Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
maybe IK 
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
**
The Drone Debate
**On the eve of December 27th 2007; I was slaving away in my office in Leeds when I got a call that left me shocked, what I felt afterwards included amongst other things embarrassment on being a Pakistani. A similar shrill went down my spine when I watched the news to find that there had been a cowardly assassination attempt on the shining star from Swat; our very own Malala Yousafzai.
Perhaps the hate and anger for those who did this was further heightened because my own mother is a Yousafzai and also because I hate what the Radio-vangelist Fazallullah had done to my favourite Holiday destination. While hate and anger is fine and justified, reacting without thought and analysis is not. It has been over 11 years since we became the ally on this war against terror and over eight years since we became a proxy.
Perceptions are often far more important than realities; as they say in Urdu ‘bad say badnaam bura’. And as any decent doctor will tell you treating symptoms and not the causes will get you nowhere. Hence, diagnosis is key. This is our war there is no mistake about it; with barbarians running wild in state territory killing, abducting and blowing up at will, we would be fools to think otherwise. But unless one of the ‘lets drone them’ advocates have a special tool that can scan and differentiate between a normal Pushtun and a Taliban, we are banking on a very ‘hit and hope’ strategy.
In the words of Thoreau ‘For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root’. Militancy and ideological extremism is a problem, but the use of the military is not a solution. Yes, I hear the Anglophile calling me a talib-sympathiser but lets all remember these cowards won’t assemble on a plane like samurai warriors and fight till their last breath. All they have to lose is to not win; you can win battles against them but not the war. They will just disperse and then hit back once things seem to have calmed down; the Malala incident testifies that.
A war of hearts and minds cannot be won without engaging in dialogue. Who with, you ask? Well every one, every one who holds any position of authority in the 30+ TTP groups and its splinters, even tribal chiefs and elders’.
Because only by engaging them can we ascertain the ideological element from the criminals who have joined them for their own agenda, and most importantly the reactionary element.
Yes, I can hear the Brown Sahibs again. Even Google will tell you that Clause 3 of the ‘Pushtunwali’ (the Pushtun honor code) is called Badal (revenge/to seek their version of justice). And in case you missed the little media attention given to the IDP’s of Waziristan, the message was loud and clear: ‘we will seek revenge from America, even if it’s after a thousand years’ (one said).
Madness is repeating the same method and expecting different results, our strategy is flawed. The Taliban won’t win but they certainly won’t lose, and until we can annihilate the ideological element be it even militarily, we first need to ascertain them from those fighting for other reasons.
Impressionable minds are easy to recruit; even Husain Haqqani was a Jamiat President in his early days, how easy would it be to recruit an illiterate youth who has just lost innocent, loved ones in a predator drone bombing?
While our hearts go out to Malala and we all unite in praying for her speedy recovery, let’s not forget the toddlers bombed to shreds by drone attacks. After all they were human souls too not plastic toys.
To the lay person who doesn’t want to understand the legal arguments, the case against drones is simple and two-pronged; firstly justice requires that no man should be condemned unheard, even Nazi’s received trials and so did Saddam. People should be charged and proven guilty before being sent to the guillotine.
The second is the International law argument, a violation of sovereignty is similar to the following example; if you’ve been a naughty child your parents can discipline you, even slap you. On the other hand, if someone in a different country ‘thinks’ you’ve been a naughty child and slaps you, it’s an entirely different ball game. Capital punishment by elders is wrong but it’s a greater wrong if the person disciplining you has no express or implied authority.
Hence, my understanding of the winning strategy to be is: ‘Engage, identify, ascertain, convince and exterminate’. Only this way can we truly make this our war … and then, win it.
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
Perhaps, they will take Suo motu action.
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
BBC News - ‘Drone strike killed my grandmother outside our house’
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
America’s drone war is out of control - FT.com
What is worse? Locking somebody up for years, without trial, while you try to find proof he is a terrorist? Or killing somebody whose name you don’t even know because his pattern of behaviour suggests to you that he is a terrorist? The first strategy, internment without trial at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp, was a signature policy of the George W. Bush administration. The use of drone strikes to kill suspected terrorists has become a trademark of the Obama administration. Yet while Guantánamo attracted worldwide condemnation, the use of drones is much less discussed.
It is hard to avoid the impression that Barack Obama is forgiven for a remarkably ruthless antiterrorism policy simply because his public image is so positive. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for goodness sake!
Yet President Obama’s free pass on drones may be running out. America’s expansion of this secretive programme is finally attracting legitimate criticism and concern – and not just from the usual civil-liberties types. **Kurt Volker, a former US ambassador to Nato for George W. Bush, asked recently in The Washington Post: “What do we want to be as a nation? A country with a permanent kill list? … A country that instructs workers in some high-tech operations centre to kill human beings on the far side of the planet because some government agency determined that those individuals are terrorists?”
**
Mr Volker’s diatribe reflects the moral uneasiness that many feel at the remote, computer-game-like quality of drone warfare. But, while drone strikes may make killing too easy and tempting, the remoteness of the method is probably the least coherent objection to the campaign. Most countries would be delighted to find a way of minimising casualties among their own troops. And civilian deaths or mass casualties are just as likely to be caused by the methods of conventional warfare – such as a piloted aircraft or an artillery shell.
**The more serious objection to drones is that they have blurred the line between war and assassination. Somebody suspected of plotting a terrorist attack on the soil of the US or the UK would be subject to arrest and prosecution. But if the suspects are in the tribal areas of Pakistan, they can simply be blown away.
**
While most strikes have been undertaken by the US military in recognised theatres of war, such as Afghanistan or Iraq, there is also a large covert programme of drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia run by the CIA. Some are aimed at known terrorist suspects, such as Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Islamist with a US passport, who was killed in Yemen. Others are so-called “signature strikes”, in which unnamed suspects are targeted, based on their pattern of behaviour.
America argues that even signature strikes are precisely targeted and that civilian casualties are minimal. But that is disputed. A recent study by Stanford and New York University law schools endorsed the claim that between 474 and 881 civilians, including almost 200 children, have been killed by drone strikes in Pakistan. One case – in which a meeting of tribal elders called to discuss a mining dispute was hit, killing 42 people – is now the subject of legal action in Pakistan and Britain. (The British are accused of providing intelligence to the US.)
The Obama administration’s legal justification for these strikes depends on a literal reading of the phrase “war on terror”. In a war, it is routine to attack concentrations of enemy forces. Thus, it is argued, is legitimate to attack al-Qaeda forces in Pakistan. Yet many lawyers regard this argument as something of a stretch. No war has been declared in Pakistan and the campaign is being conducted covertly, by an intelligence agency – not by the US military. The legal basis for drone strikes looks even more tenuous when they are conducted in Somalia, thousands of miles away from the battlefields of Afghanistan.
The niceties of international law are probably of little concern to many citizens, who are happy to be protected from terrorism and to zap “bad guys”. But the precedents set could come back to haunt the US and its allies.
**During the presidential election campaign, this thought began to worry some members of the Obama foreign policy team. One recalls that “we realised that if we lost, we would be handing over an industrial strength killing machine to Mitt Romney”. Yet efforts led by the state department to introduce more rules and transparency to the drones campaign were effectively pushed back by the CIA and the Pentagon.
**
Now that Mr Obama has been re-elected, it seems more likely that the drones campaign will be expanded rather than reined in. But the precedents set should still worry the US. Many countries – from Turkey to Russia and China – claim to be waging a war on terrorism. What if some of them follow the example set by America and decide to start eliminating enemies on foreign soil through the use of drone strikes? The technology involved is not hugely expensive or hard to master.
To make the spread of drone warfare less likely – and to prevent abuses in America’s own programme – drones need to be reclaimed from the realm of covert warfare. The CIA may relish its conversion into a paramilitary force. But wars should be fought by the military and openly scrutinised by politicians and the press. Anything else is just too dangerous for a free society and for international order.
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Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
When will Pakistan say enough is enough and take care of the wild wild west?
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
^ What is Pakistan doing since 2008? What more can Pakistan do, when the areas in Eastern Afghanistan (kunar, nuristan, paktia, paktika etc) have been left on taleban's mercy?
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
Does that mean that we should cede north waziristan etc to haqqanis etc? Pakistan has hit the area with artillery, so I think Pakistan is itching to do some damage but doesn't have the will to confront the forces of the yester years. It would be a tough break but I think it is time that Pakistan breaks with taliban type forces and assemble a new coalition for its interests like it ditched gulbadin when he became usesless.
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
Does that mean that we should cede north waziristan etc to haqqanis etc? Pakistan has hit the area with artillery, so I think Pakistan is itching to do some damage but doesn't have the will to confront the forces of the yester years. It would be a tough break but I think it is time that Pakistan breaks with taliban type forces and assemble a new coalition for its interests like it ditched gulbadin when he became usesless.
Pakistan cannot win this war in isolation, when the afghans and Americans are talking with the taleban on their side we don't have many options up our sleeves as well. We drove out TTP from swat and Mohmand and they are now attacking through eastern Afghanistan. What will PAKISTAN do when the wazirs cross the border into wazir land in Afghanistan and consider their attacks from there? Only force is not the solution, it has failed in Afghanistan as well as Pakistan.
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
interesting…Pain Continues after War for American Drone Pilot - SPIEGEL ONLINE
For more than five years, Brandon Bryant worked in an oblong, windowless container about the size of a trailer, where the air-conditioning was kept at 17 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit) and, for security reasons, the door couldn’t be opened. Bryant and his coworkers sat in front of 14 computer monitors and four keyboards. When Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the world.
The container is filled with the humming of computers. It’s the brain of a drone, known as a cockpit in Air Force parlance. But the pilots in the container aren’t flying through the air. They’re just sitting at the controls.
**Bryant was one of them, and he remembers one incident very clearly when a Predator drone was circling in a figure-eight pattern in the sky above Afghanistan, more than 10,000 kilometers (6,250 miles) away. There was a flat-roofed house made of mud, with a shed used to hold goats in the crosshairs, as Bryant recalls. When he received the order to fire, he pressed a button with his left hand and marked the roof with a laser. The pilot sitting next to him pressed the trigger on a joystick, causing the drone to launch a Hellfire missile. There were 16 seconds left until impact.
“These moments are like in slow motion,” he says today. Images taken with an infrared camera attached to the drone appeared on his monitor, transmitted by satellite, with a two-to-five-second time delay.
With seven seconds left to go, there was no one to be seen on the ground. Bryant could still have diverted the missile at that point. Then it was down to three seconds. Bryant felt as if he had to count each individual pixel on the monitor. Suddenly a child walked around the corner, he says.
Second zero was the moment in which Bryant’s digital world collided with the real one in a village between Baghlan and Mazar-e-Sharif.
Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.
“Did we just kill a kid?” he asked the man sitting next to him.
**
“Yeah, I guess that was a kid,” the pilot replied.
“Was that a kid?” they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.
**Then, someone they didn’t know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. “No. That was a dog,” the person wrote.
They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?
**
Invisible Warfare
When Bryant left the container that day, he stepped directly into America: dry grasslands stretching to the horizon, fields and the smell of liquid manure. Every few seconds, a light on the radar tower at the Cannon Air Force Base flashed in the twilight. There was no war going on there.
Modern warfare is as invisible as a thought, deprived of its meaning by distance. It is no unfettered war, but one that is controlled from small high-tech centers in various places in the world. The new (way of conducting) war is supposed to be more precise than the old one, which is why some call it “more humane.” It’s the war of an intellectual, a war United States President Barack Obama has promoted more than any of his predecessors.
In a corridor at the Pentagon where the planning for this war takes place, the walls are covered with dark wood paneling. The men from the Air Force have their offices here. A painting of a Predator, a drone on canvas, hangs next to portraits of military leaders. From the military’s perspective, no other invention has been as successful in the “war on terror” in recent years as the Predator.
The US military guides its drones from seven air bases in the United States, as well as locations abroad, including one in the East African nation of Djibouti. From its headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the CIA controls operations in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.
‘We Save Lives’
Colonel William Tart, a man with pale eyes and a clear image of the enemy, calls the drone a “natural extension of the distance.”
Until a few months ago, when he was promoted to head the US Air Force’s Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) Task Force in Langley, Tart was a commander at the Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, near Las Vegas, where he headed drone operations. Whenever he flew drones himself, he kept a photo of his wife and three daughters pasted into the checklist next to the monitors.
He doesn’t like the word drone, because he says it implies that the vehicle has its own will or ego. He prefers to call them “remotely piloted aircraft,” and he points out that most flights are for gathering information. He talks about the use of drones on humanitarian missions after the earthquake in Haiti, and about the military successes in the war in Libya: how his team fired on a truck that was pointing rockets at Misrata, and how it chased the convoy in which former Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi and his entourage were fleeing. He describes how the soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan are constantly expressing their gratitude for the assistance from the air. “We save lives,” he says.
He doesn’t say as much about the targeted killing. He claims that during his two years as operations commander at Creech, he never saw any noncombatants die, and that the drones only fire at buildings when women and children are not in them. When asked about the chain of command, Tart mentions a 275-page document called 3-09.3. Essentially, it states that drone attacks must be approved, like any other attacks by the Air Force. An officer in the country where the operations take place has to approve them.
The use of the term “clinical war” makes him angry. It reminds him of the Vietnam veterans who accuse him of never having waded through the mud or smelled blood, and who say that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
That isn’t true, says Tart, noting that he often used the one-hour drive from work back to Las Vegas to distance himself from his job. “We watch people for months. We see them playing with their dogs or doing their laundry. We know their patterns like we know our neighbors’ patterns. We even go to their funerals.” It wasn’t always easy, he says.
One of the paradoxes of drones is that, even as they increase the distance to the target, they also create proximity. “War somehow becomes personal,” says Tart.
‘I Saw Men, Women and Children Die’
A yellow house stands on the outskirts of the small city of Missoula, Montana, against a background of mountains, forests and patches of fog. The ground is coated with the first snow of the season. Bryant, now 27, is sitting on the couch in his mother’s living room. He has since left the military and is now living back at home. He keeps his head shaved and has a three-day beard. “I haven’t been dreaming in infrared for four months,” he says with a smile, as if this were a minor victory for him.
Bryant completed 6,000 flight hours during his six years in the Air Force. “I saw men, women and children die during that time,” says Bryant. “I never thought I would kill that many people. In fact, I thought I couldn’t kill anyone at all.”
After graduating from high school, Bryant wanted to become an investigative journalist. He used to go to church on Sundays, and he had a thing for redheaded cheerleaders. By the end of his first semester at college, he had already racked up thousands of dollars in debt.
He came to the military by accident. One day, while accompanying a friend who was enlisting in the army, he heard that the Air Force had its own university, and that he could get a college education for free. Bryant did so well in tests that he was assigned to an intelligence collection unit. He learned how to control the cameras and lasers on a drone, as well as to analyze ground images, maps and weather data. He became a sensor operator, more or less the equivalent to a co-pilot.
He was 20 when he flew his first mission over Iraq. It was a hot, sunny day in Nevada, but it was dark inside the container and just before daybreak in Iraq. A group of American soldiers were on their way back to their base camp. Bryant’s job was to monitor the road, to be their “guardian angel” in the sky.
He saw an eye, a shape in the asphalt. “I knew the eye from the training,” he says. To bury an improvised explosive device in the road, the enemy combatants place a tire on the road and burn it to soften the asphalt. Afterwards it looks like an eye from above.
The soldiers’ convoy was still miles away from the eye. Bryant told his supervisor, who notified the command center. He was forced to look on for several minutes, Bryant says today, as the vehicles approached the site.
“What should we do?” he asked his coworker.
But the pilot was also new on the job.
The soldiers on the ground couldn’t be reached by radio, because they were using a jamming transmitter. Bryant saw the first vehicle drive over the eye. Nothing happened.
Then the second vehicle drove over it. Bryant saw a flash beneath, followed by an explosion inside the vehicle.
Five American soldiers were killed.
From then on, Bryant couldn’t keep the five fellow Americans out of his thoughts. He began learning everything by heart, including the manuals for the Predator and the missiles, and he familiarized himself with every possible scenario. He was determined to be the best, so that this kind of thing would never happen again.
‘I Felt Disconnected from Humanity’
His shifts lasted up to 12 hours. The Air Force still had a shortage of personnel for its remote-controlled war over Iraq and Afghanistan. Drone pilots were seen as cowardly button-pushers. It was such an unpopular job that the military had to bring in retired personnel.
Bryant remembers the first time he fired a missile, killing two men instantly. As Bryant looked on, he could see a third man in mortal agony. The man’s leg was missing and he was holding his hands over the stump as his warm blood flowed onto the ground – for two long minutes. He cried on his way home, says Bryant, and he called his mother.
“I felt disconnected from humanity for almost a week,” he says, sitting in his favorite coffee shop in Missoula, where the smell of cinnamon and butter wafts in the air. He spends a lot of time there, watching people and reading books by Nietzsche and Mark Twain, sometimes getting up to change seats. He can’t sit in one place for very long anymore, he says. It makes him nervous.
His girlfriend broke up with him recently. She had asked him about the burden he carries, so he told her about it. But it proved to be a hardship she could neither cope with nor share.
When Bryant drives through his hometown, he wears aviator sunglasses and a Palestinian scarf. The inside of his Chrysler is covered with patches from his squadrons. On his Facebook page, he’s created a photo album of his coins, unofficial medals he was awarded. All he has is this one past. He wrestles with it, but it is also a source of pride.
When he was sent to Iraq in 2007, he posted the words “ready for action” on his profile. He was assigned to an American military base about 100 kilometers (63 miles) from Baghdad, where his job was to take off and land drones.
As soon as the drones reached flying altitude, pilots in the United States took over. The Predator can remain airborne for an entire day, but it is also slow, which is why it is stationed near the area of operation. Bryant posed for photos wearing sand-colored overalls and a bulletproof vest, leaning against a drone.
Two years later, the Air Force accepted him into a special unit, and he was transferred to the Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico. He and a fellow soldier shared a bungalow in a dusty town called Clovis, which consists mainly of trailers, gas stations and evangelical churches. Clovis is located hours away from the nearest city.
Bryant preferred night shifts, because that meant it was daytime in Afghanistan. In the spring, the landscape, with its snow-covered peaks and green valleys, reminded him of his native Montana. He saw people cultivating their fields, boys playing soccer and men hugging their wives and children.
When it got dark, Bryant switched to the infrared camera. Many Afghans sleep on the roof in the summer, because of the heat. “I saw them having sex with their wives. It’s two infrared spots becoming one,” he recalls.
He observed people for weeks, including Taliban fighters hiding weapons, and people who were on lists because the military, the intelligence agencies or local informants knew something about them.
“I got to know them. Until someone higher up in the chain of command gave me the order to shoot.” He felt remorse because of the children, whose fathers he was taking away. “They were good daddies,” he says.
In his free time, Bryant played video games or “World of Warcraft” on the Internet, or he went out drinking with the others. He can’t watch TV anymore because it is neither challenging or stimulating enough for him. He’s also having trouble sleeping these days.
‘There Was No Time for Feelings’
Major Vanessa Meyer, whose real name is covered with black tape, is giving a presentation at the Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico on the training of drone pilots. The Air Force plans to have enough personnel to cover its needs by 2013.
Meyer, 34, who is wearing lip gloss and a diamond on her finger, used to fly cargo planes before she became a drone pilot. Dressed in green Air Force overalls, she is standing in a training cockpit and, using a simulator to demonstrate how a drone is guided over Afghanistan. The crosshair on the monitor follows a white car until it reaches a group of mud huts. One uses the joystick to determine the drone’s direction, and the left hand is used to operate the lever that slows down or accelerates the unmanned aircraft. On an airfield behind the container, Meyer shows us the Predator, slim and shiny, and its big brother, the Reaper, which carries four missiles and a bomb. “Great planes,” she says. “They just don’t work in bad weather.”
Meyer flew drones at Creech, the air base near Las Vegas, where young men drive in and out in sports cars and mountain chains stretch across the desert like giant reptiles. Describing his time as a drone pilot in Nevada, Colonel Matt Martin wrote in his book “Predator” that, “Sometimes I felt like God hurling thunderbolts from afar.” Meyer had her first child when she was working there. She was still sitting in the cockpit, her stomach pressing up against the keyboard, in her ninth month of pregnancy.
“There was no time for feelings” when she was preparing for an attack, she says today. Of course, she says, she felt her heart beating faster and the adrenaline rushing through her body. But then she adhered strictly to the rules and focused on positioning the aircraft. “When the decision had been made, and they saw that this was an enemy, a hostile person, a legal target that was worthy of being destroyed, I had no problem with taking the shot.”
After work, she would drive home along US Highway 85 into Las Vegas, listening to country music and passing peace activists without looking at them. She rarely thought about what happened in the cockpit. But sometimes she would review the individual steps in her head, hoping to improve her performance.
Or she would go shopping. It felt strange to her, sometimes, when the woman at the register would ask: “How’s it going?” She would answer: “I’m good. How are you? Have a nice day.” When she felt restless she would go for a run. She says that being able to help the boys on the ground motivated her to get up every morning.
There was no room for the evils of the world in Meyer’s home. She and her husband, a drone pilot, didn’t talk about work. She would put on her pajamas and watch cartoons on TV or play with the baby.
Today Meyer has two small children. She wants to show them “that mommy can get to work and do a good job.” She doesn’t want to be like the women in Afghanistan she watched – submissive and covered from head to toe. “The women there are no warriors,” she says. Meyer says that he current job as a trainer is very satisfying but that, one day, she would like to return to combat duty.
**‘I Can’t Just Switch Back and Go Back to Normal Life’
**
At some point, Brandon Bryant just wanted to get out and do something else. He spent a few more months overseas, this time in Afghanistan. But then, when he returned to New Mexico, he found that he suddenly hated the cockpit, which smelled of sweat. He began spraying air freshener to get rid of the stench. He also found he wanted to do something that saved lives rather than took them away. He thought working as a survival trainer might fit the bill, although his friends tried to dissuade him.
The program that he then began working on in his bungalow in Clovis every day was called Power 90 Extreme, a boot camp-style fitness regimen. It included dumbbell training, push-ups, chin-ups and sit-ups. He also lifted weights almost every day.
On uneventful days in the cockpit, he would write in his diary, jotting down lines like: “On the battlefield there are no sides, just bloodshed. Total war. Every horror witnessed. I wish my eyes would rot.”
If he could just get into good enough shape, he thought to himself, they would let him do something different. The problem was that he was pretty good at his job.
At some point he no longer enjoyed seeing his friends. He met a girl, but she complained about his bad moods. “I can’t just switch and go back to normal life,” he told her. When he came home and couldn’t sleep, he would exercise instead. He began talking back to his superior officers.
One day he collapsed at work, doubling over and spitting blood. The doctor told him to stay home, and ordered him not to return to work until he could sleep more than four hours a night for two weeks in a row.
“Half a year later, I was back in the cockpit, flying drones,” says Bryant, sitting in his mother’s living room in Missoula. His dog whimpers and lays its head on his cheek. He can’t get to his own furniture at the moment. It’s in storage, and he doesn’t have the money to pay the bill. All he has left is his computer.
Bryant posted a drawing on Facebook the night before our interview. It depicts a couple standing, hand-in-hand, in a green meadow, looking up at the sky. A child and a dog are sitting on the ground next to them. But the meadow is just a part of the world. Beneath it is a sea of dying soldiers, propping themselves up with their last bit of strength, a sea of bodies, blood and limbs.
**Doctors at the Veterans’ Administration diagnosed Bryant with post-traumatic stress disorder. General hopes for a comfortable war – one that could be completed without emotional wounds – haven’t been fulfilled. Indeed, Bryan’s world has melded with that of the child in Afghanistan. It’s like a short circuit in the brain of the drones.
**
Why isn’t he with the Air Force anymore? There was one day, he says, when he knew that he wouldn’t sign the next contract. It was the day Bryant walked into the cockpit and heard himself saying to his coworkers: “Hey, what mother****er is going to die today?”
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
Murghi ki aik hi taang.
Drones are legal, ethical and wise: White House | World | DAWN.COM
WASHINGTON: The White House said on Tuesday that US drone strikes on potential terrorist targets were ‘legal,’ ‘ethical’ and ‘wise’ and would continue.
“These strikes are legal, they are ethical and they are wise,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told a briefing in Washington. “The US government takes great care in deciding to pursue an Al Qaeda terrorist, to ensure precision and to avoid loss of innocent life.”
Mr Carney rejected the media criticism of the US drone policy, the day after a Department of Justice memo leaked the conditions in which it viewed drone strikes targeted at American citizens abroad as legal.
The DOJ memo, which was first reported by NBC, says that the government can order the killing of American citizens abroad if there is reason to believe they are “senior operational leaders” of Al Qaeda or “an associated force”.
“If an informed, high-level official” determines that an individual is “a senior, operational leader of Al Qaeda or an associated force” and poses “an imminent threat” to the United States and that individual’s “capture is infeasible”, then killing him or her
wouldn’t violate the Constitution, says the memo.
The 16-page “white paper” provides a legal framework for killing a terrorist overseas, without violating his due process — even if the person is an American citizen.
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
Interesting thing in this report is that drone strikes in Yemen are being carried out from Saudia. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/world/middleeast/with-brennan-pick-a-light-on-drone-strikes-hazards.html?_r=0
SANA, Yemen — Late last August, a 40-year-old cleric named Salem Ahmed bin Ali Jaber stood up to deliver a speech denouncing Al Qaeda in a village mosque in far eastern Yemen.
It was a brave gesture by a father of seven who commanded great respect in the community, and it did not go unnoticed. Two days later, three members of Al Qaeda came to the mosque in the tiny village of Khashamir after 9 p.m., saying they merely wanted to talk. Mr. Jaber agreed to meet them, bringing his cousin Waleed Abdullah, a police officer, for protection.
As the five men stood arguing by a cluster of palm trees, a volley of remotely operated American missiles shot down from the night sky and incinerated them all, along with a camel that was tied up nearby.
The killing of Mr. Jaber, just the kind of leader most crucial to American efforts to eradicate Al Qaeda, was a reminder of the inherent hazards of the quasi-secret campaign of targeted killings that the United States is waging against suspected militants not just in Yemen but also in Pakistan and Somalia. Individual strikes by the Predator and Reaperdrones are almost never discussed publicly by Obama administration officials. But the clandestine war will receive a rare moment of public scrutiny on Thursday, when its chief architect, John O. Brennan, the White House counterterrorism adviser, faces a Senate confirmation hearing as President Obama’s nominee forC.I.A. director.
From his basement office in the White House, Mr. Brennan has served as the principal coordinator of a “kill list” of Qaeda operatives marked for death, overseeing drone strikes by the military and the C.I.A., and advising Mr. Obama on which strikes he should approve.
“He’s probably had more power and influence than anyone in a comparable position in the last 20 years,” said Daniel Benjamin, who recently stepped down as the State Department’s top counterterrorism official and now teaches at Dartmouth. “He’s had enormous sway over the intelligence community. He’s had a profound impact on how the military does counterterrorism.”
Mr. Brennan, a former C.I.A. station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, has taken a particular interest in Yemen, sounding early alarms within the administration about the threat developing there, working closely with neighboring Saudi Arabia to gain approval for a secret C.I.A. drone base there that is used for American strikes, and making the impoverished desert nation a test case for American counterterrorism strategy.
In recent years, both C.I.A. and Pentagon counterterrorism officials have pressed for greater freedom to attack suspected militants, and colleagues say Mr. Brennan has often been a restraining voice. The strikes have killed a number of operatives of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terrorist network’s affiliate in Yemen, including Said Ali al-Shihri, a deputy leader of the group, and the American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.
But they have also claimed civilians like Mr. Jaber and have raised troubling questions that apply to Pakistan and Somalia as well: Could the targeted killing campaign be creating more militants in Yemen than it is killing? And is it in America’s long-term interest to be waging war against a self-renewing insurgency inside a country about which Washington has at best a hazy understanding?
Several former top military and intelligence officials — including Stanley A. McChrystal, the retired general who led the Joint Special Operations Command, which has responsibility for the military’s drone strikes, and Michael V. Hayden, the former C.I.A. director — have raised concerns that the drone wars in Pakistan and Yemen are increasingly targeting low-level militants who do not pose a direct threat to the United States.
In an interview with Reuters, General McChrystal said that drones could be a useful tool but were “hated on a visceral level” in some of the places where they were used and contributed to a “perception of American arrogance.”
Mr. Brennan has aggressively defended the accuracy of the drone strikes, and the rate of civilian casualties has gone down considerably since the attacks began in Yemen in 2009. He has also largely dismissed criticism that the drone campaign has tarnished America’s image in Yemen and has been an effective recruiting tool for Al Qaeda.
“In fact, we see the opposite,” Mr. Brennan said during a speech last year. “Our Yemeni partners are more eager to work with us. Yemeni citizens who have been freed from the hellish grip of A.Q.A.P. are more eager, not less, to work with the Yemeni government.”
Christopher Swift, a researcher at Georgetown University who spent last summer in Yemen studying the reaction to the strikes, said he thought Mr. Brennan’s comments missed the broader impact.
“What Brennan said accurately reflected people in the security apparatus who he speaks to when he goes to Yemen,” Mr. Swift said. “It doesn’t reflect the views of the man in the street, of young human rights activists, of the political opposition.”
Though Mr. Swift said he thought that critics had exaggerated the role of the strikes in generating recruits for Al Qaeda, “in the political sphere, the perception is that the U.S. is colluding with the Yemeni government in a covert war against the Yemeni people.”
“Even if we’re winning in the military domain,” Mr. Swift said, “drones may be undermining our long-term interest in the goal of a stable Yemen with a functional political system and economy.”
**A Parallel Campaign
**
American officials have never explained in public why the C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command are carrying out parallel drone campaigns in Yemen. Privately, however, they describe an arrangement that has evolved since the frantic, ad hoc early days of America’s war there.
The first strike in Yemen ordered by the Obama administration, in December 2009, was by all accounts a disaster. American cruise missiles carrying cluster munitions killed dozens of civilians, including many women and children. Another strike, six months later, killed a popular deputy governor, inciting angry demonstrations and an attack that shut down a critical oil pipeline.
**Not long afterward, the C.I.A. began quietly building a drone base in Saudi Arabia to carry out strikes in Yemen. American officials said that the first time the C.I.A. used the Saudi base was to kill Mr. Awlaki in September 2011.
**
Since then, officials said, the C.I.A. has been given the mission of hunting and killing “high-value targets” in Yemen — the leaders of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula who Obama administration lawyers have determined pose a direct threat to the United States. When the C.I.A. obtains specific intelligence on the whereabouts of someone on its kill list, an American drone can carry out a strike without the permission of Yemen’s government.
There is, however, a tighter leash on the Pentagon’s drones. According to American officials, the Joint Special Operations Command must get the Yemeni government’s approval before launching a drone strike. This restriction is in place, officials said, because the military’s drone campaign is closely tied to counterterrorism operations conducted by Yemeni special operations troops.
Yemen’s military is fighting its own counterinsurgency battle against Islamic militants, who gained and then lost control over large swaths of the country last year. Often, American military strikes in Yemen are masked as Yemeni government operations.
Moreover, Mr. Obama demanded early on that each American military strike in Yemen be approved by a committee in Washington representing the national security agencies. The C.I.A. strikes, by contrast, resulted from a far more closed process inside the agency. Mr. Brennan plays a role in overseeing all the strikes.
There have been at least five drone strikes in Yemen since the start of the year, killing at least 24 people. That continues a remarkable acceleration over the past two years in a program that has carried out at least 63 airstrikes since 2009, according to The Long War Journal, a Web site that collects public data on the strikes, with an estimated death toll in the hundreds. Many of the militants reported killed recently were very young and do not appear to have had any important role with Al Qaeda.
“Even with Al Qaeda, there are degrees — some of these young guys getting killed have just been recruited and barely known what terrorism means,” said Naji al Zaydi, a former governor of Marib Province, who has been a vocal opponent of Al Qaeda and a supporter of Yemen’s president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
Mr. Zaydi, a prominent tribal figure from an area that has long been associated with members of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate, pointed out that the identity and background of these men were no mystery in Yemen’s interlinked tribal culture.
In one recent case, on Jan. 23, a drone strike in a village east of Sana killed a 21-year-old university student named Saleem Hussein Jamal and his cousin, a 33-year-old teacher named Ali Ali Nasser Jamal, who happened to have been traveling with him. According to relatives and neighbors of the two men, they were driving home from a nearby town called Jahana when five strangers offered to pay them for a ride. The drone-fired missile hit the vehicle, a twin-cab Toyota Hilux, just outside the village of Masnaa at about 9 p.m. The strangers were later identified in Yemeni news reports as members of Al Qaeda, though apparently not high-ranking ones.
After the strike, villagers were left to identify their two dead relatives from identity cards, scraps of clothing and the license plate of Mr. Jamal’s Toyota; the seven bodies were shredded beyond recognition, as cellphone photos taken at the scene attest. “We found eyes, but there were no faces left,” said Abdullah Faqih, a student who knew both of the dead cousins.
Although most Yemenis are reluctant to admit it publicly, there does appear to be widespread support for the American drone strikes that hit substantial Qaeda figures like Mr. Shihri, a Saudi and the affiliate’s deputy leader, who died in January of wounds received in a drone strike late last year.
Al Qaeda has done far more damage in Yemen than it has in the United States, and one episode reinforced public disgust last May, when a suicide bomber struck a military parade rehearsal in the Yemeni capital, killing more than 100 people.
Moreover, many Yemenis reluctantly admit that there is a need for foreign help: Yemen’s own efforts to strike at the terrorist group have often been compromised by weak, divided military forces; widespread corruption; and even support for Al Qaeda within pockets of the intelligence and security agencies.
Yet even as both Mr. Brennan and Mr. Hadi, the Yemeni president, praise the drone technology for its accuracy, other Yemenis often point out that it can be very difficult to isolate members of Al Qaeda, thanks to the group’s complex ties and long history in Yemen.
This may account for a pattern in many of the drone strikes: a drone hovers over an area for weeks on end before a strike takes place, presumably waiting until identities are confirmed and the targets can be struck without anyone else present.
In the strike that killed Mr. Jaber, the cleric, that was not enough. At least one drone had been overhead every day for about a month, provoking high anxiety among local people, said Aref bin Ali Jaber, a tradesman who is related to the cleric. “After the drone hit, everyone was so frightened it would come back,” Mr. Jaber said. “Children especially were affected; my 15-year-old daughter refuses to be alone and has had to sleep with me and my wife after that.”
**Anger at America
**
In the days afterward, the people of the village vented their fury at the Americans with protests and briefly blocked a road. It is difficult to know what the long-term effects of the deaths will be, though some in the town — as in other areas where drones have killed civilians — say there was an upwelling of support for Al Qaeda, because such a move is seen as the only way to retaliate against the United States.
Innocents aside, even members of Al Qaeda invariably belong to a tribe, and when they are killed in drone strikes, their relatives — whatever their feelings about Al Qaeda — often swear to exact revenge on America.
“Al Qaeda always gives money to the family,” said Hussein Ahmed Othman al Arwali, a tribal sheik from an area south of the capital called Mudhia, where Qaeda militants fought pitched battles with Yemeni soldiers last year. “Al Qaeda’s leaders may be killed by drones, but the group still has its money, and people are still joining. For young men who are poor, the incentives are very strong: they offer you marriage, or money, and the ideological part works for some people.”
In some cases, drones have killed members of Al Qaeda when it seemed that they might easily have been arrested or captured, according to a number of Yemeni officials and tribal figures. One figure in particular has stood out: Adnan al Qadhi, who was killed, apparently in a drone strike, in early November in a town near the capital.
Mr. Qadhi was an avowed supporter of Al Qaeda, but he also had recently served as a mediator for the Yemeni government with other jihadists, and was drawing a government salary at the time of his death. He was not in hiding, and his house is within sight of large houses owned by a former president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and other leading figures.
Whatever the success of the drone strikes, some Yemenis wonder why there is not more reliance on their country’s elite counterterrorism unit, which was trained in the United States as part of the close cooperation between the two countries that Mr. Brennan has engineered. One member of the unit, speaking on the condition of anonymity, expressed great frustration that his unit had not been deployed on such missions, and had in fact been posted to traffic duty in the capital in recent weeks, even as the drone strikes intensified.
“For sure, we could be going after some of these guys,” the officer said. “That’s what we’re trained to do, and the Americans trained us. It doesn’t make sense.”
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
Edited: No pictures/videos of the dead, please. Thank you.
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
The attitude of the US administration, specially that of Obama, has been sickening to say the least. They have justified random violence against civilians, which puts them square in the category of terrorism. Sad part is, a major chunk of people in Pakistan support this stuff.
The white house has declared it as legal. I wish Pakistan parliament had the guts to pass a legislation classifying drone strikes as illegal. All we have heard are hollow words of condemnation. If drone strikes are classified as illegal by the parliament, then it would make it an automatic crime, or an act of war for the US to conduct them on Pakistani soil. But unfortunately, our 'leaders' are easy buys.
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
Why is it that American officials realise Pakistan hatred towards drone strikes after leaving office? :hmmm:
McChrystal opposes drone strikes | World | DAWN.COM
McChrystal opposes drone strikes
At the launching ceremony of his book, “My Share of the Task”, on Friday evening, the retired general repeated what he had said earlier that US drone strikes were “hated on a visceral level”. — File Photo by AP
WASHINGTON: There’s widespread resentment against drone strikes in Pakistan, says the former commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, Gen Stanley McChrystal.
At the launching ceremony of his book, “My Share of the Task”, on Friday evening, the retired general repeated what he had said earlier that US drone strikes were “hated on a visceral level”.
He warned that too many drone strikes in Pakistan without identifying suspected militants individually can be a bad thing.
Gen McChrystal said he understood why Pakistanis, even in the areas not affected by the drones, reacted negatively against the strikes.
He asked the Americans how they would react if a neighbouring country like Mexico started firing drone missiles at targets in Texas.
The Pakistanis, he said, saw the drones as a demonstration of America’s might against their nation and reacted accordingly.
“What scares me about drone strikes is how they are perceived around the world,” Gen McChrystal said in an earlier interview.
“The resentment created by American use of unmanned strikes … is much greater than the average American appreciates. They are hated on a visceral level, even by people who’ve never seen one or seen the effects of one.”
The former US commander urged his government to use the missiles responsibly.
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
The attitude of the US administration, specially that of Obama, has been sickening to say the least. They have justified random violence against civilians, which puts them square in the category of terrorism. Sad part is, a major chunk of people in Pakistan support this stuff.
The white house has declared it as legal. I wish Pakistan parliament had the guts to pass a legislation classifying drone strikes as illegal. All we have heard are hollow words of condemnation. If drone strikes are classified as illegal by the parliament, then it would make it an automatic crime, or an act of war for the US to conduct them on Pakistani soil. But unfortunately, our 'leaders' are easy buys.
They have passed resolutions but we know, courtesy of wikileaks, what the then PM gillani told the american diplomats. To paraphrase, you keep on droning while we keep on protesting..
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
Its interesting if the last two drone strikes were not carried out by the Americans.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/world/asia/us-disavows-2-drone-strikes-over-pakistan.html?hp&_r=0
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — When news of the two latest drone strikes emerged from Pakistan’s tribal belt in early February, it seemed to be business as usual by the C.I.A.
Local and international media reports, citing unnamed Pakistani officials, carried typical details: swarms of American drones had swooped into remote areas, killing up to nine people, including two senior commanders of Al Qaeda.
In Islamabad, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry lodged an official protest with the American Embassy.
Yet there was one problem, according to three American officials with knowledge of the program: The United States did not carry out those attacks.
“They were not ours,” said one of the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the drone program’s secrecy. “We haven’t had any kinetic activity since January.”
What exactly took place in those remote tribal villages, far from outside scrutiny, is unclear. But the Americans’ best guess is that one or possibly both of the strikes were carried out by the Pakistani military and falsely attributed to the C.I.A. to avoid criticism from the Pakistani public.
E-mail and phone messages seeking comment from the Pakistani military were not returned.
If the American version is true, it is a striking irony: In the early years of the drone campaign, the Pakistani Army falsely claimed responsibility for American drone strikes in an attempt to mask C.I.A. activities on its soil. Now, the Americans suggest, the Pakistani military may be using the same program to disguise its own operations.
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: White House
Its interesting if the last two drone strikes were not carried out by the Americans.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/world/asia/us-disavows-2-drone-strikes-over-pakistan.html?hp&_r=0
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — When news of the two latest drone strikes emerged from Pakistan’s tribal belt in early February, it seemed to be business as usual by the C.I.A.
Local and international media reports, citing unnamed Pakistani officials, carried typical details: swarms of American drones had swooped into remote areas, killing up to nine people, including two senior commanders of Al Qaeda.
In Islamabad, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry lodged an official protest with the American Embassy.
Yet there was one problem, according to three American officials with knowledge of the program: The United States did not carry out those attacks.
“They were not ours,” said one of the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the drone program’s secrecy. “We haven’t had any kinetic activity since January.”
What exactly took place in those remote tribal villages, far from outside scrutiny, is unclear. But the Americans’ best guess is that one or possibly both of the strikes were carried out by the Pakistani military and falsely attributed to the C.I.A. to avoid criticism from the Pakistani public.
E-mail and phone messages seeking comment from the Pakistani military were not returned.
If the American version is true, it is a striking irony: In the early years of the drone campaign, the Pakistani Army falsely claimed responsibility for American drone strikes in an attempt to mask C.I.A. activities on its soil. Now, the Americans suggest, the Pakistani military may be using the same program to disguise its own operations.
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: White House
Pakistan Army has rebutted the news that Pakistan carried out the last two drone strikes. Maybe aliens carried them out.
Pakistan Army rejects NYT report on drone strikes | Pakistan | DAWN.COM
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: White House
Obama’s Drone Debacle
You know it’s not a good day for the Obama administration when a paragon of the Tea Party right is roasting the president and liberal twitter feeds are lighting up in support. But that’s exactly what happened earlier this week when Kentucky Senator Rand Paul mounted his “talking filibuster” to block the confirmation of CIA nominee John Brennan. Paul kept up the parliamentary maneuver for 13 hours in an effort to extract answers from the administration about its covert drone program, and particularly the question of whether it is legal to target American citizens on U.S. soil.
It was a strange-bedfellows moment that harkened back to the Clinton era, when government-fearing elements of the GOP joined forces with the civil-libertarian left to assail over-zealous law-enforcement tactics. And while Brennan’s nomination was never really in jeopardy—he was confirmed yesterday by a comfortable margin—Paul succeeded in forcing Obama officials to publicly address a set of national security issues that has always made them feel distinctly uncomfortable.
How could the administration have allowed itself to get tangled up in an embarrassing controversy over deeply hypothetical questions like whether the military could fire a drone strike at an American citizen sitting in a cafe? One reason, of course, is the circus that confirmations have become—proxy battles for the permanent political conflict between Republicans and the White House. But perhaps the biggest reason has been the administration’s unwillingness to share information about its drone program, which has fed the perception among both Republicans and Democrats that it has an imperious, high-handed attitude toward Congress. And when officials have answered questions from Congress, the responses have often been so pettifogging and over-lawyered that they’ve done more harm than good.
The irony is that Obama and most of his top aides are personally in favor of more rather than less transparency. But in the end, they have repeatedly deferred to secrecy obsessed spooks and handwringing lawyers whose default position has been to keep things under wraps. “It’s clear that the president and the attorney general both want more transparency,” says Matthew Miller, a former senior Justice Department official. “But the bureaucracy has once again thrown sand in the gears and slowed that down.”
Here’s your condensed U.S. drone program explainer.
“We realized this was going to be a public relations debacle,” recalls a former senior administration who advocated for greater transparency.
The drones mess also reflects Obama’s tortured, Solomonic approach to dealing with difficult national security issues. In seeking to balance transparency and security, Obama has pursued a middle path that, in the end, has satisfied nobody. And in the case of drones, that approach has been at odds with a basic Washington imperative: it is almost always better to be transparent earlier, lest you end up having to disclose even more later. “The word on the street,” says a former administration national security official, “is they’ll end up giving away the farm, all the animals, and the John Deere equipment by the time this is done.”
One thing you can say about Team Obama: there was no lack of internal debate about the need to be more transparent. The discussions began in the aftermath of the September 30, 2011 drone strike against Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American preacher and senior al Qaeda operative. They intensified a few weeks later when Awlaki’s son, also a U.S. citizen, was mistakenly killed in another drone attack in Yemen. “We realized this was going to be a public relations debacle,” recalls a former senior administration who advocated for greater transparency. Sure enough, academics and national security experts began writing more critically about the drone policy as well as the administration’s penchant for secrecy. One particularly stinging op-ed piece, which ran in The Washington Post, was by a former Bush administration State Department official; it appeared under the headline “Will drones strikes become Obama’s Guantanamo?”
That fall, then Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough convened a series of Situation Room meetings to hash out how much to disclose, according to three senior administration officials. At one end of the spectrum was Harold Koh, the State Department’s legal adviser, who argued that the White House should make public a redacted version of the Justice Department legal opinion authorizing the targeted killings of U.S. citizens. In addition, Koh argued for turning over the un-redacted, classified version of the opinion to Congress. That position was aggressively opposed by the intelligence community and Justice Department lawyers with the Office of Legal Counsel: the spooks were opposed to any disclosures that would lift the veil on a covert CIA program, and the OLC lawyers didn’t want to release legal opinions that they viewed as privileged advice to their client, the president. Meanwhile, lawyers for the White House fretted that too much disclosure could weaken their stance in pending litigation. (The New York Times had filed a lawsuit against the administration under the Freedom of Information Act seeking the Justice Department legal opinion in the Awlaki case.)
The issue came to a head at a Situation Room meeting in November, according to four participants. By then, officials from the intelligence community, Justice, and the White House had begun moving toward a compromise position: publicly disclosing the legal reasoning behind the Awlaki killing, but keeping the full Justice Department opinion under wraps. The State Department’s Koh kept pushing for the maximum amount of disclosure. It would come down to what McDonough cheekily called the “half Monty” versus the “full Monty.”
In the end, the White House signed off on the half Monty. A Justice Department lawyer named Stuart Delery set out to produce a stripped down version of the memo. But the White House had still not decided what form the disclosure would take. One proposal was an op-ed piece that would run under Holder’s byline, but Delery’s document ended up being so long that option was scrapped. Another possibility was releasing a white paper to the public. In the end, the White House settled on letting Holder deliver a so-called “top-wave” speech, an address that would deal with a host of pressing national security issues and would include a section on the legal rationale behind killing American citizens. But, critically, the administration did not give anything separately to Congress.
Soon thereafter, a draft of the speech was sent over to the White House for approval. For reasons that remain unclear, it languished on National Security Adviser Tom Donilon’s desk for months. Then, in January 2012, it was circulated by the National Security Council for final approval. Holder delivered the speech at the University of Chicago School of Law that March. His comments did not create much of a stir at the time—other than from law professor types who quibbled with his assertion that the due process requirement contemplated by the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment did not mandate “judicial process.” Translation: Awlaki wasn’t entitled to a trial before being whacked by a CIA drone. But it did get noticed on the Senate and House Intelligence committees, which had been pushing for more access to information on the administration’s drone program as part of their oversight responsibilities. Griped one Senate staffer, “If they were willing to talk about it publicly, they should have been willing to brief the committees more fulsomely.”
In June, Obama officials finally turned over the now-famous “white paper” to the committee, with admonitions that they not leak it. But for Congress, it was too little too late. The document did not contain a lot that went substantively beyond the Holder speech, and frustration was building among lawmakers. Democrat Ron Wyden began leading the charge for all of the Justice Department opinions relating to drones—and by this winter, Congress had its leverage to demand that they be turned over: the nomination of John Brennan, architect of the Obama drone program, to be CIA director.
In the end, the intelligence committees got most of what they wanted, including the complete, un-redacted Justice Department memo justifying the targeting of American citizens—the full Monty that Koh had argued for in the first place. But by then, Congress was hungry for more. And that’s when Rand Paul started talking.
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Klaidman, a former NEWSWEEK managing editor, is writing a book on President Obama and terrorism to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2012.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at [EMAIL=“[email protected]”][email protected].