Dirty Wars (66 page)

“This is a change in personnel,” Obama declared. “But it is not a change in policy.”

That point was driven home as the president announced that General Petraeus, one of the key architects of the expansion of the global US battlefield, would be taking over for McChrystal. Almost as soon as Petraeus took command of the war, the
pace of night raids increased
and
air strikes resumed
. As the
civilian death toll mounted
, the Afghan insurgency intensified. The US “targeted” killing program was fueling the very threat it claimed to be fighting.

YEMEN AND THE UNITED STATES
, 2010—As thousands of US troops deployed and redeployed to Afghanistan, the covert campaign in undeclared battlefields elsewhere was widening. US drone strikes were hitting Pakistan weekly, while JSOC forces were on the ground in Somalia and Yemen and pounding the latter with air strikes. All the while, al Qaeda affiliates in those countries were gaining strength. When I met again with Hunter, who worked with JSOC under Bush and continued to work in counterterrorism under the Obama administration, I asked him what changes had taken place from one administration to the next. He quickly shot back, “
There's no daylight
. If anything, JSOC operations have intensified under this administration, there's been a greater intensity in what they're being asked to do, where they're being asked to do it and how they're being asked to do it,” he told me. “There are things that are transpiring now, around the globe, that would be unthinkable to the Bush administration, not just because of vocal opposition within the cabinet, or within the Pentagon, but because they would not have the ultimate support of the president. In this administration, the president has made a political and military calculation—and this is his prerogative—that it is best to let the Joint Special Operations Command run wild, like a mustang, in pursuit of the objectives that [Obama] has set.”

The Obama administration, Hunter told me, worked diligently to bring an end to the CIA-JSOC divide and to bring all forces together in a unified global antiterrorist campaign, though it would be an uphill task. What became clear in the first year of the Obama administration was that JSOC had won the decade-long war of ideas within the US counterterrorism community. Its paramilitary-focused direct actions would become the central strategy in the new administration's various small wars, not just Afghanistan. “The operations have been institutionalized to a point where it is an integral part of any campaign, in any theater, and at some point we crossed a threshold where Joint Special Operations Command
is
the campaign,” Hunter told me. “In places like Yemen, it is Joint Special Operations Command, and that's it. And they make the rules. It's their house, and they do what it is that they need to do.” As the JSOC-ization of US counterterrorism
policy spread, the CIA was steadily increasing its paramilitary capabilities and expanding its drone strikes and target lists. In a way, it resembled a mini turf war between JSOC and the CIA over who would mow through the kill lists faster.

By early 2010, there were
at least three entities
within the US government that were maintaining kill lists: the National Security Council, which Obama dealt with directly during weekly meetings; the CIA; and the US military. The CIA had its own “
parallel, more cloistered process
” for selecting targets and executing strikes, which were for the most part in Pakistan. The NSC and the DoD had
little oversight
of that process. Obama exercised final authority over “
more complex and risky strikes
” in Pakistan.
At least twice a month
, the CIA's top lawyer would receive a file from the Counterterrorism Center (often no more than two to five pages long) containing targeting recommendations and intelligence. The lawyer would hold small meetings that included CTC lawyers and the head of the National Clandestine Service, formerly known as the Directorate of Operations, which coordinates the CIA's covert operations across the globe. Lawyers from the White House and the National Security Council would review the CIA's list, and the Gang of Eight on Capitol Hill would have to approve it, as well.

The military list, according to reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin, “
was really more than one
, since the clandestine special operations troops” from JSOC had their own internal list. These lists often overlapped, but as Priest and Arkin noted, “even these highly classified kill lists were not coordinated among the three primary agencies involved in creating them.”

A YEAR INTO HIS PRESIDENCY
, Obama and his counterterrorism team were fully committed to formalizing the process for conducting assassinations against terror suspects and other “militants.” They had, in their own way, embraced the neoconservative vision of the world as the battlefield, and the kill lists they built would encompass the globe. Unlike President Bush, who often delegated decisions on assassinations to commanders and CIA officials, Obama insisted on
personally signing off
on most strikes. On Tuesday afternoons, the president would preside over meetings that senior officials dubbed “Terror Tuesdays,” during which proposed targets would be “nominated” for spots on the kill list. Many of them were known operatives in Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia, but at times they were only loosely affiliated with other suspects or were simply residents of a particular region of a country.

“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,” reported the
New York Times
. “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,” the
Times
noted. The Terror Tuesday meetings would take place after a larger group—sometimes more than 100 of the administration's national security lawyers and officials—debated names to be added or subtracted from the list. JSOC, according to sources knowledgeable about the meetings, would dominate the process and “
groomed
” State Department, CIA and administration officials, in the words of one JSOC source, to accept a targeted killing campaign that would hit the “infrastructure” of the networks to move much further down “the food chain” in a variety of countries.

Although Obama had campaigned, in part, on a pledge to unilaterally use US force in pursuit of known terrorists, he had kept its scope narrowed to Osama bin Laden and his top deputies. Once in office, the system he was building would be far more sweeping. In essence, the kill list became a form of “pre-crime” justice in which individuals were considered fair game if they met certain life patterns of suspected terrorists. Utilizing signature strikes, it was no longer necessary for targets to have been involved with specific plots or actions against the United States. Their potential to commit future acts could be a justification for killing them. At times, simply being among a group of “military-aged males” in a particular region of Pakistan would be enough evidence of terrorist activity to trigger a drone strike. In Yemen, Obama authorized JSOC to hit targets even if the mission planners did not know the identities of those they were bombing. Such strikes were labeled
Terrorist Attack Disruption Strikes
, or TADS.

While Obama chaired the Terror Tuesday meetings, the administration's assassination policy was being coordinated by two key architects with vast experience in targeted killing: John Brennan and Admiral William McRaven. Brennan had worked extensively on the kill program under the Bush administration; McRaven had helped develop the post-9/11 version when he worked for Bush's National Security Council. Under Obama, both men were now in a position to formalize and streamline the kill programs they had worked on in the shadows for much of their careers.

In Pakistan, the CIA would take the lead on drone strikes and Obama granted the Agency a wider authority for strikes and supplied it with more drones to do so. By late 2009, Leon Panetta had declared that the CIA was “
conducting the most aggressive
operations in our history as an agency.” Most of the rest of the world would belong to JSOC, which had been empowered
under Obama with far greater latitude to strike across the globe. Although some of the behind-the-scenes conflicts that raged between JSOC and the CIA under the Bush administration would continue, both McRaven and Brennan saw an opportunity to move forward with more of a unified counterterrorism front than had been possible in the previous eight years. President Obama's credentials as a popular, liberal Democrat and a constitutional lawyer who pledged to end the excesses of the Bush war machine would be of tremendous value in selling their cause.

In interviews with the
New York Times
and other major media outlets, senior White House officials consistently hit on the themes of the “just war” theory that Obama had embraced in his Nobel Prize speech, noting that Obama was a fan of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. “
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,” State Department lawyer Harold Koh said. Koh, who had been a major critic of the Bush administration's counterterrorism policies, had changed his tune. “It's as though you had a priest with extremely strong moral values who was suddenly charged with leading a war.”

On a counterterrorism front, Obama's first year in office was marked by an aggressive embrace of assassination as a centerpiece of US national security policy. In part, the preemptive strikes were motivated by fear of another attack against the United States. Politically, Obama's advisers knew that a successful terrorist attack could damage his presidency, and they expressed this quite bluntly to reporters. But expanded use of JSOC operatives and drones also bolstered the narrative that Obama was waging a “smarter” war than his predecessor. Obama could say that he was taking the fight to the terrorists while simultaneously claiming he was winding down the Iraq occupation he had opposed. Although Obama received praise from many Republicans for his aggressive counterterrorism policies, others saw it as a way of circumventing the controversial issue of how to lawfully detain terror suspects. “
Their policy is to take out
high-value targets, versus capturing high-value targets,” declared Senator Saxby Chambliss, the most senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “They are not going to advertise that, but that's what they are doing.” Very few Democrats spoke in opposition to Obama's emerging global kill campaign. “It is
the politically advantageous thing
to do—low cost, no U.S. casualties, gives the appearance of toughness,” said Admiral Dennis Blair, Obama's former director of national intelligence, explaining how the administration viewed its policy. “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.”

The administration heavily utilized the State Secrets Privilege and claims of protecting national security to keep the details of its kill program concealed from the public. When convenient, the administration would leak details of operations to journalists. In doing so, it continued many of the same practices that liberal Democrats had railed against when Bush and his team were steering the ship. Jack Goldsmith, the former Bush administration lawyer, asserted that “
perhaps the most remarkable surprise
of his presidency” was that “Obama continued almost all of his predecessor's counterterrorism policies.” When Obama conducted a review of the proposed assassination of Anwar Awlaki, one of his senior advisers recalled the president declaring, “
This is an easy one
.” Easy as it may have been, the Obama administration
refused to release its findings
on how such an operation would be legal. “
This program rests on the personal legitimacy
of the president, and that's not sustainable,” former CIA director Michael Hayden told the
New York Times
. “I have lived the life of someone taking action on the basis of secret O.L.C. [Office of Legal Counsel] 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. [Department of Justice] safe.”

Obama and his team created a system “
where people are being killed
, you don't know what the evidence is, and you have no way to redress the situation,” former CIA case officer Phil Giraldi told me. “It's not that there aren't terrorists out there, and every once in a while one of them is going to have to be killed for one good reason or another, but I want to see the good reason. I don't want to see someone in the White House telling me, ‘You'll have to trust me.' We've had too much of that.”

BY MID
-2010, the Obama administration had increased the presence of Special Operations Forces from
sixty countries to seventy-five countries
. SOCOM had about
4,000 people
deployed around the world in countries besides Iraq and Afghanistan. “The
Special Operations capabilities
requested by the White House go beyond unilateral strikes and include the training of local counterterrorism forces and joint operations with them,” the
Washington Post
reported at the time. “Plans exist for preemptive or retaliatory strikes in numerous places around the world, meant to be put into action when a plot has been identified, or after an attack linked to a specific group.”

John Brennan laid out the new counterterrorism vision under the Obama administration: We “
will not merely respond
after the fact” to terrorist attacks. We will “take the fight to al-Qaeda and its extremist affiliates wherever they plot and train. In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond.”