Month: January 2013

As I’ve noted, Obama’s nomination of Chuck Hagel and John Brennan to Secretary of Defense and CIA Director, respectively, is perfectly in keeping with the Obama foreign policy of the first term. That is, a deep reluctance to get involved in conventional ground wars (with the notable exception of the surge in Afghanistan, of course) and a heavy reliance on covert, “light footprint” militarism, whether through drones, Special Operations forces, or CIA spy work.

Nobody should confuse “light footprint” with a less interventionist foreign policy. The post-WWII Imperial Grand Strategy will continue unabated; US troops will continue to be stationed all over the world, Washington will continue to prop up autocratic regimes in every region of the globe, and while small teams of covert Special Ops aren’t likely to be as big a catastrophe as Bush’s illegal war in Iraq, they are no picnic.

Few have asked how this reiteration of Obama’s first term foreign policy will effect the Latin American region in the next four years. Adam Isacson at Just the Facts speculates:

• More Special Forces deployments to the region. President Obama and his new appointees share a fondness for Special Operations Forces: elite, highly trained, mobile military units used for non-traditional, often clandestine missions ranging from hostage rescues to hunting down wanted individuals to intelligence-gathering and “defense diplomacy.” Special Forces are likely to see their numbers increase despite upcoming defense budget cuts, and as the Afghanistan drawdown proceeds, there will be even more of them available to carry out missions in Latin America. Last year, the New York Times noted, Adm. William McRaven of the Special Operations Command was “pushing hard” to “expand their presence in regions where they have not operated in large numbers for the past decade, especially in Asia, Africa and Latin America.”

• A greater intelligence community presence is another likely consequence of a “light footprint” in Latin America. We can only speculate, but it is reasonable to expect fewer CIA assets in Afghanistan to mean more personnel focused elsewhere, including Latin America. Even more significant may be an increase in the presence of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Defense Department’s spy agency. As the Washington Post reported in December, the DIA expects to roughly double the number of clandestine operatives it deploys worldwide over the next few years.

• Greater use of drones and robotics. The Obama administration has expanded the CIA and Defense Department use of armed unmanned aircraft to hunt down suspected terrorist targets. Brennan, the new CIA director, is known for being intimately involved this practice, which is extremely controversial because of reports that the drone program may have killed hundreds of innocent people in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.

According to Isacson, “a recent conversation with a Defense Department official confirms that, in the next few years, we are likely to witness an increase in Special Forces training missions in the region.”

“Such deployments fulfill more than just training missions, though,” he warns. “They allow Special Forces units to familiarize themselves with the terrain, culture, and key officers in countries where they might someday have to operate. And they allow U.S. personnel to gather intelligence on their host countries, whether through active snooping or passive observation.”

As we’ve persistently covered for years, Obama’s approach to Latin America has been a familiar one. He has used the ridiculous and failed drug war as a pretext to prop up ugly, military regimes with horrible human rights records throughout Latin America. This has led to some very bloody results in places like Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, and elsewhere.

And why? Dana Frank sheds some light on the true strategic calculus:

The State Department is pursuing such a misguided policy for larger strategic reasons in the region: to push back against the governments in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador, and others, which have moved considerably to the left in the last 15 years. Above all, Washington’s Honduras policy is a deliberate message to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Endorsing the coup served as a not-so-subtle threat that the others could be next. Paraguay only proves the point further — in June, the State Department looked the other way when Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo was overthrown.

So Washington is afraid of what it has always been afraid of in Latin America: losing control of it. Too many countries are unwilling to simply obey US demands, therefore, support for tyranny is justified. More of any of that is a fine thing for people like Obama, Brennan, Hagel, Kerry, and all of the elite interests tied to Washington. But it’s a terrible thing for the people in Latin America.

Claims by the Central Intelligence Agency’s new director-designate that the US intelligence services received ‘no information’ about any civilians killed by US drones in the year prior to June 2011 do not appear to bear scrutiny.

John Brennan, President Obama’s nominee to take over the CIA, had claimed in a major speech in summer 2011 that there had not been ‘a single collateral death’ in a covert US strike in the past year due to the precision of drones. He later qualified his statement, saying that at the time of his comments he had ‘no information’ to the contrary.

Yet just three months beforehand, a major US drone strike had killed 42 Pakistanis, most of them civilians. As well as being widely reported by the media at the time, Islamabad’s concerns regarding those deaths were also directly conveyed to the ‘highest levels of the Administration’ by Washington’s then-ambassador to Pakistan, it has been confirmed to the Bureau.

This confirmation suggests that senior US officials were aware of dozens of civilian deaths just weeks before Brennan’s claims to the contrary.

Jirga deaths

The CIA drone strike in Pakistan on March 17, which bombed the town of Datta Khel in North Waziristan and killed an estimated 42 people, has always seemed a contradiction of Brennan’s official statement.

The attack was later justified by an anonymous US official as a so-called ‘signature strike’ where the identities of those killed was unknown. They insisted that ‘a large group of heavily armed men, some of whom were clearly connected to al Qaeda and all of whom acted in a manner consistent with AQ-linked militants, were killed.’

In fact the gathering was a jirga, or tribal meeting, called to resolve a local mining dispute. Dozens of tribal elders and local policemen died, along with a small number of Taliban.

Within hours of the attack Pakistan’s prime minister and army chief publicly condemned the mass killing of dozens of civilians. Pakistan’s president also later protested about the strike to a visiting delegation from the US House Armed Services Committee, led by Congressman Rob Wittman.

An official Pakistani government document issued at the time reports that Washington’s then-ambassador Cameron Munter was summoned to the Foreign Ministry in Islamabad on March 18 for a dressing-down.

A strongly worded statement reported that ‘Ambassador Munter was categorically conveyed that such strikes were not only “unacceptable” but also constituted “a flagrant violation of humanitarian norms and law”.’

Munter also intended ‘to convey Pakistan’s message to the US Administration at the highest levels,’ the Foreign Ministry press release claimed.

While some challenge Pakistan’s portrayal of some aspects of the meeting, it is not disputed that the Ambassador did indeed convey Pakistan’s concerns to the highest levels in the US government.

‘Not a single collateral death’

Yet three months after the Datta Khel strike, John Brennan would insist that covert US drone strikes were so accurate that they were no longer killing civilians, and had not done so for the previous 12 months.

He told an audience on June 29 that ‘I can say that the types of operations… that the US has been involved in, in the counter-terrorism realm, that nearly for the past year there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop.’

The Datta Khel attack was not the only time that civilians had died in the period referred to by Brennan. Working with veteran Pakistani reporter Rahimullah Yusufzai and field researchers in the tribal areas, the Bureau identified and published details of 45 civilians known at the time to have been killed by CIA drones in ten strikes between August 2010 and June 2011, the date of Brennan’s speech. Many of those killed had died at Datta Khel.

The Bureau presented a summary of its findings to the White House and to John Brennan’s office in July 2011. Both declined to comment.

Nine months later, George Stephanopoulos of ABC News challenged Brennan on his original claims.

‘Do you stand by the statement you have made in the past that, as effective as they have been, [drones] have not killed a single civilian?’  the interviewer asked. ‘That seems hard to believe.’

Brennan was robust, insisting that ‘what I said was that over a period of time before my public remarks that we had no information about a single civilian, a noncombatant being killed.’

Military-aged males

A later report in the New York Times provided a possible explanation for Brennan’s robustness. The paper revealed that Washington ‘counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.’

Since all of the civilians killed at Datta Khel were adult males, officials may simply have discounted their deaths. There are no indications that the CIA has amended its records since.

The Bureau has now raised its estimate of the number of civilians killed in the period Brennan claimed none had died to 76, including eight children and two women. The new figures are based in part on our own research and on studies by Associated Press and Stanford and New York universities.

John Brennan, 57, is Barack Obama’s first choice as the new director of the CIA. As the president’s chief counter-terrorism adviser he helped to bring Yemen’s Arab Spring to a reasonably peaceful conclusion. And he also played a key role in the killings of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaqi and a host of other senior militant leaders.

Brennan also spearheaded a massive expansion of US drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

The American Civil Liberties Union urged caution in appointing him as CIA chief. Calling on the Senate to investigate any recent involvement by John Brennan or the CIA in ‘torture, abuse, secret prisons, and extraordinary rendition,’ the ACLU’s Laura Murphy also urged an end to the CIA’s ‘targeted killing program.’

Mr Brennan’s office did not respond when asked to confirm whether he had been directly informed of the Pakistan government’s concerns over civilian deaths back in March 2011.

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This article was originally published at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

The fact that Bradley Manning is being punished for exposing government crimes, lies, and misdeeds is a travesty unto itself, if you ask me. But charging him with “aiding the enemy” – which is punishable by death – is just piling on.

In court on Tuesday, Manning’s defense lawyers tried to get a significantly reduced jail time sentence due to the fact that Manning was held in abusive conditions – solitary confinement 23 hours a day, kept under  a strict suicide watch and often ordered to strip naked. The judge lifted a pitiful 112 days off of Manning’s potential life sentence.

The absurd charge of aiding the enemy – as if Manning had some connection or intention with al-Qaeda – refers to Manning’s alleged leak of classified material to WikiLeaks, a website. The ACLU explains:

The key to the government’s case is this simple claim: that posting intelligence information to the internet aids Al Qaeda because Al Qaeda has access to the internet.

…The government does not contend that Manning gave any information to Al Qaeda, or even that he intended that Al Qaeda receive it. Rather, it claims that Manning “indirectly” aided Al Qaeda by causing intelligence information to be posted on WikiLeaks’ website, knowing that Al Qaeda has access to the internet. Specifically, the government contends that Manning violated Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which provides that “any person who . . . gives intelligence to or communicates or corresponds with or holds any intercourse with the enemy, either directly or indirectly; shall suffer death or such other punishment as a court-martial or military commission may direct.”

Article 104 is not limited to sensitive or classified information — it prohibits any unauthorized communication or contact with an enemy. So, if the government is right that a soldier “indirectly” aids the enemy when he posts information to which the enemy might have access, then the threat of criminal prosecution hangs over any service member who gives an interview to a reporter, writes a letter to the editor, or posts a blog to the internet.

Manning’s attorneys have tried to get the judge to throw out these ridiculous charges, but the judge has refused. While the prosecution claims the charges are appropriate, Manning’s lawyers point out, apparently without objection, that such aiding the enemy charges have never been used this way. Politico’s Josh Gerstein:

“Publishing information in a newspaper [can] indirectly convey information to the enemy,” prosecutor Capt. Angel Overgaard said Tuesday during the pretrial hearing. She said courts in past cases had recognized that such disclosures could constitute aiding the enemy.

However, defense attorney David Coombs said those cases date to the Civil War and involve publishing coded messages, not conveying information evident to everyone on its face.

“Every case that charges Article 104 [aiding the enemy] deals with somebody who had given information directly to the enemy. This case is unprecedented,” defens attorney David Coombs said during the session. “There’s been no case in the entire history of military jurisprudence that dealt with somebody providing information to a legitimate journalistic organization and having them publish it and that involved dealing with the enemy.”

Daniel Ellsberg is today almost universally considered a hero for leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971. He wins awards, goes on television, he’s a renowned figure and activist. The material he leaked to the press was designated Top Secret, and – partly due to the abuse he was subjected to by the government for it – he was able to live out his life in freedom. Contrast that with Manning, who leaked nothing marked Top Secret, all of it was marked Secret or Classified – much lower secrecy classifications. Yet, he possibly faces charges akin to treason and punishable by death. What an outrage!

Retired Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, now at the Center for a New American Security, writes at Foreign Policy on Hamid Karzai’s upcoming visit to Washington to discuss with the Obama administration a status of forces agreement for Afghanistan beyond 2014. He argues it’s possible a complete withdrawal is a viable option.

The top US military general in Afghanistan, John Allen, has recommended keeping 6,000-20,000 US troops in country after the vaunted and wildly misrepresented 2014 “withdrawal.” Anonymous administration officials told Reuters Obama is quietly considering slightly less troops to stay beyond 2014, with numbers like 3,000-9,000 floating about.

But Barno says the “zero option,” which ultimately was chosen for Iraq despite administration efforts to keep thousands of troops there in a new status of forces agreement, is sitting in the back of Obama’s mind as one possible option.

Karzai comes to this week’s discussions convinced that the United States desperately needs long-term military bases in Afghanistan. He sees an America without other viable options to maintain its regional influence, cajole Pakistan, threaten Iran, or launch raids against nearby terrorists. Because of this, Karzai thinks that he holds all the cards in the upcoming negotiations. He is absolutely convinced that the United States has no workable strategic choice but to station substantial U.S. troops in Afghanistan after 2014.

“But Karzai has it wrong,” Barno says, for at least five reasons: (1) pullout worked ok for Iraq; (2) budgetary pressure; (3) the war weariness of the American publish; (4) US capacity to handle Afghanistan remotely; and (5) a covert intelligence war may be better than keeping troops if we get backed into a corner on a SOFA.

I see Barno’s point, and I think his five reasons are fair, but I don’t buy it. He counters his own argument more than he supports it. He admits that, absent US troops Afghanistan would descend into civil war with a probable return of the Taliban, Washington’s ability to contain Pakistan and launch drone strikes in the tribal regions would be significantly undermined, etc. I don’t expect the Obama administration to risk these scenarios.

But there are more reasons the “zero option” isn’t going to happen this time around. Afghanistan is not Iraq. With Iraq, you had a more stable and independent government that was defiant of US encroachment. That was the driving force behind Maliki’s inability/refusal to produce an acceptable SOFA to the US. In Afghanistan, Karzai’s government is extremely weak and barely operational on its own – that is, without the support of thousands of US troops and billions in foreign aid. Yes, Karzai has demonstrated his own limited defiance of Washington, but I doubt it will hold this time. He needs Washington to survive.

Secondly, Iraq was Bush’s war. Obama followed through on the SOFA signed under Bush. The immediate political costs of a full withdrawal seemed to rest much less on Obama’s shoulders in that case. Afghanistan is different. That is Obama’s war; he decided to surge in 2009, he owns it. And he’ll therefore be more concerned with Afghanistan for the long term and less inclined to pull out.

At least, that is how I speculate the administration sees it. It’s still the case that so long as any foreign occupation exists in Afghanistan, and so long as any Kabul government is propped up from abroad, the insurgency will remain alive and well. There are a host of bad options in Afghanistan and the reality is that a complete withdrawal now is the least bad, whether Obama sees it that way or not.

Update: Al-Jazeera reports that “A senior White House official has said the US would consider leaving no American troops in Afghanistan after the end of combat in December 2014.”

Asked whether Obama would consider a scenario in which all US troops left and there was no residual force in Afghanistan, Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser said: “That would be an option we would consider.”

“We wouldn’t rule out any option. We are not guided by the goal of a certain number of troops in the country. We are guided by the objective that the president has set,” Rhodes told reporters.

I still find this incredibly unlikely. The Washington phrase “not ruling out any options” is a complicated one, to say the least.

Here’s Human Rights Watch with 8 unsavory US allies Obama should “dump”:

Afghanistan: As the Pentagon bows out, it is counting on Afghan President Hamid Karzai to see through the planned 2014 transition. But the Obama administration hasn’t used its considerable leverage to dissuade Karzai from undermining women’s rights, appointing an alleged torturer as intelligence chief, tolerating rampant corruption, and blocking efforts to hold accountable his warlord allies.

Uzbekistan: During the 2005 uprising in the town of Andijan, President Islam Karimov ordered troops to surround the demonstrators and shoot everyone in sight. Hundreds were slaughtered. His government routinely tortures dissidents and imprisons them for 15 or 20 years. Some have even been boiled alive. Yet the Obama administration soft-pedals his brutality — and waived restrictions on selling him military equipment — because Uzbekistan provides an alternative to Pakistan for resupplying the troops in Afghanistan. Especially as this rationale disappears, the Faustian bargain should end.

Cambodia: In 28 years as prime minister, Hun Sen has presided over the killing of countless political opponents while increasing his control of the army, police, and courts. But the Obama administration has done little to discourage him from building a one-party state, such as insisting that exiled opposition leader Sam Rainsy be allowed home without fear of arrest, and has placed no conditions on increased military ties or aid. Cambodia is where Obama should demonstrate that his Asian “pivot” isn’t a competition with China for the loyalty of autocrats but a vision for Asian democracy.

Rwanda: Led by President Paul Kagame, the Rwandan government has long benefited from Washington’s genocide guilt (Bill Clinton’s administration sat on its hands during the 1994 massacre of more than half a million people) and admiration for its progress rebuilding the country. But the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which became the national army, itself murdered tens of thousands of civilians in the 1990s; the government uses detention and violence to shut down political opposition; and the military, despite persistent government denials, has actively supported a succession of rebel groups in neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the U.S. Congress’s insistence, the Obama administration has finally suspended some military aid to Rwanda, but it continues to run political interference for the government and downplay its crimes, most recently its military support for the murderous M23 rebellion in eastern Congo.

Ethiopia: Washington had a blind spot for growing repression under the late Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who died in August. In return for Ethiopia’s help fighting terrorism and battling al-Shabab militants in Somalia, the Obama administration muffled its criticism of the security forces’ war crimes and the government’s restrictions on civil society, detention of journalists, violence against demonstrators, and pursuit of development policies that penalize political opponents.

Saudi Arabia: Yes, it has lots of oil. But the Saudis, who need cash to fuel their welfare state, are going to sell it regardless of how Obama treats them. Meanwhile, the Saudi monarchy holds thousands in arbitrary detention, imposes archaic restrictions on women, suppresses most dissent, mistreats its Shiite minority, and insists that the neighboring Bahraini monarchy crush its pro-democracy movement. Obama has been silent.

Bahrain: Saudi Arabia’s next-door neighbor is the most glaring exception to Obama’s generally supportive posture toward Arab Spring demonstrators. The ruling Al Khalifa family uses lethal force, torture, and arbitrary detention to crush protests. Yet out of deference to Saudi sensibilities and fear of losing the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet base, the Obama administration has allowed its security relationship with Bahrain to trump its concern for the rights of Bahrainis — a selectivity that undermines its broader support for Arab freedom.

Mexico: The country’s drug cartels have committed horrific crimes, but so have the security forces that former President Felipe Calderón sent to combat them. Obama routinely praised Calderón’s “great courage” in fighting the cartels with nary a word about widespread military and police abuses. Instead, the administration has sent some $2 billion to support Mexico’s counternarcotics efforts, despite ample evidence of human rights violations and security forces so corrupt that the Mexican government has turned to its navy to crack down on the cartels.

The list can obviously be much, much longer. But these will do for a start.