Dirty Wars (96 page)

Michael Boyle, a former adviser in the Obama campaign's counterterrorism experts group and a professor at LaSalle University, said that one of the reasons the administration was “so successful in
spinning the number of civilian casualties
” was the use of signature strikes and other systems for categorizing military-aged males as legitimate targets, even if their specific identities were unknown. “The result of the ‘guilt by association' approach has been a gradual loosening of the standards by which the US selects targets for drone strikes,” Boyle charged. “The consequences can be seen in the targeting of mosques or funeral processions that kill non-combatants and tear at the social fabric of the regions where they occur.” No one, he added, “really knows the number of deaths caused by drones in these distant, sometimes ungoverned, lands.”

Using drones, cruise missiles and Special Ops raids, the United States has embarked on a mission to kill its way to victory. The war on terror, launched under a Republican administration, was ultimately legitimized and expanded by a popular Democratic president. Although Barack Obama's ascent to the most powerful office on earth was the result of myriad factors, it was largely due to the desire of millions of Americans to shift course from the excesses of the Bush era. Had John McCain won the election, it is difficult to imagine such widespread support, particularly among liberal Democrats, for some of the very counterterrorism policies that Obama implemented. As individuals, we must all ask whether we would support the same policies—the expansion of drone strikes, the empowerment of JSOC, the use of the State Secrets Privilege, the use of indefinite detention, the denial of habeas corpus rights, the targeting of US citizens without charge or trial—if the commander in chief was not our candidate of choice. But beyond the partisan lens, the policies implemented by the Obama administration will have far-reaching consequences. Future
US presidents—Republican or Democratic—will inherit a streamlined process for assassinating enemies of America, perceived or real. They will inherit an executive branch with sweeping powers, rationalized under the banner of national security.

In 2012, a former US constitutional law professor was asked about the US drone and targeted killing program.
“It's very important for the president
and the entire culture of our national security team to continually ask tough questions about ‘Are we doing the right thing? Are we abiding by the rule of law? Are we abiding by due process?'” he responded, warning that it was important for the United States to “avoid any kind of slippery slope into a place where we're not being true to who we are.”

That former law professor was Barack Obama.

The creation of the kill list and the expansion of drone strikes
“represents a betrayal
of President Obama's promise to make counterterrorism policies consistent with the US constitution,” charged Boyle. Obama, he added, “has routinized and normalized extrajudicial killing from the Oval Office, taking advantage of America's temporary advantage in drone technology to wage a series of shadow wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Without the scrutiny of the legislature and the courts, and outside the public eye, Obama is authorizing murder on a weekly basis, with a discussion of the guilt or innocence of candidates for the ‘kill list' being resolved in secret.” Boyle warned:

Once Obama leaves office, there is nothing stopping the next president from launching his own drone strikes, perhaps against a different and more controversial array of targets. The infrastructure and processes of vetting the “kill list” will remain in place for the next president, who may be less mindful of moral and legal implications of this action than Obama supposedly is.

In late 2012, the ACLU and the
New York Times
sought information on the legal rationale for the kill program, specifically the strikes that had killed three US citizens—among them sixteen-year-old Abdulrahman Awlaki. In January 2013, a federal judge
ruled on the request
. In her decision, Judge Colleen McMahon appeared frustrated with the White House's lack of transparency, writing that the Freedom of Information Act requests raised “serious issues about the limits on the power of the Executive Branch under the Constitution and laws of the United States, and about whether we are indeed a nation of laws, not of men.” She charged that the Obama administration “has engaged in public discussion of the legality of targeted killing, even of citizens, but in cryptic and imprecise ways, generally without citing to any statute or court decision that justifies its
conclusions.” She added, “More fulsome disclosure of the legal reasoning on which the Administration relies to justify the targeted killing of individuals, including United States citizens, far from any recognizable ‘hot' field of battle, would allow for intelligent discussion and assessment of a tactic that (like torture before it) remains hotly debated. It might also help the public understand the scope of the ill-defined yet vast and seemingly ever-growing exercise.”

Ultimately, Judge McMahon blocked the release of the documents. Citing her legal concerns about the state of transparency with regard to the kill program, she wrote:

This Court is constrained by law, and under the law, I can only conclude that the Government has not violated FOIA by refusing to turn over the documents sought in the FOIA requests, and so cannot be compelled by this court of law to explain in detail the reasons why its actions do not violate the Constitution and laws of the United States. The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me; but after careful and extensive consideration, I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules—a veritable Catch-22. I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the Executive Branch of our Government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret.

It is not just the precedents set during the Obama era that will reverberate into the future, but also the lethal operations themselves. No one can scientifically predict the future consequences of drone strikes, cruise missile attacks and night raids. But, from my experience in several undeclared war zones across the globe, it seems clear that the United States is helping to breed a new generation of enemies in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and throughout the Muslim world. Those whose loved ones were killed in drone strikes or cruise missile attacks or night raids will have a legitimate score to settle. In an October 2003 memo, written less than a year into the US occupation of Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld framed the issue of whether the United States was
“winning or losing
the global war on terror” through one question: “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?” More than a decade after 9/11, that question should be updated. At the end of the day, US policy makers and the general public must all confront a more uncomfortable question: Are our own actions, carried out in the name of national
security, making us less safe or more safe? Are they eliminating more enemies than they are inspiring? Boyle put it mildly when he observed that the US kill program's
“adverse strategic effects
...have not been properly weighed against the tactical gains associated with killing terrorists.”

In November 2012, President Obama remarked that
“there's no country on Earth
that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders.” He made the statement in defense of Israel's attack on Gaza, which was launched in the name of protecting itself from Hamas missile attacks. “We are fully supportive of Israel's right to defend itself from missiles landing on people's homes and workplaces and potentially killing civilians,” Obama continued. “And we will continue to support Israel's right to defend itself.” How would people living in areas of Yemen, Somalia or Pakistan that have been regularly targeted by US drones or missile strikes view that statement?

Toward the end of President Obama's first term in office, the Pentagon's general counsel, Jeh Johnson, gave a major lecture at the Oxford Union in England.
“If I had to summarize
my job in one sentence: it is to ensure that everything our military and our Defense Department do is consistent with U.S. and international law,” Johnson said. “This includes the prior legal review of every military operation that the Secretary of Defense and the President must approve.” As Johnson spoke, the British government was facing serious questions about its involvement in US drone strikes. A legal case brought in the United Kingdom by the British son of a tribal leader killed in Pakistan alleged that British officials had served as
“secondary parties to murder
” by providing intelligence to the United States that allegedly led to the 2011 strike. A
UN commission
was preparing to launch an investigation into the expanding US kill program, and new legal challenges were making their way through the US court system. In his speech, Johnson presented the US defense of its controversial counterterror policies:

Some legal scholars and commentators in our country brand the detention by the military of members of al Qaeda as “indefinite detention without charges.” Some refer to targeted lethal force against known, identified individual members of al Qaeda as “extrajudicial killing.”

Viewed within the context of law enforcement or criminal justice, where no person is sentenced to death or prison without an indictment, an arraignment and a trial before an impartial judge or jury, these characterizations might be understandable.

Viewed within the context of conventional armed conflict—as they should be—capture, detention and lethal force are traditional practices as old as armies.

In the end, the Obama administration's defense of its expanding global wars boiled down to the assertion that it was, in fact, at war; that the authorities granted by the US Congress to the Bush administration after 9/11 to pursue those responsible for the attacks justified the Obama administration's ongoing strikes against “suspected militants” across the globe—some of whom were toddlers when the Twin Towers crumbled to the ground—more than a decade later. The end result of the policies initiated under President Bush and continued and expanded under his Democratic successor was to bring the world to the dawn of a new age, the era of the Dirty War on Terror. As Boyle, the former Obama campaign counterterrorism adviser, asserted in early 2013, the US drone program was
“encouraging a new arms race
for drones that will empower current and future rivals and lay the foundations for an international system that is increasingly violent.”

Today, decisions on who should live or die in the name of protecting America's national security are made in secret, laws are interpreted by the president and his advisers behind closed doors and no target is off-limits, including US citizens. But the decisions made in Washington have implications far beyond their impact on the democratic system of checks and balances in the United States. In January 2013, Ben Emmerson, the UN special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, announced his investigation into drone strikes and targeted killing by the United States. In a statement launching the probe, Emmerson characterized the US defense of its use of drones and targeted killings in other countries as
“Western democracies
...engaged in a global [war] against a stateless enemy, without geographical boundaries to the theatre of conflict, and without limit of time.” This position, he concluded, “is heavily disputed by most States, and by the majority of international lawyers outside the United States of America.”

At his inauguration in January 2013, Obama employed the rhetoric of internationalism.
“We will defend our people
and uphold our values through strength of arms and rule of law. We will show the courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully—not because we are naïve about the dangers we face, but because engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear,” the president declared. “America will remain the anchor of strong alliances in every corner of the globe; and we will renew those institutions that extend our capacity to manage crisis abroad, for no one has a greater stake in a peaceful world than its most powerful nation.” Yet, as Obama embarked on his second term in office, the United States was once again at odds with the rest of the world on one of the central components of its foreign policy. The drone strike in Yemen the day
Obama was sworn in served as a potent symbol of a reality that had been clearly established during his first four years in office: US unilateralism and exceptionalism were not only bipartisan principles in Washington, but a permanent American institution. As large-scale military deployments wound down, the United States had simultaneously escalated its use of drones, cruise missiles and Special Ops raids in an unprecedented number of countries. The war on terror had become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The question all Americans must ask themselves lingers painfully: How does a war like this ever end?

THIS BOOK IS THE PRODUCT
of the tireless work of a team of people, spread across the globe from Brooklyn, New York, to Sana'a, Yemen; Washington, DC; Mogadishu, Somalia; Kabul, Afghanistan; and beyond. I will never forget the bravery and dedication of my fellow journalists who traveled with me and aided me in so many legs of this multiyear journey. I cannot thank by name some of the people who were most helpful in producing this book—either for their own safety or because I promised to keep their identities confidential. All of them have my deepest gratitude and respect.