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If Videos of Feeding Can Be Used as Propaganda, You’re Doing It Wrong

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Unsurprisingly, the government has just appealed Gladys Kessler’s order that it release the videos of Abu Wa’el Dhiab. h/t Josh Gerstein

DOJ cited a number of reasons why releasing videos of US service members feeding a indefinitely detained prisoner who had been cleared for released years earlier. But one of them is the propaganda to which our adversaries might use such videos.

 (4) use of the videos in propaganda by entities hostile to the United States;

Apparently, if the rest of the world saw how we fed our indefinitely detained prisoners, they would start bombing us.

But honest, DOJ says, it’s not torture and it’s not punitive.

Update, from an affidavit submitted by Rear Admiral Sinclair Harris. (h/t Ryan Reilly)

There is little doubt that ISIL would use imagery from Guantanamo Bay to further encourage its supporters and followers to attack military and government personnel.

He likens releasing these videos to the release of Marines pissing on corpses and news of the US burning Qurans.

He explains if AQAP got it, they might use it to support a recent claim made in Inspire claiming, “America has lost the most important element of global leadership: morals and principles.”

The Drone Rule Book Has Made It Easier for Our Partners To Drone Kill With Us Again

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As I noted earlier, one of the questions that National Counterterrorism Center nominee Nick Rasmussen got asked in his prehearing confirmation questions pertained to the Drone Rule Book.

He was asked about his role in writing the “US Policy Standards and Procedures for the Use of Force in Counterterrorism Operations Outside the United States and Areas of Active Hostilities.” He replied that he participated in “very initial drafts” of the document in May and June 2012 while at NSC, and then participated in the interagency process before it was approved in May 2013.

He was then asked, “Has the Presidential Policy Guidance made our counterterrorism operations more effective?”

Click through to read his full answer to question 17, but he basically talks a lot about institutionalizing the process, all while emphasizing that the Drone Rule Book simply recorded the swell procedure that was already in place. After several bullets of that, he finally answers what was ultimately a yes or no question.

By refining and documenting the careful and deliberate way in which these operations are approved and conducted and by contributing to greater transparency in our CT operations, I believe the PPG has made it easier for some of our key allies and CT partners to support those operations by sharing intelligence and/or providing other forms of support for our CT operations. I believe PPG had likely contributed to making some of our CT operations more effective by making critical forms of CT cooperation with key partners more sustainable. By standardizing and institutionalizing the considerations and processes that inform our policymaking on direct action operations, we have become more effective in reviewing these operations and ensuring all appropriate national security equities are considered prior to approval.

In response to a question about whether the Drone Rule Book “is a good long term solution for this type of irregular warfare,” Rasmussen talked about how it combined flexibility with a framework to balance many issues.

Obviously, I’m most interested in the benefit Rasmussen says the Drone Rule Book has brought: that it makes it easier for key partners to cooperate with us on drone strikes and other lethal operations.

That’s particularly interesting given the lawsuit by a Yemeni man against British Telecom for its role in a drone strike that killed his brother. He bases his suit on BT’s role in providing cable service between a base in the UK and Djibouti, from where some of the drone strikes are launched.

And here we come to find out that the Drone Rule Book is an effort to make it easier for partners — which probably includes both the UK and Djobouti (because I can’t imagine the Saudis, Yemenis, and Pakistanis much care) — to help out on our drone killing program.

 

Shorter Stafford Smith to Obama: “Don’t Drone Me, Bro!”

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On Saturday, a march is planned into South Waziristan in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Three groups are involved in the march: Reprieve, of the UK, headed by attorney Clive Stafford Smith, CodePink, of the US, headed by Medea Benjamin and Pakistan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) political party, headed by former cricket star and likely presidential candidate Imran Khan. The march is intended to draw attention to the plight of innocent civilians suffering from drone strikes aimed at militants who hide out in the area.

Prior to leaving for Pakistan, Stafford Smith wrote a letter (pdf) to President Obama (with a copy also going to CIA head David Petraeus), asking that he not be targeted by drones while he is in South Waziristan. From the letter:

This letter makes a simple request: when I march into Waziristan on October 7th, 2012, please do not let the CIA kill me, Pakistani politician Imran Khan, or the others – including many Americans – who will be marching with me to highlight the plight of the innocent people, including at least 174 children, targeted by drones in recent months and years. Indeed, should my picture come up in your weekly Powerpoint display, please remember that you and I are both lawyers from the same tradition, and it would be unseemly (as well as being both illegal and upsetting for my family) if you were to authorize my assassination.

/snip/

In terms of the studied leak to the NY Times that you and John Brennan studied St Augustine and Thomas Acquinas before authorizing a “hit”, I fear you guys must have been reading an edited edition of the ‘just war’ theory. We won’t even get into the rights and wrongs of the drone strategy, since Acquinas’ first principle was that the war had to be declared by an acknowledged sovereign: here there has been no declaration – only obfuscation by the secretive CIA — and we are waging war on an ally, Pakistan, without its consent. Arguments that these drone attacks are legal are, sad to say, hollow advocacy.

/snip/

I would be grateful if you would assure me – a simple email will do – that the CIA will not target me and my colleagues as we do what little we can to right these tragic wrongs. Surely I don’t ask much: simply not to be killed. In order that we may proceed in peace, I would appreciate such an assurance by 10am EST, on Monday, October 1st, 2012.

It does not appear that Stafford Smith has gotten Obama’s assurance that he will not be targeted.

There is now a “threat” against the march, prompting officials in the region to say that it cannot be permitted to take place, but the threat comes from a previously unknown militant group: Read more →

Administration Complains that Others Are Bringing Transparency It Refuses To on Its Drone Strikes

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In a quote for a WaPo story on the Administration’s credibility problems on its Afghanistan claims, a senior Administration official complained that their Afghan plans got leaked before they wanted them to.

There are people at every piece of this — the Taliban, Islamabad, Kabul and Washington” — who object to or are trying to influence elements of the emerging strategy, a senior administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk more candidly. “They use leaking as a tool.”

Leaking as a tool, even by those in power in DC! Imagine that!?!?

Meanwhile, in the NYT article on the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s report on the way Obama’s drone strikes have targeted rescuers and funeral attendees, another senior Administration official launches this cowardly anonymous attack.

A senior American counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, questioned the report’s findings, saying “targeting decisions are the product of intensive intelligence collection and observation.” The official added: “One must wonder why an effort that has so carefully gone after terrorists who plot to kill civilians has been subjected to so much misinformation. Let’s be under no illusions — there are a number of elements who would like nothing more than to malign these efforts and help Al Qaeda succeed.”

Mind you, that anonymous coward doesn’t actually dispute anything in the BIJ report. Instead, he or she just questions the motives of aiming to bring transparency to our drone program, insinuating that doing the hard work of counting the innocent victims of the drone strikes equates to sympathizing with al Qaeda.

Read more →

Rendition Flight Lawsuit Gives Lie to Government’s Jeppesen State Secrets Claim

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When they screw our tortured clients, they assert “National Security”, but when it is a matter of money, they don’t. — Reprieve’s Clive Smith

The British human rights organization Reprieve figured out that a NY state court case–a billing dispute between two aviation companies–pertained to rendition flights going back to 2002; it tipped off the press. The Guardian (which offers a separate story with links to some of the documents) lays out how the flight patterns tie to known renditions.

Gulfstream N85VM has already been identified as the aircraft that rendered Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, an Egyptian cleric known as Abu Omar, after CIA agents kidnapped him in broad daylight in Milan in February 2003 and took him to Cairo. Through close examination of the invoices it is possible to identify other rendition flights in which a number of high-profile al-Qaida suspects may have been rendered.

In August 2003, for example, Richmor submitted an invoice for $301,113 for eight flights over three days that took the Gulfstream to Bangkok, via Alaska and Japan, on to Kabul via Sri Lanka, and then home again via Dubai and Shannon (pdf). This operation appears to have been the rendition of Encep Nuraman, the leader of the Indonesian terrorist organisation Jemaah Islamiyah, better known as Hambali. He had been captured in Thailand shortly before the aircraft set off.

The court heard that in October 2004 the aircraft’s tail number was changed to N227SV after the US government discovered that its movements were being tracked. The following March the aircraft was publicly linked to the Abu Omar rendition. Phillip Morse, the aircraft’s ultimate owner, said he was stunned to discover how his plane was being used.

And it describes how the owners came to fear flying their own plane because it had been publicly linked to renditions.

By October 2006, Richards was writing to Moss to complain that his company was suffering negative publicity (pdf), losing business and receiving hate mail. The Gulfstream’s crews were afraid to leave the country. “In the future, whenever the name ‘Richmor’ is googled this will come up. N227SV will always be linked to renditions. No tail number change will ever erase that and our requests for government assistance in this matter have been ignored.”

The AP provides details on how the government provided bogus diplomatic notes

Every time the Gulfstream and other planes in Richmor’s fleet took to the air, they carried one-page transit documents on State Department letterhead. The notices, known as “letters of public convenience” were addressed “to whom it may concern,” stating that the jets should be treated as official flights and that “accompanying personnel are under contract with the U.S. government.”

In trial testimony, Moss said the documents were provided from the government to DynCorp, which furnished them to Richmor. Richards said the letters were given to flight crews before they left on each flight, but declined to explain their use.

The notes, signed by a State Department administrative assistant, Terry A. Hogan, described the planes’ travels as “global support for U.S. embassies worldwide.”

The AP could not locate Hogan. No official with that name is currently listed in State’s department-wide directory. A comprehensive 2004 State Department telephone directory contains no reference to Hogan, or variations of that name — despite records of four separate transit letters signed by Terry A. Hogan in January, March and April 2004. Several of the signatures on the diplomatic letters under Hogan’s name were noticeably different.

(Reprieve gave the story to the WaPo too, which did a thoroughly perfunctory job with it.)

All three stories note that the litigants expected the government to intervene–as they did in the Jeppesen suit–but did not.

Which, as Smith notes, sort of proves the lie behind the Jeppesen state secrets invocation. The government let all the details behind the KSM flights appear in unsealed court dockets. The only thing that separates what would have appeared in the Binyam Mohamed suit against Jeppesen and this suit is the explicit demand for compensation for a torture victim.