Some Data Points on Minh Qhang Pham, AQAP’s Graphic Artist of Mass Destruction

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On Friday, the government indicted Minh Quang Pham for material support of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The indictment and the press release make it clear (though don’t say explicitly–though this report confirms it) that Pham’s primary alleged crime was helping Samir Khan produce Inspire magazine.

In or about April 2011, PHAM worked with a United States citizen (“American CC-1”) to create online propaganda for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

[snip]

[Pham] facilitated communications between al Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula and supporters; and provided expert advice and assistance in photography and graphic design of media for al Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula.

Meaning CC-2 is Anwar al-Awlaki.

In or about April 2011, PHAM met with a United States citizen (“American CC-2”) in Yemen.

Given the centrality of Pham’s alleged association with Khan and Awlaki, consider the following chronology and the additional details below.

December 2010: Pham travels from the UK to Yemen.

March and April 2011: Pham carries a Kalashnikov.

April 2011: Pham works with Samir Khan and meets Anwar al-Awlaki.

“About” May 2011: UndieBomb infiltrator travels from UK to Yemen.

September 27, 2011: AQAP releases Inspire, Issue 7.

September 30, 2011: Khan and Awlaki killed in drone strike

December 2011: Pham returns to the UK; “Prior to his arrest [June 29, 2012], PHAM was held by British authorities in immigration custody.”

Around April 20, 2012: UndieBomb 2.0 and his handler removed from Yemen.

May 3, 2012: AQAP releases Inspire Issues 8 and 9.

May 7, 2012: UndieBomb 2.0 revealed.

May 11, 2012: British role in recruiting UndieBomb 2.0 revealed.

May 26, 2012: False AQAP statement released.

June 29, 2012: Pham arrested (presumably in Britain); indicted in US.

First, note that some of alleged acts–notably carrying a Kalashnikov–might require an inside source to learn.

Then consider you had someone coming from the UK to Yemen not long before the UndieBomb 2.0 infiltrator. Unlike UndieBomb 2.0, Pham appears to have decided to leave after his partner in propaganda, Khan, got killed. But then he appears to have been held in immigration custody for 6 months–which happens to cover the time UndieBomb 2.0 infiltrator and his handler were still in Yemen.

How interesting, too, that Pham is being tried here in the US, not in the UK (where the crimes are slightly different but where terrorist propaganda is even more criminalized than here, if I understand the law correctly). Why do you suppose they’re trying him here and not in the UK, where he has just been held for 6 months?

Meanwhile, I’ve always been intrigued that the latest versions of Inspire were released between the time when UndieBomb 2.0 was whisked out of Yemen and the time first the purported plot, then UndieBomb 2.0’s role it, was revealed. Then, several weeks later, someone released a false AQAP announcement claiming AQAP had been infiltrated. Pham would have been in British custody during this period.

Finally, there’s this rather interesting language. As a lot of indictments that fall under the federal terrorism statute do, this one has language on forfeiture under 18 USC 981. But note the way it phases this language on forfeiture.

As a result of planning and perpetuating Federal crimes of terrorism against the United States … defendant [] shall forfeit … all right, title, and interest in all assets, foreign and domestic, affording a source of influence over al Shabaab and AQAP.

This guy, presumably, doesn’t have a whole lot of financial goods to forfeit. Nevertheless, the government is going to the trouble of seizing all his interest in assets affording Pham influence over al Shabaab and AQAP.

Those are, mind you, just data points. But some fairly intriguing ones.

It Was All Going Swimmingly Until Morsi Committed to Freeing the Blind Sheikh

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This is the kind of international landmine that I’ve been fearing could influence November’s elections.

In his first public speech addressing tens of thousands of mostly Islamist supporters, [Egyptian President-elect Mohammed] Morsi promised Saturday to work to free Omar Abdel-Rahman, the spiritual leader of men convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Congress is off to march in their local Fourth of July parades next week, but I would assume a call to withhold Egypt’s aid will be at the top of the agenda when they come back. The threat of losing US funding will provide yet another incentive for the Egyptian military to crack down (though Morsi also promised to free protestors held under the military system).

And I expect Romney advisors like John Bolton to use this as an opportunity to accuse Obama of having lost the Arab Spring.

Which could make things … interesting.

And all that’s before you consider the effect any backlash from us will have on the Egyptian people.

Is There a Pre-2001 OLC Opinion Authorizing Targeted Killing of US Citizen Terrorists?

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Update: I realize now this can’t be the explanation. I’ve just referred back to the original request and the ACLU actually did time-limit their general requests to records created after September 11, 2001. So maybe the issue relates to non-al Qaeda terrorists?

I’m still working through all the declarations submitted in the government’s response to the drone targeting FOIAs; I will have far, far more to say about what they suggest.

But for now I wanted to point to a detail in OLC Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Bies’ declaration that suggests OLC has a pre-2001 memo authorizing the targeted killing of US citizen terrorists.

As Bies’ declaration lays out, the three FOIAs at issue in this suit ask for OLC memos relating to the targeted killing of US citizens. To summarize:

  • Scott Shane asked for OLC memos since 2001 on the targeted killing of people suspected of ties to Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups
  • Charlie Savage asked for OLC memos on the targeted killing of a United States citizen who is deemed to be a terrorist
  • ACLU asked for all records on the legal basis under which US citizens can be subjected for targeted killings

That is, Shane put a start date on his FOIA–post 2001–and limited it to terrorist groups. Savage put no start date on it and didn’t specify which terrorist groups he was addressing. ACLU didn’t limit it with either a start date or ties to terrorist groups. Note, too, ACLU was looking for info on the killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki as well as his father and Samir Khan; Savage used language suggesting an interest in Anwar al-Awlaki, though he did not limit his request to the older Awlaki. Shane used no such limiting language.

As I’ve analyzed and will show at more length, the government gave inconsistent responses to these three FOIAs, even though on the surface they appeared to ask for the same information.

More interesting still is Bies’ claim in his declaration that the responses to Savage and the ACLU were limited to the recent spate of targeted killings of US citizens. Bies wrote,

By letter dated October 27, 2011, [OLC Special Counsel] Colburn responded to the Savage Request on behalf of the OLC. … Interpreting the request as seeking OLC opinions pertaining to al-Aulaqi, OLC neither confirmed nor denied the existence of such documents, pursuant to FOIA Exemptions One, Three, and Five.

[snip]

By letter dated November 14, 2011, Mr. Colburn responded to [ACLU lawyer Nate] Wessler on behalf of OLC, interpreting the request as seeking OLC opinions pertaining to those three individuals [Anwar al-Awlaki, Samir Khan, and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki] and informing him that, pursuant to FOIA Exemptions One, Three, and Five, OLC “neither confirms nor denies the existence of the documents in your request” because the very fact of the existence of nonexistence of such documents is itself classified, protected from disclosure by statute, and privileged.” [my emphasis]

Bies’ declaration had no language about Colburn “interpreting” Shane’s FOIA to pertain only to these killings in Yemen. In addition, as you can see from the letters Colburn sent (linked above), Colburn actually didn’t note his interpretation in his response letters to Savage and ACLU. I guess they were just supposed to guess.

And while this is just a wildarsed guess, the totality of these three requests and the caveats Bies made about the responses suggests that Colburn had to make such interpretations because of the open timeframe of the requests. That is, what is common to the Savage and ACLU requests but not the Shane one is the way they set no start point for their request.

Which suggests there may be OLC documents pertaining to the targeted killing of Americans (potentially as terrorists) dating back before the 2001 start point of Shane’s request. Who knows? Maybe there’s an OLC opinion authorizing the assassination of Black Panther Fred Hampton, for example (though the FBI would only fall under Savage’s request if considered “intelligence community assets”). If that’s correct, then is that OLC memo still on the books?

There are, I suspect, a number of other reasons why the government is so squirrely about this FOIA. But one of them may relate to documents lying around OLC’s archives from before the time 9/11 changed everything … or returned an earlier state of targeted killing.

“The Yemeni situation and … the Iranian cyber situation”

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As MadDog noted yesterday, Dianne Feinstein seemed to answer a question I’ve written about here and here regarding the scope of the leak investigations.

She said the U.S. attorneys would not face political pressures from the Obama administration and would “call the shots as they see them.”

“We can move ahead much more rapidly,” Feinstein said. “Instead of one special prosecutor, you essentially have two here, one is the Yemeni situation and the other is the Iranian cyber situation. I think you’re going to get there much quicker.”

I’m not sure I agree with MD, though, that “the UndieBomb 2.0 and the Stuxnet leaks are the ones being investigated,” meaning implicitly that just those two “leaks” are being investigated.

DiFi’s quote seems to confirm that there is a distinct investigation into the source of the detail (one of the only new parts of David Sanger’s StuxNet reporting) that Israel let StuxNet free, possibly deliberately. Since Eric Holder suggested there was a jurisdictional component to his choice of US Attorneys on these investigations, we can assume that Rod Rosenstein, US Attorney for the National Security Agency, will investigate that alleged leak.

But what does DiFi include when she says, “the Yemeni situation”? Does it include only the leaks about UndieBomb 2.0? And if so, why isn’t it being investigated out of Eastern District of VA, the CIA’s US Attorney district, which purportedly had a lead on that operation in the US?

Further, MD suggested (though did not say explicitly) this means they’re not investigating the drone targeting leaks.

Now, as I’ve noted, one possible reason they wouldn’t investigate the drone targeting “leaks” would be if the stories reported falsehoods or–more charitably–a drone targeting process that was no longer in place, as the AP has reported to be the case and the White House, in their response to the AP story, seemed to confirm. That is, one possible reason why they wouldn’t investigate the “leaks” about drone targeting would be because those stories did not report accurate classified information (and I’ll remind here that the Klaidman story differs in some notable ways from the Joby Warrick story, which we now know came in part from Rahm Emanuel’s effort to publicize Baitullah Mehsud’s killing).

But there’s another possibility. I’m struck by DiFi’s description of “the Yemeni situation” rather than–as most people refer to it–the “thwarted” bomb “plot.” It’s possible that in DiFi’s mind–the mind of a Gang of Four member who has presumably been briefed on our ongoing operations in Yemen–that the leak of the bomb sting, the leak of the Saudi role in it, and the stories that made it clear that John Brennan is running a secret war against Yemeni insurgents using signature strikes out of the NSC largely at the behest of the Saudis all constitute for her “the Yemeni situation.” UndieBomb 2.0 is a part of that secret war–perhaps the legal justification for US involvement in it (and also a useful way to remove an asset and a key handler before the drones start wreaking havoc). But if this speculation is right, it may well be the other details–the report that this war is being run out of NSC, the details that make it clear we’re targeting insurgents, not just AQAP, the fact that we’re clearly in an undeclared war–that DiFi worries about most.

Mind you, this is all supposition. It may be that DiFi was just using shorthand for the UndieBomb 2.0 plot. But to a great degree, all the stories about drone targeting were efforts to expose–and then cover up–the war we’re engaging in Yemen. And that does seem like a secret the Administration is trying to prevent the American public from learning about.

Can Hillary Turn on Electricity in Yemen Better than AQAP?

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Due to the vagaries of smart phone RSS feeds, I re-read this story over the weekend. In addition to describing Secretary of State Clinton’s speech before the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference–in which she described how special ops fit into her idea of really smart power–it also aired JSOC complaints about Hillary’s proposed closer ties between diplomacy and special ops.

But rumor has it Clinton’s vision has its detractors — and that its implementation in hotspots such as Yemen and Congo has made some Special Operations Forces officers very unhappy. In Yemen, in particular, some commando officers look upon the State Department’s expanding shadow-war powers as a bureaucratic intrusion on what should be military territory. A source tells Danger Room that in Yemen State has effectively hijacked all U.S. counter-terrorism funding, requiring a labyrinthine approval process for even small expenditures. According to detractors, the funding control is a way of cementing State’s expansion into the Special Operations Forces traditional remit.

McRaven does not share the officers’ objections. The admiral has enthusiastically widened and deepened his command’s alliances with commando forces from allied nations — all in a bid to build what he calls the “global SOF partnership.” The Army 10th Special Forces Group’s ongoing deployment to Afghanistan is a perfect example: 10th Group’s Afghanistan task force includes commandos from Poland, Romania and several other countries. In a sense, McRaven is becoming more of a diplomat as Clinton becomes more of a warrior. Meeting in the middle, they’ve apparently chosen to be allies instead of rivals.

In that context, Clinton’s appearance at an otherwise minor military trade show is an important signal. McRaven is showing his officers that if he and America’s top diplomat can get along, then they can get along with their own State Department counterparts, as well. An evolving vision of American warfare is counting on it.

This story came out on May 24, just a few days after this largely unnoticed AP story described John Brennan seizing control over targeting. One reason for Brennan to do so, it seemed, was to give State more direct influence over targeting.

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.

[snip]

But some of the officials carrying out the policy are equally leery of “how easy it has become to kill someone,” one said. The U.S. is targeting al-Qaida operatives for reasons such as being heard in an intercepted conversation plotting to attack a U.S. ambassador overseas, the official said.[my emphasis]

That is, it seems like this process–which the AP dates to sometime in mid-April–allowed State to bypass DOD’s vetting process by submitting targeting suggestions directly to Brennan. And the AP story appeared to arise out of the same disgruntlement within JSOC as Wired’s story.

Now, I actually support Hillary’s efforts to strengthen State’s soft power efforts; we won the Cold War as much with soft power and oil price manipulation as we did by bankrupting Russia with an arms race. But we’ve sucked at it ever since. Read more →

Pakistan Still Searching for Long-Term Imprisonment Site for Afridi

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After a “trial” that was strangely held in Bara, in the Khyber Agency of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, Dr. Shakeel Afridi is now being held in the central jail in Peshawar in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Despite the fact that most were under the belief that Afridi was being tried on treason charges for his cooperation with the CIA in developing intelligence that lead to the killing of Osama bin Laden, we learned after the trial that he had in fact been convicted of aiding the Lashkar-e-Islam terrorist group. The actions for which he was convicted do appear to have taken place with the Khyber Agency, providing at least a justification for the trial’s venue.

As Time reported, there is concern for Afridi’s safety in the Peshawar jail:

Meanwhile, there is concern about Afridi’s safety. In a phone interview with TIME, Mohammand of the lawyers forum explains that Afridi is being kept in complete isolation and has yet to speak to anyone — including his legal counsel or family. “We actually have no idea where he is. He could be in jail; he could be in a foreign country; he could be anywhere.”

It is most likely, however, that Afridi is being held in Peshawar’s central jail. “We have requested the federal government to move Dr. Shakeel Afridi from Peshawar to another jail. We fear he could be attacked,” Mian Iftikhar Hussain, information minister for the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, told journalists on May 30. The Peshawar jail has more than 250 prisoners incarcerated on terror charges. According to Hussain, these “diehard militants” could attack Afridi.

Shaukat Qadir, a retired brigadier and columnist who has been provided unrivaled access to the Army’s Abbottabad files, agrees that the government would be unable to secure Afridi for very long: “There are enough al-Qaeda sympathizers in Pakistan that he will never be safe here.”

We learn today from the Express Tribune that Pakistan’s federal government has asked the Punjab provincial government to house Afridi in their Adiala jail but they have refused:

The Punjab government has refused to accommodate Dr Shakil Afridi at the Adiala Jail saying the province already has its fair share of law and order problems.

The federal government had requested Punjab’s provincial administration to house Dr Shakil Afridi, said to be responsible for divulging information on Osama Bin Laden’s whereabouts to the US. However, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa’s information minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain said on Sunday that Punjab has turned down the request.

The article goes on to related further detail on the request to move Afridi out of Peshawar’s jail:

“Keeping Dr Afridi at the central prison in Peshawar is risky keeping in view the recent attack on Banu Jail. We cannot keep him here and that is why we wrote a letter to the interior ministry to shift Dr Afridi to Adiala Jail as soon as possible,” official sources earlier told The Express Tribune.

Recall that the attack on the jail in Banu was in April, when over 100 militants attacked the jail, with nearly 400 prisoners being freed, although the attackers seemed most interested in freeing a high-profile militant who was being held for an assassination attempt against former president Pervez Musharraf. Note from this article about some of the Banu prisoners returning to jail voluntarily and some being recaptured that the photo shows us that jails in Pakistan are quite different from those here in the US. If Afridi is housed with prisoners loyal to al Qaeda, he could indeed be subject to attack.

It will be very interesting to see how Pakistan’s federal government responds to the refusal from the Punjab government and what their next step will be in seeking a place in which Afridi can serve his sentence.

Is Administration Admitting It Is Lying about Drones?

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I’ll have far, far more on the leak investigations tomorrow or Monday. But for the moment I want to lay out certain implications suggested by this Jack Goldsmith post.

Goldsmith asks what the scope of the leak investigation is and cites reports that the investigation is only investigating the UndieBomb 2.0 and StuxNet leaks.

However, the Wall Street Journal reports that the two relevant FBI leak investigations concern (1) “leaks about the cyberattack program” and (2) “leaks about a double agent who infiltrated al Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate.”  If the WSJ is right, it would appear that the investigations do not concern leaks about drone attacks and related matters that, like leaks about the Iranian cyber-operation and the AQAP infiltration, have been the subject of recent congressional complaint.

And he cites DOJ saying they can’t tell us the scope of the investigation because it would confirm whether or not reports were correct.

According to the New York Times, DOJ was silent on the subject matter of the investigations because revealing their subject matter “would implicitly confirm that certain reports contained accurate classified information.”

Put these two details together. If DOJ will only investigate leaks of accurate classified information, and if DOJ is really investigating the UndieBomb 2.0 leaks and StuxNet leaks but not the drone stories, one possible explanation (though not the only one) is that the UndieBomb 2.0 and StuxNet stories were accurate, but not the drone stories.

I have suggested the NYT and Klaidman stories came out when they did and in the form they did to distract from earlier reporting on signature strikes run from the NSC. Is the Administration admitting–with the scope of their leak investigations–that those leaks were not the truth?

At What Point Will the Administration Admit “American interests” Equal “What the Saudis Want”?

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There are a couple of stories this weekend on our undeclared war in Yemen that deserve some close focus.

As I pointed out in the wake of the NYT and Daily Beast stories on drone targeting, the Administration had been successfully distracting attention from Obama’s embrace of signature strikes directed out of John Brennan’s office by focusing on the vetting that goes (or went) into the Kill List.

With that in mind, compare how Greg Miller reports on those issues in this story. A key source or sources for the story are one or more former US official who describe a liberalization of the Kill List.

Targets still have to pose a “direct threat” to U.S. interests, said a former high-ranking U.S. counterterrorism official. “But the elasticity of that has grown over time.”

[snip]

One of the U.S. objectives in Yemen has been “identifying who those leaders were in those districts that were al-Qaeda and also in charge of the rebellion,” said a former senior U.S. official who was involved in overseeing the campaign before leaving the government. “There was a little liberalization that went on in the kill lists that allowed us to go after them.”

[snip]

The effort nearly ground to a halt last year amid a political crisis that finally forced Yemen’s leader for three decades, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to step down. As he fought to cling to power, U.S. officials said they became concerned that he was trying to direct U.S. strikes against his adversaries under the guise of providing locations of supposed terrorist groups.

“There were times when we were intentionally misled, presumably by Saleh, to get rid of people he wanted to get rid of,” said the former U.S. official involved in overseeing the campaign.

Now, as I noted, both the AP and Daily Beast emphasized the importance of Mike Mullen (who left on September 30, the day we killed Anwar al-Awlaki) and James Cartwright (who left on August 3) to Kill List vetting. That was an aeon ago in our war on Yemen, though the discussion of pulling back on targeting because we finally admitted to ourselves that Ali Abdulllah Saleh was playing a double game with us did happen while they were still around. And, for the moment, I can’t think of any other similarly high-ranking people who have left.

Now compare what these former officials said with what current officials are telling Miller (well, ignore Tommy Vietor, because he’s obviously blowing smoke).

“We’re pursuing a focused counterterrorism campaign in Yemen designed to prevent and deter terrorist plots that directly threaten U.S. interests at home and abroad,” said Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the National Security Council. “We have not and will not get involved in a broader counterinsurgency effort.”

But other U.S. officials said that the administration’s emphasis on threats to interests “abroad” has provided latitude for expanding attacks on al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), as the Yemen affiliate is known. Read more →

Your Obligatory Fran Fragos Townsend Leak

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Remember how the detail that UndieBomb 2.0 involved a Saudi infiltrator got out? John Brennan had a private teleconference with Richard Clarke and Fran Fragos Townsend and implied as much, which led to Clarke reporting it (and not long after, ABC confirming it with foreign sources).

At about 5:45 p.m. EDT on Monday, May 7, just before the evening newscasts, John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s top White House adviser on counter-terrorism, held a small, private teleconference to brief former counter-terrorism advisers who have become frequent commentators on TV news shows.

According to five people familiar with the call, Brennan stressed that the plot was never a threat to the U.S. public or air safety because Washington had “inside control” over it.

Brennan’s comment appears unintentionally to have helped lead to disclosure of the secret at the heart of a joint U.S.-British-Saudi undercover counter-terrorism operation.

A few minutes after Brennan’s teleconference, on ABC’s World News Tonight, Richard Clarke, former chief of counter-terrorism in the Clinton White House and a participant on the Brennan call, said the underwear bomb plot “never came close because they had insider information, insider control.”

Now, National Security Council Spokesperson Tommy Vietor, who aggressively but rather unconvincingly tried to claim that the Administration had never intended to publicly announce UndieBomb 2.0, is claiming that the Administration is obligated to hold such teleconferences because the Administration is obligated to be “transparent” about potential threats.

The Yemen plot had many intelligence and national security officials flummoxed and angered by its public airing.  Despite that, a senior administration official then briefed network counterterrorism analysts, including CNN’s Frances Townsend, about parts of the operation.

But such briefings are an “obligation” for the administration once a story like the Yemen plot is publicized, insisted National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor.

“The reason that we brief former counterterrorism officials is because they are extremely conscientious about working with us about what can and cannot be said or disclosed,” Vietor told Security Clearance.  “They understand that there is an obligation for the U.S. to be transparent with American people about potential threats but will work with us to protect operational equities because they’ve walked in our shoes.”

This is the Administration that appears to have just fired a guy for revealing that the bankster threat is growing while the terrorist threat is diminishing, claiming they had to hold a teleconference with TV commentators just before prime time to make sure Americans regarded a Saudi-managed plot as a real threat.

Vietor’s in trouble. Presumably on his advice, the White House was prepping a big roll out of UndieBomb 2.0 the day after this call with Townsend and Clarke. Clearly, by going ahead with the teleconference, he was trying to get maximum spin value out of the plot, after the AP had broken it. Indeed, the detail that led Clarke to learn the “plot” was really a sting–that we (or our buddies the Saudis) were in control the whole time–is precisely the same spin that Brennan’s sanctioned leaks have pushed in the Kill List and StuxNet stories.

But for a variety of reasons, it has become politically costly to admit the White House had planned to spin this. And so, Tommy Vietor keeps trying to tell new stories, hoping one will hold together.

Read more →

The “Kill List” Is a Shiny Object

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I recognize the term “Kill List” has some political advantages. It’s a concise way to convey the cold brutality of our use of drones. Launching a petition for a Do Not Kill list–on the White House’s own website!–is a clever use of social media.

But the “Kill List” is a shiny object.

That’s because it propagates the myth that everyone we’re killing is a known terrorist. It propagates the myth that the outdated vetting process John Brennan wants to publicize to convince the American public we use a very deliberative process before killing people with drones covers all drone killings. It propagates the myth that the government plans out each and every drone strike so thoroughly as to have the President sign off on it.

Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war.

It propagates the myth that the only innocents killed in drone strikes–19 year old Yemeni farmer Nasser Salim killed in the Fahd al-Quso drone strike, the girl Baitullah Mehsud had just married, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki–had the poor judgment to stand next to one of the named people on one of America’s Kill Lists.

The reference to and focus on a Kill List hides precisely the most controversial use of drones outside of Afghanistan: the targeting of patterns, not people.

There is absolutely no reason to believe, for example, that Obama–or even John Brennan–knew the identity of the up to 8 civilians who were killed by a drone in Jaar, Yemen, on May 15. All anyone knew about them, according to reporting, is that they ran out after an earlier drone strike to look at the impact site. Boom! They were never on any Kill List, but they are nonetheless just as dead as Quso is.

At precisely the moment the press reported the White House had embraced signature strikes in Yemen and pulled control of those strikes into the White House, John Brennan rolled out a propaganda campaign to focus on the deliberation that goes into the Kill List–that is, into drone killings not covered by the new signature strike policy.

The effort, very clearly, is an attempt to distract attention from those drone killings that don’t involve the kind of deliberation so carefully portrayed by the NYT.

A shiny object. One that is working.