Dirty Wars (2 page)

THIS IS A STORY
about how the United States came to embrace assassination as a central part of its national security policy. It is also a story about the consequences of that decision for people in scores of countries across the globe and for the future of American democracy. Although the 9/11 attacks dramatically altered the way the United States conducts its foreign policy, the roots of this story far predate the day the Twin Towers fell. In the post-9/11 world, there is also a tendency to see US foreign policy through a partisan lens that, on the one hand, suggests that President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq was an utter disaster that led the nation into a mentality that it was in a global war and, on the other, that President Barack Obama was left to clean up the mess. In the eyes of many conservatives, President Obama has been weak in confronting terrorism. In the eyes of many liberals, he has waged a “smarter” war. The realities, however, are far more nuanced.

This book tells the story of the expansion of covert US wars, the abuse of executive privilege and state secrets, the embrace of unaccountable elite military units that answer only to the White House.
Dirty Wars
also reveals the continuity of a mindset that “the world is a battlefield” from Republican to Democratic administrations.

The story begins with a brief history of the US approach to terrorism and assassination prior to 9/11. From there, I weave in and out of several stories, spanning the course of Bush's early days in office and going into Obama's second term. We meet al Qaeda figures in Yemen, US-backed warlords in Somalia, CIA spies in Pakistan and Special Operations commandos tasked with hunting down those people deemed to be enemies of America. We meet the men who run the most secretive operations for the military and the CIA, and we hear the stories of insiders who have spent their lives in the shadows, some of whom spoke to me only on condition that their identity never be revealed.

The world now knows SEAL Team 6 and the Joint Special Operations Command as the units that killed Osama bin Laden. This book will reveal
previously undisclosed or little-known missions conducted by these very forces that will never be discussed by those at the helm of power in the United States or immortalized in Hollywood films. I dig deep into the life of Anwar al Awlaki, the first US citizen known to be targeted for assassination by his own government—despite never having been charged with a crime. We also hear from those who are caught in the middle—the civilians who face drone bombings and acts of terrorism. We enter the home of Afghan civilians whose lives were destroyed by a Special Ops night raid gone wrong, transforming them from US allies to would-be suicide bombers.

Some of the stories in this book may, at first, seem to be disconnected, from people worlds apart. But taken together, they reveal a haunting vision of what our future holds in a world gripped by ever-expanding dirty wars.

—
JEREMY SCAHILL

DIRTY WARS

The young teenager sat outside with his cousins as
they gathered for a barbecue
. He wore his hair long and messy. His mother and grandparents had repeatedly urged him to cut it. But the boy believed it had become his trademark look and he liked it. A few weeks earlier, he had run away from home, but not in some act of teenage rebellion. He was on a mission. In the note he left for his mother before he snuck out the kitchen window as the sun was just rising and headed to the bus station, he admitted that he had taken money from her purse—$40—for bus fare, and for that he apologized. He explained his mission and begged for forgiveness. He said he would be home soon.

The boy was the eldest child in his family. Not just in his immediate family, which consisted of his parents and his three siblings, but in the large house they shared with his aunts and uncles and cousins and two of his grandparents. He was his grandmother's favorite. When guests visited, he would bring them tea and sweets. When they left, he would clean up after them. Once, his grandmother twisted her ankle and went to the hospital for treatment. When she limped out of the treatment room, the boy was there to greet her and make sure she got home safely. “
You are a gentle boy
,” his grandmother always told him. “Don't ever change.”

The boy's mission was simple: he wanted to find his father. He hadn't seen him in years and he was afraid that if he didn't find him, he would be left only with blurred memories: of his father teaching him to fish; to ride a horse; surprising him with an abundance of gifts on his birthday; taking him and his siblings to the beach or to the candy shop.

Finding his father would not be easy. He was a wanted man. There was a bounty on his head and he had narrowly escaped death more than a dozen times. That powerful forces in multiple countries wanted his father dead did not deter the boy. He was tired of seeing the videos of his father that painted him as a terrorist and an evil figure. He just knew him as his dad, and he wanted at least one last moment with him. But it didn't work out that way.

Three weeks after he climbed out the kitchen window, the boy was outdoors with his cousins
—
teenagers like him
—
laying a picnic for dinner beneath the stars. It was then he would have heard the drones approaching, followed by the whiz of the missiles. It was a direct hit. The boy and his cousins were blown to pieces. All that remained of the boy was the back of his head, his flowing hair still clinging to it. The boy had turned sixteen years old a few weeks earlier and now he had been killed by his own government. He was the third US citizen to be killed in operations authorized by the president in two weeks. The first was his father.

WASHINGTON, DC
, 2001–2002—It was
10:10 a.m.
on June 11, 2002, nine months to the day since the September 11 attacks. The senators and representatives filed into Room S-407 of the US Capitol. All of them were members of a small, elite group in Washington and were, by law, entrusted with the most guarded national security secrets of the US government. “I hereby move that this meeting of the committee be closed to the public,” declared Republican Richard Shelby, the senior senator from Alabama, in a Southern drawl, “on the grounds that the national security of the United States might be compromised were a proceeding to become public.” The motion was quickly seconded and the secret hearing was under way.

As the members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence gathered in Washington, DC, half a world away in Afghanistan, tribal and political leaders were convening a
loya jirga
, a “grand council,” that was tasked with deciding who would run the country following the swift overthrow of the Taliban government by the US military. After 9/11, the US Congress had granted the Bush administration sweeping powers to pursue those responsible for the attacks. The Taliban government, which had ruled Afghanistan since 1996, was crushed, depriving al Qaeda of its sanctuary in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders were on the run. But for the Bush administration, the long war was just getting started.

At the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were deep into planning the next invasion—Iraq. They had come to power with plans to topple Saddam Hussein in hand and, despite the fact that there was no Iraqi connection to the attacks, they used 9/11 as the pretext to push their agenda. But the decisions made in that first year of the Bush administration were much bigger than Iraq, Afghanistan or even al Qaeda. The men in power at that time were intent on changing the way the United States waged its wars and, in the process, creating unprecedented powers for the White House. The days of fighting uniformed enemies and national militaries according to the rules of the
Geneva Conventions were over. “The world is a battlefield” was the mantra repeated by the neoconservatives in the US national security apparatus and placed on PowerPoint slides laying out the plans for a sweeping, borderless global war. But terrorists would not be their only target. The two-hundred-year-old democratic system of checks and balances was firmly in their crosshairs.

Room S-407 was nestled in
the attic
of the Capitol building. It was windowless and accessible only by one elevator—or a narrow staircase. The room was classified as a secure facility and had been fitted with sophisticated counterespionage equipment to block any attempt at eavesdropping or monitoring from outside. For decades, the room had been used to house the most sensitive briefings of members of Congress by the CIA, the US military and scores of other figures and entities that inhabit the shadows of US policy. Covert actions were briefed and debriefed in the room. It was one of a handful of facilities in the United States where the nation's most closely guarded secrets were discussed.

As the senators and representatives sat in the closed-door session on Capitol Hill that morning in June 2002, they would hear a story of how the United States had crossed a threshold. The stated purpose of the hearing was to review the work and structure of US counterterrorism (CT) organizations before 9/11. At the time, there was a substantial amount of finger-pointing regarding US intelligence “failures” leading up to the attacks. In the aftermath of the most devastating terrorist strikes on US soil in history, Cheney and Rumsfeld charged that the Clinton administration had failed to adequately recognize the urgency of al Qaeda's threat, leaving the US homeland vulnerable by the time the Bush White House took power. Democrats pushed back and pointed to their own history of combating al Qaeda in the 1990s. The appearance of Richard Clarke before the US lawmakers on this particular day was, in part, intended to send a message to the congressional elite. Clarke had been President Bill Clinton's counterterrorism czar and chaired the Counterterrorism Security Group of the National Security Council (NSC) for the decade leading up to 9/11. He had also served on President George H. W. Bush's National Security Council and was an assistant secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan. He was one of the
most experienced
counterterrorism officials in the United States and, at the time of the hearing, was on his way out of government, though he still held a post as a special adviser to President George W. Bush on cyberspace security. Clarke was a hawkish figure who had risen to prominence under a Democratic administration and was known to have pushed hard when Clinton was in power for
more covert action
. So it made tactical sense that the Bush administration would put him forward
to make the case for a regime of military and intelligence tactics that had previously been deemed illegal, undemocratic or, simply, dangerous.

Clarke described the dialogue within the national security community under Clinton as marked by great concern over the possibility of violating a long-standing presidential ban on assassination and a deep fear of repeating scandals of the past. Clarke said he believed that “a culture” had developed at the CIA “that said when you have large scale of covert operations, they get messy, and they get out of control, and they end up
splattering mud back on the Agency
.”