The CIA: War Crimes As Policy

By DOUGLAS VALENTINE and NICOLAS J.S. DAVIES

In February the Guardian and BBC Arabic unveiled a documentary exploring the role of retired Colonel James Steele in the recruitment, training and initial deployments of the CIA advised and funded Special Police Commandos in Iraq.

The documentary tells how the Commandos tortured and murdered tens of thousands of Iraqi men and boys.  But the Commandos were only one of America’s many weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.   Along with US military forces – which murdered indiscriminately – and various CIA funded death squads – which murdered selectively – and the CIA’s rampaging palace guard – the 5,000 man strong Iraq Special Operations Forces – the Commandos were part of a genocidal campaign that killed about 10% of the Sunni Arabs of Iraq by 2008, and drove about half of all Sunnis from their homes.

Including economic sanctions, and a 50 year history of sabotage and subversion, America and its Iraqi collaborators visited far more death and destruction on Iraq than Saddam Hussein and his regime.

For the last few weeks, American pundits have been cataloguing the horrors.   They tell how the Bush and Obama regimes, united in the unstated policy of war crimes, probably murdered more than a million Iraqis, displaced around five million, and imprisoned and tortured hundreds of thousands without trial.

A few have further explained that the dictatorial administrative detention laws, torture, and executions that characterize the occupation are still in place under Prime Minister Maliki.   The prime minister’s office, notably, is where the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Bureau is currently ensconced.

All of this meets the definition of genocide in the Genocide Convention, and violates multiple articles of the Geneva Conventions, which guarantee protection to civilians in time of war.   But the responsible Americans have gone unpunished for their war crimes, not least of which was falsifying intelligence about Iraq’s non-existent weapon of mass destruction as a pretext for the invasion.  British legal advisors repeatedly warned their government that invading Iraq would be a crime of aggression, which they called “one of the most serious offenses under international law.”

For anyone familiar with the CIA, this was predictable.  But the US Government, through secrecy and censorship, destroyed much of the hard evidence of its war crimes, making it harder to prove.   And the media is content to revise history and focus public attention on front men like Steele, rather than the institutions – in particular the CIA – for whom they work.

History, however, provides contextual evidence that what happened in Iraq amounts to a policy of carefully planned war crimes.  Indeed, the CIA modeled the Iraqi Special Police Commandos on the Special Police forces it organized and funded in Vietnam.  In November 2000, Counterpunch published an article describing how Congressman Rob Simmons, while serving as a CIA officer in Vietnam, created the Special Intelligence Force Unit (SIFU) on which the Iraqi Special Police Commandos are very likely modeled.   This is only one of many historical examples of the CIA’s modus operandi.

There are other examples.  As we were reminded by the Guardian, Steele headed the U.S. Military Advisor Group in El Salvador (1984-1986), where US advised units were responsible for thousands of cases of torture and extra-judicial killing.  They operated in rural and urban areas, but wherever they operated, they were directed against anyone opposing US policy – usually leftists.

The CIA’s death squads in El Salvador were periodically moved from one administrative cover to another to confuse investigators.  The CIA played this shell game with its Special Police Commandos in Iraq as well, rebranding them as the “National Police” following the exposure of one of their torture centers in November 2005.  In its finest Madison Avenue marketing traditions, the CIA renamed the Commandos’ predatory Wolf Brigade as the “Freedom Brigade”.

In Vietnam, the CIA built an archipelago of secret torture centers to process the hundreds of thousands of detainees kidnapped by its mercenary army of “counter-terror” death squads.  All around the world, CIA officers and their Special Forces lackeys teach torture techniques and design the torture centers, often hidden at military posts.   This is well known.

Major Joe Blair, the Director of Instruction at the School of the Americas (1986-9), described the training the U.S. gave to Latin American officers as follows: “The doctrine that was taught was that if you want information you use physical abuse…false imprisonment…threats to family members… and killing.  If you can’t get the information you want, if you can’t get that person to shut up or to stop what they’re doing, you simply assassinate them, and you assassinate them with one of your death squads.”

In 2000, the School of the Americas was rebranded as “WHINSIC”, but, as Blair testified at a trial of SOA Watch protesters in 2002, “There are no substantive changes besides the name.  They teach the identical courses that I taught, and changed the course names and use the same manuals.”

General Paul Gorman, who commanded U.S. forces in Central America in the mid-1980′s, defined this type of warfare based on war crimes as “a form of warfare repugnant to Americans, a conflict which involves innocents, in which non-combatant casualties may be an explicit object.”‘

Another problem, apart from historical amnesia, is that each war crime is viewed as an isolated incident, and when the dots are connected, the focus is on some shadowy character like Steele.  The Guardian made an attempt to connect Steele to Petraeus and Rumsfeld, which again, is commendable.  But the fact is that the entire National Security State has been designed and staffed with right-wing ideologues who support the unstated US policy of war crimes for profit.

We know who these security ideologues are.  The problem is, they regularly have lunch with the reporters we trust to nail them to the wall.

For example, on 17 March 2013, CNN talking head Fareed Zakaria had Donald Gregg on his show to discuss North Korea.  Zakaria introduced Gregg as President Bush the Superior’s national security advisor in the 1980s, but did not mention that Gregg, while a CIA region officer in charge in Vietnam, developed the “repugnant” form of warfare based on war crimes described by General Gorman above, or that he oversaw its application in El Salvador through a back-channel “counter-terror” network.

Gregg’s plan, used by Steele in El Salvador and then Iraq, requires US advisers to coordinate civilian security services (like the Iraqi Special Police) with military intelligence and civil affairs units to provide death squads and military units with information on the location of guerrillas, whose hideouts are bombed by U.S. warplanes, then ravaged in My Lai-style cordon and search operations in which counter-terror hit teams hunt enemy cadres in their homes.

In Vietnam, Gregg and his CIA companions – many of whom migrated to El Salvador – put together a chart of VC political cadres from “battered” detainees.  They’d force the detainees to point out on a map where their comrades were hiding.  Then the CIA officers would take the detainees up in a helicopter to point out the hiding places on the ground.  A Special Forces or CIA paramilitary unit would then snatch the cadre and bring them to region’s secret torture center, run by a CIA-paid and owned Special Police officer – the kind of guy Steele and before him Congressman Simmons advised.

“We brought guys in from the national prison to flesh out the reports,” Gregg told me about one particular operation.  “We had guys analyzing reports, marking photographs, putting the pictures together on the wall, and then photographing that.  That led to 96 people in the organization.  Using military intel, we took photos of the houses where they lived… then took the photos back to the helicopter where we had the 23 people, who were hooded, and they circled the faces of the cadre. ”

There’s more historical evidence, of course, but this is the plan the CIA exported to El Salvador, and that Steele employed, with some modifications, in Iraq.

After finishing with Gregg, Zakaria took a commercial break and returned with Paul Wolfowitz, Bush the Inferior’s Deputy Secretary of Defense and proponent of the Iraq War.

ZAKARIA: “How do you think about as an American policy maker, the issue of – was it worth the price in American lives and treasure? By some estimates $1 trillion.

WOLFOWITZ: “I would like as much as anyone to be able to say, let’s forget about the Persian Gulf. Let’s forget about the larger Middle East.  But that part of the world isn’t leaving us alone. Al Qaeda isn’t leaving us alone. Pakistan isn’t leaving us alone. I think our interests and our values would be advanced if we stick with it.”

Zakaria did not ask Wolfowitz what he meant by “leaving us alone.”  He simply said, “Paul Wolfowitz, pleasure to have you on.”

War Criminals Wave Press Passes

Given the history of America’s genocidal wars in Vietnam and Central America, it is unfortunate that the Guardian limited itself to establishing that Steele and his administrative boss, General David Petraeus, and his boss Donald Rumsfeld, underwrote systematic torture and extrajudicial killing.

What needs to be stressed is that thousands of Americans, including political bosses like Wolfowitz, and scores of journalists with access, knew that the CIA-owned Ministry of Interior had more than a dozen secret prisons, and they knew what went on in them – as one Iraqi general told the film-makers, “drilling, murder, torture – the ugliest sorts of torture I’ve ever seen.”

Likewise, the composition of and operations of Special Police death squads, an American interviewee said, “were discussed openly, wherever it was, at staff meetings,” and were “common knowledge across Baghdad.”

It is a testament to the power of U.S. “information warfare” that this policy of war crimes comes as a surprise to the general public.   Such is the power of National Security State insiders David Corn and Michael Isikoff, who happily turn the policy of calculated war crimes into the “hubris” of a handful of sexy mad patriots whom the Establishment is glad to sacrifice on the pseudo-altar of public theatre.

Certainly people have to be reminded, and the young have to learn, that America’s long-standing policy of war crimes for profit cannot exist without the complicity of the mainstream media, who exploit our natural inclination to believe the best of “our” leaders and especially of our soldiers.  As George Orwell wrote in 1945, “The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

Belligerent nationalism is often understood as the essence of what it means to be a “patriotic” American, and this veneration for the nation is taught to all budding reporters at journalism schools, along with the Code of Silence.   Which is why, when insider Seymour Hersh reported that the CIA and Israel were training U.S. Special Forces assassination teams for deployment in Iraq, on the CIA’s Phoenix program model, he described it in a bloodless manner that made it seem necessary and, at worst, a mistake.

But war crimes are not a mistake; they are a “repugnant” and thoroughly intentional form of warfare.

Hersh quoted a former CIA station chief as saying, “We have to resuscitate Iraqi intelligence, holding our nose, and have Delta and agency shooters break down doors and take them”—the insurgents—“out.”

Hold our noses, Hersh suggested, and commit war crimes.  And when Amy Goodman interviewed him about it, she did not ask if what he described constituted a policy of war crimes.  And when Zakaria looked at Wolfowitz, he failed to question him about the war crimes he plotted and committed.

All this psychological warfare is waged in the name of morale – to make us, and our journalists, feel good about our belligerent nationalism – about being complicit in the war crimes perpetrated by the Perles, Frums, and Feiths.

After the CIA death squads eliminated the senior leadership of the Iraqi government, they eliminated “mid-level” Baath Party members, the middle class of Iraq.   Cover was provided by Newsweek, which quoted an army officer who said, “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists. From their point of view, it is cost-free.  We have to change that equation.”

How did they do this?  In one case, U.S. forces held a general’s three sons as hostages to persuade him to turn himself in.  Then, instead of releasing his sons as promised, they staged an elaborate mock execution of his 15-year-old youngest son, before torturing the general himself to death.

All of it covered up.  Not one victim featured on TV.

If you were to believe the New York Times – the newspaper of record – it doesn’t know the names of the senior CIA officers in Iraq behind these sorts of barbaric practices.   Or publishers and editors may claim that the Intelligence Identity Protection Act prevents them from naming names, but they could easily describe the jobs, and tell us what’s being done.   They could finesse the law.  But they don’t even do that, and that’s the Big Secret upon which the policy of war crimes utterly depends.

The Times conceals the simple truths that undermine our so-called “democracy.”   Truths, like how the CIA nurtured the exile leadership it installed in Iraq, and organized and funded the Ministry of Interior as its private domain, replete with a computerized list of every Iraqi citizen and every detail of their lives.

The Times could at least describe the CIA as “Keeper of the Hit Lists: Blackmail Central.”

But the Times won’t, because it’s a family affair.  As we well know, the Iraqi National Congress was headed by Ahmed Chalabi, the CIA-sponsored source on the myth of weapons of mass destruction, hand-delivered to Times reporter Judy Miller, now a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.  Chalabi’s lies, and Miller’s dutiful reporting of them, were the pretext for the war on Iraq.

What is never mentioned is that the INC was founded and funded by the CIA, and that another of its leaders was the exiled General Hassan al-Naqib, whose son, Falah al-Naqib, then became the CIA’s handpicked Interim Interior Minister in Iraq and appointed his uncle General Thavit to lead the Special Police Commandos.

Times reporters undoubtedly lunch with Uncle Thavit and his CIA case officer.

The Times doesn’t explain the CIA’s precious methods of dominance: that any American working for the Interior Ministry, or prime minister’s office, was reporting to a publicly acknowledged administrative boss, usually in the military or State Department, and secretly to a CIA case officer, his operational boss.   Or that every unit in the Special Commandos had a CIA case officer handing out hit lists to its American “Special Police Transition Team”.  Up to forty-five Americans, mostly Special Forces, worked with each Iraqi unit.  These teams were in round-the-clock communication with their CIA bosses via the Special Police Command Center, and there is no record of the Special Police ever conducting operations without U.S. supervision, even as they massacred tens of thousands of people.

Every militia and Iraqi Special Forces unit had a CIA case officer doing likewise.  Every Iraqi politician and ministry officer has a CIA case officer too.  And Times reporters drink with these advisors inside the Green Zone.  It’s the secret that enables atrocity.

American journalists do not report the truth.   Consider their deference to the Interior Ministry’s CIA advisor Steven Casteel after his Special Police Commandos launched their reign of terror in Baghdad.   Hersh’s sanitized reports of a Phoenix-style terror campaign in Iraq were conveniently forgotten and instead they regurgitated Casteel’s black propaganda – that all atrocities were either rumor or innuendo or perpetrated by “insurgents in stolen police uniforms.”

Forget about what Hersh said about “mistakes.”  Such an explanation was as ludicrous as General Petraeus claiming that the Iraqis formed the Special Police Commandos on “their own initiative.”

Knight Ridder did not mention that Casteel had managed DEA operations in Latin America and been the DEA’s Chief of Intelligence before being sent to Iraq, or that the CIA has controlled the DEA’s overseas targeting for 40 years, on a purely political basis.  Casteel had served as a CIA lackey in Latin America, attacking left wing drug traffickers and letting right wing traffickers flourish, supporting the CIA sponsored Los Pepes-AUC death squads who were responsible for about 75% of civilian deaths in the Colombian civil war over the next 10 years.

To its credit, Knight Ridder did investigate Commando atrocities, and might have uncovered the whole story, except that its Iraqi reporter, Yasser Salihee, was shot and killed by an American sniper in June 2005.  And while it had sufficient evidence to debunk Casteel’s cover story, it instead blamed the abuses on infiltration of the good guy Commandos by bad guy “Shiite militias”.

After the exposure of the al-Jadiriyah torture center, journalists reported that heads would roll.  But a major CIA asset, Deputy Interior Minister Adnan al-Asadi, maintained command of the National (formerly Special) Police, undermining the reforms promised by the new Interior Minister, Jawad al-Bulani.

Asadi remains in that position, his forces embedded and deeply implicated in persistent human rights abuses in Iraq, where prisons are still rife with rape, torture, executions (judicial and extra-judicial) and disappearances.  During Arab Spring demonstrations in Tahrir Square in Baghdad in March 2011, demonstrators spotted Asadi on a rooftop directing snipers as they shot peaceful protesters in the square below.

The Guardian and the BBC made a good start, but US journalists need to break the Code of Silence and launch an ongoing investigation into the full extent of U.S. command and control of the Special Police Commandos and all the other death squads and torture centers the United States brought to Iraq.  The investigation must seriously examine the roles of the CIA and of US Special Forces, including the secret Joint Special Operations Command and the “Nightstalkers” who worked with the Wolf Brigade in 2005.  The investigation must lead to accountability for each and every war crime committed.

American journalists were glad to demonize Saddam Hussein for his war crimes – real and imagined. Now they need to identify and humanize the up to 1,800 dead bodies that piled up every month in Baghdad, and to follow up with Iraqi human rights groups like the Organization for Follow-Up and Monitoring, who matched 92% of the bodies of execution victims with names and descriptions of people detained by US-led Interior Ministry forces.

America’s ruling National Security State, under the Obama regime, has expanded, through the CIA, “covert” paramilitary operations from 60 countries in 2008 to 120 nations.  If we are ever to have a whiff of true democracy, we need our journalists to reveal the extent to which the CIA commands and controls these operations, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we need them to explain, on a daily basis, how the National Security State corrupts intelligence and “news” for the same racist imperial purposes that have defined US foreign policy since the Vietnam War.

Doug Valentine is the author of five books, including The Phoenix Program, and “A Crow’s Dream,” his first book poems.  Seewww.douglasvalentine.com or write to him atdougvalentine77@gmail.com

Nicolas J. S. Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq (Nimble Books: 2010), with a foreword by Benjamin Ferencz, a chief investigator and the only surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg war crimes trials, and the founding father of the International Criminal Court.  Nicolas’ writing about American war crimes has been published by Alternet, Huffington Post, Z Magazine and warisacrime.org.  You can reach 8im atpeacetopower@aol.com

US Covert Actions In Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia

By Jack Serle and Chris Woods

Bureau data suggests the CIA is killing fewer people in each strike in Pakistan.

Lack of official transparency means it remains unclear who is carrying out strikes in Yemen.

No reports of US operations in Somalia but al Shabaab continues to launch attacks.

Pakistan

June 2013 actions

Total CIA strikes in June: 1
Total killed in US strikes in June: 7-9, of whom 0 were reportedly civilians

All actions 2004 – June 30 2013

Total Obama strikes: 318
Total US strikes since 2004: 370
Total reported killed: 2,548-3,549
Civilians reported killed: 411-890
Children reported killed: 168-197
Total reported injured: 1,177-1,480
For the Bureau’s full Pakistan databases click here.

A single CIA drone strike hit Pakistan in June. The attack, on June 7, killed seven including Mutaqi(aka Bahadar Khan), described by some sources as a ‘key Pakistan Taliban commander’.

The attack came two days after new prime minister Nawaz Sharif used his inaugural address to demand an end to US drone strikes. After the attack, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned deputy US ambassador Richard Hoagland to protest.

Tensions in the region continue to grow after the killing of Pakistan Taliban (TTP) deputy leader Wali Ur Rehman in a drone attack in May hardened the stance of the militant group. Rehman’s death dashed hopes of peace talks between the militant group and Pakistan authorities in Islamabad. The TTP has since claimed that a spate of bloody attacks were in retaliation for Rehman’s death, including the murder of ten climbers and their guide in the mountainous north of the country.

While peace negotiations have faltered in Pakistan, across the border the US is trying to negotiate peace talks with the Afghan Taliban. The militant group opened its political office in Qatar – a move that provoked a visceral response from the Afghan government.

Six-monthly trendsMuch has been written about the steep decline in the number of US drone strikes in Pakistan: strikes are now at their lowest level since early 2008. The number of reported civilian deaths is also at an all-time low, a trend first high-lighted by the Bureau in 2012.

The average number of people being killed in each drone strike has fallen sharply too, an analysis of the Bureau’s data shows. An average of four people now die in each attack – just a third of the rate in the first six months of 2010.

Research by the Bureau and others indicates that some of the highest casualties in the US drone war occur when the CIA carries out ‘signature strikes’ – attacks on groups of men judged to be behaving in a suspicious manner.

The rate CIA drones kill people per strike has continued to fall since the first half of 2009.

The smaller death tolls seen in recent months suggest the CIA may be limiting its use of the controversial tactic.

The Bureau showed its analysis in the graph above to law professor Rosa Brooks who recently testified before a Senate committee on the constitutional and counterterrorism implications of the US drone wars. She said the White House’s use of drones has come under pressure and the drop in the casualty rate is ‘almost certainly an effort to respond to the criticisms’. However, she added, this is ‘the optimistic theory’. ‘The less optimistic theory would simply be they have started running out of targets.’

The first half of 2013 began with a flurry of strikes in January before the CIA scaled back operations. This coincided with a move by the White House to more transparency about the drone programme. In February new CIA director John Brennan discussed the Agency’s targeted killing programme with the US Senate during his confirmation hearing. And in May President Obama for the first time acknowledged US drone strikes have killed civilians, in a major foreign policy speech.

The past six months have been bookended with the death of two significant militant leaders.Maulvi Nazir, one of the most senior commanders of the so-called ‘Good Taliban’, was killed in January. And Wali Ur Rehman, deputy leader of the Pakistan Taliban (TTP) was killed in May.

In February a leak to NBC provided a summary of the secret legal justification that allows the US to kill its own citizens in drone strikes. In April another leak to the McClatchy news agency was reported as showing the that US is not clear who it has been killing in Pakistan. According to the leaked secret documents many killed by drones were merely classified as ‘unknown‘.

Yemen

June 2013 actions

Confirmed US drone strikes: 0
Further reported/possible US strike events: 2
Total reported killed in US operations: 0-15
Civilians reported killed in US strikes: 0-1

All actions 2002 – June 30 2013*

Confirmed US drone strikes: 46-56
Total reported killed: 240-349
Civilians reported killed: 14-49
Children reported killed: 2
Reported injured: 62-144

Possible extra US drone strikes: 80-99
Total reported killed: 284-454
Civilians reported killed: 25-50
Children reported killed: 9-11
Reported injured: 78-101

All other US covert operations: 12-77
Total reported killed: 148-377
Civilians reported killed: 60-88
Children reported killed: 25-26
Reported injured: 22-111
Click here for the full Yemen data.

A 10-year-old boy reportedly died in a suspected US drone strike in June, alongside up to six alleged al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) militants. The boy, Abdulaziz, was the younger brother of alleged AQAP commander Hassan al-Saleh Huraydan - described as a key figure in enabling the movement of money and fighters from Saudi Arabia to Yemen. They were killed, reportedly along with Saudi nationals, in a vehicle as they travelled through the northern province of al Jawf on June 9.

The strike was the second of the month. The first hit Abyan province on June 1, killing alleged senior AQAP militant Awadh Ali Lakra and a second alleged militant, Lawar.

There was strong evidence to suggest both were drone strikes. Yemen Air Force commander Rashid al Janad said he was ‘unaware of any air strikes that have been launched’ by Yemeni planes. And June’s second attack targeted a moving vehicle which is potentially beyond the Yemen Air Force’s capability. However the Bureau could not confirm US involvement – or the use of drones - in either.

Six-monthly trendsThe covert drone war has been openly discussed by senior figures in the US administration. So too has President Obama’s wish to become more transparent about the drone programme – an effort to ‘push back against a lot of these allegations that are not true‘. And Brennan hinted at giving the Pentagon control of drone strikes outside Pakistan during his Senate hearing. Some suggest this would make the programme more transparent because unlike CIA strikes, Pentagon drone strikes can be publicly acknowledged by the government.

Moving the programme to military control is not a guarantee of more transparency. Earlier this year the US military significantly reduced its openness about its use of drones in Afghanistan, reversing an earlier decision to regularly publish data about the use of drones. It had originally agreed to declassify the data following months of discussions with the Bureau, but reclassified the data, claiming attention had ‘disproportionately focused’ on drones.

In Yemen the Pentagon has also run a targeted killing programme for four years or more, and does not publish details of these operations.

So far this year the Bureau has recorded four confirmed US strikes on Yemen. However it is not clear who carried out up to 12 other reported strikes. In the first half of 2012 this pattern was more pronounced – the Bureau recorded at least 21 confirmed US drone strikes, but cannot confirm US involvement in 42 more reported attacks.

US involvement cannot be confirmed in the majority of reported drone strikes.

The Yemen government has claimed its airforce carried out many of the ‘other’ attacks. But the Yemen Air Force is incapable of flying missions at night, let alone carrying out precision strikes such as many of those reported in Yemen.

At least 183 people died in these unconfirmed drone attacks in the first half of 2012 – more than double the dead from confirmed US operations. And at least 28 people have died in possible drone strikes so far in 2013, double those killed in confirmed US attacks.

Journalists have struggled at times to investigate reported drone strikes, particularly in 2012 when neither government nor AQAP forces would allow journalists into areas under al Qaeda’s control. Retrospective investigations have uncovered evidence of US involvement in strikes, and discovered previously unreported civilian casualties.

This year investigators from human rights charities HOOD and al Karama and, independently, journalists from a Swedish radio programme visited the site of a January strike. They found fragments of Hellfire missiles, confirming it was a US attack. And they discovered the Yemeni government had acknowledged the deaths of two civilians in the strike, a university student and a teacher. This is despite anonymous government sources previously naming all the dead as al Qaeda militants.

More than half of this year’s reported strikes took place in January, before an 85-day pause while Yemen’s numerous tribes convened for the start of reconciliation talks in the capital. As this conference continued the drones returned in April killing at least four people in Wessab. A week later journalist and activist Farea al Muslimi, who was born in Wessab, testified before the US Congress about the effect of drones on Yemen and its people.

* All but one of these actions have taken place during Obama’s presidency. Reports of incidents in Yemen often conflate individual strikes. The range in the total strikes and total drone strikes we have recorded reflects this.

Somalia

June 2013 actions

Total reported US operations: 0

All actions 2007 – June 30 2013

US drone strikes: 3-9
Total reported killed: 7-27
Civilians reported killed: 0-15
Children reported killed: 0
Reported injured: 2-24

All other US covert operations: 7-14
Total reported killed: 47-143
Civilians reported killed: 7-42
Children reported killed: 1-3
Reported injured: 12-20
Click here for the Bureau’s full data on Somalia.

Once again there were no US drone strikes reported in Somalia in June – the tenth consecutive month with no reported US operations in the country. However al Shabaab continues to threaten Somali security. The militant group once again successfully penetrated the heightened security area around Mogadishu airport to attack the UN Development Programme offices on June 19. As many as 22 people were killed in the assault and ensuing 90-minute gun battle.

Al Shabaab militants were driven from Kismayo late last year by a combination of Kenyan soldiers and local militia. Yet the government in Mogadishu has failed to exert sufficient influence on the southern port, and fighting between competing clans and militia on June 7 and 8 left 31 civilians dead and 38 injured, according to the World Health Organisation. At least seven were killed infurther clashes on June 26 and 27.

It emerged that the US operates its drones over Somalia using a satellite relay station in Ramstein, Germany.

Another drone reportedly crashed in Somalia, this time in the north of the country in the autonomous region of Puntland. It is unclear who the drone belonged to, in contrast with an earlier incident in May when the Pentagon unusually claimed a crashed surveillance drone as its own.

Six-monthly trends
The Bureau has not recorded a single US drone attack or other covert operation in Somalia in the first half of 2013. Whether this is due to poor reporting from the region or an absence of attacks is unclear.

This is in contrast to 2012 when there were a number of reports of US drone strikes in the African country including two that killed British citizens. This was reported on in a major Bureau investigation published by the Independent in February which revealed that two former British citizens died in US drone strikes in Somalia in 2012 after having their British citizenships removed. Bilal al Berjawi was killed by a drone in January 2012, with his childhood friend and fellow alleged militant Mohammed Sakr dying in a US drone strike the following month.

Both were UK citizens until Home Secretary Theresa May signed an order in 2010 removing their UK nationality while they were out of the country. May has the power to remove someone’s citizenship on national security grounds. Only individuals with dual nationality can be deprived of their British citizenship. But being born in the UK is not a protection. The Bureau has identified five dual nations who were born in the UK who have been deprived of their British nationality - including Mohamed Sakr. 

Sakr’s lawyer Saghir Hussain told the Bureau there appeared to be a link between thedeprivation of citizenship and subsequent US action. Leading immigration lawyer Ian McDonald QC said that stripping people of their citizenship ‘means that the British government cancompletely wash their hands if the security services give information to the Americans who use their drones to track someone and kill them’.

4 Numbers Everyone Must Know About Drone Strikes

By Ben Kuebrich

U.S. support for drone strikes has dropped 18 percent over the last year (see the Washington Post/ABC poll conducted in 2012 and the Gallup Poll released in March 2013), but almost two thirds of the U.S. population still supports drone strikes "in other countries against suspected terrorists."

As the first two numbers below demonstrate, the majority that believe drone strikes are effective, surgical tools used against terrorists hold this belief against the available facts. Both numbers are published in Living Under Drones, a report conducted by human rights and law clinics at Stanford and NYU about drone strikes in Pakistan and confirmed by a variety of other sources.

49
The number of people killed in U.S. drone strikes for every high-level suspect. Despite President Obama's statement on CNN in September 2012 that drone strikes were used in "[situations] in which we can't capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States," only two percent of the people drones killed in Pakistan between 2004 and 2012 actually fit that description.

3
The number of children killed between 2004 and 2012 for each high-level suspect.

It might be surprising to learn that we kill more children than high-level suspects. News reports flood in daily about the scores of "militants" killed in U.S. drone strikes, but these reports rely on the Obama administration's offensive, illegal definition of "militant" as all "military-age males in a strike zone." Think of the justifiable outrage if this same definition were applied to people killed in attacks on U.S. soil.

For every high-level suspect in Pakistan, the U.S. military kills 49 other people who we know little to nothing about.

The above two numbers replace the reckless ambiguity of "militant" with categories that can be counted with accuracy. The amount of high-level suspects were all confirmed by at least two reliable news agencies, and the amount of children killed by drones in Pakistan is kept in daily reporting by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Together, these first two numbers present the reality of U.S. drone strikes as it is hardly every covered: for every high-level suspect in Pakistan, the U.S. military kills 49 other people who we know little to nothing about and at least three of those 49 are children.

The final two numbers come from the Pew Global Attitudes Project. Pew has been reporting on global attitudes for over 10 years, polling what citizens of countries around the world think about the United States, other countries, and a variety of issues. The results from their recent report on Pakistan, published earlier this month, will come as a surprise to anyone still holding the belief that that the United States is helping Pakistan with its barrage of drone strikes. Here are two important numbers from the report:

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The percentage of Pakistanis who hold a favorable view of the Taliban. On top of that, 98 percent of Pakistanis see terrorism as a problem and only 13 percent of Pakistanis see Al Qaeda as favorable. It would seem that these numbers, alongside regular news of Taliban's heinous abuses, surely justify U.S. drone strikes in the region. The country is clearly against terrorist groups and the United States is a self-certified terrorist killer, so we must be welcome there, right? See the next number.

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The percentage of Pakistanis who have a favorable view of the United States. That's right, the same percentage of Pakistanis favor the U.S. as favor the Taliban, and Pakistanis actually have a more favorable view toward Al Qaeda than they do toward the United States. The report also finds that only 5 percent of the population is supportive of U.S. drone strikes.

For anyone reading first-hand accounts of drone strikes in Pakistan, like those published in Living Under Drones, these numbers should come as no surprise. The citizens of Pakistan talk about U.S. drone strikes in the same language that people talk about terrorism--constant fear, psychological trauma, never knowing if someone leaving the house to go to a wedding, community meeting, or funeral will end up dead as the result of a drone strike. That we fall into the same category of favorability as the Taliban and Al Qaeda may speak to the sort of actions we carry out in Pakistan.

Some readers may not care what Pakistan thinks about drone strikes, but hopefully these numbers dispel any myths about our violence in the region being more favorable than our enemy's violence, and they very clearly dispel any myth about our presence in the country as helping Pakistani citizens. 

Ben Kuebrich is a graduate student at Syracuse University and the head of Syracuse Students Against Drones.

With New Mini-Satellites, Special Ops Takes Its Manhunts Into Space

Noah Shachtman reports:

In September, the U.S. government will fire into orbit a two-stage rocket from a Virginia launchpad. Officially, the mission is a scientific one, designed to improve America’s ability to send small satellites into space quickly and cheaply. But the launch will also have a second purpose: to help the elite forces of U.S. Special Operations Command hunt down people considered to be dangerous to the United States and its interests.

For years, special operators have used tiny “tags” to clandestinely mark their prey — and satellites to relay information from those beacons. But there are areas of the world where the satellite coverage is thin, and there aren’t enough cell towers to provide an alternative. That’s why SOCOM is putting eight miniature communications satellites, each about the size of a water jug, on top of the Minotaur rocket that’s getting ready to launch from Wallops Island, Virginia. They’ll sit more than 300 miles above the earth and provide a new way for the beacons to call back to their masters.

The officers in charge of SOCOM say their forces will soon do less manhunting, and more training of foreign troops. Perhaps so. But with senior Pentagon officials predicting “at least another 10 to 20 years” of combat with al-Qaida, these special operations forces will continue with their mission of “tagging, tracking, and locating” suspected militants. In this fiscal year alone, SOCOM will spend $88 million on new tagging gear.

This isn’t SOCOM’s first mini-satellite. In December of 2010, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket put into orbit a $25,000 special operations spacecraft small enough to fit into the palm of a hand. The satellite stayed more than 170 miles up for about a month. But that first flight was mostly a proof of concept that something so cheap and small could have any military value at all. (“Just to test the theory that we could do it,” Douglas Richardson, SOCOM’s executive in charge of Special Reconnaissance, Surveillance and Exploitation Technologies, explained in 2011.)

The Operationally Responsive Space-3 mission (.pptx) will carry eight satellites for SOCOM (plus another 20 for other government agencies). This array of configurable “cubesats” is designed to stay aloft for three years or more. Yes, it will serve as further research project. But “operators are going to use it,” Richardson promised an industry conference in Tampa last week. His presentation showed a cubesat under the heading “tagging, tracking, and locating.”

Special operators are already using a dizzying panoply of equipment in order to perform “TTL,” as it’s called within the military. Last fiscal year, SOCOM put into the field 7,000 TTL kits, Jennifer Powers, the project manager in charge of tags, tells Danger Room. Those kits are individually tailored to the environment – jungle or desert, urban or rural — and can be filled with a mix of 190 different pieces of gear. While SOCOM funds mid-term research to make the beacons more compact and less power-hungry, new gear can also be fielded in as little as three days.

Some of the beacons use infrared flashes to signal their location; in 2009, al-Qaida propagandists claimed they found them all over villages that had been hit with U.S. drone strikes. Others are implanted into seemingly-innocent commercial electronics. Under “TTL examples,” Richardson’spresentation (.pdf) showed pictures of a cell phone and a key fob, like the kind used to open a car. Still other tags are affixed to cars or people, and transmit their whereabouts using satellite or CDMA, GPRS, and other cellular networks.

Until 2009, the market for these tags was dominated by the secretive, Virginia-headuqartered Blackbird Technologies, Inc., which counts a former chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center as a executive. That year, the firm won a contract from the Navy for up to $450 million in TTL equipment.

But since then, SOCOM has decided to introduce some competition into the tagging market. (Blackbird, meanwhile, saw one of its employees fall victim to a gruesome murder-suicide last fall.)  Cobham Plc, a British firm, is now one of several firms supplying American special operators with TTL gear.

Cobham claims its UniTrac system can perform “tracking and command/control of over 70 different tracking devices and communications networks.” The 2.5-inch GPS tags themselves weigh about 2.5 ounces and can send out SMS messages when someone walks or drives nearby. ”These solutions give valuable intelligence as to the ‘pattern of life’ of subjects, as well as being used for live tracking, location and apprehension of criminals,” the company promises in an online brochure.

TTL also means keeping tabs on targets’ data, in addition to the people themselves. So Virginia-based EWA Government Solutions, Inc. not only markets a line of radio frequency tags for “High-Value Target Tagging Missions” and “Intelligence Operations.” (.pdf)  The firm also sells a “Black Hole” wi-fi intercept system (.pdf), which is allegedly able to crack the encryption keys protecting 802.11 networks, and suck up all the traffic being communicated therein.

That gives operators “the ability to filter, display, and reconstruct e-mail messages (POP3, SMTP, IMAP), instant messaging (Yahoo, ICQ, AOL, MSM), or web page (HTTP) activity,” EWA asserts. “A simple double-click will reconstruct e-mail messages, web pages, and instant message conversations.”

EWA says its technology is being used in “real-world operations with various Department of Defense and national- level agencies.” The company won’t say which agencies or which divisions of the Pentagon, exactly, have used their technologies. But a look in a federal purchasing database shows that the company has signed multi-million dollar contracts in recent years with the Army, Navy, and, of course, U.S. Special Operations Command.

The commandos were already using all the gear they could in order to zero in on their targets. Come September, they’ll have even more, orbiting at 300 miles up.