development. But in the very recent past — indeed, even since Warsame’s capture — we have preferred to use threats.

Magic Awlaki information

I’m also interested by the timing of the unsealing of the Warsame plea.

The timing of the unsealing may be most closely connected to the sentencing of Mohamed Ibrahim Ahmed, a Somali-Swede who was sentenced to nine-plus years on Wednesday for materially supporting al Shabaab. Warsame would have testified against Ahmed if his case had gone to trial, though that was made clear before Ahmed himself plead guilty last June, so it’s not new information. As Ahmed’s attorney Sabrina Shroff describes, “It’s like you’re using the consigliere as a snitch against the soldier.” But because the revelation of the unsealing and the Ahmed’s sentencing coincided, it provides an easy way for the government to point to tangible intelligence that Warsame had provided, against however minimal a target.

Nevertheless, I wonder if this news flash doesn’t tie to the government’s efforts to lay out a case against Awlaki (and the still promised talk from the President about drones, and presumably Awlaki’s targeting).

If I’m not mistaken, the first we explicitly heard of Warsame implicating AQAP members comes from the NYT Awlaki production, which described Warsame providing intelligence on Samir Khan.

In April 2011, the United States captured Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, a Somali man who worked closely with the Qaeda affiliate in Yemen. He was held aboard a naval vessel for more than two months and spoke freely to interrogators, including about his encounters with the former North Carolina man now editing the group’s magazine, Samir Khan.

While the United States had long tracked Mr. Khan, the new details from the Warsame interrogation raised the question of whether another American citizen should be considered for targeting. There was still scant evidence tying Mr. Khan to any specific plot, so the administration left him off the list. But events would not turn out so neatly.

Note what that information amounted to: nothing tying Khan to any plot, still nothing indicating he was operational. Indeed, if Khan had been rendered rather than killed, Warsame’s failure to tie Khan to operations might have counted as exonerating information.

Now, the WaPo story reveals that Warsame also provided intelligence on Awlaki.

He also provided information about Awlaki, who had become a major target for a capture or kill operation after he was tied to an attempt to bring down a commercial aircraft over Detroit. “He was a guy who was in fairly regular contact with Awlaki and talked about his contacts with Awlaki and Awlaki’s patterns of life,” said the former administration official.

But again, neither the WaPo nor the earlier NYT (which relied on information about Warsame’s interrogations) describes information implicating Awlaki. Rather, the WaPo seems to imply Warsame helped to track down Awlaki (remember: Awlaki had a near miss in May 2011, a month after Warsame’s capture).

All that said, I wouldn’t be surprised if we got magical leaks in upcoming days stating that Warsame did provide intelligence against Awlaki in 2011. That would add something to the government narrative they currently utterly lack — any reasonably fresh intelligence against Awlaki at the time he was killed, rather than the 12 and 20-month old and problematic intelligence tied to the toner cartridge and underwear bomb plots. It would also give us something they don’t otherwise have: someone who would have testified against Awlaki.

The NYT case against Awlaki not only had significant holes and slanted coverage, but there are further problems with the Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab intelligence I hope to lay out going forward. Ultimately, just weeks after Awlaki’s death the government went forward with a conspiracy charge against Abdulmutallab but never (as far as we know) indicted the guy they much later claimed was the key driver of that conspiracy, Awlaki. That says something about the confidence they had in the case against Awlaki even as they killed him, at least as it related to the underwear bomb plot.

Which is why, if Warsame did provide more viable intelligence against Awlaki, I expect we’ll be hearing about it in upcoming weeks.