Dirty Wars (47 page)

In crafting his campaign strategy on foreign policy, Obama and his advisers needed to straddle a fence between criticizing the national security policies of the Bush era while also appearing tough on terrorism. Obama conducted a dual-track approach in attacking his Republican opponent, John McCain: linking McCain to the war in Iraq and the unaccountability and secrecy of the Bush era, and simultaneously pledging to wage a “smarter,” more focused war against al Qaeda.

On the morning of October 4, 2007, the
New York Times
ran a lengthy front-page story detailing a 2005 Justice Department opinion granting “an expansive endorsement of the
harshest interrogation techniques
ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.” Under newly arrived attorney general Alberto Gonzales, the CIA was “for the first time provided explicit authorization
to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.” That morning Obama appeared on national television. “
This is an example
of what we've lost over the last six years and what we have to recapture,” Obama told MSNBC anchor Mika Brzezinski. “You know, all of us believe we've got to track down and capture or kill terrorists who threaten America, but we have to understand that torture is not going to either provide us with information, and it's also going to create more enemies. And so as a strategy for creating a safer and secure America, I think it is wrongheaded, as well as immoral.” Obama added: “I think this administration basically viewed any tactic as acceptable, as long as it could spin it and keep it out of the public eye.”

As the presidential campaign rolled on, promises to reverse Bush-era policies became central to Obama's agenda. Torture, the prison at Guantánamo Bay, wars without justification or accountability and the evisceration of US civil liberties would come to an end, Obama vowed. “We have been
governed by fear
for the last six years, and this president has used the fear of terrorism to launch a war that should have never been authorized,” Obama said in late October 2007. He argued that the political climate fostered by the Bush administration undermined the United States at home and abroad. “We haven't even talked about civil liberties and the impact of that politics of fear, what that has done to us in terms of undermining basic civil liberties in this country, what it has done in terms of our reputation around the world,” Obama said.

But even as Obama won great praise and support from liberals and antiwar organizations in the United States, he articulated a foreign policy vision that, when it came to counterterrorism, made clear he intended to authorize covert and clandestine operations. “It was
a terrible mistake
to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005,” Obama said. “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf will not act, we will.” McCain criticized Obama for his position that he would attack inside of Pakistan, calling it irresponsible. “
You don't broadcast
and say that you're going to bomb a country without their permission,” McCain said. Obama shot back that the Bush administration had done “exactly that,” declaring, “That is the position we should have taken in the first place...the fact is, it was
the right strategy
.”

In accepting the Democratic nomination for president in 2008 in a massive football stadium in Denver, Colorado, Obama telegraphed a policy he intended to implement: escalating the war in Afghanistan and increasing US covert kill/capture operations globally. “
John McCain likes to say
that
he'll follow bin Laden to the gates of Hell, but he won't even follow him to the cave where he lives,” Obama said, reiterating that if he were elected, the United States would act unilaterally in Pakistan or elsewhere to kill terrorists. “We must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights.”

Obama's stump speeches on the campaign trail often focused on ending the war in Iraq, but he also articulated a hawkish position on unilateral US attacks that would necessitate a significant role for JSOC and the CIA. After his inauguration, as Obama built his foreign policy team, he stacked the administration with hawkish Democrats, including his vice president, Joe Biden, and secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, both of whom supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Susan Rice would serve as UN ambassador, and Richard Holbrooke would head up the civilian side of Obama's plan to expand the US war in Afghanistan. All of these figures had a track record of support for military interventions, neoliberal economic policies and a worldview consistent with the foreign policy arc that stretched from George H. W. Bush's time in office to the present. Obama also retained Bush's defense secretary, Robert Gates; tapped CIA veteran John Brennan as his senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security; and named General James Jones as his national security adviser.

Conservative Republicans heaped praise on Obama's picks. President Bush's senior adviser, Karl Rove, called Obama's cabinet selections “
reassuring
,” and neoconservative leader and former McCain campaign staffer Max Boot beamed: “
I am gobsmacked
by these appointments, most of which could just as easily have come from a President McCain.” Boot added that Hillary Clinton would be a “powerful” voice “for ‘neoliberalism' which is not so different in many respects from ‘neoconservativism.'” Boot's colleague Michael Goldfarb wrote in the
Weekly Standard,
the official organ of the neoconservative movement, that he saw “certainly nothing that represents a drastic change in how Washington does business. The expectation is that Obama is set to
continue the course
set by Bush in his second term.”

Within weeks of assuming office in early 2009, Obama would send a clear message that he intended to keep intact many of the most aggressive counterterrorism policies of the Bush era. Among these were targeted killings, warrantless wiretapping, the use of secret prisons, a crackdown on habeas corpus rights for prisoners, indefinite detention, CIA rendition flights, drone bombings, the deployment of mercenaries in US wars and reliance on the “State Secrets Privilege.” In some cases, Obama would expand Bush-era programs he had once blasted as hallmarks of an unaccountable executive branch.

Obama paid lip service on the campaign trail to holding Bush-era torturers accountable, but he later backed off such rhetoric, saying after his election that “
we need to look forward
as opposed to looking backwards.” He said his job as president “is to make sure that, for example, at the C.I.A., you've got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don't want them to suddenly feel like they've got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders.”

Early on in Obama's time in office, Dick Cheney charged that Obama was moving “to
take down a lot of those policies
we put in place that kept the nation safe for nearly eight years from a follow-on terrorist attack like 9/11.” Cheney was wrong. If anything, Obama would guarantee that many of those policies would become entrenched, bipartisan institutions in US national security policy for many years to come. Whether these policies have kept Americans safe—or have made them less safe—is another question.

PAKISTAN AND WASHINGTON, DC
, 2009—As he settled into the Oval Office and his new role as commander in chief, President Obama tweaked Bush's expansive Global War on Terror rhetoric, rebranding it as a “war against al-Qaeda and its allies.” On his third day in office, Obama signed a series of executive orders that were portrayed as “dismantling” the Bush-era torture and detention programs. “The
message we are sending
around the world is that the United States intends to prosecute the ongoing struggle against violence and terrorism, and we are going to do so vigilantly; we are going to do so effectively; and we are going to do so in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals,” Obama declared as he stood with sixteen retired military officers. “We intend to win this fight. We're going to win it on our terms.” But, while dispensing with the Bush-era labels and cowboy rhetoric that marked the previous eight years of US foreign policy, Obama simultaneously moved swiftly to expand the covert US wars that had marked his predecessor's time in office.

The day after Obama signed his executive orders, CIA director Michael
Hayden briefed him
on an operation the Agency was about to conduct inside Pakistan: a drone strike near the Afghan border. The targets, Hayden told the president, were upper-tier al Qaeda and Taliban members. Later that day, two Hellfire missiles hit compounds in North and South Waziristan.
The first strike
hit in a small village near Mir Ali, in North Waziristan, around 5:00 p.m. local time.
The second struck
a compound in the village of Karez Kot in South Waziristan at around 8:30 p.m. Hayden, weeks away from leaving the Agency, admitted to the president that the main HVTs had not been hit but told him that “at least
five al Qaeda militants
” had died. “Good,” said Obama, who made clear that he favored escalating drone strikes in Pakistan.

As the US intelligence officers monitored the footage from the January 23 drone strikes, it became clear that civilians had been killed. John Brennan went
straight to the president
and told him what had happened. Five “militants” may have died in the strikes, but they were not the only ones killed. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the first strike
in North Waziristan killed
between seven and fifteen
people, nearly all of them civilians. Many of the slain were from one family. One boy was reported to have survived, albeit with a skull fracture, a perforated stomach and the
loss of an eye
. The second strike in South Waziristan struck the “
wrong house
” and killed five to eight civilians, according to subsequent reports. Many of the dead, including at least two children, were the family members of a tribal elder, who was also killed. The elder was reportedly a member of a “
pro-government peace committee
.”

Obama summoned Hayden for a face-to-face meeting and demanded a full briefing on the drone program's protocols. Despite the scores of national security briefings Obama had received from the time he became the Democratic nominee for president, it was the
first the new president had heard
of what the CIA called “signature strikes.” Beginning in the closing months of the Bush administration, the Agency had begun targeting people based on patterns of life rather than specific intelligence. The CIA said that “military aged males” who were part of a large gathering of people in a particular region or had contacts with other suspected militants or terrorists could be considered fair targets for drone strikes. A positive ID was not necessary to strike, only some of the “signatures” the Agency had developed to identify suspected terrorists.

After some convincing from Hayden, Obama decided not to reject the signature strike policy, although he
added a constraint
: the CIA director was to have the final say on all strikes, an authority that had been occasionally delegated to the deputy director or the head of the Agency's counter-terrorism center. Obama warned that he might withdraw the signature strike authority at a later time.
But he didn't
. In the ensuing months, the new CIA director, Leon Panetta, enlisted the help of “undercover officers” from the CIA's Counterterrorism Center and put the president through a “
crash course
” on targeted strikes. Panetta reviewed the drone program and other kinetic protocols, including the authorities needed in order to launch a strike. Obama and Panetta would hold one-on-one sessions after HVTs had been hit in Pakistan.

During that first year in office, Obama began to hold regular hourlong meetings with top officials to discuss all matters of national security and counterterrorism. According to participants, these early meetings had a “
tutorial
” character. Intelligence and security threats were discussed, but Obama was still being introduced to new capabilities. For much of the first year, discussions about capturing or killing people outside of Afghanistan and Pakistan were for the most part theoretical. The vice chair of the Joint Chiefs, General “Hoss” Cartwright, and Obama's top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, were increasingly central to the deliberations, as
was Admiral McRaven, the commander of JSOC. One of the first tasks on Obama's national security agenda was a thorough review of Bush's military executive orders. When it came to counterterrorism, Obama would preserve much of his predecessor's policies, and he ended up sustaining
most of the ExOrds
without revision. In some cases, he sought to expand the authorities. Obama began striking Pakistan almost weekly.

OBAMA INHERITED
an already escalating drone program from Bush. The strikes in Pakistan had become more frequent in the waning months of 2008. Just before Obama won the election, Bush had “
reached a tacit agreement
to allow [drone strikes] to continue without Pakistani involvement.” The US policy was to inform Pakistan of attacks while they were under way, or minutes after they had been carried out. President Obama approved of the shift, which brought with it an uptick in drone activity, and he “
fully endorsed
the covert action program.” Obama also kept in place “virtually
all the key personnel
” from the CIA who had run the covert campaign under Bush. Part of this program, which Obama was read into by outgoing director of national intelligence Mike McConnell right after the election, was a HUMINT network within Pakistan. The spies provided on-the-ground intel that was a necessary counterpart to the drone surveillance and targeting. The spy program, five years in the making and reportedly expensive, was “
the real [secret]
that Obama would carry with him from that moment forward.”