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“At the Highest Levels of the U.S. Government” … Like the President?

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Update: Obama did, in fact, take responsibility for ordering the killing.

And as President, I would have been derelict in my duty had I not authorized the strike that took out Awlaki.

There’s something missing from Eric Holder’s 8 paragraphs justifying the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki.

In spite of the many sanctioned leaks asserting that President Obama “insist[s] on approving every new name on an expanding ‘kill list,'” Holder never explicitly says Obama did so with Awlaki. The Attorney General attributes the decision itself to “high-level U.S. government officials,” “senior officials,” and “senior officials” again.

Here’s how he describes the review process:

The decision to use lethal force is one of the gravest that our government, at every level, can face. The operation to target Anwar al-Aulaqi was thus subjected to an exceptionally rigorous interagency legal review: not only did I and other Department of Justice lawyers conclude after a thorough and searching review that the operation was lawful, but so too did other departments and agencies within the U.S. government.

The decision to target Anwar al-Aulaqi was additionally subjected to extensive policy review at the highest level of the U.S. Government, and senior U.S. officials also briefed the appropriate committees of Congress on the possibility of using lethal force against al-Aulaqi. Indeed, the Administration informed the relevant congressional oversight committees that it had approved the use of lethal force against al-Aulaqi in February 2010 — well over a year before the operation in question — and the legal justification was subsequently explained in detail to those committees, well before action was taken against Aulaqi. This extensive outreach is consistent with the Administration’s strong and continuing commitment to congressional oversight of our counterterrorism operations — oversight which ensures, as the President stated during his State of the Union address, that our actions are “consistent with our laws and systems of checks and balances.”

Sure, the code words meaning “the President” are in there: “at every level,” “at the highest level of the U.S. Government.” It quotes Obama’s State of the Union address at the very end, like a flourish detached from the nasty killing bit.

And the process described here, where “the Administration” informs the intelligence committees of the lethal force operations “it had approved,” is clearly that of a covert op, which requires the President’s to inform Congress of covert ops he has approved.

But unlike DOJ and the congressional committees, he’s not named in the decision process that ended up killing Awlaki. (Though Holder does later say that Obama approved the Disposition Matrix which he describes will soon be briefed to Congress, which of course implies Presidential approval for all the drone deaths to come, but not Awlaki’s.)

This might be a picayune observation if this Administration had not, secretly, made almost unprecedented efforts to keep a short phrase indicating the President (Bush) had authorized the torture program.

In his letter, Holder references Obama’s Archives Speech pledge that “whenever possible, my administration will make all information available to the American people so that they can make informed judgments and hold us accountable” (though in Holder’s letter, the “us” becomes “their Government”). He ends this letter by assuring its recipients “that the President and his national security team are mindful of this Administration’s pledge to public accountability for our counterterrorism efforts.”

But on the specific issue of Anwar al-Awlaki’s killing, this letter allows Obama (along with the CIA and DOD, presumably to avoid helping the ACLU in its FOIA — though it may be too late) to avoid any accountability.

Perhaps tomorrow Obama will stand before a bunch of cameras and admit “I personally ordered an American citizen to be drone killed.” But this letter feels like an effort to help him avoid publicly accepting just that responsibility.

Update: As QuietAmerican reminded me, Obama is quoted in that NYT piece as saying the decision to kill Awlaki was “an easy one.”

600 Days after Assassinating Anwar al-Awlaki, Administration Admits Doing So

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In this letter boasting of “unprecedented transparency,” Eric Holder officially tells Congress that since 2009 the government has killed 4 Americans: Anwar al-Awlaki was specifically targeted and killed, and Samir Khan, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, and Jude Mohammed were “not specifically targeted.”

One paragraph of the letter details how Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab told US officials of Awlaki’s involvement in the UndieBomb plot.

Too bad that in two of three confessions, Abdulmutallab said someone besides Awlaki did the things Holder lists here. Too bad that Abdulmutallab’s lawyer now says the solitary confinement associated with the interrogations in which he did implicate Awlaki made him incompetent.

Did Solitary Confinement Make UndieBomber 1.0 Incompetent to Represent Himself?

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But, in fact, the FBI do a great job as far as eliciting information after they’re Mirandizing them, and so they can get information as part of that type of negotiation with them, let them know they can in fact languish forever, or we can in fact have a dialogue about it intelligently.

— John Brennan, describing the way the FBI gets suspects to talk after Mirandizing them

Here’s something you may not know: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the first UndieBomber, is appealing his conviction and sentence.

He’s doing so on several grounds, including that his confession made during public safety questioning while on fentanyl should not have been admissible at trial. But the most interesting issue — and the one that takes up the bulk of his appeal — argues Abdulmutallab was not competent to represent himself. (His appeal, as well as the government response and his reply only recently got unsealed by the Circuit Court.)

As the appeal notes, back in August 2011, after he had been in custody almost 20 months, his standby counsel Anthony Chambers submitted a motion requesting a competency hearing, one the judge rejected.

His standby counsel filed a motion requesting a competency hearing, noting that Abdulmutallab suffered “mental lapses,” engaged in “bizarre behaviors,” and sometimes seemed interested in presenting a defense while at other times he seemed indifferent to his defense. Abdulmutallab also demonstrated indifference toward his defense in front of the district court. The district court denied the motion for a competency examination based largely on Abdulmutallab’s own equivocal and rambling profession of competency. The failure to hold the competency examination cannot be cured after the fact and requires a new trial so that a “concurrent determination” of competency can be made. Abdulmutallab’s guilty plea did not waive the competency issue because a person whose competence is in doubt cannot knowingly, voluntarily, and intelligently waive a right or plead guilty.

The appeal cites consistent difficulties Abdulmutallab and attorneys tied to his case had with the Milan Correctional Facility, where he was being held in solitary confinement with communication restrictions. At almost every status hearing (save the one where he fired his court appointed lawyers), Abdulmutallab complained about the communication restrictions placed on him at Milan. (“Milan” is pronounced My-lin.)

At a status conference on April 13, 2010, his attorney’s reported that security restrictions at Federal Correctional Institute Milan (“Milan”) had severely limited their ability to meet with him to review discovery and other matters. He was held in solitary confinement under constant 24-hour manned observation.

Read more →

Why Would the US Shield Fahd al-Quso in February 2012 But Drone Kill Him in May 2012?

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On February 10, 2012, the government went out of its way to hide Fahd al-Quso’s ongoing involvement in terrorist attacks against the US. Three months later, on May 6, 2012 — the day before the AP published its story about CIA thwarting an UndieBomb attack — the government killed Quso in a drone strike.

DOJ’s narrative of UndieBomb 1.0 hides Quso’s role in it

On February 10, 2012, as part of his sentencing, DOJ submitted a narrative telling one version of how Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to bomb Northwest Flight 253 over Detroit. In it, the government tied Abdulmutallab (who, after all, had pled guilty to a conspiracy to commit terrorism) to three AQAP figures: It claimed Anwar al-Awlaki, among other things, gave Abdulmutallab his final instructions that the attack be directed at a US plane and the bomb be set off over US soil. It explained how AQAP bomb-maker Ibrahim al-Asiri constructed the bomb and personally trained Abdulmutallab on its use. And it noted that while Abdulmutallab was training with AQAP, he met Samir Khan who (the narrative helpfully noted in a footnote) would go on to publish Inspire.

The narrative DOJ submitted on February 10 did not mention Fahd al-Quso by name.

Watering trees with UndieBomber 1.0

That’s odd, because Quso reportedly did play a role in Abdulmutallab’s attack. According to a March 2011 AP story, Quso may have been the last person Abdulmutallab met with before he set off on his attack.

Before Abdulmutallab set off on his mission, he visited the home of al Qaeda manager Fahd al-Quso to discuss the plot and the workings of the bomb.

Al-Quso, 36, is one of the most senior al Qaeda leaders publicly linked to the Christmas plot. His association with al Qaeda stretches back more than a decade to his days in Afghanistan when, prosecutors said, bin Laden implored him to “eliminate the infidels from the Arabian Peninsula.”

From there he rose through the ranks. He was assigned the job in Aden to videotape the 1998 suicide bombing of the USS Cole, which killed 17 sailors and injured 39 others, but fell asleep. Despite the lapse, he is now a mid-level manager in the organization. Al-Quso is from the same tribe as radical U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who had an operational role in the botched Christmas attack.

In December, al-Quso was designated a global terrorist by the State Department, a possible indication that his role in al Qaeda’s Yemen franchise has grown more dangerous.

Al-Quso was indicted on 50 terrorism counts in New York for his role preparing for the Cole attack and served more than five years in prison in Yemen before he was released in 2007. On the FBI’s list, al-Quso ranks behind only bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri among the most sought-after al Qaeda terrorists.

After meeting with al-Quso, Abdulmutallab left Yemen in December 2009 and made his way to Ghana, where he paid $2,831 in cash for a round-trip ticket from Nigeria to Amsterdam to Detroit and back. [my emphasis]

Indeed, Abdulmutallab’s tie to Quso is one of the only aspects of Abdulmutallab’s trip in Yemen that has been independently verified.

In his book, Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill notes,

A local tribal leader from Shabwah, Mullah Zabara, later told me he had seen the young Nigerian at the farm of Fahd al-Quso, the alleged USS Cole bombing conspirator. “He was watering trees,” Zabara told me. “When I saw [Abdulmutallab], I asked Fahd, ‘Who is he?'” Quso told Zabara the young man was from a different part of Yemen, which Zabara knew was a lie. “When I saw him on TV [after the attack], then Fahd told me the truth.” [first bracket original, second bracket mine]

Later in the book, Scahill reports that Zabara was assassinated this January by unknown killers.

Is Fahd al-Quso Abu Tarak?

The details of Quso’s ties to Abdulmutallab — particularly that the Nigerian was watering trees on Quso’s farm — make me wonder whether Quso isn’t the person Abdulmutallab called Abu Tarak in his initial confession on Christmas Day 2009.

In his opening argument in the abbreviated Abdulmutallab trial, AUSA Jonathan Tukel described what Abulmutallab initially confessed after he was captured. Along with all the things later attributed to Awlaki and Asiri, Tukel said Abdulmutallab described having daily talks with Abu Tarak about jihad.

He told the FBI that he and Abu-Tarak spoke daily about jihad and martyrdom and supported al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

In a narrative on Abdulmutallab’s commitment to jihad also submitted for the sentencing based on his personal reviews of Abdulmutallab’s interrogation reports, DOJ expert Dr. Simon Perry suggested that Abdulmutallab was living with Abu Tarak when in Yemen, though he says that was in Sanaa, not Shabwah.

While residing at Abu Tarak’s residence in Sana, Yemen he was mainly confined to his residence and discouraged from any communication with the outside world (phone, email). During this period, UFAM spoke regularly with Abu Tarak and three other individuals who visited him daily, speaking with them about Jihad and martyrdom.

In any case, regardless of whether or not Quso is Abu Tarak, or whether Abu Tarak is an amalgam of AQAP figures, it seems clear that Quso played some role in Abdulmutallab’s preparation.

And yet DOJ chose not to mention that this guy — who had been trying to attack the US since the October 12, 2000 USS Cole attack — was among the notable AQAP figures who prepared Abdulmutallab to attack the US.

Was DOJ hiding that they knew how to infiltrate AQAP?

Whatever Quso’s role in UndieBomb 1.0, the implication of the timing is clear: he was central to the UndieBomb 2.0 plot. Indeed, it is almost certain that CIA asked AP to delay publishing their story to give time to kill Quso, who had just sent our mole off with another UndieBomb.

In other words, one plausible explanation for why DOJ did not confirm what other reports made clear is that it did not want to tip Quso off to what Abdulmutallab told them about him. That is, if they were already planning the op against him, they wouldn’t want him to know they knew how Abdulmutallab had found him 2.5 years earlier.

That is just one possibility, of course.

But if that’s the case — if DOJ obscured Quso’s role in the government’s most extensive accusations that Anwar al-Awlaki had an operational role in targeting the US — then are the claims about Awlaki true?

There’s a Place for Resolving Disputes, and the Administration Chose Not To Use It

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As I was writing my flurry of posts on the AP call record seizure yesterday, former National Security Council Spokesperson Tommy Vietor and I were chatting about the facts of the case on Twitter. He disputes two of the AP’s claims: that they held the story as long as the Administration wanted them to, and that the White House had planned an announcement.

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Now, as I have said in the past, I’m somewhat skeptical of the White House’s claims, given that their story changed as the story was blowing up. Furthermore, the White House had done a big dog-and-pony show on a similar operation — the thwarting of the Toner Cartridge plot in 2010, which was also tipped by a Saudi infiltrator. So it is reasonable to believe they planned to do another one in 2012.

That said, note that the AP’s latest version of this is rather vague about whom they were discussing the story with, referring only to “federal government officials,” whereas previously they had referred to “White House and CIA” requests.

So there may well be some confusion about what happened, or it may be that David Petraeus’ CIA was planning a dog-and-pony show that the White House didn’t know about. No one seems to dispute, however, that the AP did consult with the White House and CIA, and did hold the story long enough to allow the government to kill Fahd al-Quso, all of which the Administration seems to have forgotten.

In short, behind the broad call record grab, there’s a legitimate dispute about key details regarding how extensively the AP ceded to White House wishes before publishing a story the Attorney General now claims was the worst leak ever.

But there’s a place where people go to resolve such disputes. It’s called a court.

And as this great piece by the New Yorker’s counsel, Lynn Oberlander on the issue notes, one of the worst parts of the way DOJ seized the AP records is that it prevented the AP from challenging the subpoena — and the details that are now being disputed — in court.

The cowardly move by the Justice Department to subpoena two months of the A.P.’s phone records, both of its office lines and of the home phones of individual reporters, is potentially a breach of the Justice Department’s own guidelines. Even more important, it prevented the A.P. from seeking a judicial review of the action. Some months ago, apparently, the government sent a subpoena (or subpoenas) for the records to the phone companies that serve those offices and individuals, and the companies provided the records without any notice to the A.P. If subpoenas had been served directly on the A.P. or its individual reporters, they would have had an opportunity to go to court to file a motion to quash the subpoenas. What would have happened in court is anybody’s guess—there is no federal shield law that would protect reporters from having to testify before a criminal grand jury—but the Justice Department avoided the issue altogether by not notifying the A.P. that it even wanted this information. Even beyond the outrageous and overreaching action against the journalists, this is a blatant attempt to avoid the oversight function of the courts.

I obviously don’t know better than Oberlander what would have happened. But I do suspect the subpoena would have been — at a minimum –sharply curtailed so as to shield the records of the 94 journalists whose contacts got sucked up along with the 6 journalists who worked on the story.

Moreover, I think these underlying disputed facts — as well as the evidence that the gripe about the AP story (as opposed to the later stories that exposed MI5’s role in the plot) has everything to do with the AP scooping the White House — may well have led a judge to throw out the entire subpoena.

If the AP had been able to present proof, after all, that the White House (or even the CIA) had told them the story wouldn’t damage national security, then it would have had a very compelling argument that the public interest in finding out their source is less urgent than the damage this subpoena would do to the free press.

So I don’t know what would have happened. But I do know it is a real dispute that may well have a significant impact on the subpoena.

And that’s why we have courts, after all, to review competing claims.

Of course, the Obama Administration has an extensive history of choosing not to use the courts as an opportunity to present their case. Most importantly (and intimately connected to this story), the government has chosen not to present their case against Anwar al-Awlaki on four different occasions: the Nasser al-Awlaki suit, the Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab trial, the ACLU/NYT FOIAs, and now the wrongful death suit. This serial refusal to try to prove the claims they make about their counterterrorism efforts in Yemen doesn’t suggest they’re very confident that the facts are on their side.

Which may well be why DOJ chose to just go seize the phone contacts rather than trusting their claims to a judge.

The Find Every Terrorist at Any Cost Industry

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As a thought experiment, replace the word “terrorist” in this paragraph with “soldier” or “military.”

All terrorists fundamentally see themselves as altruists: incontestably believing that they are serving a “good” cause designed to achieve a greater good for a wider constituency—whether real or imagined—which the terrorist and his organization or cell purport to represent. Indeed, it is precisely this sense of self-righteous commitment and self-sacrifice that that draws people into terrorist groups. It all helps them justify the violence they commit. It gives them collective meaning. It gives them cumulative power. The terrorist virtually always sees himself as a reluctant warrior: cast perpetually on the defensive and forced to take up arms to protect himself and his community. They see themselves as driven by desperation——and lacking any viable alternative—to violence against a repressive state, a predatory rival ethnic or nationalist group, or an unresponsive international order.

The paragraph comes from Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown Professor/ThinkTanker whose studies of terrorism predate 9/11 by decades. It forms part of his explanation, post Boston, for why people become terrorists: because they, like our own country increasingly, see violence as a solution to their grievance.

That’s not all of Hoffman’s description of what makes people terrorists, mind you. He goes onto discuss religion and the human relations that might convince someone to engage in violence. But the paragraph has haunted me since I read it over a week ago for how clearly it should suggest that one of the few things that separates terrorism from our country’s own organized violence is official sanction (and at least lip service about who makes an appropriate and legal target).

Which is one reason why Jack Levin, in a piece debunking four myths about terrorism, offers this as one solution.

Somehow, we must reinstate the credibility of our public officials — our president, our Congress, and our Supreme Court Justices — so that alienated Americans do not feel they must go outside of the mainstream and radicalize in order to satisfy their goals.

Blaming terrorism on our dysfunctional political system feels far too easy, but it’s worth remembering that in Afghanistan, Somalia, and parts of Yemen, Al Qaeda has at times won support from locals because it offered “justice” where the official government did not or could not.

In any case, the common sense descriptions Hoffman and Levin offer haven’t prevented a slew of people responding to Boston — some experts, some not — from demanding that we redouble our efforts to defeat any possible hint of Islamic terrorism, no matter the cost.

Batshit crazy Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert claims the Boston attack is all Spencer’s fault: because FBI purged some its training materials of some of the inaccurate slurs about Muslims (but did not even correct the training of Agents who had been taught that claptrap in the first place), it can no longer speak a language appropriate to pursuing terrorists. “They can’t talk about the enemy. They can’t talk about jihad. They can’t talk about Muslim. They can’t talk about Islam.” Which elicited the equally batshit crazy response from Glenn Kessler of taking Gohmert’s premise as a valid one that should be disproven by weighing how much offensive language remains in FBI materials, rather than debunking the very premise that only people who engage in cultural slurs would be able to identify terrorists. I award Kessler four wooden heads.

Somewhat more interesting is this piece from Amy Zegart, another Professor/ThinkTanker. She admits we may not know whether Boston involved some kind of intelligence failure for some time.

Finding out what happened will be trickier than it sounds. Crowdsourcing with iPhones, Twitter, and Lord & Taylor surveillance video worked wonders to nail the two suspects with lightning speed. But assessing whether the bombing constituted an intelligence failure will require more time, patience, and something most people don’t think about much: understanding U.S. counter-terrorism organizations and their incentives and cultures, which lead officials to prioritize some things and forget, or neglect, others.

But that doesn’t stop her from insisting FBI’s culture remains inappropriate to hunting terrorists “pre-boom.”

But it is high time we asked some hard, public questions about whether the new FBI is really new enough. Transformation — moving the bureau from a crime-fighting organization to a domestic intelligence agency — has been the FBI’s watchword since 9/11. Read more →

Did an Intelligence Asset Persuade Abdulrahman al-Awlaki to Search for His Father?

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There’s an inconclusive — but nevertheless intriguing — detail in Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars that might explain why Abdulrahman al-Awlaki decided, in September 2011, to go search for his father. After the boy ran away from home, the family tried to figure out why, having expressed no plans to go search for his father, he would up and leave like he did.

The family called around to Abdulrahman’s friends. Someone told [Awlaki’s father] Nasser that a teacher at the school had recently gotten close to Abdulrahman, and Nasser believed the teacher had been encouraging Abdulrahman to find his father and to reconnect with him, that it would be good for the boy. “He had influence on him, an they used to go to a pizza parlour to eat pizza.” Nasser said. When Nasser tried to find the teacher to ask him if he had any information about Abdulrahman’s whereabouts, the teacher had “vanished.”

Granted, this amounts to no more than an observation that someone who had become influential on the boy disappeared right as the family started looking for answers; there’s no affirmative evidence there was a connection.

That said, the CIA had already twice tried to use family ties to get to Awlaki by this point. As the Danish agent Morten Storm has described, he arranged a marriage between a Croatian convert to Islam and Awlaki in a failed attempt to track the cleric.

In addition, as Scahill laid out in his book and excerpted in the Nation, a CIA officer unsuccessfully approached Awlaki’s brother, Ammar, in February 2011 to help them find Awlaki.

Chris made it clear that he worked for the CIA. He told Ammar that the United States had a task force dedicated to “killing or capturing your brother”—and that while everyone preferred to bring Anwar in alive, time was running out. “He’s going to be killed, so why don’t you help in saving his life by helping us capture him?” Chris said. Then he added, “You know, there’s a $5 million bounty on your brother’s head. You won’t be helping us for free.”

Ammar told Chris that he didn’t want the money, that he hadn’t seen Anwar since 2004 and had no idea where he was. The American countered, “That $5 million would help raise [Anwar’s] kids.”

“I don’t think there’s any need for me to meet you again,” Ammar told Chris. Even so, the American told Ammar to think it over, perhaps discuss it with his family. “We can meet when you go to Dubai in two weeks,” he said. Ammar was stunned: his tickets for that trip had not yet been purchased, and the details were still being worked out. Chris gave Ammar an e-mail address and said he’d be in touch.

Clearly, by 2011, the CIA was willing to try any scheme that might help them find Awlaki, regardless of the family bounds it abused. So it is conceivable, at least, that they might try to use Abdulrahman as “bait,” a word Awlaki’s mother used.

I wonder if John Brennan considered this possibility in his review of why the United States assassinated one of its teenaged citizens?

John Brennan’s Review of How He Killed an American Teenager

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Jeremy Scahill’s book, Dirty Wars, comes out tomorrow. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it over the next few weeks.

But for now, he’s got an adaptation at the Nation that describes a Senior Administration Official involved in drone targeting, who would have left sometime between October 14, 2011 and now (so, maybe Petraeus, Panetta, Clinton, or Vietor?? Update: Or Jeh Johnson?), claiming that the strike was all a mistake, launched in response to apparently crappy intelligence from Ali Abdullah Saleh’s government (or possibly the Saudis?) claiming that senior AQAP leader Ibrahim al-Banna was present, alone.

A former senior official in the Obama administration told me that after Abdulrahman’s killing, the president was “surprised and upset and wanted an explanation.” The former official, who worked on the targeted killing program, said that according to intelligence and Special Operations officials, the target of the strike was al-Banna, the AQAP propagandist. “We had no idea the kid was there. We were told al-Banna was alone,” the former official told me. Once it became clear that the teenager had been killed, he added, military and intelligence officials asserted, “It was a mistake, a bad mistake.”

The now-former SAO goes on to describe how pissed the Moral Rectitude Drone Assassination Czar John Brennan was about the strike, because he believed Abdulrahman was deliberately set up to be killed (though Scahill’s source doesn’t appear to specify whom Brennan thought was setting up an American teenager for death, JSOC, Yemeni partners, or the Saudis).

However, John Brennan, at the time President Obama’s senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security, “suspected that the kid had been killed intentionally and ordered a review. I don’t know what happened with the review.”

So Brennan sets up a review … that apparently got stashed in the same black hole as every other report on drone killing.

Because the whole thing is embarrassing.

Brennan, who is now director of the CIA, recently answered an inquiry from the Senate Intelligence Committee on such after-strike reviews. When civilians are killed, Brennan said, “we not only take account of the human tragedy, but we also go back and review our actions.” Analysts “draw on a large body of information—human intelligence, signals intelligence, media reports, and surveillance footage—to help us make an informed determination about whether civilians were in fact killed or injured,” Brennan asserted in his written response. “In those rare instances in which civilians have been killed, after-action reviews have been conducted.” No such review of Abdulrahman’s killing has ever been made public.

The consensus that has emerged from various anonymous officials commenting on Abdulrahman’s killing was that it was a mistake. I asked the former senior administration official why, if that was the case, the White House didn’t publicly acknowledge it. “We killed three US citizens in a very short period,” he told me. “Two of them weren’t even targets: Samir Khan and Abdulrahman Awlaki. That doesn’t look good. It’s embarrassing.”

Recall, when JSOC killed almost an entire Bedouin clan in al-Majala, David Petraeus claimed that only the alleged targets immediate family had been killed, well after people had been to the site to document the carnage. Immediately after Abdulrahman’s death, the Administration immediately, almost boisterously, claimed the boy was 21, either based on crappy intelligence or in an attempt to justify a “military aged male” claim.

This is why it is so important to declassify the documents on targeted killing. Even according to the Moral Rectitude Drone Assassination Czar, this kid was set up.

He just won’t tell us by whom.

Is the Government Going to Claim Bradley Manning “Harmed” the US by Exposing Drone Details?

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Screen shot 2013-04-17 at 9.46.44 PMLast week’s Bradley Manning hearing significantly focused on how much the government could hide about its witnesses. A big part of the discussion pertained to how a Seal Team 6 member would testify to finding WikiLeaks material at Osama bin Laden’s compound. But the government also advanced its case to have a list of other government employees testify, at least partly, in secret, mostly in the “harm” phase of sentencing.

Here’s Alexa O’Brien’s transcription of that list (click through for the list). There are a number of interesting names on this list. But the one that popped out at me is Ambassador Stephen Seche.

You see, while Seche was Chargé d’Affaires in Syria mid-decade and more recently was in charge of Near Eastern affairs at State, he will almost certainly testify about how WikiLeaks disclosures of cables he wrote while Ambassador to Yemen “harmed” relations with that country.

Indeed, as the image above shows, Seche wrote one of the most newsworthy cables ever released by WikiLeaks, the January 4, 2010 cable recounting a January 2 meeting between then CentCom head David Petraeus and Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

The cable is best known for this statement, laying out the agreement by which Saleh would lie about missile and drone strikes and pretend they were Yemen’s.

“We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh said, prompting Deputy Prime Minister Alimi to joke that he had just “lied” by telling Parliament that the bombs in Arhab, Abyan, and Shebwa were American-made but deployed by the ROYG.

But there are several other inflammatory details in this cable. There’s the nugget of our agreement to shift from using cruise missiles to drones.

Saleh did not have any objection, however, to General Petraeus’ proposal to move away from the use of cruise missiles and instead have U.S. fixed-wing bombers circle outside Yemeni territory, “out of sight,” and engage AQAP targets when actionable intelligence became available.

Potentially more damning still, there’s the passage that suggests Anwar al-Awlaki was an intended target of the December 24, 2009 attack (a day before the US believed he was an operational and at least a month before it had evidence he was). In addition, there’s Petraeus’ absolutely incorrect contention that only three civilians had died at al-Majala instead of the Bedouin clan we know died.

(S/NF) Saleh praised the December 17 and 24 strikes against AQAP but said that “mistakes were made” in the killing of civilians in Abyan. The General responded that the only civilians killed were the wife and two children of an AQAP operative at the site, prompting Saleh to plunge into a lengthy and confusing aside with Deputy Prime Minister Alimi and Minister of Defense Ali regarding the number of terrorists versus civilians killed in the strike. (Comment: Saleh’s conversation on the civilian casualties suggests he has not been well briefed by his advisors on the strike in Abyan, a site that the ROYG has been unable to access to determine with any certainty the level of collateral damage. End Comment.) AQAP leader Nassr al-Wahishi and extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki may still be alive, Saleh said, but the December strikes had already caused al-Qaeda operatives to turn themselves in to authorities and residents in affected areas to deny refuge to al-Qaeda. [my emphasis]

At the very least, this passage demonstrates how shoddy our intelligence was both before and after we killed a bunch of civilians. But it may also support the case that the first time we tried to kill Awlaki, we didn’t believe he met the standards laid out in the memo that would ultimately authorize his killing: being a senior operational leader of AQAP involved in planning attacks against the US.

In other words, this cable, by itself, may include evidence of possible war and domestic crimes.

And yet the government wants to send Seche to a classified hearing to talk about the “harm” Bradley Manning caused.

While I think it possible that release of this particular cable made it harder for Djibouti to partner with us (recall we moved the drones targeting Awlaki to Saudi Arabia in 2011), the government at least maintains that Yemen continues to allow us to shoot drones in the country.

Yet it seems highly likely the government wants to claim disclosures of crimes like this amounted to “harm” of the US.

But here’s the punchline.

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