-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
In a 2007 report, entitled Underlying Reasons for Success and Failure of Terrorist Attacks (pdf) and prepared for Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate by Homeland Security Institute (and recently scrubbed from their web site, here) notes: “a favorite tactic of Hamas, the “double tap;” a device is set off, and when police and other first responders arrive, a second, larger device is set off to inflict more casualties and spread panic.”
It has been documented that this terrorist tactic has been embraced by President Obama.
Obama has adopted the “double tap” tactic by using second drone attacks to kill the first responders to the first drone attacks. Funerals for the victims of the first drone attack have also been the target of second drone attacks. These second attacks have caused the deaths of between 282 and 535 civilians, and at least 60 children.
In a comment that could have come out of the Bush/Cheney/Rove administration, a senior American counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said:
Let’s be under no illusions — there are a number of elements who would like nothing more than to malign these efforts and help Al Qaeda succeed.
This Obama administration official has committed the irrelevant conclusion (ignoratio elenchi) fallacy. The conclusion that there are those who would help Al Qaeda is not relevant to the question of accuracy of the documentation.
Obama’s “double tap” policy is nothing short of despicable. Obama has brought dishonor to America and to our founding principles. When America commits the same actions that we condemn when used by terrorists, we become terrorists. The liberals’ silence on this issue is shameful. If George W. Bush had adopted this tactic, the cries of protest would have been deafening.
We wanted change and we got it, from bad to worse.
H/T: Glenn Greenwald, Tom Engelhardt, Scott Shane, Juan Cole, Chris Bertram, Justin Elliott, Glenn Greenwald.
Dredd,
Thank you. I’ve really been trying to understand what is happening in our society. It seems that the govt. has been successful in tearing down a functioning democracy using all of the following (well-worn but still effective) tactics:
1. make certain to have an external enemy. Having a “war on terrorism” insures we will always be at war with East Asia.
2. make certain to have internal enemies. These began as “outlier” groups such as Muslims. Now, “outlier” also includes peace activists/OWS social justice groups or anyone who disagrees with the policies of this govt. This tactic is described accurately as, “First the Came”…
3. control and manipulate the information available to the population–see the “newz media” for that This makes it nearly impossible to understand what is actually happening. Into the vacuum comes the pre manufactured “facts” conveniently provided by the helpful govt.
4. make certain people do not know their rights or the law or if they do know them, make certain people know that their rights are meaningless–mission accomplished both foreign and domestically!
5. any authoritarian regime relies on many types of followers/accomplices to keep its power:
a. paid lackies: (no problem finding those!) These include violent mercenary thugs deployed both foreign and domestically. Paid writers, infiltrators, etc. these people are everywhere, including blogs such as this.
b. true believers: There must be this set of followers for the regime to truly take hold. These are largely people who want to do good by helping the leader. Often these are people who gain a little bit of or at least feeling of power as a reward for being “helpful”. For example, academics might get a taste of access to power if they write about how great the economy is doing even when they know it is not. Here is where propaganda depicting the leader as a benevolent father figure or religious leader is pivotal.
There are many other aspects of what is going on that I haven’t mentioned and don’t know about which I’m certain others could fill in. These are just some things I see happening.
After reading ‘Legacy of Ashes’ it is appalling to realize that everything the CIA touches turns to sh*t. Past performances of this organization are true indicators of future performance. Is this a feature or a bug?.
Jill 1, June 10, 2012 at 10:41 am
Drone porn articles in the MSM are written to solidify the father/child relationship of Obama and his supporters. Notice that Obama is portrayed as a wise, just, thoughtful man. He even consults his “priest”, Brennan for advice on whom to kill. Every Tuesday the father who cares so much for his children, looks over the evidence to find who might be dangerous to them. Then kindly, masterfully, and well, maybe skirting the law a little, the good father takes out anyone who might endanger his children. Read the articles, they all portray Obama as 1. a father figure and 2. a religious figure. That is propaganda and we need to pay attention to what we are being sold.
These themes, 1. the wise father and 2. the bodhisattva president are powerful in our society. But these are attributes have no place when evaluating the actions of a president.
…
==============================================
Very well said.
There are many papers and treatises that show you are spot on in your analysis.
“And, anyway, what virtues ever last
When power won intoxicates all day”
Aye, there’s the rub.
Michael Murry 1, June 10, 2012 at 10:56 am
======================
Truthful poem.
Groundhog Day! Groundhog Day!
or (in Terza Rima sonnets):
Déjà-vu, Redux
The changing of the guard brought no relief
To those who thought they’d voted out the old.
Instead, the ones who hoped soon came to grief
As pointless wars dragged on, with “new” lies told
That sounded like a replay, word-for-word,
Except for better syntax smoothly sold,
But meaning just the same as ever heard:
The status quo before and after shuns
The merest hint of change, however slurred.
The ones who “lost” kept winning while the ones
Who “won” soon found that they had really not;
That they had bought no butter – only guns.
You’d think that they could figure out the plot:
Not change they wanted, just the same they got.
He said that if elected, things would change;
So, once in office, change he did – and fast.
He pitched his voice just slightly out of range
So that which he had promised in the past
He afterwards could claim he didn’t say.
And, anyway, what virtues ever last
When power won intoxicates all day
And through the night, as well, until the dawn?
The devils, round the clock, come out to play
While sycophants and jesters kneel and fawn.
Our new Prince Charming revels in command
Of armies quartered overseas that spawn,
Through pointless violence, a deadly sand
That now blows back, eroding our own land.
The Law of Karma has a truth to tell:
That actions taken with a bad intent
Reap only consequences bad as well
And he who bombs the poor and won’t relent
Will find himself defending what he can’t
With all the lies the clever can invent.
No matter how well spun the bogus slant,
The recrudescent, bald resort to threat
Will always mark reactionary rant;
And tiresome war waged only on a bet
Has long since raised the overdue alarm.
The bankrupt deadbeat nation now must fret,
That having lost a hand, a leg, an arm,
It now seems poised to lose the whole damn farm.
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2009
Elaine,
Thanks for all the detailed information, but bad people do bad things somewhere on planet Earth every day. Therefore, America must do bad things everywhere, every day, too. Can’t have a handful of impoverished bad people taking unfair advantage of the World’s Only Superpower.
As well, we must never forget that America invaded Iraq to depose a dictator we did not fear so as to deprive him of weapons he did not possess in retaliation for an attack upon us in which he did not participate. In other words: because we wanted to and could.
Then, too, we have to fight them over there so that we don’t have to fight them here where our own government takes our freedoms from us so that the bad people over there won’t hate us for having them.
And in only a few more Friedman Units, the tipping point will turn the corner and begin connecting the dots on the ink-stained, flypaper dominoes in the tunnel at the end of the light.
And finally, the American Imperial Military Computer Virus in BASIC.
START: GO TO START
Drone porn articles in the MSM are written to solidify the father/child relationship of Obama and his supporters. Notice that Obama is portrayed as a wise, just, thoughtful man. He even consults his “priest”, Brennan for advice on whom to kill. Every Tuesday the father who cares so much for his children, looks over the evidence to find who might be dangerous to them. Then kindly, masterfully, and well, maybe skirting the law a little, the good father takes out anyone who might endanger his children. Read the articles, they all portray Obama as 1. a father figure and 2. a religious figure. That is propaganda and we need to pay attention to what we are being sold.
These themes, 1. the wise father and 2. the bodhisattva president are powerful in our society. But these are attributes have no place when evaluating the actions of a president. A president is not a father figure to the people, he is not the religious head of this nation. He is an elected representative of the people.
As such, every action the president takes is the business of the people. It needs the closest scrutiny and the most well-informed analysis. Why is this the very thing missing from our newz?
It is not opinion that what Obama is doing violates US and international law. It is not an opinion that killing civilians in the way this govt. is doing is morally reprehensible. These things, like torture before it, became open to “debate” because people ceded their power and their intellect to a leader whom they believed would keep them “safe”. That was disastrous under Bush and it has doubled down as a disaster under Obama.
Remember, the Obama administration “counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants”, so whenever you hear the word militant, think “someone who may or may not be a legitimate target.”
In ‘just war’ theory, one usually attempts to assess whether the benefits outweigh the risks (i.e. losses) before going to war. The problem is that such an assessment usually excludes those who might become losses: the military or CIA decides what an acceptable risk is (if they even go through such a process). If you asked the civilians on the ground, however, whether they are happy to put their lives on the line for American interests I’m sure you would get a completely different answer. The American government is prepared to jeopardise Afghani/Pakistani civilians for the sake of US citizens, oops I mean US interests, thus indicating the relative value the American government assigns to the lives of civilians in these lands. Truly all men are born equal, but some are born more equal than others. At least NATO might give you an apology, however worthless that is. Nevertheless, onto the next!
Drone death in Yemen of an American teenager
By Michelle Shephard
National Security Reporter
Published On Sat Apr 14 2012
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1161432–drone-death-in-yemen-of-an-american-teenager
Excerpt:
SANAA, YEMEN— With the house still quiet with slumber, the 15-year-old left a letter for his mother begging forgiveness, then crawled out a second-storey kitchen window and dropped to the garden below.
Abdulrahman al Awlaki crossed the front yard past potted plants and a carnival ride graveyard — Dumbo, Donald Duck, an arched seal balancing a beach ball — debris from his uncle Omar’s failed business venture to install rides in local shopping malls.
The family’s guard saw the grade nine student with a mop of curly hair leave the front gate at about 6:30 a.m. that morning on Sept. 4. Abdulrahman then made his way to the gates of Bab al-Yemen to catch a bus to a cousin’s house in Shabwa province in the south.
As he crossed the desert on his six-hour journey, his family awoke to news of his disappearance.
“He wrote to his mother, ‘I am sorry for leaving in this kind of way. Forgive me. I miss my father and want to see if I can go and talk to him,’ ” said the boy’s grandfather, Nasser al Awlaki, as he sipped tea in his lavish home. “ ‘I will be coming back in a few days.’ ”
“He was very obedient to everybody in the house,” said Awlaki, “and that’s why it was a surprise that he would make that kind of decision.”
Nine days later, Abdulrahman turned 16.
He never found his father, the radical online preacher Anwar al Awlaki, who a U.S. congresswoman had called “Terrorist Number One.”
The teen wasn’t even in the right part of the country.
On Sept. 30, CIA-directed hellfire missiles blasted a target in northern Yemen, killing his father and ending the two-year manhunt for the cleric whose preaching encouraged plots in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada.
Anwar al Awlaki was born in the United States, having grown up in the West after his father, Nasser, moved his family there to study.
Few mourned Awlaki’s death, but there was concern about the precedent. How could U.S. President Barack Obama order an American killed without any review?
There has been considerably less talk about what happened two weeks later.
On Oct. 14, U.S. drones pounded targets again, this time hundreds of kilometres away in the southeastern region of Azzan.
Abdulrahman, also born in the U.S., and his 17-year-old cousin were among the seven killed. They were apparently having a barbecue.
At first, media outlets reported that Abdulrahman was five years older than his actual age, had been militant like his father and, that a high-value Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) target was also among the dead.
But his grandfather, Nasser al Awlaki, a Fulbright scholar, former agricultural minister and prominent figure in Yemen, said Abdulrahman had nothing to do with his father since he had gone into hiding in 2009.
Nasser al Awlaki has never apologized for his son’s radical views, but said he had also worked hard to insulate his grandchildren from the controversy. He attempted, he said, to give them a “normal life.”
Furious at the inaccurate reporting, he released his grandson’s birth certificate. It reads: “Abdulrahman Anwar al-Aulaqi (another English spelling of the last name). Born: Denver, Colorado. Sept. 13, 1995.”
It later emerged, but was not widely reported, that the strike did not kill its purported target, AQAP’s media chief, Egyptian Ibrahim al Bana.
The U.S. administration has refused comment.
It is unclear whether Abdulrahman was the target or if the U.S. had bad information and was going after Bana, or someone else. Either way, Awlaki said he wants answers.
So do the student demonstrators who forced former president Ali Abdullah Saleh from power, many of whom knew Abdulrahman. They carried posters in Change Square with his picture last year and the words: “The Assassination of Childhood.”
“We just don’t know why they did that,” Awlaki said of the U.S. strike. “Is it because Abdulrahman was there? It’s very possible, but I cannot claim with certainty what happened. Is it a blunder on their side?
“They cannot claim he’s collateral damage.”
DRONES and U.S. directed missions have killed hundreds in Yemen in the past four years, some hitting AQAP targets, many more striking civilians.
Aside from the moral and legal implications, analysts in Yemen and the U.S. question their effectiveness against terrorism.
Take, for instance, a strike in Abyan province in December 2009 that killed 55. Among the dead were 14 women and 21 children.
The U.S. refused to acknowledge the botched mission. Compare this to the reaction last month when 17 Afghan citizens were slaughtered, allegedly by U.S. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales. Obama released a statement promising to “establish the facts as quickly as possible and to hold fully accountable anyone responsible.” The families of the dead were reportedly offered $50,000 each in “condolence payments.”
Fresh evidence of CIA civilian deaths in Pakistan revealed: Jones
2/28/12
http://www.juancole.com/bureau-of-investigative-journalism
Two major investigations have provided fresh evidence that civilians are continuing to be killed in Pakistan’s tribal areas by CIA drones – despite aggressive Agency denials.
In a study of ten major drone strikes in Pakistan since 2010, global news agency Associated Press deployed a field reporter to Waziristan and questioned more than 80 local people about ten CIA attacks. The results generally confirm the accuracy of original credible media reports – and in two cases identify previously unrecorded civilian deaths.
In a further case, in which an anonymous US official had previously attacked the Bureau’s findings of six civilian deaths in a 2011 strike, AP’s report has confirmed the Bureau’s work.
Anglo-American legal charity Reprieve has also filed a case with the United Nations Human Rights Council, based on sworn affidavits by 18 family members of civilians killed in CIA attacks – many of them children. Reprieve is calling on the UNHRC ‘to condemn the attacks as illegal human rights violations.’
New casualties
The Associated Press investigation, authored by the agency’s Islamabad chief Sebastian Abbot, represents one of the largest field studies yet into casualties of CIA drone strikes.
AP’s field reporter interviewed more than 80 local civilians in Waziristan in connection with 10 major CIA strikes since 2010. It found that of 194 people killed in the strikes, 138 were confirmed as militants:
The remaining 56 were either civilians or tribal police, and 38 of them were killed in a single attack on March 17, 2011. Excluding that strike, which inflicted one of the worst civilian death tolls since the drone program started in Pakistan, nearly 90 percent of the people killed were militants, villagers said.
In two of the ten cases AP has turned up previously-unreported civilian casualties.
On August 14 2010 AP found that seven civilians died – including a ten year old child – alongside seven Pakistan Taliban. The deaths occurred during Ramadan prayers. Until now it had not been known that civilians had died in the attack. US officials told AP that its own assessments indicated all those killed were militants.
On April 22 2011, AP confirms that three children and two women were among 25 dead in an attack on a guest house where militants were staying. Three named eyewitnesses in the village of Spinwan confirmed that the civilians had died – two had attended their funerals.
Bureau findings confirmed
The AP investigation has also independently confirmed that six civilians died alongside ten Taliban in an attack on a roadside restaurant on May 6 2011.
Interesting articles, Elaine.
And they play to a discussion I’m having with mespo on the Panetta/Drone strikes thread.
Not in mespo’s favor I might add.
First the ‘targeted killing’ campaign, then the targeted propaganda campaign
Officially, the CIA insists its drone war is a state secret, yet we’re now seeing a concerted PR effort to sanitise its dubious legality
Jameel Jaffer and Nathan Wessler
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 6 June 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/06/targeted-killing-campaign-propaganda
Excerpt:
A story in last week’s New York Times painted a remarkably detailed picture of the US government’s so-called “targeted killing” campaign, a campaign that involves the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) to kill suspected insurgents and terrorists and, it turns out, many, many others, as well. The story, written by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, discussed the CIA’s choice of munitions, its efforts to avoid civilian casualties, and its method for calculating the number of civilians killed in any given strike. The story also underscored the extent to which President Obama himself is involved in overseeing the campaign – and even in selecting its targets.
The story has already received a great deal of coverage, but two aspects of it deserve more attention.
The first has to do with the targeted killing campaign itself. Long before the New York Times story was published, human rights organizations questioned the campaign’s lawfulness. At the ACLU, we sued (pdf) over elements of the campaign two years ago, contending that the US government’s then-proposed (and now-realized) killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen would violate both international law and the US constitution.
But the New York Times story suggests the legal foundation of the targeted killing campaign is not simply shaky, but rotten. One problem is that the US government appears to take a very broad view of who can be targeted. At one point, officials at the State Department complained to the White House that the CIA seemed to believe that any group of “three guys doing jumping jacks” was a terrorist training camp.
Another problem, and perhaps an even deeper one, is in the government’s approach towards individuals who are not targeted – not in the conventional sense of the word, anyway. According to the New York Times, the government “counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants … unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent”.
If this is true, it is astounding. The government has an obligation under international law to distinguish combatants from noncombatants – and, as far as reasonably possible, to avoid causing noncombatants harm. Direct targeting of noncombatants is a war crime; indeed, it is the prototypical one. It surely need not be explained that the government’s obligation is to distinguish combatants from noncombatants while they are still alive, not after they have been killed. A “shoot first, ask questions later” policy is entirely inconsistent with international law, not to mention morally grotesque.
The other aspect of the New York Times story that warrants more attention has to do with the way the story was assembled. Becker and Shane report that they interviewed “three dozen” of President Obama’s current and former advisors. These advisors supplied them with granular detail about deliberations inside the White House, quoted (or paraphrased) conversations between the president and senior officials, and discussed tensions between various agencies – most notably, the State Department and the CIA.
That the advisors were so forthcoming would be remarkable in any circumstances, but it is particularly remarkable here because the US government’s official position – a position it has set out in legal briefs and sworn affidavits (pdf) – is that the CIA’s targeted killing campaign is a state secret. Indeed, the CIA’s position in court is that the agency’s mere acknowledgement of the campaign would cause grave and irreparable injury to the nation’s security.
The truth, of course, is that the CIA has already acknowledged the campaign, and that dozens of government officials have spoken about it to Jo Becker and Scott Shane and many other reporters besides. The CIA’s litigation position is not intended to protect the “secrecy” of the agency’s killing program, but to protect the agency’s ability to disclose only the information that it wants to disclose – information that invariably paints the CIA’s practices as closely supervised, supremely effective, and absolutely necessary.
An Interview with Chris Hedges
By David Barsamian, August 2011 issue
http://progressive.org/chris_hedges_interview.html
Excerpt:
Chris Hedges is an award-winning journalist who has covered wars in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Central America. He writes a weekly column for Truthdig.com and is a senior fellow at the Nation Institute. He is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction in 2002. His other books include American Fascists, Empire of Illusion, Death of the Liberal Class, and The World As It Is. When he was at The New York Times, he was part of a team of reporters that received the Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism.
He’s a polymath with a deep love for, and knowledge of, poetry and the classics. His writing and his speaking are crisp and terse.
In person, Hedges is soft spoken and shy. (It took him some time into our interview before he made eye contact with me.) But in terms of his critique, he bursts from the gate at full speed.
He speaks in solemn tones almost like a secular preacher. Cassandra-like, he warns of what he calls “America’s slide into totalitarian capitalism.”
He reserves his most trenchant criticism for the liberal class, which has sold out, in his view. “Liberals have turned their backs on the working class,” he says. And he calls mainstream journalists “courtiers.”
He doesn’t spare the President, either. “Obama,” he says, “is seduced by power and prestige and is more interested in courting the corporate rich than in saving the disenfranchised.” His election, Hedges says, was “the triumph of illusion” over reality.
I talked with him in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on a warm afternoon in May.
Q: How did you make the transition from Harvard Divinity School to The New York Times?
Chris Hedges: It wasn’t a direct route. I began as a freelance reporter. That’s an important distinction, because people who rise through the ranks of The New York Times become vetted, conditioned, harassed, and shaped by the institution. That never happened to me.
In my second year of Harvard Divinity School, where I was studying to be a minister like my father, I met a guy named Robert Cox, who had been the editor of the Buenos Aires Herald during the Dirty War in Argentina. Bob used to print the names of those who had been disappeared the day before, above the fold in his newspaper. It was a kind of an awakening to me to see what great journalism can and should do.
I went off to Latin America at a time when there were horrible regimes. Pinochet was in Chile, the junta was in Argentina, the death squads in El Salvador were killing between 700 and 1,000 people a month, Ríos Montt was in Guatemala. So that was my transition into journalism from a seminarian who grew up in a household that was active in social justice. Those are my roots. And those roots led to a conflict with The New York Times.
Q: When did you start noticing problems there?
Hedges: embed. We all were forced to sign documents by the military when we got off the plane saying that we would, in essence, be servants of the military. The paper reduced us to little more than propagandists. The next day, I just threw the paper in the trash and went out on my own and started writing stories.
It pleased the Times, because they were getting stuff that was outside of the pool and outside the approved stories that were managed and controlled by the military. But it really angered the other reporters who were there, who had been good little boys and girls and done what the military had told them. So they actually wrote a letter to the foreign editor saying that because of my defiance of the rules, I was ruining our relationship with the military. I’m not a careerist; I never really gave a damn about my career, and I thought that was the end. But R. W. Apple, who was running the coverage at the time, interceded on my behalf, and, in fact, when he found out about the letter, called all the reporters in and dressed them down. Apple had covered Vietnam. He said, “You know, we don’t work for the U.S. military.”
The New York Times is an institution that attracts careerists, who are drawn to power and access. This gave me a kind of a free hand. The kind of work that I wanted to do, most of the other reporters didn’t want to do. I was not doing lunch. I was not sucking up to officials. I was writing from the street. I constantly volunteered to go to Gaza, and the other reporters had no interest in going to Gaza. I volunteered to go to Sarajevo. And when I did, the then-executive editor, Joseph Lelyveld, said, “Well, I guess the line starts and ends with you.”
My clash with the paper happened when I came back. I had written War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, so I was on programs like Charlie Rose. And because I had been the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, I would be asked about the impending invasion of Iraq, and I denounced it quite strongly.
Q: You gave the commencement address at a college in Illinois two months after Bush launched the Iraq War. That rubbed the editors in New York the wrong way. Why?
Hedges:pt of the whole talk with what people shouted in brackets. The Times editors were pressured to respond, and they responded by calling me into the office and giving me a formal written reprimand for impugning the impartiality of The New York Times. We were members of the Newspaper Guild, and the process is that you give the employee a written warning and then, under Guild rules, the next time the employee violates that warning, you can fire them. So once I was handed that written warning, it was terminal, because I wasn’t about to stop speaking out against the Iraq War. I approached Hamilton Fish at the Nation Institute about becoming a senior fellow there and leaving the Times. I did leave the Times; I wasn’t fired. But if I had stayed long enough, I would have been fired. That was inevitable.
shano:
You need to read it. It’s balanced.
The whole NYT article smacks of the glorification of the valiant Bush, explaining the ‘dark side’ and why he had to torture and would do it again.
If the CIA was a better organization, and if innocents were not being killed in their sleep, there would be no reason for locals to want them gone.
Akbar and friends could have simply murdered Banks.
As Obama is doing with drones.
From the NY Times:
“The care that Mr. Obama and his counterterrorism chief take in choosing targets, and their reliance on a precision weapon, the drone, reflect his pledge at the outset of his presidency to reject what he called the Bush administration’s “false choice between our safety and our ideals.”
But he has found that war is a messy business, and his actions show that pursuing an enemy unbound by rules has required moral, legal and practical trade-offs that his speeches did not envision.
One early test involved Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. The case was problematic on two fronts, according to interviews with both administration and Pakistani sources.
The C.I.A. worried that Mr. Mehsud, whose group then mainly targeted the Pakistan government, did not meet the Obama administration’s criteria for targeted killing: he was not an imminent threat to the United States. But Pakistani officials wanted him dead, and the American drone program rested on their tacit approval. The issue was resolved after the president and his advisers found that he represented a threat, if not to the homeland, to American personnel in Pakistan.
Then, in August 2009, the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, told Mr. Brennan that the agency had Mr. Mehsud in its sights. But taking out the Pakistani Taliban leader, Mr. Panetta warned, did not meet Mr. Obama’s standard of “near certainty” of no innocents being killed. In fact, a strike would certainly result in such deaths: he was with his wife at his in-laws’ home.
“Many times,” General Jones said, in similar circumstances, “at the 11th hour we waved off a mission simply because the target had people around them and we were able to loiter on station until they didn’t.”
But not this time. Mr. Obama, through Mr. Brennan, told the C.I.A. to take the shot, and Mr. Mehsud was killed, along with his wife and, by some reports, other family members as well, said a senior intelligence official.
The attempted bombing of an airliner a few months later, on Dec. 25, stiffened the president’s resolve, aides say. It was the culmination of a series of plots, including the killing of 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex. by an Army psychiatrist who had embraced radical Islam.
Mr. Obama is a good poker player, but he has a tell when he is angry. His questions become rapid-fire, said his attorney general, Mr. Holder. “He’ll inject the phrase, ‘I just want to make sure you understand that.’ “ And it was clear to everyone, Mr. Holder said, that he was simmering about how a 23-year-old bomber had penetrated billions of dollars worth of American security measures.
When a few officials tentatively offered a defense, noting that the attack had failed because the terrorists were forced to rely on a novice bomber and an untested formula because of stepped-up airport security, Mr. Obama cut them short.
“Well, he could have gotten it right and we’d all be sitting here with an airplane that blew up and killed over a hundred people,” he said, according to a participant. He asked them to use the close call to imagine in detail the consequences if the bomb had detonated. In characteristic fashion, he went around the room, asking each official to explain what had gone wrong and what needed to be done about it.
“After that, as president, it seemed like he felt in his gut the threat to the United States,” said Michael E. Leiter, then director of the National Counterterrorism Center. “Even John Brennan, someone who was already a hardened veteran of counterterrorism, tightened the straps on his rucksack after that.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?pagewanted=6&_r=1
That doesn’t read like a reckless or immoral leader to me.
shano:
“Akbar is suing the CIA for killing innocent civilians through drone attacks in Pakistan.”
**************************
Seems Akbar has no problem outing US spies in Pakistan:
“The officer, named in Pakistan as Jonathan Banks, left the country yesterday, after a tribesman publicly accused him of being responsible for the death of his brother and son in a CIA drone strike in December 2009. Karim Khan, a journalist from North Waziristan, called for Banks to be charged with murder and executed.
In a rare move, the CIA called Banks home yesterday, citing “security concerns” and saying he had received death threats, Washington officials told Associated Press. Khan’s lawyer said he was fleeing the possibility of prosecution.
(…)
The identity of the CIA station chief is a closely guarded secret in any country. Khan’s lawyer said he had obtained Banks’s name from one Pakistani journalist and confirmed it with a second. “I asked around, then got an answer after three or four days of searching,” he said.”
(…)
Akbar, the lawyer, said the unusual legal action had attracted another 14 families of alleged drone victims from the tribal belt. They intend to bring a class action suit against the CIA in early January, he said.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/17/cia-chief-pakistan-drone-cover
shano:
“mespo: is this the same Taliban we are trying to negotiate with in Afghanistan/Iraq? If not, how do we know?It seems there may be some good Talibans and bad Talibans. Can the CIA tell the difference from thousands of feet in the air even with high powered scopes?”
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The answer is I don’t know. I do know that the news sources have listed many of the dead as “militants” and I have no idea if Greenwald definition applied there either. I doubt it.
I guess I am just not convinced this is US policy unless I see more than what I’ve seen today.
I have another question: Why does it seem we reflexively assume the worst about us and the best about the folks who harbor, recruit, and train the terrorists?