What is shocking is the sheer numbers now passing over the
president's desk. There is no way he should be personally taking
this responsibility to himself. Yet just how do you establish
guidelines for a duly appointed officer to apply. It calls for
judgment and it is terribly vulnerable to error and some fussy war
crime threshold.
Yet the true targets are engaged in war against us. Targeting them
has done a couple of things. It has decimated enemy leadership in a
way no other war making system has ever done. Even better, it ha
hugely increased the cost of personal involvement and success and the
long term effect of that must be serious recruiting difficulties.
It is worthy that those deploying suicide bombers should share the
exact same risk of been blown up much sooner than later.
It also makes intelligence gathering way more timely and effective.
Right now a text message identifying a perpetrator while in close
proximity has the potential of putting the perp under immediate
observation and at risk.
This tool will soon be generally deployed anywhere insurgency is been
pursued and this sharply reduces the effectiveness of irregular
operations. I do not expect insurgence activity to actually go away
so long as we have unbalanced social contracts, but it is now vastly
more difficult and has to adopt an even more distributed cell model.
In the meantime, the numbers are already too large to remain on the
President's desk and this practice can not continue.
Secret Kill list
Jo Becker & scott
Shane
May 29 2012
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 dronestrike 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’slegal
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.”
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