After the New Yorker story came out, Rumsfeld, the White House, the air force, politicians, and the news media all roared disapproval. Military lawyers were blamed for their punctiliousness, and Franks was criticized for screwing up the mission, for micromanaging, for slowing down the campaign, and for demanding unnecessary target approval. Political leaders were criticized for not providing timely approval and imposing excessive collateral damage constraints in the first place. Rumors circulated that CIA intelligence analysts sitting in Langley were the problem, thinking that the building the Taliban took refuge in was a mosque. The CIA meanwhile whispered that they had thought it was Omar for sure, placing the blame squarely back on the shoulders of Central Command and the military.
No one came off looking smart, and the incident and reactions surrounding it were a surrogate for much bigger battles being waged in Washington. I experienced my own unsolicited lobbying from air force leaders and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who called me at home and tried to convince me that the problem was the CIA or even “the army commanders” (read General Franks) in charge of a new technology that they neither understood nor appreciated. Predator didn’t kill the target, and everyone spent an inordinate amount of time with their new black box, specially cleared to enter a still-restricted chamber. The dynamic itself, the stimuli of action creating crisis and decisions, obscured both the power and the cost of going at it unmanned, and made the mission seem more than it was, as if the death of Mullah Omar would have untangled the United States from Afghanistan for the next decade and a half or stopped terrorism.
Days after the bombing of Afghanistan commenced, a military aide came into Donald Rumsfeld’s office at the Pentagon to advise him that the IT wizards could hook up a special monitor at his desk so he also could watch real-time video from Predators flying half a world away. The vernacular of the irascible defense secretary’s response is lost to history: “That’s not the job of the Secretary of Defense,” he is blandly quoted as replying. “That’s General Franks’s job and the job of our field commanders.”50
Rumsfeld’s instinct about the danger of micromanagement was right, even if he and everyone else would soon get all tied up by Predator’s inaugural use. In his autobiography, General Franks would later tell some tall tale about intentionally choosing not to bomb Mullah Omar’s house on the first night of the war, “hoping it would serve as a magnet for Omar and his deputies…” later on.51 For some reason, he forgets that a Hellfire was fired at that very house, and he gets the location of Objective Gecko wrong, saying it was in downtown Kandahar.52
The air force types who hated Tommy Franks for having a typical man-in-green blind spot when it came to anything that wasn’t boots on the ground couldn’t wait to tattle. Though Rumsfeld blithely labeled Predator video and control of the drones Franks’s job, they whispered that the field commander went overboard in trying to put himself in the pilot’s seat. Not only did he watch the Predator feed himself, talking directly with the pilot regarding picture quality, fuel status, and even how the Hellfire missile might work, but he also personally directed the strike on the very vehicle that he would later forget was even bombed. “This sequence took over 90 minutes to complete and at multiple points the CENTCOM/CC [General Franks] was talking directly with the pilot of a single aircraft and directing aircraft tactics based upon the Predator video,” a key air force participant later wrote.53
The blood between the services became so bad that after Franks heard that air force chief of staff General John Jumper had watched the first-night attack unfold on video from the Pentagon, he ordered that his feed be removed.54 Thus the inaugural use of an armed Predator ended up being an introduction to the fundamental divide that exists between the world of the manned and the unmanned, as war begins to slip dangerously into the realm of video games and button-pushing murder. There are wars and secret wars, special and unspecial operations, civilians acting as military men and the actual field commanders being constantly diverted to tend to some promised silver bullet. It would happen again and again, this intrinsic fight between history and secret history. Unmanned warfare—safer, more flexible, newer, and certainly more alluring—might demand greater human attention but also starts us down the road of devaluing human input.
CHAPTER EIGHT
My Back Is Killing Me
… he took up his axe in his hand,
he drew forth the dirk [from] his [belt],
forward he crept and on [them] he rushed down.
Like an arrow he fell among them.…
TABLET X, EPIC OF GILGAMESH
It is perhaps a minor point, but the sources are practically unanimous, and they are almost all wrong: in the first weeks of the war against terrorism, the experts and articles and studies say, a Predator drone (not just a Predator but a CIA Predator) killed—and not just killed, but “assassinated”—Mohammad Atef, the al Qaeda military operations chief and World Trade Center attack commander.1 Atef was killed on November 3, 2001, or maybe it was the thirteenth or late November, or at least in the month of November; in Kabul, near Kabul, south of Kabul, in Gardez, in Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan; at a house, in a hotel, while on the run. As people fled, the Predator opened fire on them as well; Atef was killed along with “close to a hundred” other al Qaeda members. So say the history and law professors; the prodrone analysts; the antidrone activists; the industry of terrorism authorities; the Congressional Research Service; the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the infamous lawyer John Yoo, author of the torture memos; the New York Times; and pretty much everyone else.2
Mohammad Atef did die—that we know. He was the first and highest-ranking al Qaeda man to be killed after 9/11 and the first to be killed in any kind of air attack that specifically targeted an individual. But he wasn’t killed by a drone. Is this the way we want to leave the history of something so controversial: with wrong assumptions and messy scholarship? And even if Atef had been killed by a Predator, is it proper to call his death assassination, during a war, or to pin it on the CIA, as if the intelligence agency is somehow independent and not just some secret-agent warrior in our wholly transformed hybrid of a military? Does it matter that the story is engaged as highbrow ammunition for a particular argument or that it is mangled in rumor and a massive game of Telephone? I think it does matter, but as I tell the story, I just ask the reader to remember the telephone and not the Predator: Mohammed Atef was killed because of the black box and the phone.
Mohammad Atef was described as “a very striking-looking person, tall and slender with bright green eyes, dark-skinned, bearded, full of youth and vigour,” by Abdel Bari Atwan in The Secret History of al Qaeda. “He was modest, extremely radical and exceptionally polite.”3 A lot can be said about Atef, but the most important fact for this story is that he had a bad back, a really bad back. He was practically immobile, and US intelligence has since concluded that he was likely bed-bound, so when other al Qaeda leaders and fighters evacuated the Afghan capital, Atef stayed behind.
I’ve been to the house in Kabul where Atef was killed. I didn’t know that at the time; I had been directed to a nice residence in an upscale neighborhood by locals when I was leading a bomb damage assessment on behalf of the nongovernmental organization Human Rights Watch. The house had obviously been bombed, and not just promiscuously; it had been intentionally targeted and directly attacked with multiple bombs; the adjacent houses had been damaged only by the blast and flying shrapnel, the telltale signs of a precision attack. It was one of a dozen or more locations I probably visited that day in March 2002, looking for and verifying civilian casualties and trying to make sense of the targeting choices in Operation Enduring Freedom. In Kabul, eyewitnesses said the house was hit on November 12 or 13. Taliban forces were retreating from the Afghan capital, and the Northern Alliance was coming in from the Shomali Plain to the north; there was chaos. The early-morning hours of November 13 also turned out to be the final major urban air attack of the initial post-9/
11 campaign. It was the same day, sources said, and I have confirmed, that the offices of Al Jazeera television nearby were also attacked.
When Al Jazeera was bombed, it was immediately reported in the news media. “We had identified two locations in Kabul where Al Jazeera people worked, and this location wasn’t among them,” Colonel Rick Thomas, a Gulf-based spokesman for Central Command, told the Associated Press the same day. The attacked structure, he added, was “a known al-Qaida [sic] facility” in downtown Kabul. Thomas said that the United States “had no indications this or any nearby facility was used by Al Jazeera.”4
That morning, Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral Craig Quigley happened to be conducting a briefing at the Foreign Press Center in Washington and was also asked about the attack. “I have seen the news reports… that some sort of weapon went awry and destroyed those facilities,” he said, suggesting a malfunction. Adding that the United States only hits “military targets,” Quigley surmised that perhaps “weapons have failed” or “human errors have been made,” with perhaps “targets being struck that we did not intend to strike.”5
But Mohammed Jassim al-Ali, Al Jazeera’s managing editor, claimed in an interview that the strike must have been deliberate. “They know where we are located and they know what we have in our office and we also did not get any warning,” he said.6 Colonel Brian Hoey, another spokesman for CENTCOM and located in Florida, then contradicted Quigley and said that the building in question had been deliberately attacked, but said the attack was based on “compelling” evidence that it was being used by al Qaeda and not because it was Al Jazeera. At the time of the attack, Hoey added “the indications we had was that this was not an Al Jazeera office.” The US military, he said, “does not and will not target media. We would not, as a policy, target news media organizations—it would not even begin to make sense.”7
Despite denials and explanations, to outsiders the attack on Al Jazeera looked absolutely intentional. The Arab network had become famous for reporting on civilian casualties from inside Afghanistan, a role similar to the one that Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) played in the 1999 Kosovo war. Given that NATO intentionally bombed the Belgrade headquarters of the RTS during Operation Allied Force, it was easy to speculate that Al Jazeera was targeted simply for reporting a side of the war that the United States wanted suppressed. The Committee to Protect Journalists in New York protested, putting out a warning that a “deliberate attack on a civilian facility is prohibited under international humanitarian law.” No less than General Tommy Franks responded to the committee by letter six months later, categorically denying that Al Jazeera facilities “have ever been intentionally targeted by coalition forces.”8 In a letter to Al Jazeera dated December 6, 2001, Assistant Secretary of Defense Victoria (“Tori”) Clarke stated that “the building we struck was a known al-Qaeda facility in central Kabul,” adding that “there were no indications that this or any nearby facility was used by Al-Jazeera.”9
Around the same time, I was contacted by a team of air force analysts who were working on the lessons learned, trying to reconstruct and analyze the bombing campaign, what went right, what went wrong. They’d heard I had pictures; they’d heard I knew things, and they wanted to compare notes. We agreed that they would break the rules and invite me into the classified realm to combine the official target lists, pilot mission reports, and poststrike assessments with my observations and data from the ground. What we pieced together was that on the night of November 12–13, the United States undertook a meticulously planned attack on at least three dispersed houses, each coded as being associated with al Qaeda leadership. Three were identified on the target list as:
• Kabul Residence (AOM 666)
• Kabul Probable Arab Residence (AOM 532)
• Kabul Suspect Residence (AOM 597)
These were all preplanned attacks, that is, the targets were identified and selected based on intelligence reporting that associated the locations with al Qaeda at least twenty-four hours beforehand: they went on a validated target list, as opposed to being time-sensitive (or fleeting) targets chosen because conditions on the ground or contemporaneous intercepts indicated that they were active, though, as we shall see, that played a role as well. As best as it can be reconstructed and understood by me, as the numbers would suggest, there were hundreds of prospective targets in this category, and on the thirty-fifth day of bombing, with rapidly changing circumstances and al Qaeda leadership on the move, this was probably close to a last chance to bomb in Kabul (Kandahar in the south was still contested, as were most of the cities and villages in the east). War planners were still uncertain whether the city would indeed fall and how quickly US special operations forces (and “other government agencies,” as they like to say of the CIA) would make it into the city to reconnoiter and exploit al Qaeda and Taliban places of interest.
The squadrons and pilots in these cases received the air tasking order with their assigned targets, time of attack, designated weapons, and special instructions. Target study was done, in the sense of identifying the object to be attacked on a map and on satellite imagery and special graphics, and the planners at CENTCOM and the attacking squadron applied effectiveness methodologies to calculate the optimum angle of attack, the specific aimpoint, and the bomb and fusing that would be required to maximize the specified damage while minimizing collateral damage to adjacent areas.
According to the classified air tasking order (ATO) for that evening, three targets were attacked by US Navy F/A-18 Hornet fighter aircraft armed with 500-pound GBU-12 laser-guided bombs. Since all of the targets were located in densely built-up and heavily populated areas, the smallest laser-guided bomb in existence at that time was chosen. The pilots had to locate their target through their viewing systems, align their aircraft to be able to shoot a laser beam to the intended aimpoint, and, while flying at more than 500 mph, release the laser-guided bombs in the right “envelope” in order for the weapon to detect the laser reflection, which then guided the bomb to the intended aimpoint.
According to the classified pilot mission reports, two of the three targets—Kabul Probable Arab Residence and Kabul Suspect Residence—were hit nearly simultaneously at 14:04 and 14:20 Zulu time (Greenwich Mean Time), or 18:04 and 18:20 local time. The third target, Kabul Residence, was hit at 20:39 and 20:49 Zulu time, or 12:39 a.m. and 12:49 a.m. local time, in the early-morning hours of November 13. Kabul Residence was hit with four GBU-12s, two each separated by ten minutes.
Using the coordinates listed on the ATO and mission reports and comparing them to satellite imagery and GPS coordinates I collected on the ground, a fourth target also appeared. Air force analysts labeled it Building 4. It appeared that Kabul Residence (AOM 666), a house quite some distance away, was not bombed by an ATO asset that night after all. Building 4 turned out instead to be a house containing the offices of Al Jazeera television, that is, based upon the coordinates my team derived on the ground and seemingly the targets the navy fighters attacked based upon the time of attack, even if their official mission reports said they attacked AOM 666.10 AOM 592 and 597, the latter closest to the main avenue and located at Wazir Akbar Khan Street No. 13, according to my notes, were two adjacent houses practically opposite the Wazir Akbar Khan hospital complex. The air force analysts concluded that Mohammed Atef was in one of those two houses. An FBI special agent who later exploited the house confirmed the location based upon my pictures.
But there was a limit to what the military records revealed, at least in air force and CENTCOM records outside compartmented worlds. Whether AOM 666 was bombed at all remained unclear; it was a house that once was the residence of the Kabul mayor but far away from the Al Jazeera office (Building 4) or Mohammed Atef’s house. We scoured the air tasking order to see if some other attacker, particularly a CIA Predator drone, was also flying in the area at that time. My air force friends made inquiries up the chain of command. After months of work, we concluded that there was a single armed CIA Predator there th
at night that might have been involved in the bombing of AOM 666.11 It was pretty clear that Building 4 was Al Jazeera, and it was pretty clear that the F-18 dropped at least two of its four weapons at the moment it was attacked. But how did it get on the target list? Did the navy pilots get a time-sensitive target change while they were in the air and then attack Building 4? Their postmission reports didn’t say. And what was the role of the Predator, which almost everyone claimed killed Atef?
Rear Admiral Quigley later stated that the United States intentionally targeted the residential building that housed Al Jazeera (and indeed it was just a house), the target we were now calling Building 4. He said the house occupied by Al Jazeera “had been, and was at the time, a facility used by al-Qaida.” According to the Guardian, Quigley said its “military significance” made it a “legitimate target.”12 He took back his earlier presumption that there was any error, and stated that US intelligence had confirmed that the house was an al Qaeda facility. Quigley also said that the United States never knew the house was Al Jazeera’s office, and that the compound had a “different intelligence signal completely.”13
I visited the Al Jazeera house (Building 4) as well, and with Al Jazeera papers strewn everywhere amongst the rubble, and a large satellite dish in the courtyard, it was indeed being used by the Qatari-based network. But reconstructing any event is difficult, as I would find out once again, even when one has the best of information. They don’t talk about “fog of war” for nothing, and there’s always something one doesn’t know, especially in this new style of warfare, where intelligence information is as important as operations, where military and CIA overlap uncomfortably and where decisions are split second. But remember the telephone? When Quigley and other spokesmen referred to “compelling evidence” and called the Al Jazeera office a “command and control” facility of “military significance,” this was code for an emanating signal, what Admiral Quigley elliptically referred to as the house’s “intelligence signal.” But “intelligence signature” is the correct term, and I later confirmed with the admiral that he had not misspoken, so I assumed that the Guardian reporter just got the transposition of the term wrong in his notes.
Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare Page 10