NYT: Obama and the 'Kill List'.

[SirNitram]

Link

WASHINGTON — This was the enemy, served up in the latest chart from the intelligence agencies: 15 Qaeda suspects in Yemen with Western ties. The mug shots and brief biographies resembled a high school yearbook layout. Several were Americans. Two were teenagers, including a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years.

President Obama, overseeing the regular Tuesday counterterrorism meeting of two dozen security officials in the White House Situation Room, took a moment to study the faces. It was Jan. 19, 2010, the end of a first year in office punctuated by terrorist plots and culminating in a brush with catastrophe over Detroit on Christmas Day, a reminder that a successful attack could derail his presidency. Yet he faced adversaries without uniforms, often indistinguishable from the civilians around them.

“How old are these people?” he asked, according to two officials present. “If they are starting to use children,” he said of Al Qaeda, “we are moving into a whole different phase.”

It was not a theoretical question: Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values; the chart, introducing people whose deaths he might soon be asked to order, underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be.

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. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.

“He is determined that he will make these decisions about how far and wide these operations will go,” said Thomas E. Donilon, his national security adviser. “His view is that he’s responsible for the position of the United States in the world.” He added, “He’s determined to keep the tether pretty short.”

Nothing else in Mr. Obama’s first term has baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressive counterterrorism record. His actions have often remained inscrutable, obscured by awkward secrecy rules, polarized political commentary and the president’s own deep reserve.

In interviews with The New York Times, three dozen of his current and former advisers described Mr. Obama’s evolution since taking on the role, without precedent in presidential history, of personally overseeing the shadow war with Al Qaeda.

They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing. While he was adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relations with the Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and dangerous lands. When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda — even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was “an easy one.”

His first term has seen private warnings from top officials about a “Whac-A-Mole” approach to counterterrorism; the invention of a new category of aerial attack following complaints of careless targeting; and presidential acquiescence in a formula for counting civilian deaths that some officials think is skewed to produce low numbers.

The administration’s failure to forge a clear detention policy has created the impression among some members of Congress of a take-no-prisoners policy. And Mr. Obama’s ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron P. Munter, has complained to colleagues that the C.I.A.’s strikes drive American policy there, saying “he didn’t realize his main job was to kill people,” a colleague said.

Beside the president at every step is his counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, who is variously compared by colleagues to a dogged police detective, tracking terrorists from his cavelike office in the White House basement, or a priest whose blessing has become indispensable to Mr. Obama, echoing the president’s attempt to apply the “just war” theories of Christian philosophers to a brutal modern conflict.

But the strikes that have eviscerated Al Qaeda — just since April, there have been 14 in Yemen, and 6 in Pakistan — have also tested both men’s commitment to the principles they have repeatedly said are necessary to defeat the enemy in the long term. Drones have replaced Guantánamo as the recruiting tool of choice for militants; in his 2010 guilty plea, Faisal Shahzad, who had tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square, justified targeting civilians by telling the judge, “When the drones hit, they don’t see children.”

Dennis C. Blair, director of national intelligence until he was fired in May 2010, said that discussions inside the White House of long-term strategy against Al Qaeda were sidelined by the intense focus on strikes. “The steady refrain in the White House was, ‘This is the only game in town’ — reminded me of body counts in Vietnam,” said Mr. Blair, a retired admiral who began his Navy service during that war.

Mr. Blair’s criticism, dismissed by White House officials as personal pique, nonetheless resonates inside the government.

William M. Daley, Mr. Obama’s chief of staff in 2011, said the president and his advisers understood that they could not keep adding new names to a kill list, from ever lower on the Qaeda totem pole. What remains unanswered is how much killing will be enough.

“One guy gets knocked off, and the guy’s driver, who’s No. 21, becomes 20?” Mr. Daley said, describing the internal discussion. “At what point are you just filling the bucket with numbers?”

‘Maintain My Options’

A phalanx of retired generals and admirals stood behind Mr. Obama on the second day of his presidency, providing martial cover as he signed several executive orders to make good on campaign pledges. Brutal interrogation techniques were banned, he declared. And the prison at Guantánamo Bay would be closed.

What the new president did not say was that the orders contained a few subtle loopholes. They reflected a still unfamiliar Barack Obama, a realist who, unlike some of his fervent supporters, was never carried away by his own rhetoric. Instead, he was already putting his lawyerly mind to carving out the maximum amount of maneuvering room to fight terrorism as he saw fit.

It was a pattern that would be seen repeatedly, from his response to Republican complaints that he wanted to read terrorists their rights, to his acceptance of the C.I.A.’s method for counting civilian casualties in drone strikes.

The day before the executive orders were issued, the C.I.A.’s top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, had called the White House in a panic. The order prohibited the agency from operating detention facilities, closing once and for all the secret overseas “black sites” where interrogators had brutalized terrorist suspects.

“The way this is written, you are going to take us out of the rendition business,” Mr. Rizzo told Gregory B. Craig, Mr. Obama’s White House counsel, referring to the much-criticized practice of grabbing a terrorist suspect abroad and delivering him to another country for interrogation or trial. The problem, Mr. Rizzo explained, was that the C.I.A. sometimes held such suspects for a day or two while awaiting a flight. The order appeared to outlaw that.

Mr. Craig assured him that the new president had no intention of ending rendition — only its abuse, which could lead to American complicity in torture abroad. So a new definition of “detention facility” was inserted, excluding places used to hold people “on a short-term, transitory basis.” Problem solved — and no messy public explanation damped Mr. Obama’s celebration.

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

Even before he was sworn in, Mr. Obama’s advisers had warned him against taking a categorical position on what would be done with Guantánamo detainees. The deft insertion of some wiggle words in the president’s order showed that the advice was followed.

Some detainees would be transferred to prisons in other countries, or released, it said. Some would be prosecuted — if “feasible” — in criminal courts. Military commissions, which Mr. Obama had criticized, were not mentioned — and thus not ruled out.

As for those who could not be transferred or tried but were judged too dangerous for release? Their “disposition” would be handled by “lawful means, consistent with the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and the interests of justice.”

A few sharp-eyed observers inside and outside the government understood what the public did not. Without showing his hand, Mr. Obama had preserved three major policies — rendition, military commissions and indefinite detention — that have been targets of human rights groups since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

But a year later, with Congress trying to force him to try all terrorism suspects using revamped military commissions, he deployed his legal skills differently — to preserve trials in civilian courts.

It was shortly after Dec. 25, 2009, following a close call in which a Qaeda-trained operative named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had boarded a Detroit-bound airliner with a bomb sewn into his underwear.

Mr. Obama was taking a drubbing from Republicans over the government’s decision to read the suspect his rights, a prerequisite for bringing criminal charges against him in civilian court.

The president “seems to think that if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war,” former Vice President Dick Cheney charged.

Sensing vulnerability on both a practical and political level, the president summoned his attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., to the White House.

F.B.I. agents had questioned Mr. Abdulmutallab for 50 minutes and gained valuable intelligence before giving him the warning. They had relied on a 1984 case called New York v. Quarles, in which the Supreme Court ruled that statements made by a suspect in response to urgent public safety questions — the case involved the location of a gun — could be introduced into evidence even if the suspect had not been advised of the right to remain silent.

Mr. Obama, who Mr. Holder said misses the legal profession, got into a colloquy with the attorney general. How far, he asked, could Quarles be stretched? Mr. Holder felt that in terrorism cases, the court would allow indefinite questioning on a fairly broad range of subjects.

Satisfied with the edgy new interpretation, Mr. Obama gave his blessing, Mr. Holder recalled.

“Barack Obama believes in options: ‘Maintain my options,’ “ said Jeh C. Johnson, a campaign adviser and now general counsel of the Defense Department.

‘They Must All Be Militants’

That same mind-set would be brought to bear as the president intensified what would become a withering campaign to use unmanned aircraft to kill Qaeda terrorists.

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

In response to his concern, the C.I.A. downsized its munitions for more pinpoint strikes. In addition, the president tightened standards, aides say: If the agency did not have a “near certainty” that a strike would result in zero civilian deaths, Mr. Obama wanted to decide personally whether to go ahead.

The president’s directive reinforced the need for caution, counterterrorism officials said, but did not significantly change the program. In part, that is because “the protection of innocent life was always a critical consideration,” said Michael V. Hayden, the last C.I.A. director under President George W. Bush.

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

Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.

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

But in interviews, three former senior intelligence officials expressed disbelief that the number could be so low. The C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it “guilt by association” that has led to “deceptive” estimates of civilian casualties.

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

‘A No-Brainer’

About four months into his presidency, as Republicans accused him of reckless naïveté on terrorism, Mr. Obama quickly pulled together a speech defending his policies. Standing before the Constitution at the National Archives in Washington, he mentioned Guantánamo 28 times, repeating his campaign pledge to close the prison.

But it was too late, and his defensive tone suggested that Mr. Obama knew it. Though President George W. Bush and Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican candidate, had supported closing the Guantánamo prison, Republicans in Congress had reversed course and discovered they could use the issue to portray Mr. Obama as soft on terrorism.

Walking out of the Archives, the president turned to his national security adviser at the time, Gen. James L. Jones, and admitted that he had never devised a plan to persuade Congress to shut down the prison.

“We’re never going to make that mistake again,” Mr. Obama told the retired Marine general.

General Jones said the president and his aides had assumed that closing the prison was “a no-brainer — the United States will look good around the world.” The trouble was, he added, “nobody asked, ‘O.K., let’s assume it’s a good idea, how are you going to do this?’ “

It was not only Mr. Obama’s distaste for legislative backslapping and arm-twisting, but also part of a deeper pattern, said an administration official who has watched him closely: the president seemed to have “a sense that if he sketches a vision, it will happen — without his really having thought through the mechanism by which it will happen.”

In fact, both Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the attorney general, Mr. Holder, had warned that the plan to close the Guantánamo prison was in peril, and they volunteered to fight for it on Capitol Hill, according to officials. But with Mr. Obama’s backing, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, blocked them, saying health care reform had to go first.

When the administration floated a plan to transfer from Guantánamo to Northern Virginia two Uighurs, members of a largely Muslim ethnic minority from China who are considered no threat to the United States, Virginia Republicans led by Representative Frank R. Wolf denounced the idea. The administration backed down.

That show of weakness doomed the effort to close Guantánamo, the same administration official said. “Lyndon Johnson would have steamrolled the guy,” he said. “That’s not what happened. It’s like a boxing match where a cut opens over a guy’s eye.”

The Use of Force

It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.

This secret “nominations” process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia.

The video conferences are run by the Pentagon, which oversees strikes in those countries, and participants do not hesitate to call out a challenge, pressing for the evidence behind accusations of ties to Al Qaeda.

“What’s a Qaeda facilitator?” asked one participant, illustrating the spirit of the exchanges. “If I open a gate and you drive through it, am I a facilitator?” Given the contentious discussions, it can take five or six sessions for a name to be approved, and names go off the list if a suspect no longer appears to pose an imminent threat, the official said. A parallel, more cloistered selection process at the C.I.A. focuses largely on Pakistan, where that agency conducts strikes.

The nominations go to the White House, where by his own insistence and guided by Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama must approve any name. He signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan — about a third of the total.

Aides say Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed in lethal counterterrorism operations. A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions. And he knows that bad strikes can tarnish America’s image and derail diplomacy.

“He realizes this isn’t science, this is judgments made off of, most of the time, human intelligence,” said Mr. Daley, the former chief of staff. “The president accepts as a fact that a certain amount of screw-ups are going to happen, and to him, that calls for a more judicious process.”

But the control he exercises also appears to reflect Mr. Obama’s striking self-confidence: he believes, according to several people who have worked closely with him, that his own judgment should be brought to bear on strikes.

Asked what surprised him most about Mr. Obama, Mr. Donilon, the national security adviser, answered immediately: “He’s a president who is quite comfortable with the use of force on behalf of the United States.”

In fact, in a 2007 campaign speech in which he vowed to pull the United States out of Iraq and refocus on Al Qaeda, Mr. Obama had trumpeted his plan to go after terrorist bases in Pakistan — even if Pakistani leaders objected. His rivals at the time, including Mitt Romney, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Mrs. Clinton, had all pounced on what they considered a greenhorn’s campaign bluster. (Mr. Romney said Mr. Obama had become “Dr. Strangelove.”)

In office, however, Mr. Obama has done exactly what he had promised, coming quickly to rely on the judgment of Mr. Brennan.

Mr. Brennan, a son of Irish immigrants, is a grizzled 25-year veteran of the C.I.A. whose work as a top agency official during the brutal interrogations of the Bush administration made him a target of fierce criticism from the left. He had been forced, under fire, to withdraw his name from consideration to lead the C.I.A. under Mr. Obama, becoming counterterrorism chief instead.

Some critics of the drone strategy still vilify Mr. Brennan, suggesting that he is the C.I.A.’s agent in the White House, steering Mr. Obama to a targeted killing strategy. But in office, Mr. Brennan has surprised many former detractors by speaking forcefully for closing Guantánamo and respecting civil liberties.

Harold H. Koh, for instance, as dean of Yale Law School was a leading liberal critic of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies. But since becoming the State Department’s top lawyer, Mr. Koh said, he has found in Mr. Brennan a principled ally.

“If John Brennan is the last guy in the room with the president, I’m comfortable, because Brennan is a person of genuine moral rectitude,” Mr. Koh said. “It’s as though you had a priest with extremely strong moral values who was suddenly charged with leading a war.”

The president values Mr. Brennan’s experience in assessing intelligence, from his own agency or others, and for the sobriety with which he approaches lethal operations, other aides say.

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

Yet the administration’s very success at killing terrorism suspects has been shadowed by a suspicion: that Mr. Obama has avoided the complications of detention by deciding, in effect, to take no prisoners alive. While scores of suspects have been killed under Mr. Obama, only one has been taken into American custody, and the president has balked at adding new prisoners to Guantánamo.

“Their policy is to take out high-value targets, versus capturing high-value targets,” said Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Republican on the intelligence committee. “They are not going to advertise that, but that’s what they are doing.”

Mr. Obama’s aides deny such a policy, arguing that capture is often impossible in the rugged tribal areas of Pakistan and Yemen and that many terrorist suspects are in foreign prisons because of American tips. Still, senior officials at the Justice Department and the Pentagon acknowledge that they worry about the public perception.

“We have to be vigilant to avoid a no-quarter, or take-no-prisoners policy,” said Mr. Johnson, the Pentagon’s chief lawyer.

Trade-Offs

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

But he has found that war is a messy business, and his actions show that pursuing an enemy unbound by rules has required moral, legal and practical trade-offs that his speeches did not envision.

One early test involved Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. The case was problematic on two fronts, according to interviews with both administration and Pakistani sources.

The C.I.A. worried that Mr. Mehsud, whose group then mainly targeted the Pakistan government, did not meet the Obama administration’s criteria for targeted killing: he was not an imminent threat to the United States. But Pakistani officials wanted him dead, and the American drone program rested on their tacit approval. The issue was resolved after the president and his advisers found that he represented a threat, if not to the homeland, to American personnel in Pakistan.

Then, in August 2009, the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, told Mr. Brennan that the agency had Mr. Mehsud in its sights. But taking out the Pakistani Taliban leader, Mr. Panetta warned, did not meet Mr. Obama’s standard of “near certainty” of no innocents being killed. In fact, a strike would certainly result in such deaths: he was with his wife at his in-laws’ home.

“Many times,” General Jones said, in similar circumstances, “at the 11th hour we waved off a mission simply because the target had people around them and we were able to loiter on station until they didn’t.”

But not this time. Mr. Obama, through Mr. Brennan, told the C.I.A. to take the shot, and Mr. Mehsud was killed, along with his wife and, by some reports, other family members as well, said a senior intelligence official.

The attempted bombing of an airliner a few months later, on Dec. 25, stiffened the president’s resolve, aides say. It was the culmination of a series of plots, including the killing of 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex. by an Army psychiatrist who had embraced radical Islam.

Mr. Obama is a good poker player, but he has a tell when he is angry. His questions become rapid-fire, said his attorney general, Mr. Holder. “He’ll inject the phrase, ‘I just want to make sure you understand that.’ “ And it was clear to everyone, Mr. Holder said, that he was simmering about how a 23-year-old bomber had penetrated billions of dollars worth of American security measures.

When a few officials tentatively offered a defense, noting that the attack had failed because the terrorists were forced to rely on a novice bomber and an untested formula because of stepped-up airport security, Mr. Obama cut them short.

“Well, he could have gotten it right and we’d all be sitting here with an airplane that blew up and killed over a hundred people,” he said, according to a participant. He asked them to use the close call to imagine in detail the consequences if the bomb had detonated. In characteristic fashion, he went around the room, asking each official to explain what had gone wrong and what needed to be done about it.

“After that, as president, it seemed like he felt in his gut the threat to the United States,” said Michael E. Leiter, then director of the National Counterterrorism Center. “Even John Brennan, someone who was already a hardened veteran of counterterrorism, tightened the straps on his rucksack after that.”

David Axelrod, the president’s closest political adviser, began showing up at the “Terror Tuesday” meetings, his unspeaking presence a visible reminder of what everyone understood: a successful attack would overwhelm the president’s other aspirations and achievements.

In the most dramatic possible way, the Fort Hood shootings in November and the attempted Christmas Day bombing had shown the new danger from Yemen. Mr. Obama, who had rejected the Bush-era concept of a global war on terrorism and had promised to narrow the American focus to Al Qaeda’s core, suddenly found himself directing strikes in another complicated Muslim country.

The very first strike under his watch in Yemen, on Dec. 17, 2009, offered a stark example of the difficulties of operating in what General Jones described as an “embryonic theater that we weren’t really familiar with.”

It killed not only its intended target, but also two neighboring families, and left behind a trail of cluster bombs that subsequently killed more innocents. It was hardly the kind of precise operation that Mr. Obama favored. Videos of children’s bodies and angry tribesmen holding up American missile parts flooded You Tube, fueling a ferocious backlash that Yemeni officials said bolstered Al Qaeda.

The sloppy strike shook Mr. Obama and Mr. Brennan, officials said, and once again they tried to impose some discipline.

In Pakistan, Mr. Obama had approved not only “personality” strikes aimed at named, high-value terrorists, but “signature” strikes that targeted training camps and suspicious compounds in areas controlled by militants.

But some State Department officials have complained to the White House that the criteria used by the C.I.A. for identifying a terrorist “signature” were too lax. The joke was that when the C.I.A. sees “three guys doing jumping jacks,” the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said one senior official. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bombmakers — but they might also be farmers, skeptics argued.

Now, in the wake of the bad first strike in Yemen, Mr. Obama overruled military and intelligence commanders who were pushing to use signature strikes there as well.

“We are not going to war with Yemen,” he admonished in one meeting, according to participants.

His guidance was formalized in a memo by General Jones, who called it a “governor, if you will, on the throttle,” intended to remind everyone that “one should not assume that it’s just O.K. to do these things because we spot a bad guy somewhere in the world.”

Mr. Obama had drawn a line. But within two years, he stepped across it. Signature strikes in Pakistan were killing a large number of terrorist suspects, even when C.I.A. analysts were not certain beforehand of their presence. And in Yemen, roiled by the Arab Spring unrest, the Qaeda affiliate was seizing territory.

Today, the Defense Department can target suspects in Yemen whose names they do not know. Officials say the criteria are tighter than those for signature strikes, requiring evidence of a threat to the United States, and they have even given them a new name — TADS, for Terrorist Attack Disruption Strikes. But the details are a closely guarded secret — part of a pattern for a president who came into office promising transparency.

The Ultimate Test

On that front, perhaps no case would test Mr. Obama’s principles as starkly as that of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric and Qaeda propagandist hiding in Yemen, who had recently risen to prominence and had taunted the president by name in some of his online screeds.

The president “was very interested in obviously trying to understand how a guy like Awlaki developed,” said General Jones. The cleric’s fiery sermons had helped inspire a dozen plots, including the shootings at Fort Hood. Then he had gone “operational,” plotting with Mr. Abdulmutallab and coaching him to ignite his explosives only after the airliner was over the United States.

That record, and Mr. Awlaki’s calls for more attacks, presented Mr. Obama with an urgent question: Could he order the targeted killing of an American citizen, in a country with which the United States was not at war, in secret and without the benefit of a trial?

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel prepared a lengthy memo justifying that extraordinary step, asserting that while the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.

Mr. Obama gave his approval, and Mr. Awlaki was killed in September 2011, along with a fellow propagandist, Samir Khan, an American citizen who was not on the target list but was traveling with him.

If the president had qualms about this momentous step, aides said he did not share them. Mr. Obama focused instead on the weight of the evidence showing that the cleric had joined the enemy and was plotting more terrorist attacks.

“This is an easy one,” Mr. Daley recalled him saying, though the president warned that in future cases, the evidence might well not be so clear.

In the wake of Mr. Awlaki’s death, some administration officials, including the attorney general, argued that the Justice Department’s legal memo should be made public. In 2009, after all, Mr. Obama had released Bush administration legal opinions on interrogation over the vociferous objections of six former C.I.A. directors.

This time, contemplating his own secrets, he chose to keep the Awlaki opinion secret.

“Once it’s your pop stand, you look at things a little differently,” said Mr. Rizzo, the C.I.A.’s former general counsel.

Mr. Hayden, the former C.I.A. director and now an adviser to Mr. Obama’s Republican challenger, Mr. Romney, commended the president’s aggressive counterterrorism record, which he said had a “Nixon to China” quality. But, he said, “secrecy has its costs” and Mr. Obama should open the strike strategy up to public scrutiny.

“This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president, and that’s not sustainable,” Mr. Hayden said. “I have lived the life of someone taking action on the basis of secret O.L.C. memos, and it ain’t a good life. Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memos locked in a D.O.J. safe.”

Tactics Over Strategy

In his June 2009 speech in Cairo, aimed at resetting relations with the Muslim world, Mr. Obama had spoken eloquently of his childhood years in Indonesia, hearing the call to prayer “at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk.”

“The United States is not — and never will be — at war with Islam,” he declared.

But in the months that followed, some officials felt the urgency of counterterrorism strikes was crowding out consideration of a broader strategy against radicalization. Though Mrs. Clinton strongly supported the strikes, she complained to colleagues about the drones-only approach at Situation Room meetings, in which discussion would focus exclusively on the pros, cons and timing of particular strikes.

At their weekly lunch, Mrs. Clinton told the president she thought there should be more attention paid to the root causes of radicalization, and Mr. Obama agreed. But it was September 2011 before he issued an executive order setting up a sophisticated, interagency war room at the State Department to counter the jihadi narrative on an hour-by-hour basis, posting messages and video online and providing talking points to embassies.

Mr. Obama was heartened, aides say, by a letter discovered in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. It complained that the American president had undermined Al Qaeda’s support by repeatedly declaring that the United States was at war not with Islam, but with the terrorist network. “We must be doing a good job,” Mr. Obama told his secretary of state.

Moreover, Mr. Obama’s record has not drawn anything like the sweeping criticism from allies that his predecessor faced. John B. Bellinger III, a top national security lawyer under the Bush administration, said that was because Mr. Obama’s liberal reputation and “softer packaging” have protected him. “After the global outrage over Guantánamo, it’s remarkable that the rest of the world has looked the other way while the Obama administration has conducted hundreds of drone strikes in several different countries, including killing at least some civilians,” said Mr. Bellinger, who supports the strikes.

By withdrawing from Iraq and preparing to withdraw from Afghanistan, Mr. Obama has refocused the fight on Al Qaeda and hugely reduced the death toll both of American soldiers and Muslim civilians. But in moments of reflection, Mr. Obama may have reason to wonder about unfinished business and unintended consequences.

His focus on strikes has made it impossible to forge, for now, the new relationship with the Muslim world that he had envisioned. Both Pakistan and Yemen are arguably less stable and more hostile to the United States than when Mr. Obama became president.

Justly or not, drones have become a provocative symbol of American power, running roughshod over national sovereignty and killing innocents. With China and Russia watching, the United States has set an international precedent for sending drones over borders to kill enemies.

Mr. Blair, the former director of national intelligence, said the strike campaign was dangerously seductive. “It is the politically advantageous thing to do — low cost, no U.S. casualties, gives the appearance of toughness,” he said. “It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.”

But Mr. Blair’s dissent puts him in a small minority of security experts. Mr. Obama’s record has eroded the political perception that Democrats are weak on national security. No one would have imagined four years ago that his counterterrorism policies would come under far more fierce attack from the American Civil Liberties Union than from Mr. Romney.

Aides say that Mr. Obama’s choices, though, are not surprising. The president’s reliance on strikes, said Mr. Leiter, the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, “is far from a lurid fascination with covert action and special forces. It’s much more practical. He’s the president. He faces a post-Abdulmutallab situation, where he’s being told people might attack the United States tomorrow.”

“You can pass a lot of laws,” Mr. Leiter said, “Those laws are not going to get Bin Laden dead.”

Lots of digging into the really uncomfortable stuff on the drone strikes.. And to be sure, there's lots of uncomfortable to go around. But I can't help but think a targetted strike, even if it's badly targetted or not as precise as we want, is better than conventional methods of attacking a foe.

[SirNitram]

Glenn Greenwald wrote two articles about this today:

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/29/militan ... singleton/

Summary: when the Obama administration says "militants", we now know they mean "military aged male". Greenwald is disgusted by the media's repetition of this bullshit each and every time America murders somebody.


http://www.salon.com/2012/05/29/obama_t ... singleton/

This is a longer, more in depth look at the NYT article SirNitram linked to. Greenwald discusses both the content of the article and the tone behind it.

If you had read the article, you'd see it specifically points out the 'military aged male' part.

[Block]

He'd rather just link Greenwald's latest biased and poorly researched spew at you.

[SirNitram]

Shut the fuck up, you lying sack of shit. I did read the article. Did you? Greenwald quoted from it!

If you're going to fly off the handle when I point out we don't need Greenwald's writings to see something.. That it's openly stated in the article.. You really need to find a new thread. I didn't lie, and I'd prefer you not to explode like this and perhaps have a mature discussion.

[MKSheppard]

Summary: when the Obama administration says "militants", we now know they mean "military aged male". Greenwald is disgusted by the media's repetition of this bullshit each and every time America murders somebody.

Summary: Gleen Greenwald lies as usual. Here's the revelant quote from the NYT article which I read in full:

Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.

It takes some remarkably unlucky coincidences for an innocent goatherder to end up in the back of a truck full of ammunition and explosives, with an Al Quaeda HVT in the passenger's seat.

[Thanas]

Summary: when the Obama administration says "militants", we now know they mean "military aged male". Greenwald is disgusted by the media's repetition of this bullshit each and every time America murders somebody.

Summary: Gleen Greenwald lies as usual. Here's the revelant quote from the NYT article which I read in full:

Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.

It takes some remarkably unlucky coincidences for an innocent goatherder to end up in the back of a truck full of ammunition and explosives, with an Al Quaeda HVT in the passenger's seat.

And yet, strikes have killed women, children and other civilians.

[SirNitram]

SirNitram: If you actually read the links, you'd know full well that the statement came from the NYT link. The source was openly stated in the article.

Moreover, like I said in the summary, Greenwald went on to give his opinion on the media's usage of the term... his opinion adds to the NYT discussion, rather than restating it like you're implying.

If you don't like his opinion, fine, but don't repeat lies about what other people did or did not read.

If Greenwald wants to put up his opinion here, he is welcome to. I am not posting things here to hear random netizens opinions, I'm trying to get the opinions of the SDNetters. As for your screaming about lies, it's a mocking statement for your needing to pull up Greenwald to make a statement contained within. Don't be so literal, or if you must be, don't pretend to be righteous.

Do you have opinions/input outside of Greenwald's?

[MKSheppard]

And yet, strikes have killed women, children and other civilians.

You know, there's a segment in that NYT article that references that:

One early test involved Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. The case was problematic on two fronts, according to interviews with both administration and Pakistani sources.

The C.I.A. worried that Mr. Mehsud, whose group then mainly targeted the Pakistan government, did not meet the Obama administration’s criteria for targeted killing: he was not an imminent threat to the United States. But Pakistani officials wanted him dead, and the American drone program rested on their tacit approval. The issue was resolved after the president and his advisers found that he represented a threat, if not to the homeland, to American personnel in Pakistan.

Then, in August 2009, the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, told Mr. Brennan that the agency had Mr. Mehsud in its sights. But taking out the Pakistani Taliban leader, Mr. Panetta warned, did not meet Mr. Obama’s standard of “near certainty” of no innocents being killed. In fact, a strike would certainly result in such deaths: he was with his wife at his in-laws’ home.

“Many times,” General Jones said, in similar circumstances, “at the 11th hour we waved off a mission simply because the target had people around them and we were able to loiter on station until they didn’t.”

But not this time. Mr. Obama, through Mr. Brennan, told the C.I.A. to take the shot, and Mr. Mehsud was killed, along with his wife and, by some reports, other family members as well, said a senior intelligence official.

[Aaron MkII]

So they waited and wound up killing his wife and others anyway.

I'm not sure where your going Shep, is this better, worse?

[MKSheppard]

Greenwald also pretty much omits really important facts in his essays; like this one:

Link

This practice continues even though key Obama officials have been caught lying, a term used advisedly, about how many civilians they’re killing. I’ve written and said many times before that in American media discourse, the definition of “militant” is any human being whose life is extinguished when an American missile or bomb detonates (that term was even used when Anwar Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son, Abdulrahman, was killed by a U.S. drone in Yemen two weeks after a drone killed his father, even though nobody claims the teenager was anything but completely innocent: “Another U.S. Drone Strike Kills Militants in Yemen”).

Link 2

Two weeks after the U.S. killed American citizen Anwar Awlaki with a drone strike in Yemen — far from any battlefield and with no due process — it did the same to his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, ending the teenager’s life on Friday along with his 17-year-old cousin and seven other people. News reports, based on government sources, originally claimed that Awlaki’s son was 21 years old and an Al Qaeda fighter (needless to say, as Terrorist often means: “anyone killed by the U.S.”), but a birth certificate published by The Washington Post proved that he was born only 16 years ago in Denver. As The New Yorker‘s Amy Davidson wrote: “Looking at his birth certificate, one wonders what those assertions say either about the the quality of the government’s evidence — or the honesty of its claims — and about our own capacity for self-deception.” The boy’s grandfather said that he and his cousin were at a barbecue and preparing to eat when the U.S. attacked them by air and ended their lives.

What Mr Greenwald leaves unsaid in his made up events of the death of Abdul Rahman al-Awlaki is this:

Initial statement of Ibrahim al Bana's death by Yemen

US Predators kill AQAP media emir: report
By BILL ROGGIO
October 15, 2011 3:39 AM

The Yemeni Defense Ministry claimed that an Egyptian named Ibrahim al Bana who served as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's "media chief" was killed last night in a US Predator airstrike. The report is unconfirmed. According to The Associated Press, the strike that killed Bana was one of five in Shabwa province in southern Yemen last night. Bana is said to have been killed in Azzan, one of several cities in the south under AQAP control. From AP:

The slain media chief, identified as Egyptian-born Ibrahim al-Bana, was killed along with six other militants in the southeastern province of Shabwa on Friday night, Yemen's Defense Ministry said in a statement released Saturday. Security officials said an American drone carried out the attack, which was one of five overnight strikes that targeted suspected al-Qaida positions in Shabwa and the neighboring province of Abyan in Yemen's largely lawless south.

Officials and tribal elders in the area said the strike followed a meeting of al-Qaida militants in a house in Azan, a district in Shabwa. A missile hit the house after the militants had already left, but a second strike targeted two sport utility vehicles in which the seven were traveling after the meeting.

The two vehicles were completely destroyed and the men's bodies were charred, said the officials and the tribal elders speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media. It was not clear whether other participants in the meeting were targeted in separate strikes.

The Yemen Post also reported that Bana was killed, and claimed that "Abdul Rahman, the son of Anwar Awlaqi was also believed to be killed in the air strike." Indian Express claimed that Sarhan al Quso, the brother of Fahd al Quso, a top operational commander for AQAP, was also killed. The reports are also unconfirmed.

It is unclear if Bana led the Malahim Media Foundation, AQAP's media outlet. The founder of the Malahim Media Foundation, Nayef bin Mohammed bin Said al Kudri Qahtani, was killed in Yemen sometime in late 2010.

If Bana's death is confirmed, he will be the third senior AQAP media official to have been killed in the past two weeks. On Sept. 30, American jihadists Anwar al Awlaki and Samir Khan were killed in a US Predator strike in Marib province. Awlaki was a top ideologue, recruiter, and operational commander for AQAP. Khan ran AQAP's English-language media, including Inspire magazine.

al Bana is alive

AQAP claims media emir is alive
By BILL ROGGIO
October 29, 2011 12:40 PM

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's front group, Ansar al Sharia, claimed that its media emir, Ibrahim al Bana, was not killed in a US Predator airstrike that took place on Oct. 14 in Shabwa province. From the Yemen Post:

In a leaflet it distributed in Shabwa province, Ansar Sharia extremist group based in Yemen's southern province of Abyan, denied that terror suspect Ibrahim Banna was killed in the UD drone attack two weeks ago.

Banna was considered the top media officer for AQAP and his killing was hailed by the Yemen government. He was suspected killed during a US drone attack in Shabwa two weeks ago.

If al Bana is indeed alive, this will make the strike that killed Abdul Rahman al Awlaki all the more controversial. The media has essentially accepted the al Awlaki family's narrative that Abdul Rahman was an innocent teen who left the Yemeni capital of Sana'a in an attempt to find his father. US officials have justified Abdul Rahman's death by saying that he was killed because he "was in the wrong place at the wrong time," according to TIME.

to attain martyrdom as my father attained it

Anwar al Awlaki's son hoped 'to attain martyrdom as my father attained it'
By BILL ROGGIO
December 8, 2011

Anwar al Awlaki's son said he hoped "to attain martyrdom as my father attained it" just hours before he was killed in a US Predator airstrike in Yemen in mid-October, according to a journalist who sympathizes with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Abdul Rahman al Awlaki, Anwar's 16-year-old son and an American citizen, made the statement to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's emir of the city of Azzam in Shabwa province. Azzan is one of several Yemeni cities currently under AQAP control.

"His sadness reached its peak after the American planes assassinated his father," said Abdul Razzaq al Jamal, a Yemeni journalist from Al Wasat, according to a statement posted on jihadist forums that was translated by the SITE Intelligence Group. Jamal spent weeks with AQAP in the Zinjibar area and elsewhere in southern Yemen, and wrote articles that sympathized with the terror group's attempts to control the region.

"But when he said to the Emir [Leader] of the city of Azzam, 'I hope to attain martyrdom as my father attained it,' it did not come to his mind that this will happen, and just one day after he said it. This actually happened. The son joined the father in another American raid that came only two weeks apart from the one that assassinated his father," Jamal continued.

Jamal said that AQAP members referred to Abdul Rahman, as "Usayyid," or the lion's cub, and intimated that Abdul Rahman would one day replace his father.

"The word 'usayyid' is the diminutive form of the word 'assad [lion],' and in this name is
a reference to an Arab proverb: 'This cub is from that lion,'" Jamal said.

Jamal also said that Abdul Rahman's death was intentionally planned by the US "so that America would not be afflicted in the future with another Awlaki of the same type as Sheikh Anwar."

AQAP attacked an oil pipeline in the Belhaf area of Shabwa province immediately after Abdul Rahman was killed, according to Jamal.

Abdul Rahman was killed in a Predator strike in Shabwa province on Oct. 14. The strike targeted Ibrahim al Bana, AQAP's media emir. Al Bana was not killed in the attack. Abdul Rahman's death sparked outrage from the Awlaki family, which has claimed the teenager was not involved in terrorism and was merely in Shabwa to search for his father, who had been killed two weeks earlier.

Anwar was killed in a US Predator drone airstrike on Sept. 30 in Yemen's Al Jawf province, where al Qaeda is known to operate training camps. In addition to serving as a recruiter and ideologue for AQAP, Anwar is known to have played a role in directing terror attacks against the US. [See LWJ report, Awlaki's emails to terror plotter show operational role, for more information.]

In a recent audiotape, Nassar al Awalki, Abdul Rahman's grandfather, said that his grandson was not an "operational figure" in al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and lauded the work of his son, Anwar. Nassar said "it is the job of all of us to spread his [Anwar's] knowledge and keep it alive." The audiotape was released last weekend on YouTube by Anjem Choudary, a radical Islamist preacher in Britain who leads the banned group Muslims Against Crusades. [See LWJ report, Nassar al Awlaki urges the spread of his son Anwar's teachings, for more information on Nassar and his audiotape.]

Essentially, we targeted a top AQAP leader, failed to kill him, and instead got Abdul Rahman as bonus damage; fulfilling Abdul Rahman's wish for martyrdom for him.

[MKSheppard]

I'm not sure where your going Shep, is this better, worse?

Our Good Friends, the Pakistanis wanted him dead, because he was targeting Pakistanis. So we killed him for them, and took the strike only after several failed attempts of waiting for him to be clear of any possible collateral damage.

[Simon_Jester]

Greenwald also pretty much omits really important facts in his essays; like this one:

Link

This practice continues even though key Obama officials have been caught lying, a term used advisedly, about how many civilians they’re killing. I’ve written and said many times before that in American media discourse, the definition of “militant” is any human being whose life is extinguished when an American missile or bomb detonates (that term was even used when Anwar Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son, Abdulrahman, was killed by a U.S. drone in Yemen two weeks after a drone killed his father, even though nobody claims the teenager was anything but completely innocent: “Another U.S. Drone Strike Kills Militants in Yemen”).

Link 2

Two weeks after the U.S. killed American citizen Anwar Awlaki with a drone strike in Yemen — far from any battlefield and with no due process — it did the same to his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, ending the teenager’s life on Friday along with his 17-year-old cousin and seven other people. News reports, based on government sources, originally claimed that Awlaki’s son was 21 years old and an Al Qaeda fighter (needless to say, as Terrorist often means: “anyone killed by the U.S.”), but a birth certificate published by The Washington Post proved that he was born only 16 years ago in Denver. As The New Yorker‘s Amy Davidson wrote: “Looking at his birth certificate, one wonders what those assertions say either about the the quality of the government’s evidence — or the honesty of its claims — and about our own capacity for self-deception.” The boy’s grandfather said that he and his cousin were at a barbecue and preparing to eat when the U.S. attacked them by air and ended their lives.

What Mr Greenwald leaves unsaid in his made up events of the death of Abdul Rahman al-Awlaki is this:

Initial statement of Ibrahim al Bana's death by Yemen

Snip.

al Bana is alive

Snip.

to attain martyrdom as my father attained it

Snip.

Essentially, we targeted a top AQAP leader, failed to kill him, and instead got Abdul Rahman as bonus damage; fulfilling Abdul Rahman's wish for martyrdom for him.

How is that "bonus" anything? All it does is make America out to be a bunch of murderous fuckups. Abdul was a goddamn sixteen year old idiot whose father we just assassinated, of course he talks big. That doesn't make him anyone a sane person would see any special need to go half way round the world to kill.

If America starts killing every teenager in the Muslim world who talks big about patriotism becoming a martyr for the cause of "fuck America," that's so obviously a self-renewing excuse for mass murder that it's pathetic and monstrous at the same time.


To be blunt, this is just a great illustration of the problem- we are "precisely" targeting groups of people when we have no damn clue who half the members of the group are. It's less bad than massive carpet-bombings, but... it really does look like a game of Whack-a-Mole, only with real heads getting broken. Especially since so many of the targets are people who we don't have any real evidence against, in terms of their actually posing any meaningful threat to the US. Rebels in Yemen who want to overthrow the government of Yemen aren't our problem, or shouldn't be. Teenagers who talk big aren't our problem, or shouldn't be.

There is no "bonus" to this. There is only the precedent for killing off everyone and their dog in a political organization that doesn't like us. Then doing it again when all the killing spawns the creation of a second organization that doesn't like us. Then doing it again to the third organization, and the fourth.

It'd be funny if it weren't getting people, many of them unarmed and totally non-threatening to us, killed.

[MKSheppard]

Abdul was a goddamn sixteen year old idiot whose father we just assassinated, of course he talks big.

Sucks to have been him, but don't fall in with Al Quaeda in the Arabian Penisula (AQAP) if you can't stand the Hellfires.

Especially since so many of the targets are people who we don't have any real evidence against, in terms of their actually posing any meaningful threat to the US. Rebels in Yemen who want to overthrow the government of Yemen aren't our problem, or shouldn't be.

Way to ignore the fact that the last few major plots against the Continental United States have been based in/originated from Yemen:

2009 Christmas Day Underwear Bomber Plot

2010 Printer Cartridge Plot

Likewise, AQAP is running a pretty violent civil war against the duly constituted Yemeni authorities in an attempt to establish a jihadist state:

Link

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula fighters killed and mutilated seven more Yemeni soldiers in the south, this time in the western province of Hadramout. From The Associated Press:

The militants sprayed the sleeping soldiers with bullets leaving their bodies severely disfigured, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters.

The attack on the area of Shibam in the southeastern Hadramout province was the latest in a series of deadly setbacks suffered by army garrison posts in the south that highlight the vulnerability of a Yemeni military demoralized and split in its loyalties by a year of upheaval.

Today's attack takes place just one day after AQAP fighters overran a checkpoint in the town of Al Milah in Lahj province, killing 17 Yemeni soldiers before withdrawing with two captured tanks and other heavy weapons. And on March 4, a large AQAP force attacked and overran a Yemeni Army base in Al Koud in Abyan that housed a mechanized battalion. The AQAP fighters decimated the battalion, killing 185 soldiers, wounding 150, and capturing at least 73 more. AQAP also seized heavy weapons, including tanks, during the assault. AQAP is still holding the 73 Yemeni soldiers.

AQAP has been openly battling the Yemeni military for nearly a year, and has held its ground in Zinjibar despite the efforts of a division of Yemeni troops. The US has aided the Yemeni military with drone and conventional airstrikes, but with little effect. AQAP has expanded its control in the south; just last week, the coastal town of Radum in Shabwa province was the latest population center to fall to AQAP.

When Al Quaeda is decimating Yemeni mechanized battalions in garrison, things have gotten serious enough to warrant dronespam and death from the sky to support the Yemeni government.

EDIT: Or would you rather prefer we did what worked so brilliantly in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal: Ignore the place until a major plot, such as 9/11 is successfully launched at us?

[MKSheppard]

I'm really surprised that Gleeeen Greeeeenwald and everyone else has missed the 'shadow war' of Africa, where George W. Bush, Barack H. Obama, and the European Union have been funding African governments to fight Al-Shabaab in Somalia for us.

Back in 2010, Al-Shabab announced that it had joined AQ's global jihad, and earlier this year, they announced a 'merger' with Al Quaeda; so they're people worth killing the fuck out of.

Hell, OBL even instructed Al-Shabab on various issues -- thanks to released documents from Abbotabad, we know this:

Link

Bin Laden told Shabaab to hide al Qaeda ties
By Bill Roggio
May 3, 2012

In August 2010, al Qaeda emir Osama bin Laden sent a letter instructing the leader of Shabaab, Mukhtar Abu al Zubayr, to hide the ties between the two terror groups so as not to draw international attention and thereby hinder nongovernmental organizations and businessmen from providing humanitarian aid to Somalia. The document confirms an exclusive report by The Long War Journal from August 2010 that stated al Qaeda had ordered Shabaab to downplay its links to al Qaeda.

Bin Laden's letter to Zubayr (a.k.a. Ahmed Abdi Aw Mohamed or Godane), which is dated Aug. 7, 2010, addresses a previous letter from the Shabaab leader that has not been released. While thousands of documents were seized during the raid in Abbottabad, only 17 have been released to the public.

In Zubayr's initial letter, he appears to have asked bin Laden's advice on declaring an Islamic state in Somalia and requests the official merger with al Qaeda. Bin Laden responds by calling Zubayr his "Most Generous Brother," and advises the Shabaab leader to not officially declare an emirate and to keep the merger, or "unity," between al Qaeda and Shabaab a secret.

"Now, in relation to the issue of unity, I see that this obligation should be carried out legitimately and through unannounced secret messaging, by spreading this matter among the people of Somalia, without any official declaration by any officers on our side or your side, that the unity has taken place," bin Laden wrote, according to a translation of the document by the Countering Terrorism Center at West Point.

But bin Laden then tells Zubayr that the relationship can be disclosed within the ranks of Shabaab.

"But there remains the situation of the brothers on your side and their talking about their relationship with al Qaeda, if asked. It would be better for them to say that there is a relationship with al Qaeda which is simply a brotherly Islamic connection and nothing more, which would neither deny nor prove," bin Laden wrote.

Bin laden's rationale for keeping the ties secret was twofold. First, he feared that an official merger, once it "becomes declared and out in the open, it would have the enemies escalate their anger and mobilize against you."

"This is what happened to the brothers in Iraq or Algeria," bin Laden cautioned, referring to the creation of al Qaeda in Iraq and the North African affiliate, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. But the ties would eventually be disclosed, bin Laden wrote.

"It is true that the enemies will find out inevitably; this matter cannot be hidden, especially when people go around and spread this news. However, an official declaration remains to be the master for all proof," he stated.

Bin Laden also said that "those who would like to provide rescue assistance to Muslims in Somalia" would be able to do so if "definitive evidences" of the merger did not exist.

Additionally, bin Laden said that obscuring the merger would allow him to "press the merchants in the countries of the Arabian Peninsula to support pro-active and important developmental projects which are not expensive."

"Therefore, by not having the mujahidin openly allied with al Qaeda, it would strengthen those merchants who are willing to help the brothers in Somalia, and would keep people with the mujahid," he concluded.

Bin Laden's letter to Zubayr confirmed the The Long War Journal's exclusive report of Aug. 15, 2010, which noted that al Qaeda had ordered Shabaab to suppress ties between the two groups. [See LWJ report, Al Qaeda advises Shabaab to keep low profile on links, attack US interests.]

"Al Qaeda's top leadership has instructed Shabaab to maintain a low profile on al Qaeda links," a senior US intelligence official who closely follows al Qaeda and Shabaab in East Africa told The Long War Journal in August 2010. The official, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject, said the information was passed between the top leadership of both groups.

"Al Qaeda has accepted Shabaab into the fold and, and any additional statements would only serve to draw international scrutiny," the intelligence official said. "Al Qaeda is applying lessons learned from Iraq, that an overexposure of the links between al Qaeda central leadership and its affiliates can cause some unwanted attention."

Zubayr and Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda's new emir, discarded bin Laden's advice on Feb. 9, 2012, when Shabaab formally announced its merger with al Qaeda. The Muslim Youth Center, Shabaab's affiliate in Kenya, said it has become "part of al Qaeda East Africa."

Link

May 22, 2012

NAIROBI, Kenya - Somali government forces backed by African Union troops have launched an offensive to oust al-Shabab in the outskirts of Mogadishu, along the Afgoye corridor. Security officials say the aim of the assault is to bring security and stability to the more than 400,000 internally displaced persons in the Afgoye area, located west of Mogadishu.

For the first time, African Union forces and Somali national army troops have attacked al-Shabab bases outside Mogadishu.

Paddy Ankunda, spokesman for the AU force, known as AMISOM, told VOA his forces launched an offensive from Daynile district and were moving westwards, which will give them an entry point to Afgoye.

AMISOM has deployed about 15,000+ troops to Somalia, and suffered 170+ dead and 200+ wounded since 2007.

From 2007 to 2011, the United States paid $862~ million, the EU $167~ million, the UK $51~ million, and various United Nations member contributions of some $615~ million to AMISOM to ensure that the Uganda People's Defense Force, Kenyan Military, and Burundian military keep Al-Shabab properly freedomised.

Unfortunately, we don't have this option in all parts of the world; hence the use of dronespam.

[Simon_Jester]

Put it this way: I can get how it makes sense for us to ally with the Yemenis against AQAP. What's stupid is thinking of big-mouthed teenagers as a strategic-level threat that could possibly justify assassination attempts targeted at them personally. Or even starting to view them as "bonus damage" in some kind of demented "nits make lice" mindset.

If America decides to expand the "War on Terror" to include the "War on Grief-Stricken, Mouthy Teenagers," we're never going to have peace again. And that really is not a price we should be willing to accept.



On a side note, it's also stupid thinking we're never going to see someone trying massed assassination programs on us in the future- blowback can be a real pain. I wonder how seriously anyone's thought about this... or how loudly a lot of people would squawk about it being some kind of war crime if it did.

Me, I try to stick to a standard of "turnabout is fair play:" anything it's inherently wrong for them to do to us, it's wrong for us to do to them, even if we do it with robots and they do it with suicidal loonies. I may think it's a bad thing when someone's blowing up our patrols with roadside bombs, but I don't think it's "EVIL TERRORISM" any more than it is when we blow up guerilla columns with Hellfires. Either neither of them is wrong, or both, but there's no moral significance to it. Not if the only difference between the two is "we don't like it when it's happening to us instead of somebody else."




Another side note- America's war with Al Qaeda is taking on the character of a bull's war with the red flag. Any jackass who wants to name themselves "Al Qaedaish" immediately becomes the target of a perpetual American war on terrorenemycriminamilitabatants. Or whatever we're calling them this week.

This leads to groups that basically don't give a shit about the US naming themselves "Al Qaeda" as a macho expression of "fuck you," and us responding by blowing up their families, which just makes them mad enough to say "fuck you" harder. Which, again, leads to permanent war. If we have a war plan that involves never ending the damn war, we really need to rethink our basic approach to the problem.

EDIT: Or would you rather prefer we did what worked so brilliantly in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal: Ignore the place until a major plot, such as 9/11 is successfully launched at us?

Honestly? At this point that might be cheaper in both money and lives. Eternal war is bad for democracy. And it warps our foreign policy and forces us to concentrate our energy on useless hellholes purely because the people who live there hate our guts. Normally you'd try to avoid being locked down in a struggle with a useless hellhole where people hate your guts, and this has worked very well for the US regarding (for instance) North Korea.

Trying to preemptively wreck all guerilla organizations in the world with "AQ" in their initials is the opposite of this. It's like the national equivalent of OCD: no matter what else is happening we keep dropping what we're doing to go blow up some more Al Qaeda or whatever. And there's always more Al Qaeda to blow up, so we're never really done.

Contrast this to a policy of deterrence, where we only actually start pounding the crap out of people after we're attacked. At least if we built our policy around deterrence, we'd get to occasionally get some peace and quiet instead of this neverending war that lets our politicians waste their time and pretend we don't have domestic problems that need solving.

And hell, we'd probably actually be less unpopular for a few violent retaliatory bombings too, if those bombings came after an actual attack, instead of being preemptive "nits make lice" bullshit whose only real accomplishment is blowing up a lot of mouthy teenagers and random Yemeni guys who we arbitrarily decide were "militants" after the fact because they're military age males and we just killed them.

[Aaron MkII]

It'll be interesting to see the pants shitting and pissing and moaning should they start targeting military families and kids of government officials in retaliation.

Least we could do is wait and see if he does something, diarrhea of the mouth isn't a crime.

[MKSheppard]

stupid is thinking of big-mouthed teenagers as a strategic-level threat that could possibly justify assassination attempts targeted at them personally.

Except we were aiming at AQAP's media emir, not Abdul.

Or even starting to view them as "bonus damage" in some kind of demented "nits make lice" mindset.

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade...

By the way, can anyone explain to me how being next to known AQAP operatives gets turned into "going out to a barbeque with relatives"?

On a side note, it's also stupid thinking we're never going to see someone trying massed assassination programs on us in the future- blowback can be a real pain.

Have you been reading the Washington Post lately? If you have, you would have read how the Azerbaijanis helped break up an Iranian-backed plot to hit US diplomats and their families, along with the usual targets (Israelis or Jewish targets).

The Iranians didn't press the matter further once the initial plots were broken up, as they were shifting from 'asshole' mode to 'diplomat' mode, wrt the nuclear negotiations.

This leads to groups that basically don't give a shit about the US naming themselves "Al Qaeda" as a macho expression of "fuck you," and us responding by blowing up their families, which just makes them mad enough to say "fuck you" harder.

You of course, will provide proof of the whole "We don't care about the US, but we'll name ourselves AQ-something to tell off the US?" meme?

[Block]

This leads to groups that basically don't give a shit about the US naming themselves "Al Qaeda" as a macho expression of "fuck you," and us responding by blowing up their families, which just makes them mad enough to say "fuck you" harder. Which, again, leads to permanent war. If we have a war plan that involves never ending the damn war, we really need to rethink our basic approach to the problem.

Who has done this? Also, our war plan is to strengthen local governments so that they can handle terrorist plots and cells as a domestic law enforcement issue. It's what I do for a living when deployed. Look up Civil Affairs, my MOS, that's pretty much the first stage of the plan, combined with stability operations. Stage 2 is to hand things over to the locals and support them, stage 3 is to let them do it on their own with some NGO(Non-governmental organization) support and small advising units from the US and its allies on how to improve training and morale. It's a lot more complicated with many small sub steps and snags, but the hope is that we remove the bad actors, remove the reasons for conflict like high unemployment and widespread corruption, which kills the ability of these people to recruit, and peace comes from that.

[Mr Bean]

You of course, will provide proof of the whole "We don't care about the US, but we'll name ourselves AQ-something to tell off the US?" meme?

I got one for this, the personal writings of one Osama Bin Laden constantly bitching about the fact that Al-Q in Somalia was a bunch of thugs and brutes who took the name and money but refused to take any suggestions let alone any orders from other veteran Al-Q commanders and includes notes that he tried sending them some leadership but they pretty much ignored them.

[Block]

You of course, will provide proof of the whole "We don't care about the US, but we'll name ourselves AQ-something to tell off the US?" meme?

I got one for this, the personal writings of one Osama Bin Laden constantly bitching about the fact that Al-Q in Somalia was a bunch of thugs and brutes who took the name and money but refused to take any suggestions let alone any orders from other veteran Al-Q commanders and includes notes that he tried sending them some leadership but they pretty much ignored them.

Yeah but they did it to get support against the AU and the US's anti-piracy operations. In fact they're getting desperate about the anti-piracy stuff cause their main source of income has dried up and moved off the Western African coast, so they didn't do it to tell off the US, they were looking for help fighting.

[Simon_Jester]

OK, I'll grant that the idea of groups literally naming themselves "AQ of Blah" just to say "fuck you" to America is ridiculous. I shouldn't have said it.

But this is a red herring. There's a serious point I was making here, which is that the "Al Qaedas" of 2012 don't look much like the Al Qaeda of 2002. The central leadership is hollowed out, and from a functional perspective these organizations devote the vast majority of their time and energy fighting domestic civil wars, or trying to continue their piracy, or otherwise doing exactly the same things they'd be doing anyway if Al Qaeda had never existed.

Trying to get rid of these organizations, which are Al Qaeda in name only, is a tremendously costly and prolonged thing for the US to do. We'd need to prosecute a whole new round of guerilla wars- and we're not even done in Afghanistan yet. We're going to need to continue our extensive antiterrorist monitoring, our targeted assassinations of whoever the president thinks is involved with this, our endless foreign policy focus on Get "Al Qaeda" No Matter What...

I'm not joking, to me this looks like a recipe for disaster. America is in danger of becoming Captain Ahab, only there is no great white whale to hunt down anymore- it's more like there's a million little white fish. We could be chasing these groups for the next twenty or thirty years; by the time one of them is broken up there can easily be two or three more. And they can keep us tied up this way without ever hitting the US anywhere near as hard as we're hitting all these other countries, in this endless campaign of war wherever we want and as long as we like.

Is it really that strange that I find this prospect disturbing? That we're locked in eternal conflict with an enemy who has few or no agents on our soil, no ability to launch any attacks outside the range of what we normally get from street crime and natural disasters, and that all questions of civil liberties and security policy are on hold for the duration? That we're going to predictably alienate pretty much every Muslim country with this kind of heavy-handed policy, so that even after terrorists finally get tired of calling themselves "Al Qaeda" they'll still hate our guts and be plotting to go after us, only without the convenient "Al Qaeda" label to tell us to bomb them preemptively?

What's the point of all this? How are we better off prosecuting eternal quasi-war this way than we would be with a relatively straightforward policy like "okay, we hammered Al Qaeda good, if we get any evidence of them organizing anything we land on them like a ton of bricks, and if you shelter terrorists who launch another major attack on us we will bomb the shit out of you until you wish you were Afghanistan?"

[Grumman]

By the way, can anyone explain to me how being next to known AQAP operatives gets turned into "going out to a barbeque with relatives"?

Can't it be both? Since when is being a AQAP operative and being somebody's brother in law/son in law/uncle mutually exclusive?

If he'd been down at the 7-Eleven, would you question how being next to a known AQAP operative gets turned into "working at the local grocery store"?

[Eleas]

By the way, can anyone explain to me how being next to known AQAP operatives gets turned into "going out to a barbeque with relatives"?

Can't it be both? Since when is being a AQAP operative and being somebody's brother in law/son in law/uncle mutually exclusive?

You don't seem to understand how dehumanization works. In order to follow the prevailing rhetoric on a gut level, you have to emotionally buy into the notion that "them ter'rists" aren't human. It's an exclusionary state. The Enemy has no sons, no daughters, no recognizable quality that we can relate to. He has no family that loves him, no friends he jokes with, no girl he's sweet on, no ordinary job or dreams or hopes worth remembering. He has "followers," "fellow militants," or that most nauseatingly Orwellian term, "associates" (which can signify anything, up to and including the guy he bought groceries from last week). The Enemy has no family or familial bonds, no capacity for love or human emotion; there's nothing in his life that even vaguely resembles that of real humans. The Enemy is part of an unthinking hive bent on doing Evil. So when you're (preemptively) defending yourself by slaughtering him and his family wholesale, it's not like you're killing real human beings.

How, then, does one go about orchestrating such a sophisticated fabrication of reality? Successful dehumanization rests first within defining those which a government wishes to antagonize as “others,” distinctly lacking a capacity for those characteristics associated with being innate to human nature; ultimately, the goal is to construct this definition in such a way so as to “emphasize that the ‘other’ is morally culpable of great crimes, thus less than human and deserving of punishment” (Boudreau and Polkinghorn 2008, 176). This is usually established in relation to ethnicity and race, with the “enemy” cast as being savages or barbarians lacking in culture, cognitive and rational capacities, morality, and self-restraint; the ideal portrayal is of a “savage [that] has brutish appetites for violence and sex, is impulsive, and prone to criminality” (Haslam 2006, 252). One effective means of denying a group inclusion to the human race through rhetoric is to explicitly liken the group’s members to animals, insects, or parasites. Equally effective is the construction of a likeness to children, implicating a lack of development and autonomy. Put simply, if rhetoric is crafted in such a way so as to cast one’s enemies as “lacking what distinguishes humans from animals, they should be seen [either] implicitly or explicitly as animal-like” (Haslam 2006, 258); the definitive goal is to define the reality of the intended enemy so that public perception associates the group, as well as the groups individual members, as anything but human (Elliot 2004).

and

Though not as inherently diabolical a concept as evil, the rhetoric of murder is perhaps more effective as it draws a direct link between those Bush wishes to dehumanize, and an understanding of the moral capacity to commit heinous criminal acts upon innocent individuals. Whether it be his continual reference to the attacks on 9/11 as “acts of murder” (for example, Bush 2001a, Bush 2001b, Bush 2002), or the statement that “The United States of America is an enemy of those who aid terrorists and of the barbaric criminals who profane a great religion by committing murder in its name,” (Bush 2001c) Bush is able to further deny membership to the human species to those enemies of the U.S by constructing for them a reality in which there is absolutely no capacity for innate human characteristics.

The quoted essay concerns the Bush years, but as we've seen time and again Obama has adopted the practice without signs of slowing down.

If he'd been down at the 7-Eleven, would you question how being next to a known AQAP operative gets turned into "working at the local grocery store"?

1. By the doctrine of dehumanization, that very question becomes ludicrous. Obviously, no AQAP operative would ever visit something as mundane and American as a 7-Eleven. No, whatever evil nest of nefarious resupply this AQAP had visited in order to further the horrific ambitions of his hive, anyone who was present was probably in on it and deserved to be fumigated exterminated killed.
2. If you're looking for someone to question the use of naked force on defenseless civilians, I submit Shep may be the wrong person to ask.

[BrooklynRedLeg]

Linked from Glenn Greenwald...

If you're "probably up to no good," President Obama wants to kill you

Since they chanted "Drill, baby, drill!" at the 2008 RNC, maybe they could chant "Kill, baby, kill" at the 2012 DNC when they re-nominate President Obama:

Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values; the chart, introducing people whose deaths he might soon be asked to order, underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be.

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's kind of like that popular game "(Bleep), Marry or Kill" but without the "(Bleep)" or "Marry" part. The Times story at least starts out with something of a pro-Obama spin -- the anguished liberal, blah blah blah -- so it's better to get the straight story on this from Salon's Glenn Greenwald:

want specifically to highlight this one vital passage about how the Obama administration determines who is a “militant.” The article explains that Obama’s rhetorical emphasis on avoiding civilian deaths “did not significantly change” the drone program, because Obama himself simply expanded the definition of a “militant” to ensure that it includes virtually everyone killed by his drone strikes. Just read this remarkable passage:

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

Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.

This may be the ultimate example of something we've seen a lot in the last three and a half years, which we'll call, "If President Bush did this, liberals would be outraged." For what little it's worth, I'm fairly outraged. I do certainly approve of the raid and killing of Osama bin Laden and believe there was a time when al-Qaeda was stronger and more of a threat that these kind of attacks could be justified with solid intelligence.

But today the harm that's caused by raining death from machines in the sky down onto far too many civilians -- including someone's son, brother, or father who wasn't "up to no good" at all -- vastly outweighs any good. Righteous anger over the killing of civilians creates new terrorists faster than the killing of any old ones. As for the morally indefensible position that any male killed in such an attack is "probably up to no good," isn't the Obama administration saying the EXACT same thing that George Zimmerman said about Trayvon Martin?

Ponder that for a moment.

One more revolting thing is the news that a political adviser, David Axelrod, sat in on some of these meetings at which it was decided who would live and die.

If Karl Rove had done that (which he did, by the way). liberals would have been outraged.

UPDATE: Actually, the similarity with Zimmerman is even greater than I first thought. What he said to the Sanford police dispatcher was that Trayvon Martin "looks like he's up to no good." Thank God Zimmerman didn't have drones, huh?

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/atty ... l-you.html

Boy, nice to see how the times have changed. All that 'why weren't you bitching when Bush was in office' can now be turned around as "why the fuck aren't you bitching NOW when you were bitching when Bush was in office'. Gotta love the ways in which partisans twist themselves into knots to keep their cognitive dissonance.

[MKSheppard]

One of the worst things about "the war on concept X" is that concept X can't surrender. It can't negotiate an armistice/peace treaty.

I agree, the phrase "War on Terror" is a stupid one; but it was done because the honest truth "War on Islamic Terror" was too unpalatable to say at a time when we were trying to gain inside information in the Islamic world on AQ and possible terror plots, and trying to defuse the whole "war on ISLAM oneoneoenonshift!" propaganda that was starting to be thrown around at the time by islamic militants trying to gin up support for their views.