Angler 2.0: Brennan Wields His Puppet Strings Differently

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As I said earlier, the parallel between the Jo Becker/Scott Shane Angler 2.0 story and the earlier series by Becker and Barton Gellman is hard to miss.

But I’m very interested in how the stories are structured differently. With Angler 1.0, the story was very clearly about Dick Cheney and the methods he used to manipulate Bush into following his advice. Here, the story is really about John Brennan, Obama’s Cheney, portrayed deep in thought and foregrounding Obama in the article’s picture. Indeed, halfway through, the story even gives biographical background on Brennan, the classic “son of Irish immigrants” story, along with Harold Koh’s dubious endorsement of Brennan’s “moral rectitude.”

But instead of telling the story of John Brennan, Obama’s Cheney, the story pitches Obama as the key decision-maker–a storyline Brennan has always been one of the most aggressive pitchmen for, including when he confirmed information on the Anwar al-Awlaki strike he shouldn’t have. In a sense, then, Brennan has done Cheney one better: seed a story of his own power, but sell it as a sign of the President’s steeliness.

The Silent Sources for the Story

I already pointed out how, after presenting unambiguous evidence of Brennan’s past on-the-record lies, the story backed off calling him on it.

But there are other ways in which this story shifts the focus away from Brennan.

A remarkable number of the sources for the story spoke on the record: Tom Donilon, Cameron Munter, Dennis Blair, Bill Daley, Jeh Johnson, Michael Hayden, Jim Jones, Harold Koh, Eric Holder, Michael Leiter, John Rizzo, and John Bellinger. But it’s not until roughly the 3,450th word of a 6,000 word article that Brennan is first quoted–and that’s to largely repeat the pre-emptive lies of his drone speech from last month.

“The purpose of these actions is to mitigate threats to U.S. persons’ lives,” Mr. Brennan said in an interview. “It is the option of last recourse. So the president, and I think all of us here, don’t like the fact that people have to die. And so he wants to make sure that we go through a rigorous checklist: The infeasibility of capture, the certainty of the intelligence base, the imminence of the threat, all of these things.”

That is the only on-the-record direct quote from Brennan in the entire article, in spite of the centrality of Brennan to the story.

And I would bet several of the sources quoted anonymously in the section describing Obama’s method of counting the dead (which still ignores the women and children) are Brennan: “a top White House adviser” describing how sharp Obama was in the face of the first civilian casualties; “a senior administration official” claiming, in the face of credible evidence to the contrary, that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan were in “single digits.”

Note, too, the reference to a memo his campaign national security advisors wrote him.

“Pragmatism over ideology,” his campaign national security team had advised in a memo in March 2008. It was counsel that only reinforced the president’s instincts.

The memo was written not long after Brennan started playing a more central role among Obama’s campaign advisors. But the story makes no mention of his presumed role in it. Further, in describing Jeh Johnson to introduce a quote, the piece notes that he was “a campaign adviser” (it doesn’t say Johnson was also focused on voter protection). But it does not note that Brennan, too, was a key campaign advisor, one with an exclusively national security focus.

Nor does the story note, when it describes how Obama “deployed his legal skills … to preserve trials in civilian courts” it was John Brennan making that case, not the Attorney General.

In other words, in several places in this story, Brennan plays a key role that is downplayed.

The Pro-Drone Narrator

Given that fact, I’m really interested in the several places where the story adopts a pro-drone viewpoint (it does adopt a more critical stance in the narrative voice at the end).

For example, the story claims, in the first part of the story, that the drone strikes “have eviscerated Al Qaeda” without presenting any basis for that claim. This, in spite of the fact that al Qaeda has expanded in Yemen since we’ve started hitting it with drones.

Later, the article uncritically accepts the claim that the drone–regardless of the targeting that goes into using it–is a “precision weapon” that constitutes a rejection of a “false choice between our safety and our ideals.”

The care that Mr. Obama and his counterterrorism chief take in choosing targets, and their reliance on a precision weapon, the drone, reflect his pledge at the outset of his presidency to reject what he called the Bush administration’s “false choice between our safety and our ideals.”

For fucks sake! This article describes how the White House has adopted a “guilt by association” approach to drone targeting. Read more →

John Brennan, Liar

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Since Jo Becker co-wrote the Angler series in the WaPo with Barton Gellman, her long piece today with Scott Shane will be seen as the Obama version of that story: how he evades the law to pursue ruthless counterterrorism policies.

I’ll have more to say about the story later. But for now, let me note how it proves, pretty definitively, that John Brennan is a liar.

The story describes Obama being informed, just days after his confirmation, that a drone strike had killed civilians.

Just days after taking office, the president got word that the first strike under his administration had killed a number of innocent Pakistanis. “The president was very sharp on the thing, and said, ‘I want to know how this happened,’ “ a top White House adviser recounted.

Now, who do you suppose informed Obama of this (see update below–it was Michael Hayden)? And who do you suppose was involved in discussions of it? I find it inconceivable to believe that John Brennan was out of the loop on that news, particularly as Obama responded by using less powerful missiles for drones to lessen collateral damage. John Brennan learned, in the first days of the Administration, that we had killed civilians.

And yet Brennan repeatedly and publicly has claimed there had been no civilian casualties.

The NYT story acknowledges Brennan’s comments (and probably quotes him again, anonymously, in this passage).

This counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths. In a speech last year Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s trusted adviser, said that not a single noncombatant had been killed in a year of strikes. And in a recent interview, a senior administration official said that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr. Obama was in the “single digits” — and that independent counts of scores or hundreds of civilian deaths unwittingly draw on false propaganda claims by militants.

If Brennan is indeed that anonymous source, then it means NYT presented evidence he lied his ass off–though didn’t call him on it–and then went back to him for more bullshit lies.

The story seems to accept as serious the funny accounting the Administration uses to pretend civilian drone deaths didn’t happen.

Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

But others (I’m guessing Dennis Blair is one of these) recognize this is all phony accounting.

The C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it “guilt by association” that has led to “deceptive” estimates of civilian casualties.

“It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,” the official said. “They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.”

I guess it’s opposition like this that causes the White House to bring its drone war into the White House, to be overseen solely by John Brennan, so they can continue to pretend that all the dead teenage boys (including, of course, US citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who would also be counted as a fighter using these rules) were our enemies.

Read more →

Brennan to Pakistan: The Beatings Drone Strikes Will Continue Until Morale Improves

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There was yet another US drone strike in Pakistan today. According to Bill Roggio at Long War Journal, today’s strike is the fourth strike in six days. After the first strike in this series, I posed the question of whether that strike was more politically based than strategically based, as the strike came just two days (Roggio has it as one day after the summit, but there are large time zone differences; the summit ended on Monday in Chicago and the first strike was early Wednesday local time in Pakistan) after US-Pakistan negotiations on reopening NATO supply routes through Pakistan broke down at the NATO summit in Chicago and on the very day that Dr. Shakeel Afridi was sentenced for treason because he helped the CIA to gather intelligence that aided the US raid to kill Osama bin Laden.

There is now ample evidence to believe that politics are indeed behind the recent strikes and, as Marcy and I have been noting on Twitter, they likely will continue on a virtually daily basis to make the political points that the US is stressing. Recall that after the first strike in the series, I quoted a Guardian article that also came to the conclusion the strike was politically motivated:

The attack came as Washington runs out of patience with Islamabad’s refusal to reopen supply routes for Nato troops in Afghanistan.

US drone strikes have complicated negotiations over the routes, which Pakistan closed six months ago in retaliation for US air strikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers along the Afghan border. Pakistan’s parliament demanded the strikes stop after the attack, but the US refused.

In today’s report, Roggio provides a quote with direct evidence that the strikes now are tied politically to the impasse over reopening the supply routes (although it seems likely that Dana Rohrabacher isn’t the only one advocating the use of a “stick” on Pakistan over the Afridi sentencing, too):

A US intelligence official involved in the drone program in the country told The Long War Journal that the strikes would continue now that Pakistan has refused to reopen NATO’s supply lines for the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.

“There certainly hasn’t been a shortage of targets in Pakistan’s tribal areas,” the official said. “Unfortunately the politics of getting the GLOC into Afghanistan has trumped the targeting of bad guys in Pakistan’s tribal areas,” the official said, referring to the Ground Lines of Communication.

But hold on just a minute here. Note the misdirection in this quote. Despite the claim that the US is “targeting bad guys” with these strikes, Roggio reports elsewhere in this article that no high value target has been reported as killed in today’s attack. In fact, he reports that there have been 17 US drone strikes in Pakistan this year, but only two high value targets have been killed in them.

Where have we heard someone recently trying to make the false claim that “signature strikes” are targeted rather than based simply on patterns of activity? Why that would be in John Brennan’s April 30 drone speech, which Marcy has cleanly dissected as a failed attempt to direct attention away from the war crimes committed regularly in signature strikes.

Roggio’s anonymous source says basically that the strikes will continue until the political situation improves. Despite the source’s claim that the strikes target “bad guys” the evidence instead shows that these are signature strikes that at best target mid-level or even lower level militants who happen to be in areas “known to harbor insurgents”. Given how closely this misdirection about targeting mirrors Brennan’s speech (and the fact that Brennan himself now controls signature strikes) it seems likely that the strikes themselves are Brennan’s way of telling Pakistan that the beatings will continue until morale improves.

The Assassination Czar’s War Crimes Dodge: Revisiting John Brennan’s Targeted Killing Speech

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Now that John Brennan is in charge of selecting which patterns of behavior we should target with drones, it ought to be easy to charge him with war crimes. The at least eight civilians we killed in Jaar a number of weeks after Brennan seized control of targeting? John Brennan killed them, presumably based not on intelligence about who they were and what ties to AQAP they had, but because they ran out of a house after an earlier strike.

John Brennan is choosing to target people in Yemen without making adequate efforts to avoid civilian casualties. Given that we know he’s making these choices, you’d expect someone to try to hold him accountable.

Of course, such an effort would present all kinds of difficulties. You can’t really make a legal case against Brennan based on anonymous sources in an AP story. Furthermore, moving the drone program into the National Security Council makes it inaccessible to FOIA and, probably, to full Congressional oversight.

Most of all, though, Brennan appears to be preemptively crafting his defense.

When Brennan gave his drone speech on April 30, I–and a few other people–noted that the speech was already outdated. Brennan did admit, unequivocally, that we use drones to kill people.

So let me say it as simply as I can.  Yes, in full accordance with the law, and in order to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States and to save American lives, the United States Government conducts targeted strikes against specific al-Qaida terrorists, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones.

Yet he spoke repeatedly of targeting specific individuals.

Without question, the ability to target a specific individual, from hundreds or thousands of miles away, raises profound questions.

[snip]

In this armed conflict, individuals who are part of al-Qaida or its associated forces are legitimate military targets. [my emphasis]

Thus, he wasn’t talking about the program in Yemen that–perhaps 10 days earlier–had been expanded to target patterns rather than individuals. Rather, he was pretending that the program remained limited to personality strikes, strikes against known targets.

The speech always seemed like an attempt to put the best spin on the program. But the approach makes even more sense now that we know Brennan is the one who has legal liability for making these targeting decisions.

When and if anyone were to charge Brennan for war crimes for targeting civilians, for example, he will point back to these paragraphs as “proof” of his “belief” that we were not targeting civilians.

Targeted strikes conform to the principles of distinction, the idea that only military objectives may be intentionally targeted and that civilians are protected from being intentionally targeted.  With the unprecedented ability of remotely piloted aircraft to precisely target a military objective while minimizing collateral damage, one could argue that never before has there been a weapon that allows us to distinguish more effectively between an al-Qaida terrorist and innocent civilians.

Read more →

John Brennan, Assassination Czar

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Between appearing on Democracy Now this morning and some other things, I’ll be out of pocket most of the day.

But I should say that I didn’t invent the moniker “Assassination Czar.” I’m not sure who did (though I’m happy to provide credit!), but here’s to hoping use of it embarrasses the Administration into reversing their plan to run the Yemen war out of the White House.

US Drone Strike in Pakistan Reeks of Political Retaliation Yet Again

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Map of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan. Note Orakzai and North Waziristan are as close as 50 milies in some spots. (Wikimedia Commons)

Today, US drones killed four more people in North Waziristan in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). This strike comes at a critical time in US-Pakistan relations, as many believed that the US and Pakistan would announce an agreement reopening NATO supply routes through Pakistan at last weekend’s NATO summit in Chicago. Instead of reaching agreement, however, Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari was essentially shunned at the meeting. Today’s strike adds to that insult, as Pakistan has been objecting strenuously to US drone strikes as an imposition on Pakistan’s sovereignty. Despite US claims that Pakistan does nothing to stop insurgents in the FATA, Pakistani jets also killed 12 people today in Orakzai Agency, which is near North Waziristan and also within the FATA.

Drone strikes in Pakistan by the US have occasionally been interrupted by various diplomatic issues. For example, there was a lull of over a month at the height of negotiations over the release of Raymond Davis.  One of the most notorious US drone strikes was on March 17, 2011, the day after Raymond Davis was released. This signature strike killed over 40, and despite US claims (was that you, John Brennan?), that those killed “weren’t gathering for a bake sale” it was later determined that the majority of those killed were indeed civilians at a jirga to discuss local mineral rights. Because it was so poorly targeted, this strike always stood out in my mind as the product of an attitude where high-level US personnel demanded a target, no matter how poorly developed, simply to have something to hit since drone strikes had been on hold over the Davis negotiations and there was a need to teach Pakistan a lesson.

Not too long after that strike, another strike seemed to be timed as a response to negotiations gone bad. On April 13, 2011, there was a drone strike in South Waziristan that occurred while Pakistan’s ISI chief was in transit back to Pakistan after discussions with the US over drones was cut short.

With those strikes as background, today’s strike may well be another example of the US deciding to send in a strike to make a political point. The Guardian seems to see the strike in the same way, and notes how the strikes may affect negotiations:

The attack came as Washington runs out of patience with Islamabad’s refusal to reopen supply routes for Nato troops in Afghanistan. Read more →

UndieBomb 2.0 Led to John Brennan’s Personal Signature Strike Drone Shop

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The AP story reporting on John Brennan centralizing control of drone targeting in his own grubby paws keeps evolving. Compare the first two paragraphs of what I believe to be the second version (the first was really a leak from DOD sources describing Brennan’s power grab):

The Pentagon’s role in choosing terror leaders to be targeted for drone attacks or raids has been minimized in a new system developed by White House counterterror chief John Brennan. The current procedure concentrates power over the use of lethal U.S. force outside war zones within one small team at the White House.

With Brennan’s team now in the lead, consulting with the State Department and other agencies as to who should go on the list, a previous military-run review process in place since 2009 has become less relevant, according to two current and three former U.S. officials aware of the evolution in how the government targets terrorists.

With the first three paragraphs  of what I believe to be the third version.

White House counterterror chief John Brennan has seized the lead in guiding the debate on which terror leaders will be targeted for drone attacks or raids, establishing a new procedure to vet both military and CIA targets.

The move concentrates power over the use of lethal U.S. force outside war zones at the White House.

The process, which is about a month old, means Brennan’s staff consults the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies as to who should go on the list, making a previous military-run review process in place since 2009 less relevant, according to two current and three former U.S. officials aware of the evolution in how the government targets terrorists. [my emphasis]

One of the new details is that date: “about a month old.”

That is, around April 22.

Which means this decision–to bypass DOD’s evidence based targeting process and instead have Brennan do it all from the White House–coincides with and was probably a part of the decision to do signature strikes, which in turn both appear to have followed the Saudi delivery of a bomb “plot” to justify the change. Here’s what the known timeline currently looks like:

April 18: Greg Miller first reports on debate over signature strikes

Around April 20: UndieBomb 2.0 device recovered

Around April 22: John Brennan takes over drone targeting from JSOC

April 22: Drone strike that–WSJ reports, “Intelligence analysts [worked] to identify those killed” after the fact, suggesting possible signature strike

April 24: Robert Mueller in Yemen for 45 minute meeting, presumably to pick up UndieBomb

April 25: WSJ reports that Obama approved use of signature strikes

April 30: John Brennan gives speech, purportedly bringing new transparency to drone program, without addressing signature strikes

May 6: Fahd al-Quso killed

May 7: AP reports on UndieBomb 2.0

May 8: ABC reports UndieBomb 2.0 was Saudi-run infiltrator

May 15: Drone strike in Jaar kills a number of civilians

Note, other reporting makes it clear the Saudis had contact with the 2.0 UndieBomber leading up to him coming in, with some reports saying Obama had notice as well.

In any case, the chronology seems to be clear: the 2.0 UndieBomber came in, then Brennan brought the drone targeting–now including signature strikes!–into the White House for micromanagement.

More Failed Targeting Based on Travel Patterns

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The other day I noted what happened when the US or its allies applied the standard it is using in the Latif case: targeting people based on claims the route they traveled makes them a terrorist. In Turkey, 34 Kurds were killed because they were using the same path PKK guerrillas use.

In Honduras, our travel-based targeting appears to have killed civilians as well, sparking anti-US outrage in response. On May 11, four Hondurans were killed in a joint DEA-Honduran attack against suspected drug traffickers. It turns out the law enforcement officials (the US claims DEA agents didn’t shoot) shot at an unlit boat carrying 4 civilians nearby, not the lit traffickers’ boat; the traffickers escaped.

In US denials of fault, they said the unlit boat could not have been civilians, since it was the middle of the night. But it turns out there is a reasonable explanation for their presence.

In fact, Ms. Lezama and her husband say, they were not fishing, as the mayor initially suggested — they were returning from a daily trip in which they dropped off lobster fishermen at the Caribbean coast, coming back with passengers picked up at several spots along the river.

“We’ve been doing this for 25 years, day and night,” Ms. Lezama said. Her husband and other relatives, surrounding her as she lay in bed, nodded. They and other town residents confirmed that the family business had been making the trip for years.

And the spot in the river where the shooting occurred is not as isolated as Honduran and American officials have suggested.

“The Patuca River is like a highway; it’s always full of traffic from the village,” said Mayor Lucio Baquedano. Indeed, on Friday afternoon the landing where witnesses said the shooting occurred looked like a taxi stand: about 20 long, skinny boats bobbed in the brown water. A gray Yamaha motor hung from the back of one carrying families east to Brus Laguna, a larger town where Ms. Lezama’s boat usually stops. In another sat a red bike, while in a third, a man carried a hunk of freshly cut wood as long and wide as his leg.

Near the end was Ms. Lezama’s blue boat. A half dozen gunshot holes could clearly be seen.

“What worries me is that if there are more drugs moving along that river,” Mayor Baquedano said, “more of our people are going to be attacked.” [my emphasis]

Another common highway Americans didn’t recognize as such, seeing instead a route conveying only traffickers.

How many times do you suppose we’re going to do this before we learn that common travel routes are not, themselves, evidence of terrorism or trafficking?

Riyadh’s Station Chief, John Brennan, Takes JSOC’s Drone Keys Away

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I think I’ve actually found a story in which John Brennan features but was probably not the original leaker: this one, describing how Brennan is centralizing all drone targeting decisions in the White House.

The Pentagon is likely to be sidelined from decisions on determining which terror leaders are targeted for attacks by drones. It’s a change that would concentrate the power to strike with lethal force outside war zones within one small team at the White House.

Let me make a few points about timing.

First, this leak comes on the same day the Obama Administration succeeded in hiding the “Gloves Come Off” Memorandum of Notification authorizing–in addition to torture–the targeted killing program. I suspect this means there will be less oversight from here on out.

In addition, the leak also comes just after the Administration asked for another month extension on their response to the drone FOIA. That’s funny, because the Administration was reportedly ready to start revealing details about military drone operations, but not CIA ones.

The changes considered most likely to win adoption would bring about greater openness regarding the military drone program, while keeping most or all details of CIA strikes classified, U.S. officials said. CIA officials are opposed to publicly acknowledging the details of drone programs under its control, for fear of setting precedents that could affect other covert programs.

Does this mean the Administration also wants to micromanage transparency, as well as targeting, in part by exerting more control over that part of the program that would be more transparent?

But the most interesting coincidence with this news is the expansion of signature strikes in Yemen. When Greg Miller first reported on the possibility of signature strikes in Yemen, he suggested that JSOC neither needed nor wanted that authority; it would be used with CIA alone.

The CIA is seeking authority to expand its covert drone campaign in Yemen by launching strikes against terrorism suspects even when it does not know the identities of those who could be killed, U.S. officials said.

[snip]

Some U.S. officials have voiced concern that such incidents could become more frequent if the CIA is given the authority to use signature strikes.

“How discriminating can they be?” asked a senior U.S. official familiar with the proposal. Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen “is joined at the hip” with a local insurgency whose main goal is to oust the country’s government, the official said. “I think there is the potential that we would be perceived as taking sides in a civil war.”

[snip]

The JSOC has broader authority than the CIA to pursue militants in Yemen and is not seeking permission to use signature strikes, U.S. officials said.

That was two days before the Saudis delivered us up an UndieBomb plot on April 20 to justify expanding our attacks in Yemen.

But when, five days after the Saudis delivered the UndieBomb plot (though still weeks before we’d learn about it), WSJ reported Obama had approved the signature strikes, the story said JSOC had asked for signature authority along with the CIA.

“This was an interagency decision made based on deliberations about the growing threat from AQAP and concerns about the safe haven,” a senior Obama administration official said. The White House is “broadening the aperture” for CIA and JSOC strikes, the official added.

[snip]

The CIA and JSOC asked last year for broader targeting powers, however, which would include leeway to conduct what are known as “signature strikes,” in which targets are identified based on patterns of behavior, such as surveillance showing they are transporting weapons.

[snip]

Recently the CIA and JSOC, citing the fears about an al Qaeda haven, renewed requests to the White House.

In other words, there have been conflicting reports about whether JSOC wanted to or would participate in signature strikes.

Since then, we’ve launched our big new assault on Yemen, including a drone strike that killed 8 civilians.

Then, just as our assault expands, John Brennan–perhaps along with his Saudi friends–decides we can’t exercise the level of caution that DOD has previously exercised.

Under the new plan, Brennan’s staff compiles the potential target list and runs the names past agencies such as the State Department at a weekly White House meeting, the officials said. Read more →

Join a Military Exercise and Win a Drone!

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William Arkin catalogs the 19 countries participating in the “largest US exercise in the Middle East” this month.

U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) now says that the exercise is “the largest annual exercise in the Central Command area of operations,” supplanting Bright Star, the exercise series previously conducted in Egypt.  I guess the masters of war planning have a lot of faith in the stability and resilience of the Jordanian government, come to think of it, just like they did about Egypt.

Eager Lion, which most press reports refer to as including 17 participants, actually includes 19 participants, according to CENTCOM.   They include Australia, Bahrain, Brunei, Egypt, France, Italy, Iraq, Jordan, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Lebanon, Pakistan, Qatar, Spain, Romania, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and United States.  The exercise is touted as “building relationships,” but the 19 nations weren’t named until May 15th: I suppose it’s more like a furtive affair than a relationship.  It’s interesting to note that Turkey, previously reported as participating, evidently is not; and that Iraq is there.

Like Arkin, I’m struck by the addition of Iraq and the apparent withdrawal of Turkey from the exercise.

Particularly given this news:

Iraq is buying unmanned drones from the United States to help protect its southern oil platforms as the OPEC nation ramps up production after the withdrawal of the last American troops, U.S. and Iraqi officials said on Monday.

[snip]

Iraq’s 40,000-strong energy police stepped up protection to deter attacks it expected from Sunni Islamist armed groups linked to al-Qaeda. But officials long complained they were poorly equipped for the task of protecting the vital sector.

As noted, the ostensible threat these drones are targeting are Sunni insurgents. Given the current regime in Iraq and the Shia population in the south, where these drones will be used, that makes sense.

But I wonder whether it doesn’t represent a shift away from Iran. Iraq has been rather disinterested in playing the former colony, not only kicking us out but also siding with Iran last year on oil targets. But if it is participating in a military exercise targeting (even though DOD is pretending it is not) Iran, and then gets drones, it sure seems like it has changed its mind about playing client state to Iran, either.

Maybe someone has been reading about what has happened to Iran’s client state in Libya and what is in process of happening in Syria.