NYTimes would prefer “untargeted” killing?
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Targeted Killing Comes to Define War on Terror
By SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON — When Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden, was
taken into American custody at an airport stopover in Jordan last month, he
joined one of the most select groups of the Obama era: high-level terrorist
suspects who have been located by the American counterterrorism juggernaut,
and who have not been killed.
Mr. Abu Ghaith’s case — he awaits a federal criminal trial in New York — is
a rare illustration of what Obama administration officials have often said
is their strong preference for capturing terrorists rather than killing
them.
“I have heard it suggested that the Obama administration somehow prefers
killing Al Qaeda members rather than capturing them,” said John O. Brennan,
in a speech last year when he was the president’s counterterrorism adviser;
he is now the C.I.A. director. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
In fact, he said, “Our unqualified preference is to only undertake lethal
force when we believe that capturing the individual is not feasible.”
Despite Mr. Brennan’s protestations, an overwhelming reliance on killing
terrorism suspects, which began in the administration of George W. Bush, has
defined the Obama years. Since Mr. Obama took office, the C.I.A. and
military have killed about 3,000 people in counterterrorist strikes in
Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, mostly using drones. Only a handful have been
caught and brought to this country; an unknown number have been imprisoned
by other countries with intelligence and other support from the United
States.
This policy on targeted killing, according to experts on counterterrorism
inside and outside the government, is shaped by several factors: the
availability of a weapon that does not risk American casualties; the
resistance of the authorities in Pakistan and Yemen to even brief incursions
by American troops; and the decreasing urgency of interrogation at a time
when the terrorist threat has diminished and the United States has deep
intelligence on its enemies.
Though no official will publicly acknowledge it, the bottom line is clear:
killing is more convenient than capture for both the United States and the
foreign countries where the strikes occur.
The drone strikes have become unpopular abroad; in a Pew Research Center
poll last year, just 17 percent of Pakistanis supported them against leaders
of extremist groups. And domestic critics have attacked from two different
directions: Some Republicans in Congress accuse Mr. Obama of adopting a de
facto kill preference because he shut down the C.I.A.’s overseas prisons and
does not want to send more detainees to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Human rights
advocates argue that some drone strikes have amounted to extrajudicial
killings, the execution without trial of people suspected of being militants
whose identities American officials often do not know and who sometimes pose
little threat to the United States.
But with the American public, the strikes remain popular. Even as some
senior former American security officials question whether the strikes are
beginning to do more harm than good, 65 percent of Americans questioned in a
Gallup poll last month approved of strikes to kill suspected foreign
terrorists; only 28 percent were opposed.
Mr. Brennan’s criterion for capture — when it is “feasible” — is a very
subjective judgment, said Matthew C. Waxman, a former Defense Department
official who is now at Columbia Law School.
“Those simple statements about a preference to capture mask a much more
complicated story,” Mr. Waxman said. “The U.S. military and intelligence
community can do a great deal if they’re directed to do it. Sometimes where
we say it’s infeasible, we mean it’s too risky.”
But he believes the hazards of a capture strategy are real. “I think in most
cases we could not capture people without significant risk to our own forces
or to diplomatic relations,” he said.
The uncertainties were evident nine months into Mr. Obama’s first term, when
intelligence agencies tracked down Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a suspect in the
attacks on two American embassies in East Africa in 1998.
The original plan had been to fire long-range missiles to hit Mr. Nabhan and
others as they drove in a convoy from Mogadishu, Somalia, to the seaside
town of Baraawe. But that plan was scrubbed at the last minute, and instead
a Navy SEALs team helicoptered from a ship and strafed Mr. Nabhan’s convoy,
killing him and three others. The SEALs landed to collect DNA samples to
confirm the identities of the dead.
The episode raised uncomfortable questions for some at the Pentagon. If the
United States took the risk to land troops in Somalia, they wondered, why
did they not capture Mr. Nabhan instead of killing him?
Or consider the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric who had
joined the Qaeda branch in Yemen. In September 2011, when American
intelligence located him, it might conceivably have been possible to
organize a capture by Yemeni or American commandos. But a drone strike was
politically far less complicated for both countries, said Gregory D.
Johnsen, an expert on Yemen at Princeton.
If American forces captured him, their presence on Yemeni soil might have
spurred unrest, Mr. Johnsen said. If the forces of the Yemeni president at
the time, Ali Abdullah Saleh, caught him, he said, “Does he turn him over to
the Americans and risk a backlash? Does he hold him? It was easier for Saleh
to let the Americans take a shot at Awlaki than to send his troops to catch
him.”
The trade-offs have not changed under Yemen’s new president, Abdu Rabbu
Mansour Hadi, who lauded the precision of drone strikes in a 2012 speech in
Washington. Two months later, an American strike killed Adnan al-Qadhi, a
well-connected Qaeda supporter, even though he was in a town near the
capital, Sana, where several high-level officials live. Neighbors told
reporters that he could easily have been captured.
In Pakistan, where the SEAL raid that killed Bin Laden sent
Pakistani-American relations into a tailspin, drone strikes — though deeply
unpopular — are tolerated by the security establishment. “There’s an
intangible notion that a drone flying over is less of an intrusion than
troops on the ground,” said Ashley S. Deeks, a University of Virginia law
professor and a former State Department lawyer.
Then there is the question of very real danger to Americans in capturing
heavily armed terrorists. The SEALs sent to Abbottabad were instructed that
if Bin Laden immediately surrendered, he should be detained, according to
Matt Bissonnette, a member of the SEAL team who wrote a book on the raid.
But if Americans died trying to catch a midlevel militant — when drones were
available but went unused — there would be a huge public outcry, most
officials believe.
Only in the drone era has killing terrorism suspects become routine. In the
1980s and 1990s, counterterrorism officers captured several suspects
overseas and brought them back to the United States for trial.
Brad Garrett, a former F.B.I. agent, was on the teams that caught both Ramzi
Ahmed Yousef, an organizer of the first World Trade Center attack in 1993,
and Mir Aimal Kansi, who shot five C.I.A. employees, two of them fatally,
outside the agency’s headquarters in Virginia the same year. Teams of
American and Pakistani officers caught the men by kicking down doors at
their guesthouses, and “no shots were fired in either case,” he said.
As an investigator, Mr. Garrett said, “I’ve spent my life talking to live
people. That’s the downside of drones. There’s no one left to talk to.” But
he said that catching a solo suspect in an urban setting, while risky, was
far less hazardous than confronting a gang of heavily armed men in the
hostile territory of Pakistan’s or Yemen’s tribal areas. “I don’t think you
can really compare them,” he said.
When Mr. Obama closed the C.I.A. prisons and banned coercive interrogations,
Republicans complained that there was nowhere left to hold and question
terrorists, a charge that resonated with some military and C.I.A. officers.
The president countered by creating a High-Value Detainee Interrogation
Group, an elite group of analysts and interrogators that officials say has
been sent about two dozen times to question detainees at home and abroad.
That is a tiny number compared to the frequency of drone strikes, of course,
but officials say the secretive group has been successful.
An even smaller number of those questioned by the interrogation group have
been brought back to the United States to face criminal charges, including
Mr. Abu Ghaith, the Bin Laden son-in-law, and Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, a
Somali commander of the militant group Shabab.
By all accounts, Mr. Warsame’s handling is a powerful illustration of the
value of capturing rather than killing a terrorism suspect. He first began
providing information to American counterterrorism officials after being
caught on a ship in April 2011. He has never stopped talking about both the
Shabab and the Qaeda branch in Yemen, officials say, and he knows that his
ultimate sentence will depend on his cooperation.
There are signs that the Obama administration may itself have grown wary of
the convenience of targeted killing — or may be running out of high-level
targets. After a sharp rise in Mr. Obama’s first two years, the total number
of drone strikes is now in sharp decline.
In Pakistan, strikes peaked in 2010 at 117; the number fell to 64 in 2011,
46 in 2012, with 11 so far this year, according to The Long War Journal,
which covers the covert wars. In Yemen, while strikes shot up to 42 in 2012,
no strikes have been reported since a flurry of drone hits in January,
according to several organizations that track strikes.
In his State of the Union address in February, Mr. Obama pledged more
transparency for the drone program, and he and his aides have hinted that
changes are coming. It remains unclear what the administration has in mind,
but the president has spoken of the treacherous allure of the drone.
Decisions on targeted killing, he told CNN in September, are “something that
you have to struggle with.”
“If you don’t, then it’s very easy to slip into a situation in which you end
up bending rules thinking that the ends always justify the means,” Mr. Obama
said. “That’s not who we are as a country.”
Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting.
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