Dirty Wars (56 page)

On the campaign trail and after becoming president, Barack Obama pledged that the United States would no longer use certain Bush-era torture and detention tactics. CIA director Leon Panetta had stated in April 2009 that the “
CIA no longer operates
detention facilities or black sites” and announced a “plan to decommission the remaining sites.” Yet three months later, Hassan found himself in a secret prison being interrogated by Americans.

According to a US official who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, Hassan was not directly rendered from Kenya to Somalia by the US government. But, the official said, “The
United States provided information
which helped get Hassan—a dangerous terrorist—off the street.” That description supported the theory that Kenyan forces were rendering suspects on behalf of the United States and other governments. Another well-informed source said that Hassan had been targeted in Nairobi because of intelligence suggesting that he was the “
right-hand man
” of Nabhan, then the presumed head of al Qaeda in East Africa.

Two months after Hassan was rendered to the secret prison in Mogadishu, on September 14, 2009, a JSOC team
took off in helicopters
from an aircraft carrier positioned off the Somali coast and penetrated Somali airspace. The man they were stalking, they learned from recently obtained “actionable” intelligence, had been making
regular trips
between the port cities of Merca and Kismayo, near the Kenyan border. On this day, their target was traveling in a Land Cruiser, supported by several technicals.
According to witnesses
, the helicopters “buzzed” over a rural village en route to the convoy. In broad daylight, the JSOC team attacked the convoy from the helicopters, gunning down the people inside. The American commandos then landed and
collected at least two
of the bodies. One of them was later confirmed to be that of Saleh Ali Nabhan. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman would not comment on “
any alleged operation
in Somalia,” nor would the White House. That day, when
al Shabab confirmed
that Nabhan, five other foreigners and three Somali al Shabab fighters had been killed in the attack, there was little room for doubt. JSOC had taken down their most-wanted man in East Africa in the first known targeted killing operation inside of Somalia authorized by President Obama.

To veteran counterterrorism operators, like Malcolm Nance, the Nabhan
hit was an example of what the United States should have done instead of backing the Ethiopian invasion. “
I am a firm believer
in targeted assassinations when they are people who are no longer of value to your collection processes. If they are too strong for your ability to negate their capacity in the battlefield, then you are just going to have to put a Hellfire in 'em,” Nance told me. “We were much more successful using the surgical strikes, where we went in—to tell you the truth, very Israeli-like—and we did the drone strike, and/or Hellfire strike and we blasted the individual car of a known guy who was known to be in that vehicle. We flew in, we snatched his body, we confirmed it, we got the intelligence and went away. That's the way we should be doing it. We could have been doing that for the [preceding] ten years.”

The Nabhan strike won Obama much praise from the counterterrorism and Special Ops community, but in other circles it raised serious questions about the emerging bipartisan consensus on assassinations, renditions and secret prisons. “These are
like summary executions
,” said Evelyn Farkas, a former Senate Armed Services Committee staffer who worked on oversight for SOCOM from 2001 to 2008. “Who's giving authority? Who's making the [target] lists? Is it a kill or capture [mission], or is it a kill mission?” Candidate Obama laid out a vision of how he would radically depart from the policies of the Bush era, but in the Nabhan case he relied on some of the most controversial of them. “Has our policy shifted at all since the previous administration?” Farkas asked. “My sense is ‘no.'”

Jack Goldsmith, who served as an assistant attorney general in the Bush administration, said that the belief that “the Obama administration has reversed Bush-era policies is largely wrong.
The truth is closer to the opposite
: The new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expanded some of it, and has narrowed only a bit. Almost all of the Obama changes have been at the level of packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric.”

While declaring an end to the secret prisons, Obama and his counterterrorism team found a backdoor way of continuing them. In Somalia, the CIA had begun using the secret underground prison where Hassan was held as a center to interrogate suspected al Shabab or al Qaeda prisoners there. Although not technically run by the United States, American agents would be
free to interrogate the prisoners
. Lawyers retained by the family of Hassan, the alleged right-hand man of Nabhan, saw his case as showcasing a slightly cleaned-up continuation of Bush's detention policies. “
Hassan's case suggests
that the US may be involved in a decentralized, out-sourced Guantánamo Bay in central Mogadishu,” his family's Kenyan legal team asserted, noting that Hassan had not been provided access to lawyers, his family or the Red Cross. It would also soon be clear that Hassan was not
the only prisoner being held in Somalia's underground secret prison—and that Washington's role in that prison was not limited to occasional interrogations of high-value detainees.

With Nabhan gone, Fazul became the most senior al Qaeda figure known to be operating in Somalia. Although al Shabab had suffered two major blows at the hands of JSOC, it was hardly undeterred. Its asymmetric battle was just beginning. Nabhan's death, like so many of Washington's most passionately embraced “strategic” victories in Somalia, would result in blowback. Even when perfectly executed, targeted strikes had the potential to help bolster the ranks of insurgent groups and provide them with martyrs to be emulated. By the end of 2009,
at least seven US citizens
had died fighting on behalf of al Shabab and scores of others were believed to be among the group's ranks and in its training camps preparing for future action. Although al Shabab was unable to strike directly at the United States, it was showing that it could recruit American citizens and wreak havoc on its puppets and proxies in Mogadishu. In the process, al Shabab would draw the United States, the African Union and the Somali government into a potentially disastrous replay of the CIA warlord era, mixed with the worst excesses of the Ethiopian occupation period.

OF COURSE
, the Obama administration saw developments in Somalia differently. Following the perfectly executed assassination of the Somali pirates, President Obama's relationship with JSOC and its commander, Admiral McRaven, deepened. The administration carefully reviewed the existing orders issued by President Bush that authorized US military forces to strike at terrorists wherever they resided, the “world is a battlefield” doctrine developed by Stephen Cambone and other architects of the war on terror. They decided that they wanted such authority expanded. Defense Secretary Gates and Obama's newly appointed CIA Director, Leon Panetta, worked diligently to bridge the CIA-JSOC divide, which, fueled by Rumsfeld and Cheney, had persisted during the Bush administration. Obama wanted a seamless counterterrorism machine. After the Nabhan strike, then-CENTCOM commander David Petraeus
issued his update
to the AQN-Execute Order, giving US military forces, particularly those from JSOC, far greater latitude to operate in Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere. Asymmetric attacks that had been relatively infrequent during the Bush administration—with Iraq as a draining focus of counterterrorism attention—would become the focal point of Obama's rebranded global war.

During his first year in office, President Obama and his advisers endeavored to reframe US counterterrorism policy as a more comprehensive, full-spectrum effort to reduce extremism, largely based on regional
security. Defense Secretary Gates summed up the purported stance of top civilian and military officials in the Obama administration when he stated in April 2009 that there would not be a “
purely military solution
” to piracy or civil war in Somalia. The US approach to Somalia would have to shift away from containment. “The
National Security Council
has brought together the Department of State, the Department of Defense, USAID, the intelligence community, and a variety of other agencies to work to develop a strategy that is both comprehensive and sustainable,” noted Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Johnnie Carson on May 20, 2009, during an appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Increasing assistance to the Somali government and AMISOM would be priorities, but the major focus remained targeting the leadership of al Shabab and al Qaeda.

The priorities laid out in Obama's first annual budget request earlier in May were telling: the president continued the arc of a militarized Africa policy, while increasing security assistance to African states. The budget, noted Daniel Volman, director of the African Security Research Project, showed “the administration is
following the course
laid down for AFRICOM by the Bush administration, rather than putting these programs on hold until it can conduct a serious review of US security policy towards Africa.” The US request for arms sales to Africa went up to $25.6 million, from $8.3 million in fiscal year 2009, including $2.5 million set aside for Djibouti, $3 million for Ethiopia, and $1 million for Kenya. Military training programs to those countries expanded as well. Further spending was proposed for Camp Lemonnier, as well as naval assets for security operations in the Indian Ocean. In addition to the drone capability at Camp Lemonnier, the Obama administration reached a deal with the
government of the Seychelles
to position a fleet of MQ-9 Reaper drones there beginning in September 2009. Although the stated purpose of the drones was for unarmed surveillance to support counterpiracy operations, US counterterrorism officials began pushing for the drones to be weaponized and used in the hunt for al Shabab. “
It would be a mistake
to assume that Obama will not take further military action if the situation in Somalia escalates,” Volman concluded. He was right.

As Obama's national security team began mapping out a new, lethal strategy to deal with al Shabab in Somalia and AQAP in Yemen, al Shabab was also reorganizing. Fazul had taken over for Nabhan and was deeply embedded within the al Shabab leadership structure. By late 2009, al Shabab had benefited tremendously from the Ethiopian invasion. “Now we are dealing with a group that's in there and they are entrenched,” Nance told me. By September 2009, the AMISOM force in Mogadishu had
expanded to 5,200
troops from just over 1,700, thanks in large part to increased funding and support from Washington. In the aftermath of Nabhan's death, there were rumors that the AMISOM force was preparing for a
post-Ramadan offensive
against al Shabab later in the year.

After Nabhan was killed, al Shabab operatives stole
two UN Land Cruisers
from central Somalia and brought them to Mogadishu. On September 17, the al Shabab agents drove the vehicles up to the gates of Mogadishu's international airport, where the AMISOM forces were meeting at their base with Somali security officials. They positioned the Land Cruisers outside the offices of a US private security contractor and a fuel depot. The UN vehicles exploded in a spectacular, stealth suicide bombing. In the end, more than twenty people were killed in the attack, seventeen of them African Union troops. Among the dead was the deputy commander of the AMISOM force, Major General Juvenal Niyoyunguruza of Burundi. “This was very tactical,” an AMISOM official told the
New York Times
. “It's like these guys had a map of the place.” It was the
single deadliest attack
against AMISOM since it arrived in Somalia in 2007.

Al Shabab's spokesperson, Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rage, claimed credit for the strike and said it avenged the death of Nabhan. “
We have got our revenge
for our brother Nabhan,” Rage declared. “Two suicide car bombs targeting the AU base, praise Allah.” He added: “We knew the infidel government and AU troops planned to attack us after the holy month. This is a message to them.” Rage said that, in all, five al Shabab agents participated in the suicide mission. Soon after the attack, witnesses who saw the Land Cruisers being prepared for the suicide mission said they heard two of the bombers
speaking English
. “They spoke English and identified themselves as being from the United Nations,” said Dahir Mohamud Gelle, the Somali information minister. A Somali news site, known to be reliable, later reported that one of the attackers
was a US citizen
. While the US was celebrating the takedown of Nabhan, al Shabab had launched its own targeted killing campaign.

ON DECEMBER
3, 2009, dozens of proud young Somalis poured into the Shamo Hotel in Mogadishu wearing blue-and-yellow graduation caps and gowns. In a city that desperately needed doctors, they would literally become lifelines. All of them were to receive their medical degrees that day from Benadir University, which was
established in 2002
by a group of Somali doctors and academics. In a
video of the ceremony
, which was given to me in Mogadishu, the young graduates-to-be smiled as they posed for
pictures, their friends and families looking on with pride. As the ceremony began and people took their seats, dignitaries settled into the front row. Among them were
five Somali government ministers
, including those from the departments of education, sports and health. Three of the five were diaspora Somalis, who had returned to try to help rebuild the Somali government. The
higher education minister
, Ibrahim Hassan Addou, was a US citizen, and the
health minister
, Qamar Aden Ali, was a British Somali woman. Cameramen lined the perimeter of the stage, as they would for a high-profile press conference. The graduation was to be a message to Somalia and the world: this is our bright future.