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    The Permanent War: Rise of the Drones
    The Permanent War: Rise of the Drones
    The Permanent War: Rise of the Drones
    Ebook119 pages2 hours

    The Permanent War: Rise of the Drones

    By The Washington Post

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    The Pulitzer Prize-nominated examination of the United States drone campaign, and U.S. counterterrorism policies.

    On January 30, 2013, President Barack Obama acknowledged publicly what most Americans already knew: The U.S. government was operating a covert drone campaign in Pakistan. Even as Obama maintained policy was for judicious actions only, his own administration was drawing up secret plans to institutionalize targeted killings in U.S. counter-terrorism policy.

    The scope of those plans remained hidden until The Washington Post published a three-part series as reporters Craig Whitlock, Greg Miller, Karen DeYoung, and Julie Tate explored how the use of drones moved from a temporary means to kill terrorists to a permanent weapon of war.

    Collected together for the first time, ?THE PERMANENT WAR is the result of a year of investigative reporting on the who, what, and how behind the targeted killing policies that will from the core of American counter-terrorism efforts for years to come.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDiversion Books
    Release dateAug 13, 2013
    ISBN9781626810006
    The Permanent War: Rise of the Drones
    Author

    The Washington Post

    The Washington Post has built an unparalleled reputation in its coverage of American politics and related topics. The paper’s circulation, prominence, and influence continue to grow.

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      Book preview

      The Permanent War - The Washington Post

      The Permanent War

      Rise of the Drones

      The Washington Post

      Copyright

      Diversion Books

      A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

      443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

      New York, NY 10016

      www.DiversionBooks.com

      Copyright © 2013 by The Washington Post

      All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

      For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

      First Diversion Books edition August 2013

      ISBN: 978-1-62681-000-6

      Introduction

      On Jan. 30, 2013, President Obama acknowledged publicly what most Americans already knew: The U.S. government was operating a covert drone campaign in Pakistan and elsewhere, killing suspected militants at a pace far greater than the previous administration’s. Even as Obama defended the policy as judicious, his administration was drawing up secret plans to institutionalize the practice of targeted killing in U.S. counterterrorism policy.

      The scope of those plans, and the vast infrastructure being assembled to implement them, remained hidden until The Washington Post published a three-part series, The Permanent War. For more than a year, reporters Craig Whitlock, Greg Miller, Karen DeYoung and Julie Tate explored how American drones moved from a temporary means to kill terrorists to a permanent weapon of war.

      The articles provided the most authoritative portrait to date of how the administration intends to carry out its plans for battling the next generation of extremists, and was eventually named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

      This eBook collects together, for the first time, all those award-winning articles, as well as Post reporting on drones that led to their series, and stories prompted by the series in the months after they were published.

      The reporting describes the development of the disposition matrix, a targeting list that identifies suspected militants worldwide and maps how to capture or kill them. The articles revealed a startling assessment from intelligence officials: A decade into the fight, the country is probably only at the halfway point in its battle against terrorism.

      The series went inside the White House to track what the administration is doing to permanently enshrine its tactics and legal justifications for targeted killings through a playbook, and showed how these plans will be executed, focusing on the transformation of a dusty outpost on the Horn of Africa into the U.S. military’s first global counterterrorism base. Relying heavily on thousands of pages of records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and public Web sites, Post reporters documented a $1.5 billion plan to expand Camp Lemmonier in Djibouti into a hub for drones and Special Forces ready to take the lead in future conflicts.

      Post reports revealed the detailed plans by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency to increase the number of spies it runs overseas. The new cadre will work alongside the CIA and elite military commando units, a further blurring of the lines between intelligence and military operations in the permanent war.

      The series grew out of two articles about the extent of secret U.S. military operations across Africa aimed at the emerging threat from al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Those articles described the breadth of American surveillance programs across Africa and the growing reliance on contractors to carry out those missions.

      Taken together, these deeply reported stories offer readers the who, what and how behind the targeted killing policies that will form the core of American efforts to combat terrorism for years to come.

      U.S. drone targets two leaders of Somali group allied with al-Qaeda, official says

      By Greg Jaffe and Karen DeYoung

      June 29, 2011

      A U.S. drone aircraft fired on two leaders of a militant Somali organization tied to al-Qaeda, apparently wounding them, a senior U.S. military official familiar with the operation said Wednesday.

      The strike last week against senior members of al-Shabab comes amid growing concern within the U.S. government that some leaders of the Islamist group are collaborating more closely with al-Qaeda to strike targets beyond Somalia, the military official said.

      The airstrike makes Somalia at least the sixth country where the United States is using drone aircraft to conduct lethal attacks, joining Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Iraq and Yemen. And it comes as the CIA is expected to begin flying armed drones over Yemen in its hunt for al-Qaeda operatives.

      Al-Shabab has battled Somalia’s tenuous government for several years. In recent months, U.S. officials have picked up intelligence that senior members of the group have expanded their ambitions beyond attacks in Somalia.

      They have become somewhat emboldened of late, and, as a result, we have become more focused on inhibiting their activities, the official said.They were planning operations outside of Somalia.

      Both of the al-Shabab leaders targeted in the attack had direct ties to American-born cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi, the military official said. Aulaqi escaped a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in May.

      The White House declined Wednesday night to respond to questions about the attack.

      But Obama administration officials have made repeated references to al-Shabab in recent weeks, indicating that the group has expanded its aims and its operations. In a speech Wednesday unveiling the administration’s new counterterrorism strategy, senior White House aide John O. Brennan included Somalia among the countries where the administration has placed a new focus on al-Qaeda affiliates.

      As the al-Qaeda core has weakened under our unyielding pressure, it has looked increasingly to these other groups and individuals to take up its cause, including its goal of striking the United States, said Brennan, Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser. From the territory it controls in Somalia, he said, al-Shabab continues to call for strikes against the United States.

      And earlier this month, in a hearing to confirm him as Obama’s new defense secretary, CIA Director Leon Panetta told senators that the agency had intelligence on al-Shabab that indicates that they, too, are looking at targets beyond Somalia. Panetta said al-Qaeda had moved some of its operations to nodes in Yemen, Somalia and North Africa. The CIA, he said, was working with the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command in those areas to try to develop counterterrorism.

      The Special Operations Command carried out last week’s Somalia strike, the military official said, and it has been flying remotely piloted planes over Yemen for much of the past year. It has taken the lead in operations in Yemen, where Aulaqi, a senior figure in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, is based.

      U.S. aircraft and Special Operations commandos have carried out other attacks in Somalia against militants linked to al-Qaeda, but the strike last week appears to have been one of the first U.S. drone attacks in Somalia.

      It was not immediately clear what kind of unmanned aircraft was used in the attack or where the drone originated.

      The airstrike appears to be one piece of a larger effort to step up offensive action against al-Shabab militants with ties to al-Qaeda in Somalia. Somali media have reported numerous rumors in recent months of U.S. airstrikes on militant camps.

      On April 6, an al-Shabab commander was reported to have been killed by an airstrike in Dhobley, a border town in southern Somalia, according to the Web site Long War Journal.

      This month, Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the alleged architect of the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa, was killed in a shootout in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, Somali officials said. Mohammed was a founder of al-Shabab and was considered the most-wanted man in East Africa.

      The United States conducted a DNA analysis to confirm Mohammed’s demise, a U.S. official said. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton described it as a significant blow to al-Qaeda, its extremist allies and its operations in East Africa.

      In last week’s attack, local officials told the Associated Press that military aircraft struck a convoy carrying the militants as they drove along the coastline of the southern port city of Kismaayo late Thursday. Other local residents told journalists that an air attack had taken place on a militant camp near Kismaayo, an insurgent stronghold. Several residents were quoted as saying that more than one explosion had occurred over a period of several hours and that they thought that at least helicopters had taken part in the attack.

      An al-Shabab leader confirmed the airstrike and said two militants were wounded. Abdirashid Mohamed Hidig, Somalia’s deputy defense minister, said

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