Protesters scale the gate at the U.S. Embassy in Yemen.

The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From the Reuters:

KHARTOUM/TUNIS (Reuters) – Fury about a film that insults the Prophet Mohammad tore across the Middle East after weekly prayers on Friday with protesters attacking U.S. embassies and burning American flags as the Pentagon rushed to bolster security at its missions.

The obscure California-made film triggered an attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya’s city of Benghazi that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans on Tuesday, the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 al Qaeda attacks on the United States.

In Tunis, at least three people were killed and more than two dozen wounded, state television said after police gunfire near the U.S. embassy in the city that was the cradle of last year’s Arab Spring uprisings for democracy. At least one person died in the Sudanese capital Khartoum, a doctor said, after some of thousands of protesters had leaped into the U.S. embassy.

As U.S. military drones faced Islamist anti-aircraft fire over Benghazi, about 50 marines landed in Yemen a day after the U.S. embassy there was stormed. For a second day in the capital Sanaa, police battled hundreds of young men around the mission.

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Here’s an interesting take from philosopher Bradley Strawser on the US government’s use of drones. Strawser’s basic argument centers around the actual reasons behind the war, not the use of drones themselves, which he says are much safer, more effective and completely transparent:

Strawser says cases where drone strikes allegedly killed innocents would be unjustified, but did not render the technology illegitimate. “If the policy to begin with is wrong then of course we shouldn’t do it. It’s irrelevant if we use drones, a sniper rifle or a crossbow.” He says he considers poison gas and nuclear weapons inherently wrong because they did not discriminate – unlike drones.

“The question is whether drones will tempt us to do wrong things. But it doesn’t seem so because we have cases where drones were used justly and it seems they actually improve our ability to behave justly. Literally every action they do is recorded. For a difficult decision (operators) can even wait and bring other people into the room. There’s more room for checks and oversights. That to me seems a normative gain.”

Straswer says he understands why many shuddered over revelations of the so-called White House “kill lists” but believes it, in fact, shows accountability at the highest level, unlike Abu Ghraib, when authorities pinned blame on lower ranks……

Strawser is at pains to stress he is no hawk. But if a particular operation was just, and if using a drone could avert risk to a pilot without compromising the operation, the US had a duty to use drones, he says.

I guess it’s a little tricky to argue against this logic – if you absolutely have to fight, it’s better to risk as few lives as possible, but again, only if the cause is justified. There are still several problems with this argument though. Firstly, the US targeted killing policy is completely illegal under international law, no matter how complicated the legal language used to justify it is. If another country started sending drones to take out American military planners, we would consider it an act of war – and rightly so. The US is sovereign territory and controls its own airspace. There’s no reason why Yemen or any other country subject to drone attacks shouldn’t have the same rights.

Also, the use of robots to kill people further removes the American population from the realities of war. Once it has been outsourced to non-thinking, feeling bits of metal, war and murder become like video games with no real meaning. You can sit at home and eat Cheetos while your country sends flying robots to assassinate people in countries you’ve never heard of, and you’ll never know anyone who risked their lives to do it. The Vietnam war only stopped when the death toll in America became so high that the public refused to partake in the assault on South East Asia. I think it’s a given that had the draft been in place when the US decided to go to war with Iraq, there would have been a lot more questions asked and the evidence pored over far more seriously. If the political classes knew their children could end up getting blown to pieces in the Middle East, I’d bet money there would not have been the votes needed to authorize war. Now drones are taking over the jobs of soldiers, there’s no risk to anyone other than the weird dark people in countries with unpronounceable names.

I personally don’t have much time for armchair warriors eager to send other people’s children into wars, but this takes that mentality to another level. The use of drones completely destroys the meaning of war, making it easier to support and easier to detach oneself from its brutal realities.

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(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Chris Woods: Two US reports published on May 29th provide significant insights into President Obama’s personal and controversial role in the escalating covert US drone war in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

In a major extract from Daniel Klaidman’s forthcoming book Kill Or Capture, the author reveals extensive details of how secret US drone strikes have evolved under Obama – and how the president knew of civilian casualties from his earliest days in office.

The New York Times has also published a key investigation exploring how the Obama Administration runs its secret ‘Kill List’ – the names of those chosen for execution by CIA and Pentagon drones outside the conventional battlefield.

The Times’ report also reveals that President Obama personally endorsed a redefining of the term ‘civilian’, which has helped to limit any public controversy over ‘non-combatant’ deaths.

Civilian Deaths from Day Three
As the Bureau’s own data on Pakistan makes clear, the very first covert drone strikes of the Obama presidency, just three days after he took office, resulted in civilian deaths in Pakistan. As many as 19 civilians – including four children – died in two error-filled attacks.

Until now it had been thought that Obama was initially unaware of the civilian deaths. Bob Woodward has reported that the president was only told by CIA chief Michael Hayden that the strikes had missed their High Value Target but had killed ‘five al Qaeda militants.’

Now Newsweek correspondent Daniel Klaidman reveals that Obama knew about the civilian deaths within hours. He reports an anonymous participant at a subsequent meeting with the President: ‘You could tell from his body language that he was not a happy man.’ Obama is described aggressively questioning the tactics used.

Yet despite the errors, the president ultimately chose to keep in place the CIA’s controversial policy of using ‘signature strikes’ against unknown militants.That tactic has just been extended to Yemen.

On another notorious occasion, the article reveals that US officials were aware at the earliest stage that civilians – including ‘dozens of women and children’ – had died in Obama’s first ordered strike in Yemen in December 2009. The Bureau recently named all 44 civilians killed in that attack by cruise missiles.

No US officials have ever spoken publicly about the strike, although secret diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks proved that the US was responsible. Now Klaidman reveals that Jeh Johnson, one of the State Department’s senior lawyers, watched the strike take place with others on a video screen:

Johnson returned to his Georgetown home around midnight that evening, drained and exhausted. Later there were reports from human-rights groups that dozens of women and children had been killed in the attacks, reports that a military source involved in the operation termed “persuasive.” Johnson would confide to others, “If I were Catholic, I’d have to go to confession.”

Aggressive tactics
Klaidman describes a world in which the CIA and Pentagon constantly push for significant attacks on the US’s enemies. In March 2009, for example. then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen reportedly called for the bombing of an entire training camp in southern Somalia in order to kill one militant leader.

One dissenter at the meeting is said to have described the tactic as ‘carpet-bombing a country.’ The attack did not go ahead.

Obama is generally described as attempting to rein back both the CIA and the Pentagon. But in the case of Anwar al-Awlaki – ‘Obama’s Threat Number One’ – different rules applied.

According to Klaidman Obama let it be known that he would consider allowing civilian deaths if it meant killing the US-Yemeni cleric. ‘Bring it to me and let me decide in the reality of the moment rather than in the abstract,’ an aide recalls him saying. No civilians died that day, as it turned out.

Redefining ‘civilian’
In its own major investigation, the New York Times examines the secret US ‘Kill List’ – the names of those chosen for death at the hands of US drones. The report is based on interviews with more than 36 key individuals with knowledge of the scheme.

The newspaper also accuses Obama of  ‘presidential acquiescence in a formula for counting civilian deaths that some officials think is skewed to produce low numbers,’ and of having a ‘Whack-A-Mole approach to counter-terrorism,’ according to one former senior official.

It is often been reported that President Obama has urged officials to avoid wherever possible the deaths of civilians in covert US actions in Pakistan and elsewhere. But reporters Jo Becker and Scott Shane reveal that Obama ‘embraced’ a formula understood to have been devised by the Bush administration.

Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

So concerned have some officials been by this ‘false accounting’ that they have taken their concerns direct to the White House, according to the New York Times.

The revelation helps explain the wide variation between credible reports of civilian deaths in Pakistan by the Bureau and others, and the CIA’s claims that it had killed no ‘non-combatants’ between May 2010 and September 2011 – and possibly later.

The investigation also reveals that more than 100 US officials take part in a weekly ‘death list’ video conference run by the Pentagon, at which it is decided who will be added to the US military’s kill/ capture lists. ‘A parallel, more cloistered selection process at the CIA focuses largely on Pakistan, where that agency conducts strikes,’ the paper reports.

But according to at least one former senior administration official, Obama’s obsession with targeted killings is ‘dangerously seductive.’ Retired admiral Dennis Blair, the former US Director of National Intelligence, told the paper that the campaign was:

The politically advantageous thing to do — low cost, no US casualties, gives the appearance of toughness. 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 article was originally published on the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

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Osama bin Laden: Final days were not so glorious (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Letters from Osama bin Laden’s last hideaway, released by U.S. officials intent on discrediting his terror organization, portray a network weak, inept and under siege — and its leader seemingly near wit’s end about the passing of his global jihad’s glory days.

The documents, published online Thursday, are a small sample of those seized during the U.S. raid on bin Laden’s Pakistan compound in which he was killed a year ago. By no accident, they show al-Qaida at its worst. The raid has become the signature national security moment of Barack Obama’s presidency and one he is eager to emphasize in his re-election campaign.

Those ends are served in the 17 documents chosen by U.S. officials for the world — and voters — to see. The Obama administration has refused to release a fuller record of its bin Laden collection, making it difficult to glean any larger truths about the state of his organization.

What is clear from the documents released so far is that al-Qaida’s leaders are constantly on the run from unmanned U.S. aircraft and trying to evade detection by CIA spies and National Security Agency eavesdroppers.

In one letter, either bin Laden or his senior deputy tells the leader of Yemen’s al-Qaida offshoot that, in the face of U.S. power, it is futile to try to establish a government that will offer it safe haven.

“Even though we were able to militarily and economically exhaust and weaken our greatest enemy before and after the eleventh,” the letter says, referring to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, “the enemy continues to possess the ability to topple any state we establish.”

Read more at the Detroit Free Press….

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By Chris Woods: For some weeks in early winter 2009 the people of al-Majala, southern Yemen, had noticed a spotter plane overhead.

The aircraft, most likely American, wasn’t seen as a threat. After all, it had been seven years since the last US military action in Yemen, when a CIA drone had killed six al Qaeda-linked militants.

But everything was about to change. At 6am on December 17, a US Navy vessel stationed in the Gulf launched at least one cruise missile towards al-Majala.

The US target that day was Saleh Mohammed al-Anbouri, also known as al-Kazemi. The man was a known militant, who had allegedly been ‘bringing nationals from different countries to train them to become Al Qaeda members’, as stated in a later inquiry. He was linked to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a franchise of the global terrorist organisation which had launched multiple attacks against US interests in Yemen.

Al Anbouri had brought his wife and four young sons to live with his tribe in al-Majala. Also living in the hamlet was the extended al Haydara family, mostly women and children.  They had no known links to AQAP.

Al Anbouri told locals that after recently being released from prison, he wanted to ‘start a new life.’ On the morning of December 17, he and a group of other men were digging a well.

But then at least one BGM-109D Tomahawk cruise missile hit al-Majala. An Amnesty International investigation later forensically identified fragments, concluding:

This type of missile, launched from a warship or submarine, is designed to carry 166 cluster sub-munitions (bomblets) which each explode into over 200 sharp steel fragments that can cause injuries up to 150m away. Incendiary material inside the bomblet also spreads fragments of burning zirconium designed to set fire to nearby flammable objects.

Entire families killed

Within hours of the attack, news began circulating that a large number of civilians had died in al-Majala. The New York Times reported that night: ’some witnesses and local journalists in Abyan said a number of civilians were also killed in Thursday’s raids there.’ By the following day Al Jazeera was airing video images of shrouded corpses.

Forty-one civilians died in the US attack. Fourteen members of the extended al Haydara clan were killed, along with 27 members of the al Anbouri clan. Three more people later died when they stepped on left-over cluster munitions.

As a surviving woman later told reporter Jeremy Scahill, for Al Jazeera, ‘At 6am they were sleeping and I was making bread. When the missiles exploded I lost consciousness. I didn’t know what had happened to my children, my daughter, my husband. Only I survived with this old man and my daughter.’

Among those killed that day were 22 children. The youngest, Khadje Ali Mokbel Louqye, was just one year old. A dozen women also died, five of them reportedly pregnant.

Yet these numbers mask the many individual families annihilated in the attack. Mohammed Nasser Awad Jaljala, 60, his 30-year-old wife Nousa, their son Nasser, 6, and daughters Arwa, 4, and Fatima, aged 2, were all killed.

Then there was 35-year old Ali Mohammed Nasser Jaljala, his wife Qubla (25), and their four daughters Afrah (9), Zayda (7), Hoda (5) and Sheikha (4) who all died.

Ahmed Mohammed Nasser Jaljala, 30, was killed alongside his 21-year old wife Qubla and 50-year old mother Mouhsena. Their daughter Fatima, aged 13, was the only survivor of the family, badly injured and needing extensive medical treatment abroad.

The Anbour clan suffered similarly catastrophic losses. Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye died with his wife, son and three daughters. His brother Ali Mokbel Salem Louqye’s seven-strong family were also wiped out.

Sheik Saleh Ben Fareed, a tribal leader, went to the area shortly after the attack and described the carnage to Al Jazeera reporter Scahill: ‘If somebody has a weak heart, I think they will collapse. You see goats and sheep all over. You see heads of those who were killed here and there. You see children. And you cannot tell if this meat belongs to animals or to human beings. Very sad, very sad.’

The deaths represent one of the highest civilian death tolls of any recent US military operation.

Yet because the US is fighting a covert war in Yemen, it is unknown whether there has been any investigation into the deaths. Instead, the US has actively sought to cover up its role in the attack.

The intended US target of the attack, Al Anbouri, was killed that day, along with more than a dozen alleged militants. Only one has ever been identified – Abdulrahman Qaed Al-Zammari. Six bodies were rushed from the scene by ‘unidentified armed men’, according to reports, and buried in an unknown location.

For the Pentagon’s elite Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) – the group that captured Saddam Hussein and would later kill Osama bin Laden – the first US attack in Yemen in seven years must have seemed a success. A wanted terrorist and his alleged associates were dead.

Three weeks after that attack, General David Petraeus, then head of United States Central Command (Centcom) – and who now runs the CIA – met Yemen’s President Saleh in the capital Sanaa. In line with the covert nature of this new front in Obama’s war on terror, the two schemed to cover up the US role in the attack.

But Saleh was concerned. He ‘lamented the use of “not very accurate” cruise missiles…  mistakes were made,’ he said. Why were so many civilians killed in the attack?

According to the secret report of that meeting, later released by WikiLeaks, Petraeus was thrown by Saleh’s concern. ‘The only civilians killed were the wife and two children’ of Al Anbouri, he told the president. An aside in the cable notes that ‘Saleh’s conversation on the civilian casualties suggests he has not been well briefed by his advisors.’

Yet it was Petraeus himself who appears to have been poorly briefed that day.

Al-Anbouri’s wife Amina did die. So too her four sons Maha aged 12, Soumaya, 9, Shafika, 4 and two-year-old Shafiq. So did 39 other civilians, we now know.

Official inquiry

Days after the attack, Yemen’s parliament convened a Commission of inquiry into the security incidents in Abyan province. Made up of 14 representatives, the commission was led by Sheikh Hamir Ben Abdullah Ben Hussein Al-Ahmar, now deputy speaker of the Yemeni parliament.

The commission sought to discover what had really happened in al-Majala, travelling to the hamlet and questioning survivors. A spokesman for the sheikh told the Bureau this week that the inquiry ‘did not state that the American forces launched the attack’.

The commission found grisly evidence of a massacre. Although it concluded that al Anbouri and 13 other militants died, their deaths were overshadowed by those of 44 civilians. The effect of a cluster bomb-filled cruise missile had been particularly brutal:

When members of the Commission visited the cemetery where the victims were buried, they noticed that some members of the two families were buried in communal graves because their remnants could not be identified. Their bodies had been completely torn into pieces during the attack.

Naming the dead
The commission published its full investigation, in Arabic, on February 7, 2010. Included were the names, ages, genders, family relationships and clans of all 44 civilians killed, along with eyewitness testimony from survivors.

A month later Yemen’s parliament approved the commission’s findings in full, calling on the government to open a judicial investigation. According to Amnesty, ‘the same day, the Yemen government apologized to the victims’ families, describing the killings as a “mistake” during an operation that was meant to target al-Qa’ida militants, and said that committees would be established to provide compensation for the people killed and the property destroyed.’

This week Yemen confirmed to the Bureau that it had itself paid out compensation at local levels to affected families, but that ‘the American authorities did not get involved in this process in any way.’

For two years the US has been aware, in extensive detail, of all 44 civilians killed at al-Majala. Its direct role in the attack is clearly documented, and confirmed in leaked US diplomatic cables.

The Bureau this week asked the US Department of State and Centcom, which is responsible for US military operations in Yemen, the following questions:

• What investigations has the US carried out into the December 17 attack and the high number of reported civilian casualties? What were the conclusions reached?
• Specifically on the Yemen parliamentary commission findings – what further investigations were carried out into the reports of 44 named civilians killed in that attack?
• What disciplinary measures, if any, have been taken against US personnel involved in that attack?
• What compensation, if any, has been paid by the US to surviving members of the al-Hadra and al-Anbour families?

A State Department spokesperson, speaking on background terms, replied: ‘I don’t have any information for you with respect to the December 17, 2009 incident in question. I refer you to the Government of Yemen for additional information on its counterterrorism efforts.’

Centcom declined to discuss matters which may relate to US Special Operations.

The Bureau also asked the US Senate Armed Services Committee what investigations it has carried out generally into US military actions in Yemen, and specifically into the December 17 2009 incident. The committee replied that it was ‘not able to answer these questions’.

The names in full of civilians killed
The Yemen Commission report named all 44 civilians killed in the attack, which the Bureau has here translated. Three civilians were killed shortly after the strike, after stepping on cluster munitions. They were Khaled Mohammed Ali, Nasser Saleh Al-Soueidi and Mithaq Al-Jild. All 41 others died when the cruise missile hit, named as:

The dead from the Haydara clan:

Family of Mohammed Nasser Awad Jaljala

Family of Ali Mohammed Nasser Jaljala:

Family of Ahmed Mohammed Nasser Jaljala:

The dead from the Anbour clan:

Family of Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye

Family of Ali Mokbel Salem Louqye

Family of Mokbel Salem Louqye:

Family of Abdullah Awad Sheikh:

Family of Hussein Abdullah Awad Sheikh:

Family of Nasser Mahdi Ahmad Bouh:

Family of Mohammed Saleh Mohammed Ali Al-Anbouri:

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