Among Obama’s counterterrorism advisers was John Brennan, one of George Tenet’s senior deputies on 9/11 and a career CIA official with extensive Mideast experience. No one has yet been able to determine what role Brennan played during the establishment of the apparatus of torture, disappearance, and secret jails, but he was part of Tenet’s leadership team during the creation. He instinctively bristled when the agency’s use of torture was challenged. Brennan’s CIA tribalism was part of the point, as it made him a bridge between Obama and the Security State, as CNAS was.
Obama’s perspective on surveillance had changed during the course of the campaign season. He had pledged ending what he called the “illegal wiretapping of American citizens.” But a month after he clinched the Democratic nomination from Clinton, the Senate voted to broaden the NSA’s ability to intercept Americans’ international communications. It was not the abolition of unconstitutionally broad surveillance, but legislative ratification of it, rationalized as an indispensable counterterrorism authority. Obama, surely thinking ahead to his own possible presidency, voted for it, calling the bill “improved but imperfect.” Civil libertarian activists had pressed him to oppose what would become a crucial legal wellspring for a geometric expansion in the NSA’s bulk digital collection programs. The vote marked the first time that Obama broke with a constituency.
In the summer of 2008, Obama traveled to Iraq and was photographed beside Petraeus in a helicopter overlooking Baghdad. Before the trip Obama belatedly rebuked MoveOn. “A general providing his best counsel on how to move forward in Iraq was accused of betrayal,” he said, even comparing Petraeus to Iraq war opponents who were “tagged by some as unpatriotic.” Maliki’s government flexed its muscle as well. While Obama was in Baghdad, Maliki’s spokesman endorsed a 2010 combat withdrawal deadline, a schedule that fit Obama’s proposal, and undermined the Republican charges that such a timetable was irresponsible. At the end of their civil war, the Iraqis pinned the United States between its stated respect for a “sovereign” Iraq and the elite consensus behind remaining in Iraq. But for much of the right, there was a greater emergency at home.
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AMID DISPLAYS OF FACTORY-FRESH TRACTORS and dairy machines, Rudy Giuliani entered an agriculture trade expo in California’s Central Valley and reminisced about 9/11. “Most of the first hour was just reacting quickly,” he remembered over breakfast with farmers and farm-equipment retailers. Giuliani admitted he didn’t know much about farming, but warned those who did that a violent death loomed constantly: “This desire of these terrorists to come here and kill us is going to continue.”
Giuliani supported the surge, but he had a sense of fatalism about Iraq. The former New York mayor, now running for president, instead proposed ramping up brutality in what he termed the Terrorists’ War on Us: “If we succeed in Iraq, or if we fail in Iraq, the terrorists are still going to be at war with us.” In such a war, anything America wanted to inflict on its enemies was justified, from waterboarding to “whatever method [interrogators] could think of.” Giuliani’s rival, the aristocratic Mitt Romney, had even less of a national-security background, and compensated by promising to “win the war on jihad” and to “double Guantanamo.” When Ron Paul, the only antiwar contender among the Republican candidates, argued that the Terrorists’ War on Us was sparked by American imperialism, Giuliani demanded that Paul retract his comment. Paul had a validator: Michael Scheuer, who had started the CIA’s Usama bin Laden Unit. “Foreign policy is about protecting America,” Scheuer said. “Our foreign policy is doing the opposite.”
It was the Republicans’ first post-Bush, post-9/11 election, and the Forever War was no longer the sure path to political power that Rove had forecast. The eventual nominee, though, framed perseverance in Iraq as a matter of national honor. John McCain was the premier war hero in American public life, owing to his endurance of five and a half years of torture in Vietnamese captivity. From the start, McCain had backed the most aggressive of measures in the War on Terror, and through his endorsement gave the war a reflected valor. McCain was the War on Terror on horseback, a fantasy of the war that neocons and liberals wanted to believe might have been. His opposition to torture shamed and embittered its enthusiasts. McCain did not accept the concept of a war against Islam—although he accepted the endorsement of John Hagee, a Christian Zionist pastor who did. He instead pledged to bear any burden, boasting to “make it a hundred” years in Iraq if necessary. But that position was no longer enough to overcome nativist objections to McCain’s permissive attitude toward immigration and other social positions. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who warned of encroaching Islamic law and had been a fellow Iraq war enthusiast, refused to endorse McCain. In the Buchananite American Conservative, W. James Antle III observed the race and wondered, “Can the Iraq War rally the millions who entered politics to fight the Culture War?”
In Barack Obama, they saw how to square the circle.
The prospect of the first Black president erupted deep wells of white anxiety across the political spectrum. Biden “praised” Obama by calling him a “clean” Black candidate “like we’ve never had before.” Hillary Clinton attracted supporters, like the ex-CIA officer Larry Johnson, who spread the lie that Obama somehow had faked his birth certificate to hide his lack of American citizenship. Clinton herself spoke of her following among “hardworking Americans, white Americans” and Obama’s weakness among this herrenvolk.
An email began to appear in American inboxes calling attention to Obama’s middle name, Hussein. “Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim,” it warned, inventing his attendance at an “Islamic school steeped in the radical teaching that is followed by the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad against the western world.” It signed off, “Let us all be on alert.” The Nation’s Chris Hayes traced the spread of the secret-Muslim conspiracy through the popular conservative message board Free Republic and other online warrens before noting that “Barack Obama Muslim” was the third-most-googled term regarding Obama. To motivate right-wing voters, the Islamophobic Clarion Fund distributed a free DVD called Obsession: Radical Islam’s War on the West into critical states by the millions. Clarion received in 2008 an astonishing $17 million from Donors Capital Fund, one of the largest financiers of mainstream conservative causes. More visibly, a Fox News anchor asked if Obama giving his wife dap was a “terrorist fist jab.”
Most importantly, McCain, behind in the polls and in need of rallying his base, chose the Alaska governor, Sarah Palin, for his vice president. As ignorant as she was rabid, Palin knew instinctively how to wield the War on Terror against Obama. She also knew why her white audience would embrace it. Exaggerating Obama’s acquaintance with the former left-wing militant Bill Ayers, Palin told crowds that Obama “pals around with terrorists.”
Many on the right began to believe that Obama was part of the same threat that arose on 9/11. Attendees of McCain and Palin’s rallies acted accordingly. In Clearwater, Florida, when Palin invoked Ayers’s ties to Obama, someone yelled, “Kill him!” The previous month, another yelled, “Off with his head!” Obama’s willingness to negotiate with U.S. adversaries became, in Palin’s telling, “his plans to meet unconditionally with terror state leaders like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,” as if they were calling on each other socially. Signs appeared with slogans like obama, osama. Rallygoers told McCain that they were afraid of an Obama presidency. A Florida sheriff, wearing his uniform, invoked “Barack Hussein Obama” at a Palin event, and defended himself as just “calling somebody by his middle name.” At a Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, McCain–Palin rally, a woman demanded to know why Obama concealed his “Muslim heritage.” Even the respectable New Republic ran a piece headlined jihadists for obama, which reported the existence of a “a strong Yes We Can contingent that seems to be firing their guns in the air this week.” An appalled Colin Powell rebuked Republicans in October 2008, saying that even
if Obama were Muslim, “Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America.”
In Minnesota weeks before the vote, McCain was booed when he told a crowd that it didn’t have to fear an Obama presidency. An elderly white woman said she “had read about” Obama and couldn’t trust him because “he’s not—he’s an Arab.” McCain took her microphone and stumbled through an answer about how Obama was “a decent, family man, citizen.” McCain meant to include Obama within the American fabric, but his formulation, however inadvertent, excluded “Arabs,” by which the woman meant Muslims, from it. Such exclusions were socially permissible in respectable discourse throughout the War on Terror, so McCain received praise for rebuking the woman. It appeared never to have occurred to McCain that the open-ended war he helped build, against an amorphous enemy, would lead her and other Americans to unleash racist fanaticism. Nor did he seem to realize that once such politics bestowed power, they would be wielded against those who came to take power away. By September 2008, when the global financial catastrophe erupted, it was clear that McCain and the Republican Party would suffer an electoral devastation.
An apparatus of death, surveillance, detention, and brutality, forged and implemented by the Bush administration and the security services, with the uncomfortable and occasionally regretful support of the liberal opposition, was now in the hands of Barack Obama. Antiwar enthusiasm helped bring Obama to this point, even as he cautioned that he did not thoroughly share it. An incensed portion of the country now felt itself disempowered by an ally of America’s enemies—Muslim, Black, and foreign. Obama, opposed to dumb wars and committed to changing the mindset that ensnared America within them, now had to define how much of the War on Terror he would discard, and how much he would wield.
CHAPTER FOUR
OBAMA AND THE “SUSTAINABLE” WAR ON TERROR
2009–2013
Faheem had spent much of the long day on his feet, from Friday prayers to a food-shopping errand his mom ordered. One of his uncles had returned from a business trip in the United Arab Emirates, which meant he now had to listen to all the corny jokes and boring rants from the sidelines of the packed men’s parlor. His mind wandered to the nearby playground, where the other Ziraki village kids were probably on the cricket pitch or the badminton courts. Then Faheem heard something that sounded like a plane taking off.
When the shock faded, he realized he had caught fire. Faheem ran frantically out of the ruined parlor and into the yard, grasping before him, as he couldn’t see anything, hoping to douse his face with water from wherever he could find it.
The survivors of the blast found the thirteen-year-old unconscious and rushed him to the hospital, where he would not awaken for forty days. He had suffered burns so severe that the entire left side of his body required operations. The doctors had taken shrapnel from his stomach and used lasers to repair his right eye. They couldn’t save his left.
Faheem’s family kept the worst from him while he convalesced. The Hellfire antitank missile fired from the Predator drone above their home in Pakistan’s North Waziristan province had killed two of his uncles and his twenty-one-year-old cousin, who was about to travel to the UAE for work. Fourteen of his cousins had lost their fathers. Once Faheem was released from the hospital, he would have to be one of the family’s primary breadwinners. He’d have to abandon his ambitions to become a chemist and make his mangled body perform whatever work he could find.
The drone strike that forever marked Faheem Qureshi’s life occurred on January 23, 2009, the third full day of Barack Obama’s presidency. It was the inaugural act of an aerial bombardment campaign, conducted from remotely operated planes resembling giant gray mosquitoes, heralding a new era in institutionalized killing. Obama would intensify and proliferate these lethal attacks to the point where his name became synonymous with them.
Drone strikes were more than just the centerpiece of Obama’s counterterrorism strategy. They represented how he saw the War on Terror: not as something to end, but something to reorient. The Iraq war proved the folly of a massive, ponderous ground invasion. Pakistan, like other countries the United States had turned into battlefields, had little interest in suppressing extremists in its own tribal areas on behalf of a deeply unpopular hegemon. Obama considered the drone strikes a responsible, calibrated use of lethal force, a weapon of precision, not one suited to indiscriminate killing. To guard against their excesses, Obama created a simulacrum of due process, which technocratic liberalism trusted to yield responsible outcomes, known as the disposition matrix. This framework empowered intelligence officials, who “nominated” someone for “disposition,” and lawyers, who labored to impose consistency on this expanding enterprise. Obama and his officials found the term “War on Terror” as embarrassing as the Department of Homeland Security’s color-coded ladder boxes that presumed to quantify justified fear—and jettisoned them both. They instead tended to refer to a “sustainable” approach to counterterrorism.
Although the United States was not at war with Pakistan, and no United Nations measure had ever sanctioned missile attacks on its territory, Obama’s lawyers assured him that assaults on suspected members of al-Qaeda and its associated forces fell within the 2001 AUMF, now eight years old. Carrying cameras as well as missiles, the drones could follow and loiter above a target for half a day before receiving an order to fire. Because the guided missile fired by the Predator, a flimsy airframe, weighed only one hundred pounds, anyone close enough to the target to be injured or killed was likely be an intimate of the target. How innocent could they be? Better still, at a time when Obama attempted to reboot America’s relationship with the Muslim world, the strikes were official secrets. Whatever disasters resulted from their deployment would never be officially acknowledged, leaving journalists, human rights groups, and survivors to sift through the wreckage to estimate how many died, why, and even who they were.
The drone strikes bound Obama and the Security State. As long as they did, there would never be any legal consequence for the CIA’s torturers and jailers. As much as torture offended Obama, the man placed in charge of the drone campaign was Michael D’Andrea, the same CIA Counterterrorism Center director who had overseen the agency’s black sites from 2006—the torture inflicted there continued until November 8, 2007—until Obama ordered them closed.
Because drone strikes could be an end result of the NSA’s bulk surveillance, they also tied Obama to STELLARWIND and its successor programs. The drone strikes, as well as the video intelligence they accumulated, facilitated JSOC raids, the surge in Afghanistan, and the drawdown in Iraq. Through what CIA director Leon Panetta described as “the only game in town,” the Security State learned it could do business with Obama. Just as fatefully, waging the Long War meant embracing many who designed, maintained, and carried it out, repudiating the civil libertarians who warned Obama that the horrors of the War on Terror would only continue if their architects faced no reprisal. Still, the relationship between Obama and the Security State was as wary as it was symbiotic, with both sides concerned the other’s agenda would compromise its own. Obama’s relationship with progressives was relatively expendable.
Panetta delivered his assessment around the time Faheem Qureshi finally left his hospital bed. Lawyers helped Faheem petition Islamabad for compensation. His family ultimately acquired official Pakistani documents that cited “nine civilians” killed in the strike on what they listed as Faheem’s village. Journalistic accounts of the strike portray it failing to hit its intended target. But for years, when seeking justice, Faheem heard the same refusals—from the tribal liaison, from the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, and from the United Nations Human Rights Council. He could not even extract from the Americans or the Pakistani government the basic acknowledgment that his trauma had occurred at all.
Without such an admission, nothing prohibited the CIA from killing people as it liked. Sometimes derogatory information
about specific individuals came from the CIA’s paid Pashtun informants on both sides of the Afghanistan–Pakistan border, however reliable they might be. Usually the necessary data was sifted from voice, text, or email intercepts; or from the detritus captured in raids by Special Operations forces. Often the inception of the strikes was the result of information from several fragmentary sources that analysts would piece together, guessing at the identity and whereabouts of a potential target. Sometimes the CIA did not need a specific identity at all. Men as young as Faheem or as old as his grandfathers were classified as “military-aged males” by the agency and its allies. If the drones observed a threatening “pattern of life,” such as military-aged males gathering or traveling while bearing the region’s ubiquitous weaponry, and there weren’t too many women and children around, the CIA could kill these men in what it called signature strikes.
The U.S. government held the power of the drones’ narrative. Secret strikes required confirmation that only the CIA controlled. It provided reporters, off the record at all times, a narrative of uncanny technological precision. Obama’s closest counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, felt confident enough to insist that in one year, “There hasn’t been a single collateral death” in the drone strikes. Obama’s first director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, explained to journalist Jeremy Scahill that the lethal program “plays well domestically, and is unpopular only in foreign countries.”
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