Obama officials weigh drone attack on US suspect

By KIMBERLY DOZIER

AP Intelligence Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The case of an American citizen and suspected member of al-Qaida who is allegedly planning attacks on U.S. targets overseas underscores the complexities of President Barack Obama's new stricter targeting guidelines for the use of deadly drones.

The CIA drones watching him cannot strike because he's a U.S. citizen. The Pentagon drones that could are barred from the country where he's hiding, and the Justice Department has not yet finished building a case against him.

Four U.S. officials said the American suspected terrorist is in a country that refuses U.S. military action on its soil and that has proved unable to go after him. And Obama's new policy says American suspected terrorists overseas can only be killed by the military, not the CIA, creating a policy conundrum for the White House.

Two of the officials described the man as an al-Qaida facilitator who has been directly responsible for deadly attacks against U.S. citizens overseas and who continues to plan attacks against them that would use improvised explosive devices.

The officials said the suspected terrorist is well-guarded and in a fairly remote location, so any unilateral attempt by U.S. troops to capture him would be risky and even more politically explosive than a U.S. missile strike.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said Monday he would not comment on specific operations and pointed to Obama's comments in the major counterterrorism speech last May about drone policy.

"When a U.S. citizen goes abroad to wage war against America and is actively plotting to kill U.S. citizens, and when neither the United States, nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot, his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a SWAT team," Carney said, quoting from Obama's speech last year.

Under new guidelines Obama addressed in the speech made to calm anger overseas at the extent of the U.S. drone campaign, lethal force must only be used "to prevent or stop attacks against U.S. persons, and even then, only when capture is not feasible and no other reasonable alternatives exist to address the threat effectively." The target must also pose "a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons" - the legal definition of catching someone in the act of plotting a lethal attack.

The Associated Press has agreed to the government's request to withhold the name of the country where the suspected terrorist is believed to be because officials said publishing it could interrupt ongoing counterterror operations.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the classified drone targeting program publicly.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., complained last week that a number of terrorist suspects were all but out of reach under the administration's new rules that limit drone strikes based on the target's nationality or location. Two of the U.S. officials said the Justice Department review of the American suspected terrorist started last fall.

The senior administration official confirmed that the Justice Department was working to build a case against the suspected terrorist. The official said, however, the legal procedure being followed is the same as when the U.S. killed militant cleric and former Virginia resident Anwar al-Awlaki by drone in Yemen in 2011, long before the new targeted killing policy took effect.

The official said the president could make an exception to his policy and authorize the CIA to strike on a onetime basis or authorize the Pentagon to act despite the possible objections of the country in question.

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Afghanistan Exit Is Seen as Peril to C.I.A. Drone Mission

By DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITT  on JAN. 26, 2014

in the New York Times 

WASHINGTON — The risk that President Obama may be forced to pull all American troops out of Afghanistan by the end of the year has set off concerns inside the American intelligence agencies that they could lose their air bases used for drone strikes against Al Qaeda in Pakistan and for responding to a nuclear crisis in the region. 

Until now, the debate here and in Kabul about the size and duration of an American-led allied force in Afghanistan after 2014 had focused on that country’s long-term security. But these new concerns also reflect how troop levels in Afghanistan directly affect long-term American security interests in neighboring Pakistan, according to administration, military and intelligence officials.

The concern has become serious enough that the Obama administration has organized a team of intelligence, military and policy specialists to devise alternatives to mitigate the damage if a final security deal cannot be struck with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, who has declined to enact an agreement that American officials thought was completed last year. 

If Mr. Obama ultimately withdrew all American troops from Afghanistan, the C.I.A.’s drone bases in the country would have to be closed, according to administration officials, because it could no longer be protected. 

Their concern is that the nearest alternative bases are too far away for drones to reach the mountainous territory in Pakistan where the remnants of Al Qaeda’s central command are hiding. Those bases would also be too distant to monitor and respond as quickly as American forces can today if there were a crisis in the region, such as missing nuclear material or weapons in Pakistan and India.

A senior administration official, asked about the preparations, responded by email on Sunday that as the possibility of a pullout “has grown in Afghanistan, we have been undertaking a methodical review of any U.S. capabilities that may be affected and developing strategies to mitigate impacts.” 

The official added that the administration was determined to find alternatives, if necessary. “We will be forced to adapt,” the official said, “and while perhaps less than most efficient, the United States will find ways necessary to protect our interests.”

The issue is coming to the fore after the Pentagon recently presented Mr. Obama with two options for the end of the year. One option calls for a presence through the end of Mr. Obama’s term of 10,000 American troops who could train Afghan troops, conduct counterterrorism raids and protect the American facilities, including those in eastern Afghanistan where drones and nuclear monitoring are based. 

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Lawmakers seek to stymie plan to shift control of drone campaign from CIA to Pentagon

By Greg Miller, Published: January 15, 2014
Washington Post

Congress has moved to block President Obama’s plan to shift control of the U.S. drone campaign from the CIA to the Defense Department, inserting a secret provision in the massive government spending bill introduced this week that would preserve the spy agency’s role in lethal counterterrorism operations, U.S. officials said.
 
The measure, included in a classified annex to the $1.1 trillion federal budget plan, would restrict the use of any funding to transfer unmanned aircraft or the authority to carry out drone strikes from the CIA to the Pentagon, officials said.

Video

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) read from a Washington Post story on the Senate floor Thursday, slamming the Senate and House Appropriations committee for amending a spending bill so that it would affect policy with regard to drones.

The Houes voted to adopt the $1.1-trillion measure that funds the government through the fiscal year.

The provision represents an unusually direct intervention by lawmakers into the way covert operations are run, impeding an administration plan aimed at returning the CIA’s focus to traditional intelligence gathering and possibly bringing more transparency to drone strikes.

The move also reflects some lawmakers’ lingering doubts about the U.S. military’s ability to conduct strikes against al-Qaeda and its regional affiliates without hitting the wrong targets and killing civilians.

Those apprehensions were amplified after a U.S. military strike in Yemen last month killed a dozen people, including as many as six civilians, in an 11-vehicle convoy that tribal leaders said was part of a wedding procession. U.S. officials said that the strike was aimed at a senior al-Qaeda operative but that reviews of the operation have raised concern that it failed to comply with White House guidelines requiring “near certainty” that no civilians would be harmed.

On Wednesday, there were reports that another U.S. strike had killed a farmer in Yemen.

The extent of the restrictions contained in the drone provision remained unclear. The measure was included by members of the House and Senate appropriations committees, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly on the legislation. Other senior lawmakers and congressional officials declined to comment on the contents of the classified annex, which details funding for U.S. spy agencies.

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I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

Few of the politicians who so brazenly proclaim the benefits of drones have a real clue how it actually works (and doesn't)

by Heather Linebaugh   
from theguardian.com on  Sunday 29 December 2013

An Elbit Systems Hermes 450 drone. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Whenever I read comments by politicians defending the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Predator and Reaper program – aka drones – I wish I could ask them a few questions. I'd start with: "How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile?" And: "How many men have you seen crawl across a field, trying to make it to the nearest compound for help while bleeding out from severed legs?" Or even more pointedly: "How many soldiers have you seen die on the side of a road in Afghanistan because our ever-so-accurate UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] were unable to detect an IED [improvised explosive device] that awaited their convoy?"

Few of these politicians who so brazenly proclaim the benefits of drones have a real clue of what actually goes on. I, on the other hand, have seen these awful sights first hand.

I knew the names of some of the young soldiers I saw bleed to death on the side of a road. I watched dozens of military-aged males die in Afghanistan, in empty fields, along riversides, and some right outside the compound where their family was waiting for them to return home from the mosque.

The US and British militaries insist that this is an expert program, but it's curious that they feel the need to deliver faulty information, few or no statistics about civilian deaths and twisted technology reports on the capabilities of our UAVs. These specific incidents are not isolated, and the civilian casualty rate has not changed, despite what our defense representatives might like to tell us.

What the public needs to understand is that the video provided by a drone is not usually clear enough to detect someone carrying a weapon, even on a crystal-clear day with limited cloud and perfect light. This makes it incredibly difficult for the best analysts to identify if someone has weapons for sure.

One example comes to mind: "The feed is so pixelated, what if it's a shovel, and not a weapon?" I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we endangered the wrong people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian's life all because of a bad image or angle.

It's also important for the public to grasp that there are human beings operating and analysing intelligence these UAVs. I know because I was one of them, and nothing can prepare you for an almost daily routine of flying combat aerial surveillance missions over a war zone. UAV proponents claim that troops who do this kind of work are not affected by observing this combat because they are never directly in danger physically.

But here's the thing: I may not have been on the ground in Afghanistan, but I watched parts of the conflict in great detail on a screen for days on end. I know the feeling you experience when you see someone die. Horrifying barely covers it. And when you are exposed to it over and over again it becomes like a small video, embedded in your head, forever on repeat, causing psychological pain and suffering that many people will hopefully never experience. UAV troops are victim to not only the haunting memories of this work that they carry with them, but also the guilt of always being a little unsure of how accurate their confirmations of weapons or identification of hostile individuals were.

Of course, we are trained to not experience these feelings, and we fight it, and become bitter. Some troops seek help in mental health clinics provided by the military, but we are limited on who we can talk to and where, because of the secrecy of our missions. I find it interesting that the suicide statistics in this career field aren't reported, nor are the data on how many troops working in UAV positions are heavily medicated for depression, sleep disorders and anxiety.

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Obama’s New Normal: The Drone Strikes Continue

By Amy Goodman
Posted on Truthdig.com  Posted on Dec 23, 2013

There has been yet another violent attack with mass casualties. This was not the act of a lone gunman, or of an armed student rampaging through a school. It was a group of families en route to a wedding that was killed. The town was called Radda—not in Colorado, not in Connecticut, but in Yemen. The weapon was not an easy-to-obtain semiautomatic weapon, but missiles fired from U.S. drones. On Thursday, Dec. 12, 17 people were killed, mostly civilians.

The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has consistently tracked U.S. drone attacks, recently releasing a report on the six months following President Barack Obama’s major address on drone warfare before the National Defense University (NDU) last May. In that speech, Obama promised that “before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured—the highest standard we can set.” The BIJ summarized, “Six months after President Obama laid out U.S. rules for using armed drones, a Bureau analysis shows that covert drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan have killed more people than in the six months before the speech.” In a nation that abhors the all-too-routine mass killing in our communities, why does our government consistently kill so many innocents abroad?

One significant problem with assessing the U.S. drone-warfare program is its secrecy. U.S. officials rarely comment on the program, less so about any specific attack, especially where civilian deaths occur. As Obama admitted in the speech, “There’s a wide gap between U.S. assessments of such casualties and nongovernmental reports. Nevertheless, it is a hard fact that U.S. strikes have resulted in civilian casualties.” The BIJ’s estimate of the death toll from U.S. drone strikes during the past 12 years in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia is well over 4,000.

While the U.S. media shower attention on the hypothetical prospects that in the next few years, Amazon.com will deploy clever little drones to deliver your holiday orders, it is important to take a hard look at what these airborne robots are actually doing now. “Democracy Now!” correspondent Jeremy Scahill has been exposing U.S. covert warmaking for years, most recently in his book and film “Dirty Wars.” The film was just shortlisted for an Oscar for best documentary. After the Academy Award nomination was made, he told us, “I hope that people pay attention to these stories, that Americans will know what happened to the Bedouin villagers in al-Majalah, Yemen, where three dozen women and children were killed in a U.S. cruise missile strike that the White House tried to cover up.”

In his NDU address, Obama said, “We act against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people.” Neither Obama nor any of his aides have explained just what kind of threat the wedding convoy presented to the American people. The government of Yemen, following local custom, made reparations to the victimized families, reportedly delivering 101 Kalashnikov rifles and a little over $100,000.

These rural villages in Yemen are caught in the middle of a violent conflict, as Human Rights Watch wrote in an October report titled “Between a Drone and Al-Qaeda.” Just one month to the day before Obama gave his address at the NDU, Farea al-Muslimi, an eloquent young Yemeni man who spent a year attending a U.S. high school, spoke before a congressional hearing. Six days before he testified, a drone strike hit his village of Wessab. Farea said: “What Wessab’s villagers knew of the U.S. was based on my stories about my wonderful experiences here. ... Now, however, when they think of America, they think of the terror they feel from the drones that hover over their heads, ready to fire missiles at any time. What the violent militants had previously failed to achieve, one drone strike accomplished in an instant. There is now an intense anger against America in Wessab.” He ended his testimony with the hope that “when Americans truly know about how much pain and suffering the U.S. air strikes have caused ... they will reject this devastating targeted killing program.”

The scenes of senseless violence in the U.S. form a list of sorrow and loss: Columbine, Tucson, Aurora, Newtown, Littleton. With the ongoing work of committed activists, courageous journalists and responsible officials, perhaps Americans will recite as well the names Gardez, Radda, al-Majalah, Mogadishu and the many more sites of drone strikes still cloaked in secrecy.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,000 stations in North America. She is the co-author of “The Silenced Majority,” a New York Times best-seller.
© 2013 Amy Goodman
Distributed by King Features Syndicate

Potluck: Building the Movement Against Drones

Potluck: Building a Movement Against Drones
Saturday, January 11, 2014

5:00 to 7:00 p.m.
4200 Cedar Avenue South, Minneapolis.

Bring a dish to share and come hear from Anti-War Committee members Misty Rowan and Sophia Hansen-Day about the Code Pink Drone Summit they attended in Washington D.C. Then we'll have a discussion about what to do to continue to build a grassroots movement against drones. Families welcome.

Sponsored by: the Anti-War Committee. Endorsed by: WAMM Ground All Drones Committee, MN Immigrant Rights Action Committee, Veterans for Peace, Welfare Rights Committee and Women Against Military Madness.
FFI  612.827.5364 or  https://www.facebook.com/events/379241808877955/

The Official Story: How NY Times Covers Yemen Drone Strikes

from FAIR (Fairness in Accuracy & Reporting)  Posted Dec 13
By Peter Hart

News that a US drone strike hit a wedding convoy in Yemen has been getting a lot of international press attention, mostly due to the fact that over a dozen people were reportedly killed. But the New York Times' write-up (12/13/13) was one of the most jarring:

Most of the dead appeared to be people suspected of being militants linked to Al Qaeda, according to tribal leaders in the area, but there were also reports that several civilians had been killed.

 So most of the dead appeared to be  people suspected of being linked to Al Qaeda. That's a whole lot of qualifiers to make the point that those who were killed were the intended targets.
But there's a pattern of the Times doing this.
In August of this year there were several suspected US drone attacks. Strikes on August 1 and August 8 reportedly killed several civilians, including children, part of a series of drone strikes around that time.
The New York Times ran an AP dispatch on August 9, reporting this:

 Three American drone strikes in Yemen on Thursday killed a total of 12 people suspected of being members of Al Qaeda, a Yemeni military official said, raising to eight the number of attacks in less than two weeks.

A news analysis on August 10 reported, "Eight strikes have been carried out in Yemen in the past two weeks, a ferocious rate of drone attacks," before adding, "It is yet unknown who exactly was killed in Yemen during the past two weeks." One would hope that more journalistic energy would be devoted to figuring out who the United States was killing.

And there are other examples. On May 16, 2012, the Times reported news of a drone strike the day before:

The United States has also stepped up its drone strikes in Yemen in recent days, with 11 militants reported killed on Saturday east of Sana.

 But other accounts told a different story. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (5/15/12) reported that

between 14 and 15 people have been killed in a double air strike on the southern city of Jaar.  Of these, as many as a dozen are being reported as civilians. Up to 21 civilians have also been reported injured.
Witnesses said the first strike targeted alleged militants meeting in a house. Civilians who had flocked to the impact site were killed in a follow-up strike.

 And CNN reported (5/15/12):

Two suspected U.S. drone strikes killed seven al Qaeda militants and eight civilians in the southern part of Yemen on Tuesday, three Yemeni security officials said.

And one of the most infamous attacks in Yemen occurred on December 17, 2009, when the United States launched a cruise missile strike on al-Majala, in southern Yemen. That attack included cluster bombs. 41 civilians are believed to have been killed in the strike.  

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