UPDATE 1: A 9/12/12 NY Times story citing drone revenge as motive in the Libyan Consul killings (part of which I copied below at 5:05pm on 9/12) now seems to have "disappeared." It's been replaced by a different article which puts the entire blame on an anti-Islam film. I've left the part as I originally copied it. I found references to drone revenge elsewhere and included 3 sources below, NBC, CNN, and Reuters (end of post).
'Kill list' NY Times report, scroll down
----------------------------------------
Update 2: This report from NBC News cites an expert who says the Consul killings were revenge for US drone killing in June of a top Al Qaeda figure:
..............
9/12/12, "US won't rule out Islamist militant link to attack, sends forces to Libya," NBC News
............
"Al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri released a video Tuesday marking the anniversary. In it, he called for Islamists to seek revenge for the killing by a U.S. drone strike of deputy al-Qaida leader Abu Yahya al-Libi in June.
Online postings Wednesday from Islamist militants were celebrating the attack as payback for his death, said Evan Kohlmann, a Middle East and terrorism analyst for NBC News. One of the postings claimed responsibility for the attack in the name of Ansar al-Sharia, a Sunni Muslim militant faction."
.............
---------------------------------------------------------
.............
NBC's analyst said a video was released "marking the anniversary," possibly referring to the 911 anniversary. The drone killings are Obama's alone. He insists "on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies he selects." (Relevant NY Times text posted below, scroll down). Obviously, Obama isn't going to say the Consulate deaths are his fault and open himself up for lawsuits. He's going to have the media say the movie did it or at least influenced it. Terrorist 'peace partners' will happily pile on with that. People will hear the lie so many times they'll never believe anything else.
............
-----------------------------------------------------------
Update #3: A CNN opinion piece by a former Libyan Islamic fighter who believes it was revenge for a drone killing of an Al Qaeda figure:
9/13/12, "What jihadists want you to believe about Libya," CNN commentary by Noman Benotman,
"The Obama administration may very well be right that the attack in Benghazi which claimed the lives of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. officials was part of a pre-planned terrorist operation. It would have happened sooner or later regardless of any protests against an obscure anti-Islam film made in America.
The attack apparently occurred because in recent days, the al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri posted a video online calling on Libyans to avenge the killing of al-Qaeda's second in command, Abu Yahya al-Libi."...
..................
========================================..................
This post originally began here with a NY Times story about drone revenge. As I mentioned at the top, the 9/12/12 NY Times story linked immediately below now links to a different article, one which puts the entire blame on a film, removes all the language you see below, different authors. In other words, Obama has friends at the NY Times. Nevertheless, the drone revenge thesis has been mentioned by other outlets including 3 mentioned in this post, CNN, NBC News (above), and Reuters (scroll down).
9/12/12, "U.S. Suspects Libya Attack Was Planned," NY Times, Baker et al.
"About 24 hours before the consulate attack, however, Al Qaeda posted to militant forums on the Web a video in which its leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, acknowledged the death in an American drone strike in June of his Libyan deputy, Abu Yahya al-Libi, and called on Libyans to avenge the death.
If it were established that the deaths of the American diplomats resulted not from the spontaneous anger of a crowd about an insult to Islam but from a long-planned Qaeda plot, that might sharply shift perceptions of the events. But officials cautioned that the issue was still under urgent study. ...
The news of the deaths emerged on Wednesday after violence spilled over the American Consulate in Benghazi and demonstrators stormed the fortified walls of the American Embassy in Cairo. Anti-American protests also were reported in Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring revolution, and in Gaza. The Taliban called on Afghans to “take revenge” on American targets in Afghanistan. ...
In Italy, the Web site of the newspaper Corriere della Sera showed images of what it said was the American Consulate in Benghazi ablaze with men carrying automatic rifles and waving V-for-victory signs, silhouetted against the burning buildings. One photograph showed a man closely resembling Mr. Stevens apparently unconscious, his face seeming to be smudged with smoke and his eyes closed."...
==================================
Mr. Greenwald is one of few on the left who will speak of how Obama's actions incite violence:
7/18/11, "The War on Terror, now starring Yemen and Somalia," Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com
"The U.S. continues to spawn the very Terrorism problem it claims to combat, with the media helpfully in tow."
"There is a concerted campaign underway to ensure that the War on Terror bonanza continues unimpeded in the wake of Osama bin Laden's death, and even despite Leon Panetta's acknowledgment that Al Qaeda has a grand total of "fewer than two dozen key operatives" on the entire planet. That effort relies primarily on touting a growing villainous alliance -- the scariest since Marvel Comic's Masters of Evil -- between Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (mostly in Yemen) and the al Shabab group in Somalia. To accomplish this, all the standard fear-mongering propaganda is being trotted out, and the War on Terror apparatus is simply being re-directed to those nations. Most notably,
- the establishment media is being used to disseminate these messages,
American media reports such as the one appearing this weekend in the LA Times reflexively depict escalating American military attacks as a response to the growing Terrorist threat rather than as what they are: a leading cause of that threat. One might also take cognizance of the obvious connection between these escalating attacks under Obama and the
- plummeting of U.S. public standing in the Arab and Muslim world."...
- http://www.salon.com/2011/07/18/terrorism_37/
........
6/7/12, "Obama Supporters Know His Drone War Is Indefensible," The Atlantic, Friedersdorf
........
===============================
...........
NY Times article describing Obama and the "kill" list. "Asked
what surprised him most about Mr. Obama, Mr. Donilon, the national
security adviser, answered immediately: “He’s a president who is quite
comfortable with the use of force on behalf of the United States.”"...
The 2010 Times Square bomber cited 'drones killing children' in his guilty plea. (It's known that drones preceded Obama but that he accelerated their use): "It was Jan. 19, 2010, the end of a first year in office punctuated by terrorist plots and culminating in a brush with catastrophe over Detroit on Christmas Day (the underwear bomber)."...[Note: Not stated in the article discussing Mr. Obama's various actions, he only does what he does because the US has no opposition political party. The GOP E has the same agenda as the democrats. Both "sides" and the media have to pretend that the two parties are sharply divided---the Republicans should really all go home, they just rubber stamp Obama. So the US is a de facto dictatorship. So-called "gridlock" in congress is just a sales pitch for show. The GOP E would be fine if Obama were president forever. They were desperate to see him re-elected in 2012. They allowed him to run basically unopposed in both 2008 and 2012.]
............
5/29/12, "Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will," NY Times, Jo Becker, Scott Shane
"This was the enemy, served up in the latest chart from the intelligence agencies: 15 Qaeda suspects in Yemen with Western ties. The mug shots and brief biographies resembled a high school yearbook layout. Several were Americans. Two were teenagers, including a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years.
President Obama, overseeing the regular Tuesday counterterrorism meeting of two dozen security officials in the White House Situation Room, took a moment to study the faces. It was Jan. 19, 2010, the end of a first year in office punctuated by terrorist plots and culminating in a brush with catastrophe over Detroit on Christmas Day, a reminder that a successful attack could derail his presidency. Yet he faced adversaries without uniforms, often indistinguishable from the civilians around them.
“How old are these people?” he asked, according to two officials present. “If they are starting to use children,” he said of Al Qaeda, “we are moving into a whole different phase.”
It was not a theoretical question: Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values; the chart, introducing people whose deaths he might soon be asked to order, underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be.
Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.
“He is determined that he will make these decisions about how far and wide these operations will go,” said Thomas E. Donilon, his national security adviser. “His view is that he’s responsible for the position of the United States in the world.” He added, “He’s determined to keep the tether pretty short.”
Nothing else in Mr. Obama’s first term has baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressive counterterrorism record. His actions have often remained inscrutable, obscured by awkward secrecy rules, polarized political commentary and the president’s own deep reserve.
In interviews with The New York Times, three dozen of his current and former advisers described Mr. Obama’s evolution since taking on the role, without precedent in presidential history, of personally overseeing the shadow war with Al Qaeda.
They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing. While he was adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relations with the Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and dangerous lands. When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda — even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was “an easy one.”
His first term has seen private warnings from top officials about a “Whac-A-Mole” approach to counterterrorism; the invention of a new category of aerial attack following complaints of careless targeting; and presidential acquiescence in a formula for counting civilian deaths that some officials think is skewed to produce low numbers.
The administration’s failure to forge a clear detention policy has created the impression among some members of Congress of a take-no-prisoners policy. And Mr. Obama’s ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron P. Munter, has complained to colleagues that the C.I.A.’s strikes drive American policy there, saying “he didn’t realize his main job was to kill people,” a colleague said....
Drones have replaced Guantánamo as the recruiting tool of choice for militants; in his 2010 guilty plea, Faisal Shahzad, who had tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square, justified targeting civilians by telling the judge, “When the drones hit, they don’t see children.”
Dennis C. Blair, director of national intelligence until he was fired in May 2010, said that discussions inside the White House of long-term strategy against Al Qaeda were sidelined by the intense focus on strikes. “The steady refrain in the White House was, ‘This is the only game in town’ — reminded me of body counts in Vietnam,” said Mr. Blair, a retired admiral who began his Navy service during that war.
Mr. Blair’s criticism, dismissed by White House officials as personal pique, nonetheless resonates inside the government.
William M. Daley, Mr. Obama’s chief of staff in 2011, said the president and his advisers understood that they could not keep adding new names to a kill list, from ever lower on the Qaeda totem pole. What remains unanswered is how much killing will be enough....
A few sharp-eyed observers inside and outside the government understood what the public did not. Without showing his hand, Mr. Obama had preserved three major policies — rendition, military commissions and indefinite detention — that have been targets of human rights groups since the 2001 terrorist attacks....
The Use of Force
of suspected members of Al
Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia.A few sharp-eyed observers inside and outside the government understood what the public did not. Without showing his hand, Mr. Obama had preserved three major policies — rendition, military commissions and indefinite detention — that have been targets of human rights groups since the 2001 terrorist attacks....
The Use of Force
It
is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than
100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus
gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’
biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to
die.
This
secret “nominations” process is an invention of the Obama
administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides
bearing the names, aliases and life stories
The
video conferences are run by the Pentagon, which oversees strikes in
those countries, and participants do not hesitate to call out a
challenge, pressing for the evidence behind accusations of ties to Al
Qaeda....
A parallel, more cloistered selection process at the C.I.A. focuses
largely on Pakistan, where that agency conducts strikes.
The
nominations go to the White House, where by his own insistence and
guided by Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama must approve any name. He signs off on
every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more complex and risky
strikes in Pakistan — about a third of the total.
Aides
say Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed in lethal
counterterrorism operations. A student of writings on war by Augustine
and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility
for such actions. And he knows that bad strikes can tarnish America’s
image and derail diplomacy.
“He
realizes this isn’t science, this is judgments made off of, most of the
time, human intelligence,” said Mr. Daley, the former chief of staff.
“The president accepts as a fact that a certain amount of screw-ups are
going to happen, and to him, that calls for a more judicious process.”
But
the control he exercises also appears to reflect Mr. Obama’s striking
self-confidence: he believes, according to several people who have
worked closely with him, that his own judgment should be brought to bear
on strikes.
He (Obama) has found that war is a messy business, and his actions show that
pursuing an enemy unbound by rules has required moral, legal and
practical trade-offs that his speeches did not envision....
Mr.
Obama, who had rejected the Bush-era concept of a global war on
terrorism and had promised to narrow the American focus to Al Qaeda’s
core, suddenly found himself directing strikes in another complicated
Muslim country.
The
very first strike under his watch in Yemen, on Dec. 17, 2009, offered a
stark example of the difficulties of operating in what General Jones
described as an “embryonic theater that we weren’t really familiar
with.”
It killed not only its intended target, but also two neighboring families, and left behind a trail of cluster bombs
that subsequently killed more innocents. It was hardly the kind of
precise operation that Mr. Obama favored. Videos of children’s bodies
and angry tribesmen holding up American missile parts flooded You Tube,
fueling a ferocious backlash that Yemeni officials said bolstered Al
Qaeda.
The sloppy strike shook Mr. Obama and Mr. Brennan, officials said, and once again they tried to impose some discipline.
In
Pakistan, Mr. Obama had approved not only “personality” strikes aimed
at named, high-value terrorists, but “signature” strikes that targeted
training camps and suspicious compounds in areas controlled by
militants.
But
some State Department officials have complained to the White House that
the criteria used by the C.I.A. [which reports to Obama] for identifying a terrorist “signature”
were too lax. The joke was that when the C.I.A. sees “three guys doing
jumping jacks,” the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said
one senior official. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be
bombmakers — but they might also be farmers, skeptics argued.
Now,
in the wake of the bad first strike in Yemen, Mr. Obama overruled
military and intelligence commanders who were pushing to use signature
strikes there as well.
“We are not going to war with Yemen,” he admonished in one meeting, according to participants....
Mr.
Obama had drawn a line. But within two years, he stepped across it.
Signature strikes in Pakistan were killing a large number of terrorist
suspects, even when C.I.A. analysts were not certain beforehand of their
presence. And in Yemen, roiled by the Arab Spring unrest, the Qaeda
affiliate was seizing territory.
Today,
the Defense Department can target suspects in Yemen whose names they do
not know. Officials say the criteria are tighter than those for
signature strikes, requiring evidence of a threat to the United States,
and they have even given them a new name — TADS, for Terrorist Attack
Disruption Strikes. But the details are a closely guarded secret — part
of a pattern for a president who came into office promising
transparency....
Justly
or not, drones have become a provocative symbol of American power,
running roughshod over national sovereignty and killing innocents. With
China and Russia watching, the United States has set an international
precedent for sending drones over borders to kill enemies.
Mr.
Blair, the former director of national intelligence, said the strike
campaign was dangerously seductive. “It is the politically advantageous
thing to do — low cost, no U.S. casualties, gives the appearance of
toughness,” he said. “It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular
only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest
only shows up over the long term.”"...
===============
“This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president, and
that’s not sustainable,” Mr. Hayden (former CIA director) said. “I have lived the life of
someone taking action on the basis of secret O.L.C. memos, and it ain’t a
good life. Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memos
locked in a D.O.J. safe.”"...(last parag. in subhead, The Ultimate Test)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
===============================
Dec. 25, 2009 Underwear bomber--signals present but missed by Obama
--who everyone including him said would fix all the mixed signals:
1/17/2010, "Review of Jet Bomb Plot Shows More Missed Clues," NY Times,
"Mr.
Obama this month presented his government’s findings on how the plot
went undetected. But a detailed review of the episode by The New York
Times, including more than two dozen interviews with White House and
American intelligence officials and with counterterrorism officials in
Europe and Yemen, shows that there were far more warning signs than the
administration has acknowledged.
The
officials also cited lapses and misjudgments that were not disclosed in
the declassified government report released Jan. 7 about what went
wrong inside the nation’s counterterrorism network.
In
September, for example, a United Nations expert on Al Qaeda warned
policy makers in Washington that the type of explosive device used by a
Yemeni militant in an assassination attempt in Saudi Arabia could be
carried aboard an airliner.
In
early November, American intelligence authorities say they learned from
a communications intercept of Qaeda followers in Yemen that a man named
“Umar Farouk” — the first two names of the jetliner suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — had volunteered for a coming operation.
In
late December, more intercepts of Qaeda operatives in Yemen, who had
previously focused their attacks in the region, mentioned the date of
Dec. 25, and suggested that they were “looking for ways to get somebody
out” or “for ways to move people to the West,” one senior
administration official said.
And
the same day those White House meetings on terrorist activities took
place, a Qaeda figure made ominous — and seemingly prescient — threats
against the United States....
The
American intelligence network was clearly listening in Yemen and
sharing that information, a sign of progress since the 2001 terrorist
attacks. Yet the inability to pull the data together or correctly
interpret it produced the “systemic failure” that Mr. Obama has vowed to
fix and that Congress will examine in hearings this week.
The
criticism of the government’s performance has provoked infighting, with
rival agencies privately pointing at one another and some intelligence
officials complaining about what they see as a White House attempt to
deflect responsibility....
“We
had a system in place to capture these nuggets because of the
investment we put into the collection system,” Mr. Brennan said in an
interview. “We had the ability to map it against a database that was
designed specifically to capture that bio data information. We had those
pieces in place."...
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/us/18intel.html?pagewanted=all
.....................
===================================
.........
.........
Drone revenge cited:
.........
.........
...........
"The attack that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other American diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, may have been planned and organized in advance, U.S. government officials said on Wednesday....
They also said some reporting from the region suggested that members of Al-Qaeda's north Africa-based affiliate, known as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, may have been involved....
U.S. and European officials said that in contrast to the Benghazi attack, which some investigators say may have been calculated and organized, the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Cairo appeared more likely to have been a spontaneous eruption by a mob....
A London think-tank run by a former Libyan militant leader suggested on Tuesday that not only was the Benghazi attack "well planned," but that it may have been retaliation for an American drone attack which killed a Libyan leader of al-Qaeda's core command group earlier this year.
Quilliam, whose president, Noman Benotman, once was a leader of an anti-Gaddafi militant faction known as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, said that according to its sources, up to 20 militants had prepared for
- a military assault.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment