Month: April 2013

One of the bombshell findings in Jeremy Scahill’s new book Dirty Wars, is revealed in a piece just published in Nation excerpted from the book. A former senior official in the Obama administration tells Scahill that John Brennan, current CIA Director and the President’s counterterrorism adviser at the time, “suspected” Abdulrahman Awlaki, the 16-year old son of Anwar al-Awlaki, had been deliberately targeted in the drone strike that killed him in Yemen in 2011.

A former senior official in the Obama administration told me that after Abdulrahman’s killing, the president was “surprised and upset and wanted an explanation.” The former official, who worked on the targeted killing program, said that according to intelligence and Special Operations officials, the target of the strike was al-Banna, the AQAP propagandist. “We had no idea the kid was there. We were told al-Banna was alone,” the former official told me. Once it became clear that the teenager had been killed, he added, military and intelligence officials asserted, “It was a mistake, a bad mistake.” However, John Brennan, at the time President Obama’s senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security, “suspected that the kid had been killed intentionally and ordered a review. I don’t know what happened with the review.”

After a long time of refusing to comment on the killing of Abdulrahman Awlaki, a US citizen like his father, the Obama administration’s quiet admission of the incident has always described it as a grave “mistake.” Several anonymous officials have claimed the real target was “Ibrahim al-Banna, an Egyptian citizen described as the ‘media coordinator’ for AQAP.”

If it truly was a mistake, it would also have to be an incredibly unlikely coincidence. Of the countless sites in Yemen that US intelligence officials were choosing from, they chose to hit exactly the location of the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen who had been killed in another targeted assassination two weeks earlier. Further, the Obama administration’s claim that it was a mistake fails to make it any less damning, because it pokes holes in the argument that the drone war and the procedures that eventually lead to strikes is an air-tight process executed with weapons that are exceedingly precise.

And if Scahill’s source is correct that Brennan suspected the hit was intentional, it is damning on a number of levels. First – the obvious – the US government at some level intentionally targeted for assassination a 16-year old citizen that was never even suspected of any crime or association with terrorism. Perhaps they believed he would avenge his father’s unwarranted murder?

But second, this account seems to depict Brennan and President Obama as unsure of the motivations behind drone strikes carried out by JSOC. That would mean the JSOC teams waging drone warfare have run totally amok, and even the Obama administration’s dangerously insufficient internal oversight processes aren’t enough to stop rogue strikes on innocent people from happening.

Lindsey Graham’s predictable argument post-Marathon bombing that the suspects should be treated as enemy combatants and tried in military commissions was the sort of role we have come to expect him to play. He is perhaps the foremost jingo in the US Senate and is radically disinclined to even acknowledge constitutional restraints on government.

But Alex Seitz-wald at Salon.com caught something that is even more revealing of Graham’s impenetrable psychosis: suspected terrorists should be deprived of due process, but their Second Amendment rights should not be infringed.

At a press conference he set up this afternoon to slam the White House on the enemy combatant decision, he was asked about legislation that would stop people on the Terrorist Watch List from buying guns. Here’s his response:

GRAHAM: “I think, anyone who’s on the Terrorist Watch List should not lose their Second Amendment right without the ability to challenge that determination. I think, Senator Kennedy was on the Terrorist Watch List. There’ve been people come up on the watch list. I did not want to make that a — the basis to take someone’s Second Amendment rights away. What I would suggest, is that if you come up on the Terrorist Watch List, you have the ability to say, “No, I’m not a terrorist.” And that would be the proper way to do that.

…Contrast his opposition to closing the “terror gap” with this, from a 2011 New York Times article:

Citizens who are suspected of joining Al Qaeda are opening themselves up “to imprisonment and death,” Mr. Graham said, adding, “And when they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them: ‘Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer. You are an enemy combatant, and we are going to talk to you about why you joined Al Qaeda.’ ”

There you have it. Senator Graham has become the full picture of a self-parody. I cannot tell difference between the Senator’s actual words, and those that might be written for his imitators on Saturday Night Live.

Police were continually screaming “don’t look out the window!” during their sweep in Watertown last week. This photo shows what happens to folks who disobeyed that order.

So our security now depends on permitting police to threaten to kill anyone who disobeys any order? Or to treat every American like a terrorist suspect who can be gunned down on the flimsiest pretext?

As more people view photos like the above, the knee-jerk pro-government reaction to last week’s finale will dissipate. It will not matter if 70% or 80% of people still support any action the government takes. There will be enough people – initially with camcoms and cell phones – that the legitimacy of mass crackdowns will not survive.

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This video is a shocking example of the total lockdown of an entire city and the virtual martial law that took over to find a single 19-year old. While watching it, remember that none of this ostentatious security theater helped to find the suspect. And it was only when the authorities eased the order for Watertown residents to stay in their homes that an individual called in with a tip.

Another Watertown resident posted this photograph on Facebook, taken from their home:

This one, from AP, really gets the point across:

Here’s Anthony Gregory on how fragile liberty is:

The police are conducting the most pedestrian, universally assumed valid function of government. They are going after a murderer who appears to be armed and dangerous and a continuing threat. And in this pursuit, they have turned several cities into what look like police states by any reasonable measure. This demonstrates that the core nature of the state, its monopoly on crime control, always holds the potential for a full-blown security state and a total abolition of public liberty. What matters most is a culture wary of state power in any and all manifestations.

Yes, the lockdown will eventually ratchet back, but I fear this is only a hint of what is to come. On the one hand, we can say the suspect allegedly committed a particularly insidious crime and poses an especially frightening threat, and so the police reaction is either no cause for alarm, or at least something that will pass. On the other hand, all it took was a couple people with a couple bombs made from pressure cookers, and they managed to provoke the kind of full-scale lockdown you’d expect in response to a genuine invasion by a fully armed and manned military force. Monday showed us how fragile life and social tranquility are. Today shows us how fragile liberty is.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee today and reiterated the same assessment regarding Iran as was delivered last month.

The exact same statements – verbatim – were included in Clapper’s unclassified report, including the assessment that, “Iran is developing nuclear capabilities to enhance its security, prestige, and regional influence and give it the ability to develop nuclear weapons, should a decision be made to do so. We do not know if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.”

Of course, as Clapper notes, Iran’s ability to potentially manufacture the components is inherent to its advanced nuclear infrastructure and is not an indication of an active nuclear weapons program, which all U.S. intelligence agencies agree Iran does not have.

As such, Clapper again reported to the Senate Committee, “Iran has the scientific, technical, and industrial capacity to eventually produce nuclear weapons. This makes the central issue its political will to do so.”

In his testimony, Clapper stated that, were the decision to weaponize its nuclear energy program to be made by Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran could theoretically reach a “breakout” point within “months, not years.” His report repeats the assessment, though, that “[d]espite this progress, we assess Iran could not divert safeguarded material and produce a weapon-worth of WGU before this activity is discovered.”

Again, undermining the bogus claims that Iran is an irrational and reckless actor, Clapper maintained the judgment that “Iran’s nuclear decisionmaking is guided by a cost-benefit approach,” balancing its own domestic interests with “the international political and security environment.”  Iran also has a defensive – not aggressive – military posture, one based on “its strategy to deter – and if necessary retaliate against – forces in the region, including US forces” were an attack on Iran to occur.

During questioning from Senators following his prepared remarks, Clapper admitted – as a number of recent independent reports have shown – that the increasingly harsh sanctions levied upon Iran have had no effect on the decision-making process of the Iranian leadership, yet has produced considerable damage to the Iranian economy and resulted in increased “inflation, unemployment, [and the] unavailability of commodities” for the Iranian people.

This, he said, is entirely the point.  Responding to Maine Senator Angus King, who asked about the impact sanctions have on the Iranian government, Clapper explained that the intent of sanctions is to spark dissent and unrest in the Iranian population, effectively starting that Obama administration’s continued collective punishment of the Iranian people is a deliberate (and embarrassingly futile) tactic employed to foment regime change.

“What they do worry about though is sufficient restiveness in the street that would actually jeopardize the regime. I think they are concerned about that,” Clapper said of the Iranian leadership. It is no wonder, then, that Clapper refers in his own official report to the economic warfare waged against Iran as “regime threatening sanctions.”

Continue reading “Clapper: Iran Still Not Building Nukes; Sanctions Intended to Foster Unrest”