Posts

Turning the Drone Program into a Weekly Lawn Maintenance Program

/15 Comments/in /by

Greg Miller has the first of what will be three articles on Obama’s efforts to institutionalize drone war in today’s WaPo. After describing the Administration’s efforts to systematize eliminating counterterrorist targets identified through a formalized process, he concludes with a reflection on how such systematization of the drone war might backfire.

In focusing on bureaucratic refinements, the administration has largely avoided confronting more fundamental questions about the lists. Internal doubts about the effectiveness of the drone campaign are almost nonexistent. So are apparent alternatives.

“When you rely on a particular tactic, it starts to become the core of your strategy — you see the puff of smoke, and he’s gone,” said Paul Pillar, a former deputy director of the CIA’s counterterrorism center. “When we institutionalize certain things, including targeted killing, it does cross a threshold that makes it harder to cross back.”

For a decade, the dimensions of the drone campaign have been driven by short-term objectives: the degradation of al-Qaeda and the prevention of a follow-on, large-scale attack on American soil.

Side effects are more difficult to measure — including the extent to which strikes breed more enemies of the United States — but could be more consequential if the campaign continues for 10 more years.

“We are looking at something that is potentially indefinite,” Pillar said. “We have to pay particular attention, maybe more than we collectively have so far, to the longer-term pros and cons to the methods we use.”

The entire article adds to the sense that drones have become a tactic in search of a strategy. Click through for Bruce Reidel’s analogizing of drones to mowing lawns.

Needless to say, the entire thing is worth reading.

I’m interested, as well, in a few of the details Miller provides.

He describes Brennan’s assumption of the Drone Assassination Czar role reported earlier this year, providing Brennan’s logic for why it’s a good thing he–rather than the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs–manages all the targeting.

Now the system functions like a funnel, starting with input from half a dozen agencies and narrowing through layers of review until proposed revisions are laid on Brennan’s desk, and subsequently presented to the president.

Video-conference calls that were previously convened by Adm. Mike Mullen, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have been discontinued. Officials said Brennan thought the process shouldn’t be run by those who pull the trigger on strikes.

“What changed is rather than the chairman doing that, John chairs the meeting,” said Leiter, the former head of the NCTC.

One of the reasons Brennan is in the position he is is because he wasn’t considered confirmable: his background with torture (and illegal wiretapping) made him politically toxic. And yet this guy, who hasn’t been Senate confirmed and whose position evades almost all Congressional oversight, is the guy with power over life and death rather than a position over which Congress does exercise clear oversight?

And this detail–which echoes descriptions in earlier Miller stories as well as the Angler 2.0 story from earlier this year–haunts me.

Obama approves the criteria for lists and signs off on drone strikes outside Pakistan, where decisions on when to fire are made by the director of the CIA. But aside from Obama’s presence at “Terror Tuesday” meetings — which generally are devoted to discussing terrorism threats and trends rather than approving targets — the president’s involvement is more indirect.

“The president would never come to a deputies meeting,” a senior administration official said, although participants recalled cases in which Brennan stepped out of the situation room to get Obama’s direction on questions the group couldn’t resolve.

There are a number of famous examples where top White House officials claim to consult the President on an issue but–history ends up showing–never did (I suspect the Plame outing is just one of many things Cheney did this with, for example, and Al Haig used to do it too). Is there any reason we should believe that when Brennan steps out of the room he’s actually consulting Obama, or that he’s representing an apparently contentious debate faithfully? This is classic gatekeeping behavior, and on something as important as targeting, ought to concern everyone.

But it’s not just Brennan we need to worry about. This article also talks about how central the National Counterterrorism Center has become to all this.

The administration has also elevated the role of the NCTC, which was conceived as a clearinghouse for threat data and has no operational capability. Under Brennan, who served as its founding director, the center has emerged as a targeting hub.

Other entities have far more resources focused on al-Qaeda. The CIA, JSOC and U.S. Central Command have hundreds of analysts devoted to the terrorist network’s franchise in Yemen, while the NCTC has fewer than two dozen. But the center controls a key function.

“It is the keeper of the criteria,” a former U.S. counterterrorism official said, meaning that it is in charge of culling names from al-Qaeda databases for targeting lists based on criteria dictated by the White House.

“The keeper of the criteria”! This concerns me, first of all, because NCTC is totally data driven. As the article’s discussion of relative staffing suggests, NCTC’s analysts aren’t doing a whole lot more beyond datamining.

Moreover, while the context here is clearly foreign targeting, remember what happened earlier this year: NCTC got the authority to access all government databases–including social security databases or tax records–that it deems to have a counterterrorist purpose. Which means some very personal data is part of the NCTC borg–along with inaccurate reports such as that Ford Motor Company is a terrorist suspect. That is, NCTC’s are maximalist databases, not terrible accurate ones, and ones that include a lot of American citizens.

And that’s the entity that’s “the keeper of the criteria.”

That’s a problem.

The larger story clearly shows that the Administration is making drone killing a factory process, that needs to be fed with Muslim men like fuel. But it also reinforces the picture of a dangerous concentration of power in some highly unaccountable hands.

Latif’s Unexplained Death: Yemeni Government Facilitates US Stall

/14 Comments/in /by

Jason Leopold has an important story on Adnan Farhan abd al Latif’s unexplained death. He provides more detail of Latif’s struggles with his 1994 head injury the government claimed wasn’t the reason for his 2001 trip to Pakistan. He describes how Latif’s family–including his 14 year old son Ezzi Deen–responded to the news Latif had died at Gitmo.

But most importantly, Leopold adds more details to those reported by ProPublica on Latif’s death and subsequent limbo.

When Latif died, people–including me–suggested he might have finally found a way to kill himself. But as Leopold points out, with every suicide at Gitmo, DOD has released details on the obvious signs of that suicide. And a Gitmo spokesperson has repeatedly confirmed there was no immediately apparent evidence of suicide.

But in a statement to the Associated Press two days after Guantanamo officials announced the death of a prisoner without naming him, Durand said, “There is no apparent cause, natural or self-inflicted.”

Durand explained to Truthout at the time he made that statement he was responding to a reporter’s query: “Would you call it an apparent suicide or natural causes?”

Now, however, “It would be inappropriate to speculate on the cause of death at this time.”

There was nothing to “immediately suggest ‘apparent suicide,'” Durand said, and the death is being investigated by “multiple entities.”

A Yemeni official reflecting information presumably passed from John Brennan to Yemeni President Abed Rabu Mansour Hadi when they met on September 28 confirms the government appears to have ruled out suicide.

The Yemeni government official told Truthout that US officials appear to have ruled out suicide as the manner of his death.

Leopold quotes Cyril Wecht suggesting convulsions (possibly associated with his brain injury) or drugs may have had a role in Latif’s death.

Meanwhile, no one can perform independent analysis on Latif’s body, because the government has stashed it at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. The US and Yemeni governments continue the same story shared with ProPublica: the Yemenis won’t accept the body until they get a report on why he died, the US hasn’t provided that, so the body decays in US custody.

[Latif’s brother] Muhammed said the family was told by Yemen’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs that his brother’s remains would be sent home within two weeks after his death. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, according to Muhammed, obtained that information from the Yemen Embassy in Washington, DC.

But according to a Yemeni official, the Yemen government refused to accept Adnan’s body until they receive a full accounting of the cause of his death.

[snip]The Yemeni government official’s comments about Adnan were obtained during an interview late last month when President Hadi visited the United States. His statements about Adnan were made in the context of discussions Hadi had with top US officials in the White House about the remaining Yemeni detainees in Guantanamo and Afghanistan.

Tick tock.

Tick tock.

Latif died 40 days ago. Just 19 days remain before the election. Between them, the US and Yemeni governments have forestalled the time when the US has to admit a man–the sole evidence against whom was a flawed intelligence report written while Pakistanis were trying to convince us to pay a bounty for Latif–died of unnatural causes in their custody. Possibly, they will have to admit complications of the same head injury they claimed, in court, was not all that serious, killed him.

And it appears John Brennan may be buying Hadi’s complicity on this front with promises he may not be able to keep. Leopold’s Yemeni source makes clear that the US and Yemeni government have tied discussions of the release of the other Yemenis in Gitmo and Bagram to the fate of Latif’s body.

“President Hadi was in Washington, DC, and met with President Obama’s cabinet ministers,” the official said. “The remaining Yemeni detainees was one of the talking points. President Hadi has made Guantanamo and Bagram [prison in Afghanistan] a high priority for Yemen. We are emphasizing talks and opening up a dialogue to ensure the timely release and transfer and rehabilitation of those remaining detainees to Yemeni custody and we are working closely with the US government. These discussions took place with high-level officials in the Obama administration.” [brackets original]

I can imagine a quid pro quo that goes this way: Hadi agrees to refuse to accept the body, helping to forestall announcements of how Latif died, until after the election. And then the US will enter discussions to do what they should have done 2 years ago: release the Yemenis who don’t pose a threat to the US.

But all that’s premised on getting Congressional support to release roughly 60 Yemenis, after the Administration already neutralized the one point of leverage–detainee wins in habeas proceedings–that has worked to override Congressional intransigence in the past.

To some degree, I can’t blame Hadi for doing the bidding of the superpower that put him in power, on whose continued military support he relies. I can’t blame Hadi for trading Latif’s decaying corpse for the fate of 60 other Yemenis unjustly held at Gitmo.

But if that’s the trade-off, I do question Hadi’s judgment for believing Obama will do in a second term what he had easier ways of doing–habeas proceedings–in the first.

The Evolution of the “Obama Doctrine” after Benghazi

/5 Comments/in /by

The other day, I wondered whether using three C-130s to bring a team of FBI Agents to Benghazi was overkill. And while I was able to get some kind of explanation (1 transport, 1 decoy, 1 to bring the toys), given this report on all the Special Forces C-130s swarming out of Crete…

In the last weeks, an unsual, covert, constant activity of U.S. Special Operations planes has been recorded in the Mediterranean Sea. Quite regularly, taking off from Souda Bay, in Crete, various types of “Special Hercules”, including  MC-130Ps, MC-130Hs, HC-130P, and AC-130U gunships, performed day and night missions in the Libyan airspace whose purpose has yet to be fully unveiled.

As well as very vague reports that the Special Forces were not just protection–but were “helping gather intel”–in Benghazi, I’m not so sure.

Special Forces were always likely to help investigate this killing, but it appears there’s some kind of funky hybrid going on, the latest iteration of partnership between our National Security agencies in the war on terror.

And today, John Brennan headed to Libya to meet with Mohammed Magarief, who has been trying to consolidate national power even while the Prime Minister elect was ousted in a failure to form an acceptable government.

It’s against that background that this WaPo piece offers some key insight.

Before I get into it, I’m using “Obama Doctrine” as David Sanger did in his book. I think it’s a bogus term, but it’s the evolution in policy Sanger described as Obama moved away from CounterIntelligence in Afghanistan, to Counterterrorism, to a belief that partners and locals could carry out the fighting in Libya and elsewhere. The problem with that plan, I’ve always believed, is it offers no better solutions and some worse problems in how you establish the security and institution-building that countries need to have viable economies and legal systems. You’re still faced with the whole failed state problem.

In addition to general Islamist sentiment, Ambassador Steves’ assassination happened in an environment where the government was trying to nurture regime change and nation reformation without the military footprint we had in Afghanistan and Iraq. While Stevens appears to have had real security concerns, he also apparently pushed to have an open presence and to encourage capacity building in Libyans. Arguably, that’s part of what got him killed.

The WaPo catches us up to what kind of dilemmas that presents now as we try to find the best way to respond.

Should it rely on the FBI, treating the assaults on the two U.S. compounds like a regular crime for prosecution in U.S. courts? Can it depend on the dysfunctional Libyan government to take action? Or should it embrace a military option by ordering a drone strike — or sending more prisoners to Guantanamo Bay?

Read more →

Barack Obama (and the Three Musketeers of Selective Leaking) Says Barack Obama Wanted an OBL Trial

/6 Comments/in , /by

The AP made some news yesterday with this Barack Obama quote from Mark Bowden’s new book, The Finish.

Frankly, my belief was if we had captured him, that I would be in a pretty strong position, politically, here, to argue that displaying due process and rule of law would be our best weapon against al-Qaida, in preventing him from appearing as a martyr.

It’s a quote repeated and expanded in this exclusive piece from Vanity Fair, which will have an excerpt of the book in its next edition.

Now, both of these excerpts make it clear: This is a direct quote of an Obama claim, made after the fact. But if that didn’t already make you suspect the political efficacy of telling this story just weeks before the election, check out Bowden’s acknowledgements, above.

Not only does Bowden thank the Three Musketeers of Obama’s selective leaking, John Brennan, Tom Donilon, and Denis McDonough.

But it also thanks Obama personally.

(It also thanks CIA Director David Petraeus, a man who never met press coverage he didn’t like.)

Look, I’d love to imagine that Obama would have made the political effort to give Osama bin Laden a trial had he been captured alive. I’ve even rationalized how much easier that would be, given that we presumably would avoid the whole torture phase that has made trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

There are both political and legal reasons why it serves Obama’s interests to say he considered the possibilities of a live capture followed by a trial. And given how closely Bowden worked with those trying to make the most of Obama’s OBL killing, I don’t see any reason to treat the claim as credible.

And this book–with Obama’s top aides identified as sources so clearly–is yet another reason why I think Mark Bissonnette won’t experience any legal troubles for publishing a book covering the same topic.

Why Is Jose Rodriguez Hanging Out John Brennan NOW?

/9 Comments/in , , /by

I’m no fan of either Jose Rodriguez or John Brennan. So I take no pleasure that the former is blaming the latter for a big intelligence scam carried out against the CIA back in the day.

As head of the multi-agency Terrorist Threat Integration Center in 2003 and 2004, Brennan disseminated to the Bush White House a stream of CIA intelligence from a bogus source, former CIA officials say. Ridiculed by some with the CIA, the bogus intelligence nevertheless led to disruption in the U.S. and abroad, including an orange terror alert and the cancellation of dozens of international flights.

[snip]

At the CIA, the information was controversial from the beginning, and many agency officials said at the time that it should not have been distributed. Jose Rodriguez, who was directing the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, said the CTC viewed the intelligence as “crazy.”

“We were very skeptical,” Rodriguez recalled.

[snip]

“It was briefed by John. He was the guy who was bringing it there,” said Rodriguez, who added that he believes Brennan was trying to build up his own profile. “My own view is he saw this, he took this, as a way to have relevance, to take something important to the White House.”

But I am interested in why Rodriguez is doing this now–particularly since, as Defense News points out, he chose not to do so in his own book.

I can think of three possible reasons this is coming out now–they’re all wildarsed guesses. It’s possible that Brennan’s star is fading, so he’s vulnerable now in a way he wasn’t before.

It’s possible that some story behind the underlying scam this guy–Dennis Montgomery–carried out against the government is about to unfold. Read more →

DOD Gets Awfully Sensitive When They’re Cornered

/17 Comments/in , /by

Just about every outlet that reported on George Little’s whine about Matt Bissonnette’s book yesterday claimed that Little had said there was “classified” information in the book.[all emphasis in this post mine]

CNN: A Pentagon official said Tuesday that a former Navy SEAL who helped kill Osama bin Laden included classified material in his new book and did not follow protocol for pre-publication review.

AP: George Little said that an official review of the book, “No Easy Day,” determined that it reveals what he called “sensitive and classified” information.

ABC: Top Pentagon officials said today that a controversial firsthand accountof the nighttime raid that killed Osama bin Laden written by a former U.S. Navy SEAL reveals classified information and could endanger other special operations servicemen.

Fox: “Sensitive and classified information is contained in the book,” Pentagon spokesman George Little told reporters in Washington. “It is the height of irresponsibility not to have this material checked.”

The reality is far more telling. Little did not commit to saying there was classified information in the book until cornered after repeated questions by the press. The transcript is worth reviewing in more detail since, if this ever gets litigated, Little’s hesitation to claim the book included classified information will become an issue.

In response to the first question on Bissonnette’s book, Little gave what was probably his rehearsed answer to it. He focused on Bissonnette’s failure to do a prepublication review (remember, Bissonnette’s lawyer, Bob Luskin, says such a review was recommended but not required). And when discussing the actual review, Little said there was sensitive information; only later, speaking more generally, did Little say “sensitive and classified.”

George, on the separate issue, on the SEAL book, has the department made a decision yet on whether to take any legal action regarding this and on whether or not there is classified material in the book, and if there — if, indeed, you’ve determined there is, can you tell us what it is and what action may or may not be taken at this point?

MR. LITTLE: Thank you very much, Lita, for that question. We continue to review our options when it comes to legal accountability for what in our estimation is a material breach of nondisclosure agreements that were signed by the author of this book.

With respect to the information that’s contained in the book, people inside the department have read it. And we do have concerns about some of the sensitive information that we believe is contained in it. I’m not going to get out ahead of what the process going forward might be and what options we might decide to pursue, but this is a very serious concern that we have.

When it comes to sensitive special operations missions, such as the operation that took down Osama bin Laden, it is important that those who are involved in such operations take care to protect sensitive and classified information. And if I had been part of the raid team on the ground and I had decided to write a book about it, it wouldn’t have been a tough decision for me to submit the book for pre-publication review. That is common sense. It’s a no-brainer. And it did not happen.

Thus far into the process, the press wasn’t buying Little’s slight of hand. He gets a followup on the sensitive/classified distinction, which he dodges by focusing on pre-publication review again.

Q: Will you — just as a follow-up — you made a distinction between sensitive and classified. So is the determination that it is sensitive information there and not classified? And also, is there any determination on whether the book will be sold on — on bases (off mic)

MR. LITTLE: There’s been no directive from this department to withhold sale of the book from military exchanges. This book is being made widely available in bookstores and online. It is not our typical practice to get into the business of deciding what and what does not go on bookshelves in military exchanges. But that doesn’t mean in any way, shape or form that we don’t have serious concerns about the fact that this process of pre-publication review was not followed.

Read more →

John Brennan’s Incredible Claims

/5 Comments/in /by

I’m working on a longer post on John Brennan’s Yemen speech yesterday. But I wanted to point to both Gregory Johnsen and Yemen Peace Project’s responses to his speech. Johnsen calls Brennan’s claim we spend over 50% of our Yemen funds on develop and transition aid “fuzzy math” (Micah Zenko has been making similar points on Twitter). YPP challenges Brennan’s claim that drone strikes don’t “generat[e] widespread anti-American sentiment or recruits of AQAP” (as does Johnsen less directly).

I’ve long said that the State Department’s plan for Yemen looks good on paper. That was true before the revolution, and it’s still somewhat true. But anyone who is honest about it can tell you that what’s on paper is not what’s going on on the ground. Even the most well-intended policies are worthless if they cannot be implemented. More importantly, the Yemeni people no longer believe a word of what Brennan and his colleagues have to say. I almost choked when Brennan said the following (quoted also by Gregory Johnsen):

“Contrary to the conventional wisdom, we see little evidence that these actions are generating widespread anti-American sentiment or recruits of AQAP.”

Well, Mr. Brennan, there’s a reason why that wisdom is conventional. I have no idea–literally none–how Brennan arrived at his conclusion. There has, to my knowledge, been no polling done on the subject recently. Mr. Brennan doesn’t talk to ordinary Yemenis when he goes over there, and neither do the embassy staff. But I do, and I can tell you that Yemeni public opinion about America and American policies has never been lower than is is right now. Go ask a Yemeni if you don’t believe me. Yemenis I’ve talked to recently about this topic include intellectuals, activists, western-educated scholars, shop-keepers, bus drivers, students, and unemployed college graduates. They all believe that US CT efforts are killing innocent civilians on a regular basis, that the US has never stopped supporting ‘Ali Saleh, and that John Brennan and Ambassador Feierstein are essentially operating as imperial viceroys of the country. What’s more, most of the Yemenis I’ve talked to believe wholeheartedly that the ill consequences of US policy are completely intended, and that the US is driving the total mess that passes for a transition in post-revolutionary Yemen.

Now, it’s my belief that most of the negative consequences of US policy are unintended, but this doesn’t mean they’re unpredictable.

Now, while I agree with these points, I also think they are too credulous of Brennan’s frame. If we spend even just 50% of our budget sowing chaos, does it really matter that we spend an equal amount trying to fix the chaos? If we sow chaos or discredit the government, does it matter that people aren’t joining AQAP in response?

But there’s a bigger issue here.

Why is it that the DC establishment accepts Brennan’s speech as a good faith statement of facts on the ground? Even putting aside Brennan’s notorious briefing after the Osama bin Laden killing–in which the stories he spun were debunked within a day–this is the guy who claimed there had been no civilian casualties in the previous year just three months after the US took out a village jirga called to mediate a land dispute on March 17, 2011. After a range of sources–including the hawkish Long War Journal–disputed Brennan’s claim, he backed off of it slightly.

John O. Brennan, clearly referring to the classified drone program, said in June that for almost a year, “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.”

[snip]

In a statement on Tuesday for this article, Mr. Brennan adjusted the wording of his earlier comment on civilian casualties, saying American officials could not confirm any such deaths.

“Fortunately, for more than a year, due to our discretion and precision, the U.S. government has not found credible evidence of collateral deaths resulting from U.S. counterterrorism operations outside of Afghanistan or Iraq, and we will continue to do our best to keep it that way,” Mr. Brennan said.

I’m curious: did Brennan mean we’ve used our precision and discretion to not find credible evidence of collateral deaths? Because it seems the Administration used their discretion to define all military aged males as terrorists and avoided interviewing all the people who journalists interviewed to sustain this incredible claim.

And yet, in spite of the fact that Brennan has stopped short of making such obviously false claims in recent days, he has never corrected the record on this point. Until he does, his credibility should always be questioned.

John Brennan has a history of saying things about which he’s not entirely certain so they’ll get printed in the press. But until such time that someone who retains more credibility (like Hillary, though some of her claims on Syria have eroded her credibility too) decides they’re willing to make these claims, we’d be well served to presume the reason Brennan is saying them is because he’s the only one who’s wiling to make such claims with a straight face.

We shouldn’t spend time carefully debunking Brennan’s claims until such a time he has regained credibility from his past demonstrably bogus claims. And until then, the response should simply be, “the same guy who claimed there were no civilian casualties just claimed drone strikes don’t generate anti-American sentiment. Right.”

How Drone Strikes against American Citizens Are Like Clinton’s Blowjob

/8 Comments/in , , /by

The government has submitted its response in the ACLU/NYT suits for the authorization it used to kill three American citizens. I’m working on a more thorough response, but for the moment, I want to point to one detail that would be funny if it weren’t so damned cynical.

To argue that the flood of sanctioned leaks and official declarations about targeted killing doesn’t constitute official acknowledgment of their targeted killing program, the government says,

Plaintiffs incorrectly contend that the agencies have officially acknowledged three discrete “facts”: (1) “the existence of the targeted killing program”6 (2) “the legal analysis supporting its use against U.S. citizens,” and (3) “the killing of [Anwar] al-Awlaki.” ACLU Opp. at 14.7 To the contrary, the government has acknowledged only that it possesses some responsive records reflecting a general U.S. government interest in the legal basis for the possible use of lethal force against U.S. citizens, and the process by which U.S. citizens could be designated for targeted lethal force.

To which they append this footnote:

Plaintiffs do not define, and it is otherwise unclear from their response, what is meant by “targeted killing program.”

At one level, this cynical ploy is a refreshing breath of honesty. After all, there are probably three or four drone killing programs–the Air Force’s use of drones for force protection in Afghanistan, the CIA’s use of drones to kill both identified and unidentified targets in Pakistan, JSOC’s use of drones to kill what used to be identified but now also include unidentified targets in Yemen and other counterterrorism theaters, and CIA’s use of drones to kill both identified and unidentified targets around the world (but especially in Yemen).

These actions are not the same, and implicitly, the government is admitting what the barrage of sanctioned leaks over the last several months has led the press to forget: targeted strikes are not the same as signature strikes, and JSOC strikes are not the same as CIA strikes. And based on an implicit admission that their last several months of propaganda is a lie, they’re going to play dumb about what the ACLU is FOIAing.

Hey press corps: The government says you should stop treating all the uses of drones as targeted killings!

But of course, the reason why the press has done so is because the Administration has made great efforts to get the press to treat this all as one program–to which they even made a failed attempt to append a unified name, TADS. And when the Administration talks about its targeted killing program, they use that word–“targeted”–with great discipline.

For example, after John Brennan made the following explicit acknowledgement of the targeted killing program,

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-Qa’ida terrorists, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones.  And I’m here today because President Obama has instructed us to be more open with the American people about these efforts. [my emphasis]

He went on to use that magic word, “targeted,” 20 more times in his speech. And he used it again yesterday, in his speech on Yemen.

Likewise, discussion of Yemeni and American counterterrorism efforts tend to focus almost exclusively on the use of one counterterrorism tool in particular—targeted strikes.

[snip]

Of course, attention has often focused on one counterterrorism tool in particular—targeted strikes, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones. In June, the Obama Administration declassified the fact that in Yemen our joint efforts have resulted in direct action against AQAP operatives and senior leaders. This spring, I addressed the subject of targeted strikes at length and why such strikes are legal, ethical, wise, and highly effective. Today, I’d simply say that all our CT efforts in Yemen are conducted in concert with the Yemeni government. When direct action is taken, every effort is made to avoid civilian casualties. And contrary to conventional wisdom, we see little evidence that these actions are generating widespread anti-American sentiment or recruits for AQAP. In fact, we see the opposite. Our Yemeni partners are more eager to work with us. Yemeni citizens who have been freed from the hellish grip of AQAP are more eager, not less, to work with the Yemeni government. In short, targeted strikes against the most senior and most dangerous AQAP terrorists are not the problem; they’re part of the solution. [my emphasis]

Moreover, he spoke of targeted strikes in Yemen (where all the FOIAed deaths took place) as one tool, singular, obscuring the differences between the different uses of drone killing.

But according to the government, all that doesn’t amount to admission of a targeted killing program–“golly, we keep using that term ‘targeted’ but we can’t even imagine what ‘targeted killing’ means!” Because it’s just too hard for powerful men to figure out the difference between fucking and a blowjob, I guess, if they can even figure out what the meaning of “is” is.

Read more →

John Brennan Channels Scott McClellan Dodging Leak Questions

/3 Comments/in , /by

When Margaret Warner asked John Brennan about the leak witch hunt today, he said, in part,

First of all, there are investigations underway, so we have to be mindful of that and respectful of that investigative process.

Secondly, the President has made it very clear that any leak of classified national security information is something that should be rigorously pursued.

Let’s see. Dodging the question by invoking an ongoing investigation.

Check.

Reassurance that–quote–“the President has made it very clear” that he takes this stuff seriously.

Check.

Brennan must not have seen this movie when it was first released. Because this strategy ultimately didn’t work out that well.

John Brennan Vows to Combat the “Bad Guys” Attacking Our Critical Infrastructure

/10 Comments/in , , , , , /by

John Brennan just gave a speech, purportedly about our policy in Yemen. But it ended up being largely about infrastructure, That’s partly because his speech focused on how, rather than spending 75% of our Yemen funds on bombs, we’re now spending just 50% (having bumped up the total to include an equal amount development assistance). So a good part of his talk focused on whether or not Yemen would be able to do the critical work of rebuilding its infrastructure sufficient to combat AQAP which, in some areas, has done a better job of building infrastructure.

Of course as I noted while he spoke, a number of the infrastructure challenges Brennan confidently assured we could help rebuild–things like access to water–are challenges we are increasingly failing in our own country.

And then, because the DC attention span had had enough of Yemen, moderator Margaret Warner asked Brennan what the Administration will do now that their cybersecurity bills have been defeated. To justify his talk of using Executive Orders to address some of the infrastructure problems, Brennan talked about the “bad guys” who posed a cyberthreat to our critical infrastructure.

Nowhere did Brennan acknowledge the much more immediate threat to our critical infrastructure: in the corporations and politics that let it decline. PG&E and Enbridge, failing to invest the money to fix known defects in their pipelines. Fracking companies, depleting and degrading our water supply. Verizon, eliminating choice for Internet access for rural customers. Republicans who want to gut our Postal Service and passenger rail. And heck, even Fat Al Gore and climate change, which is not only depleting our water supply but stalling key water transport routes.

Brennan promises to help rebuild Yemen’s infrastructure. But not only can’t he implement his plan against the bogeyman “bad buys” threatening our infrastructure, he seems completely unaware that those “bad guys” aren’t anywhere near the biggest threat to our infrastructure.

Don’t get me wrong. I applaud the Administration’s decision to dedicate money to Yemen’s infrastructure, even if I think a 50/50 split, aid to bombs, is still woefully inadequate. But until we begin to see what “bad guys” pose the biggest threat to our own infrastructure, I’m skeptical our efforts in Yemen will be any more successful than they were in Iraq or Afghanistan.