Objective Troy

by Scott Shane

  And on a few occasions Obama had made it clear that he shared some of the doubts, betraying an anxiety about the power to kill that he had exercised with such seeming confidence. Once, on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, of all places, Obama said the country needed a “legal architecture” to make sure that he and future presidents were “reined in” when it came to drone strikes. In an interview with the author Mark Bowden, Obama remarked on the powerful temptation of the drone: “There’s a remoteness to it that makes it tempting to think that somehow we can, without any mess on our hands, solve vexing security problems.” Obama had often noted that terrorism could not be defeated by military means alone and that the United States must counter jihadist ideology and address economic hopelessness. But those projects were long-term, generational challenges. In the meantime it was a lot easier to put dangerous people on a kill list and then cross them off it. On several occasions, he told aides, with chagrin, that as president he had discovered an unexpected talent. “It turns out,” he said, “that I’m really good at killing people.”

  By 2014, the number of drone strikes in Pakistan had declined drastically from its peak in 2010, and the pace in Yemen was far below the peak there in 2012. The skill of the targeters seemed to be improving: the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, which conducted skeptical reviews of every strike, found that the number of civilians killed in Pakistan in 2013 and 2014 was zero or very near zero. In Yemen, with a shorter drone history, the record was poorer. One huge fan, however, was Saleh’s replacement as Yemeni president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who said in a Washington visit in 2012 that drones “pinpoint the target” because “the electronic brain’s precision is unmatched by the human brain.”

  But the undeniable fact was that after years of American strikes both Pakistan and Yemen were less stable and their people more hostile to the United States. Yemenis were flabbergasted in September 2014 when Obama said the US strategy in Yemen had proven so successful that it could be a model for battling the Islamic State in Iraq. Pakistan and Yemen were complicated, troubled lands, and the reasons for their problems went way beyond the drones. But even if the strikes had accomplished their narrow goals of reducing the short-term threat of attacks on the United States, political instability and economic distress in both countries raised the possibility of a bigger threat in the future.

  When I spoke with the tribal leader who had visited the site of Awlaki’s killing in Al Jawf, Abdullah al-Jumaili, he said that support for AQAP in his region had only grown since the death of Awlaki. He didn’t quarrel with the American decision to take out an avowed enemy. But he said that the United States should do more to address the root cause of the trouble. “For every missile America launches to kill terrorists, we want five missiles for development,” Jumaili said, speaking of the cost of each Hellfire missile, up to $125,000. “Missiles for health. Missiles for schools. It’s incredibly important for America to understand this.” As a leader pushing development in an impoverished province, Jumaili’s comments were perhaps predictable. But in interviews with dozens of Yemenis, from military officers to human rights activists, I found that opposition to American strikes was all but universal. Some were against all such strikes, saying Yemen should be allowed to take care of its own problems. Others criticized the sloppiness with which the American campaign was carried out. If the Americans killed only high-ranking AQAP leaders, I was told, many Yemenis would have been quietly supportive. But too many strikes killed innocent people, they said. Their objection was not necessarily to drone strikes as such, but to incompetent drone strikes.

  In February 2013, after years of debilitating and unnecessary secrecy, public debate about drone strikes had burst out in one of the strangest episodes in the modern history of Congress. For years, as the number of strikes climbed, congressional leaders had remained silent about drones, kowtowing to CIA and White House demands for secrecy. But when Obama named John Brennan, who had closely overseen the drone campaign, to head the CIA, the issue came to a boil. Brennan was replacing David Petraeus, the married former general whose sensational resignation after admitting to an affair was a reminder that Awlaki was not the only man on both sides of the terrorism fight to risk his career for sexual gratification. In an ironic twist, Petraeus and his lover, Paula Broadwell, had communicated secretly by saving drafts of notes to a shared e-mail account—a favorite technique of Awlaki and many other terrorists.

  Now, required to vote on Brennan’s nomination as CIA director, the members of the malleable Senate Intelligence Committee bridled at the fact that even they had not been allowed to read the Justice Department’s legal opinions justifying the strikes, especially the killing of an American. The idea that a president could order the extrajudicial execution of a citizen was raising a delayed alarm on both the right and the left. Senator Rand Paul shrewdly spotted an opportunity to address simmering public concern and announced grandly that he would filibuster the nomination of Brennan as CIA chief.

  The ambitious eye doctor from Kentucky was perhaps not the ideal drone critic, but he deserved credit for shattering the silence. In a thirteen-hour, stream-of-consciousness performance on the Senate floor in early March, relieved from time to time by fellow senators quite willing to share the spotlight, he tossed out a grab-bag of legitimate issues and libertarian fantasies. “I will speak as long as it takes,” Senator Paul began, “until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court. That Americans could be killed in a cafe in San Francisco or in a restaurant in Houston or at their home in Bowling Green, Kentucky, is an abomination. It is something that should not and cannot be tolerated in our country.” Why wouldn’t the president, Paul demanded to know, declare that “no, we won’t kill Americans in cafes; no, we won’t kill you at home in your bed at night; no, we won’t drop bombs on restaurants”?

  Of course, no Americans had been killed in drone strikes in the United States, and no such strikes had been proposed. The Senate eventually voted to end the filibuster and confirm Brennan. But the spectacle of Paul’s stand at the microphone nonetheless drew a sizable national audience and picked up the support of odd political bedfellows who realized that the Kentucky senator’s cri de coeur, however quixotic and hyperbolic, expressed the fear and resentment of many Americans who had never been informed or consulted about the government’s aggressive use overseas of this scary new weapon. The next day, the redoubtable leftist Medea Benjamin, cofounder of the peace group Code Pink and not generally a fan of libertarian Republicans, showed up at Rand Paul’s Senate office with flowers and candy.

  If this was not the way Barack Obama wanted the national debate over drone strikes to begin, he had himself to blame. He had missed many opportunities to open such a discussion. Instead, he had allowed the reflexive secrecy of the intelligence agencies to shape the administration’s approach.

  Had the president signaled to leaders of the intelligence or armed services committees that he would welcome a series of public, unclassified hearings on targeted killing, they surely would have obliged. Had he taken the initiative to release the classified documents setting the rules for strikes or their legal justification, they would have found an avid audience. In June 2010, after reporting that Awlaki had been added to the kill list, I filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for all Justice Department legal opinions on targeted killing. I did not ask for the sensitive intelligence on particular strikes, just for the program’s legal basis. The Justice Department summarily rejected my request, and when The New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union sued, the administration took the position that it could neither confirm nor deny the existence of a drone program in Pakistan, though Obama himself had spoken publicly about it. An appeals court finally ruled in our favor nearly four years after my initial request. W
e got heavily redacted copies of the two 2010 legal opinions by David Barron and Marty Lederman making the case that it was legal and constitutional to kill Awlaki.

  Nor did Congress fare much better in peeling back the secrecy. When Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and Obama’s friend and former mentor, finally convened the Senate’s very first public hearing on drone strikes in April 2013, the White House refused to send a single witness to testify. From a president who had famously promised the most transparent administration in American history, it was another dispiriting performance.

  —

  On May 23, 2013, Obama came to the National Defense University in Washington to deliver the big drone speech. This was his chance to make up for years of secrecy and silence, and he indeed spoke more openly and in greater detail about drone strikes than ever before. His speech demonstrated, in fact, that the absurd secrecy surrounding this weapon had never been necessary; he might have given such a speech years earlier without endangering national security.

  The speech also reflected Obama’s contradictory feelings about the unprecedented role he had taken on, as the first American president to routinely approve individual lethal strikes. “As was true in previous armed conflicts,” Obama said, “this new technology raises profound questions—about who is targeted, and why; about civilian casualties, and the risk of creating new enemies; about the legality of such strikes under US and international law; about accountability and morality.” He acknowledged civilian casualties as a “hard fact” of US strikes, saying of himself and his aides that “those deaths will haunt us as long as we live.” But a decision to order a strike did not occur in isolation, he said. “As commander-in-chief,” Obama said, “I must weigh these heartbreaking tragedies against the alternatives.” He argued that because most of those killed by Al Qaeda were civilians—Muslim civilians—killing the terrorists also prevented civilian deaths. He argued that drones killed fewer civilians than other kinds of strikes and provoked a less intense backlash than even small numbers of American ground troops.

  On the day that Awlaki had been killed, in an awkward nod to secrecy rules, Obama had avoided explicitly taking responsibility for the strike. Now he fully embraced it. At the very core of his case for drones, he defended his decision to order the killing of Awlaki. No president should deploy armed drones over US soil, he said, and none should kill an American without due process of law. Then he invoked the police-shooting analogy that had become the administration’s shorthand defense of Awlaki’s killing. “When a US citizen goes abroad to wage war against America and is actively plotting to kill US citizens, and when neither the United States, nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot,” Obama said, “his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a SWAT team.” Recounting Awlaki’s role in the Christmas bombing and the printer plot, the president declared that the cleric “was continuously trying to kill people,” leaving the government no real choice. “As president,” Obama said, “I would have been derelict in my duty had I not authorized the strike that took him out.”

  Despite the erring intelligence and the targeting mistakes that had plagued the drone program, despite his worries about the example he was setting for future presidents and for other countries, despite the growing backlash against strikes in Yemen and Pakistan, this was Obama’s bottom line. As president, he often said, his first responsibility was to protect the American people. If that required morally fraught decisions—the doctrine of “dirty hands” that some moral philosophers had advanced—he did not flinch from them. He still believed that his use of drones had destroyed the ability of Al Qaeda’s core in Pakistan to mount major plots and had seriously disrupted AQAP, probably averting attacks that might have killed many Americans. If the strikes also had undesirable effects, so be it. He would live with the consequences, and with history’s judgment.

  Remarkably, the gatekeepers at Obama’s speech had admitted along with the crowd of uniformed officers and security officials none other than Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, who was known for disrupting congressional hearings and public speeches on disputed security issues. That led to a remarkable scene between Obama and one of his most outspoken critics. Predictably, well into the president’s hourlong address, Benjamin stood and began shouting at him from her seat about Guantanamo and drones, mentioning in particular the killing of sixteen-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. Rather than react angrily, Obama politely asked Benjamin to let him finish talking. Even after she interrupted a second time, Obama was unruffled, departing from his prepared text to defend Benjamin’s right to protest. “The voice of that woman is worth paying attention to,” the president declared. “Obviously, I do not agree with much of what she said, and obviously she wasn’t listening to me in much of what I said. But these are tough issues, and the suggestion that we can gloss over them is wrong.” It was an unusual moment in the history of heckling.

  Obama’s speech made a nuanced case for his record. But to the surprise of no one at the White House, it failed to quiet the growing chorus of detractors. They were mostly on the left and the libertarian right—Cornel West disgustedly denounced Obama as a war criminal and his tenure as “a drone presidency,” and fans of Rand Paul echoed his Senate diatribe. More disturbing to Obama’s aides were the former security officials, some of whom had themselves overseen targeted killing, who now expressed their doubts in newspaper op-eds or the Sunday morning TV shows. The first was Dennis Blair, but he had been fired as director of national intelligence, so they could dismiss his complaints as sour grapes. But his example was followed by other officials after they stepped down. General Stanley McChrystal, who had built the Joint Special Operations Command into a lethal machine that hunted down targets on the ground and from the air, expressed alarm about the effect of drone strikes on hostility toward America. “They are hated on a visceral level, even by people who’ve never seen one or seen the effects of one,” McChrystal said. Then there was Robert Gates, the former defense secretary, who called himself “a big advocate of drones” but nonetheless expressed concern about the Awlaki killing. “I think this idea of being able to execute, in effect, an American citizen, no matter how awful…I think some check on the ability of the president to do this has merit, as we look to the longer term future.” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, noted that these were second thoughts. “I say this with respect—they tend to express these doubts after they leave government. When you’re in government and you have a responsibility to protect the American people, you tend not to ask those questions as much. And look, maybe that’s a problem,” Rhodes told me.

  Even Lee Hamilton, the former congressman and 9/11 Commission vice-chairman who had advised Obama during the 2008 campaign, had deeply mixed feelings. A lawyer by training, Hamilton had been one of the few advisers who supported candidate Obama’s decision to say publicly that he would, if necessary, order attacks against terrorists hiding in Pakistan. By 2014, Hamilton was quite anguished, if sympathetic, about Obama’s record. In particular, Hamilton told me, he was “deeply disturbed” by the Awlaki strike. “How do you deal with a figure like that? He wants to kill as many Americans as he can. You can’t give him due process—I find that awful. But what do you do? The national security adviser comes in and says, ‘We’ve got him in our sights.’ What do you do? It’s an insoluble dilemma, and I’m very uneasy about it.”

  These were misgivings from people with deep experience. But perhaps more painful to Obama than his critics were his newly found allies. Among the few prominent voices speaking up for the president’s aggressive use of the drone was none other than Dick Cheney, though when Cheney endorsed the Awlaki killing he also demanded an apology. “I think it was a very good strike. I think it was justified,” Cheney said on CNN. “I’m waiting for the administration to go back and correct something they said two years ago,” when Obama had attacked Bush and Cheney for bet
raying American values by approving the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques.

  It was galling, but there was some logic to Cheney’s claim. Both Bush and Obama, operating on the basis of secret legal opinions from the Justice Department, had taken steps unprecedented in American history—in Bush’s case, approving interrogation methods the United States had long considered torture; in Obama’s, ordering the killing of an American citizen without trial. Both presidents defended the extraordinary measures as necessary to meet the terrorist threat. Obama’s case was arguably based on a far more solid legal and practical foundation than Bush’s; torture is always illegal, while targeted killing can be lawful. But the parallel was undeniable.

  It was hard to imagine a comment more humiliating than Cheney’s backhanded endorsement, but one eventually came along. Defending his own long-ago record in ordering the secret bombing of Cambodia, Henry Kissinger, ninety-one, reached for an unexpected comparison. “I bet if one did an honest account,” he said, “there were fewer civilian casualties in Cambodia than there have been from American drone attacks.” His claim was preposterous. Estimates of civilian deaths from the American bombing of Cambodia began at 50,000; many sources put the total at 150,000 or even higher. By comparison, the high-end estimates from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London of civilian deaths from drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen totaled about 1,200 at the time Kissinger spoke. Kissinger’s assertion, as misleading and self-serving as it was, capped off the extraordinarily negative turn in the public perception of Obama’s drone campaign.