Dirty Wars (84 page)

In the packed White House conference room halfway around the world, Obama's national security team was overwhelmed. “
We got him
,” Obama
said quietly. “We got him.” Admiral McRaven was careful to dispel any premature celebration. “Look,
I've got a Geronimo call
, but I need to tell you it's a first call. This is not a confirmation. Please keep your expectations managed a little here. Most operators when they are on a mission their adrenaline is sky high. Yes, they are professional, but let's not count on anything until they get back and we have some evidence.” The JSOC chief added, “We've got SEALs on the ground without a ride.”

The SEALs had been at the compound for a little over half an hour by the time bin Laden was killed. The possibility of an encounter with the Pakistani military was increasing with each passing second. Back on the second floor of the compound, the SEALs were attempting to
gather as many of bin Laden's belongings
and potential intelligence clues as possible.

Once the process of taking bin Laden's photos and DNA samples was completed, a pair of SEALs dragged his corpse out of the bedroom by the legs. Bissonnette began searching the area, grabbing papers and some cassettes. They also
found two guns
: an AK-47 and a holstered Makarov pistol. Neither was loaded.

Time was running short. The interpreter and the SEALs outside the compound had managed to deter curious onlookers, but Abbottabad was waking up. Pakistani authorities could arrive at any moment, and the choppers circling above were running out of fuel. The interpreter's presence was warranted, as residents of the typically tranquil neighborhood heard the sounds of helicopters and explosions and some found their electricity had been cut off. Gul Khan told
India Today,
“
I saw soldiers emerging
from the helicopters and advancing towards the house. Some of them instructed us in chaste Pashto to turn off the lights and stay inside.” An unidentified man interviewed by CNN in the aftermath of the raid said through a translator, “
We never saw their clothes
but they were speaking Pashto and told us to go away. After a while, [when the] electricity blackout ended and the light came back on, they told us to turn them all off.” Another man speaking to CNN through a translator added, “We tried to go there and they pointed their laser guns on us and said ‘No, you can't go.' They were speaking Pashto, so we thought that they were from Afghanistan, not America.”

The SEALs inside were overwhelmed with the volume of materials on hand but could only gather and carry so much. They had five minutes. “
We all knew the risks of running out of gas
or remaining on target too long, giving the local police or military time to react,” Bissonnette later recalled. “We got what we came for: Bin Laden. It was time to get out while we still could.”

Bissonnette proceeded to the landing zone. He was soon joined by the SEALs from the second floor of bin Laden's compound, who were overloaded with materials they had gathered from inside. “
We looked like a gypsy camp
,
or like Santa Claus on Christmas Eve,” he wrote. “Guys had mesh bags over their shoulders so full they seemed to waddle more than run. I saw one SEAL carrying a CPU in one hand and a leather gym bag overflowing in the other.”

Bin Laden's corpse, now in a body bag, was loaded on
the remaining stealth Black Hawk
, which the SEALs thought had the best chance of escaping Pakistan unscathed. The big Chinook—the CH-47—would carry the remaining SEALs. Before taking off, the commandos blew up the downed Black Hawk so that its stealth technology could not be examined by the Pakistanis. Obama and his team watched the video feed of the
$60-million bonfire
.

News of unusual events unfolding in Abbottabad traveled fast. At
1:00 a.m., just before the SEALs took off
from the compound, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of Pakistan's army, was in his study when he received a call from his director of military operations, Major General Ishfaq Nadeem. From the initial reports he had heard, Kayani thought India might be launching some sort of a strike inside Pakistan. He called Air Chief Marshal Rao Qamar Suleman and ordered the force to confront any unidentified aircraft.

At approximately 1:08 a.m., the SEALs took off from Abbottabad. Obama told his national security team, “
Inform me as soon as our helicopters are out
of Pakistani airspace.” The Black Hawk and the Chinook took more direct but
separate routes
as they exited Pakistan, with the Black Hawk stopping at a refueling point inside the country. All of the US personnel crossed the border into Afghanistan unscathed, with bin Laden's body in tow.

On the tarmac in Jalalabad
, a white Toyota HiLux pickup was waiting to transport bin Laden's corpse to a nearby hangar. When the Black Hawk landed, three Army Rangers approached the helicopter to grab the al Qaeda leader's body. “Fuck no,” one of the SEALs told the Rangers. “We got this.”

After bin Laden's body was flown to Bagram and further DNA samples were taken, it was
choppered out to the Arabian Sea
, where the USS
Carl Vinson
was positioned. “
Traditional procedures for Islamic burial
was followed,” read a May 2 e-mail sent from the
Carl Vinson
by Rear Admiral Charles Gaouette to Mullen and other military officials. “The deceased's body was washed (ablution) then placed in a white sheet. The body was placed in a weighted bag. A military officer read prepared religious remarks, which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker. After the words were complete, the body was placed on a prepared flat board, tipped up, whereupon the deceased's body slid into the sea.”

SOMALIA, WASHINGTON, DC, AND YEMEN
, 2011—It was 11:35 p.m., Washington time. President Obama walked down the hallway leading to the East Room of the White House. He took his place at the lectern in a dark suit with a red tie and an American flag pin on his left lapel. “
Good evening
,” the president began. “Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda, and a terrorist who's responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.” The president did not mention the SEALs or Admiral McRaven. “At my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability,” the president asserted. “No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.”

In the ensuing weeks, controversy would swirl as White House officials leaked details of the operation that turned out to be wildly false or exaggerated. Although the administration explicitly said that the operation was “kill or capture,” and not an assassination, bin Laden was unarmed when he was killed and the weapons that were recovered in his bedroom were not loaded. Yet a senior administration official who briefed reporters soon after the raid claimed that bin Laden “
did resist the assault force
” and “was killed in a firefight as our operators came onto the compound.” In reality, the raid was far from the dramatic firefight described initially by White House officials.

In the span of less than twenty minutes, the SEALs had shot
seven of the eleven adults
in the compound, killing four men and one woman.
According to Pakistani officials
, both women and children were injured in the raid. Peter Bergen, who gained access to the compound and many witnesses, alleged that all of those who were injured appeared to have been unarmed. The international human rights group Amnesty International described the raid as illegal in its annual report for 2011. “
The US administration made clear
that the operation had been conducted under the USA's
theory of a global armed conflict between the USA and al-Qaeda in which the USA does not recognize the applicability of international human rights law,” the report asserted. “In the absence of further clarification from the US authorities, the killing of Osama bin Laden would appear to have been unlawful.”

The day after the operation, Brennan delivered an error-filled press conference that purported to give details of the raid. Brennan opened by claiming bin Laden was killed in a firefight and that there was no opportunity to take him alive. He later added that bin Laden used women in the compound as human shields. “Thinking about that from a visual perspective, here is bin Laden, who has been calling for these attacks, living in this million dollar-plus compound, living in an area that is far removed from the front, hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield,” he said. “I think it really just speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years. And so, again, looking at what bin Laden was doing hiding there while he's putting other people out there to carry out attacks again just speaks to I think the
nature of the individual he was
.” Brennan also alleged that one woman who died was shot while shielding bin Laden, though she was actually killed with her own husband. The White House was later
forced to retract
Brennan's comments.

The leaks from the White House sparked outrage in the Special Ops community and ultimately led Bissonnette, one of the SEALs who had shot bin Laden, to write his own book on the raid, under the pen name Mark Owen, called
No Easy Day,
which he said he wrote to set the record straight. So many former SEALs and other Special Ops veterans began speaking out that McRaven
issued a directive
ordering all current and former Special Ops Forces to stop speaking to the media.

The night Obama had announced bin Laden's death, thousands of Americans poured into the streets in front of the White House and in New York's Times Square, chanting, “USA, USA!”

Victims' families from the 9/11 attacks spoke of bin Laden's death bringing closure. But the al Qaeda leader's demise had breathed new life into Washington's global war.

JSOC, once shrouded in secrecy, had overnight become a household name and was lionized in the media. The Disney Corporation actually
tried to trademark
the term “SEAL Team 6,” and
Zero Dark Thirty,
a high-profile Hollywood film, was put into production; the filmmakers were even given
access to sensitive material
.

While the battle over the leaks—and varying and contradictory narratives over how exactly bin Laden was killed—raged in the media, behind the scenes the White House was deeply immersed in planning more lethal operations against High Value Targets. Chief among these was Anwar Awlaki.

IN APRIL
2011, Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, a Somali man the United States alleged had links to Somalia's al Shabab, had been captured by JSOC forces in the Gulf of Aden. Warsame was aboard a small skiff when he was
snatched by an amphibious team
. US counterterrorism officials alleged that he had met with Awlaki and was building ties between al Shabab and AQAP. The JSOC forces took him to a military brig aboard the USS
Boxer,
where Warsame was held incommunicado for more than two months before being
transferred to New York and indicted
on conspiracy charges and providing material support to al Shabab and AQAP.

Although the Obama administration won praise from some in the civil liberties community for trying him in federal court rather than sending him to Guantánamo, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was not permitted to see him until after he had
endured two months
of regular interrogation on board the
Boxer.
Nor was Warsame given access to lawyers. Warsame's case ignited a legal debate over the Obama administration's policies on capturing and detaining terror suspects, particularly in light of the widening counterterrorism campaigns in Somalia and Yemen.

The executive orders that President Obama had issued two days after he was sworn into office required the US government to
provide the ICRC
with notification of, and timely access to, any persons in the custody of the US government. To those who had long fought the Bush administration's detainee policies, the Warsame case indicated that Obama was violating his own executive orders. “
This is illegal and inexcusable
. It means in effect that Mr. Warsame was disappeared for this period with all the attendant dangers such hidden detention engenders. It is reminiscent of early Guantánamo Bay and CIA ‘black site' detention,” alleged the Center for Constitutional Rights. The group accused the Obama administration of “stretching” the meaning of the original Authorization for Use of Military Force granted by Congress to enable pursuit of the 9/11 attackers and using it a decade later “to capture and detain, perhaps indefinitely, anyone it claims is a terrorism suspect anywhere in the world.”

But the Obama administration was not simply capturing or detaining suspects: It was interrogating them as part of its intensifying campaign to hunt down terrorists. After Warsame's capture, US officials
anonymously boasted
to major US media outlets that he had provided them with actionable intelligence. The action sparked by that intelligence would not be in Somalia, but in Yemen, against one of Washington's most wanted targets.

“
I WANT AWLAKI
,
” President Obama told his counterterrorism team. “Don't let up on him.”

Bin Laden was dead and Ayman al Zawahiri would soon take his place as
the head of al Qaeda central, but it was the US citizen running around the badlands of Yemen that Obama and his team had labeled America's new Public Enemy Number One. Obama was a constitutional law professor in a different lifetime, but as president he had developed an alternative legal structure for dealing with Awlaki. President Obama's executive branch had served as prosecutor, judge and jury. As the ultimate authority, he had rendered his verdict. Now his handpicked forces would perform the execution.