Exclusive: Allan Nairn Exposes Role of U.S. and New Guatemalan President in Indigenous Massacres

In 1982, investigative journalist Allan Nairn interviewed a Guatemalan general named “Tito” on camera during the height of the indigenous massacres. It turns out the man was actually Otto Pérez Molina, the current Guatemalan president. We air the original interview footage and speak to Nairn about the U.S. role backing the Guatemalan dictatorship. Last week, Nairn flew to Guatemala where he had been scheduled to testify in the trial of former U.S.-backed dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, the first head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide. Ríos Montt was charged in connection with the slaughter of more than 1,700 people in Guatemala’s Ixil region after he seized power in 1982. His 17-month rule is seen as one of the bloodiest chapters in Guatemala’s decades-long campaign against Maya indigenous people, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands. The trial took a surprising turn last week when Guatemala President Gen. Otto Pérez Molina was directly accused of ordering executions. A former military mechanic named Hugo Reyes told the court that Pérez Molina, then serving as an army major and using the name Tito Arias, ordered soldiers to burn and pillage a Maya Ixil area in the 1980s. Click here to hear our live update of the trial from Nairn in Guatemala City. [includes rush transcript]
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. We continue our coverage of the historic trial of former U.S.-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. Allan Nairn joined us in our studio last week before he flew to Guatemala. I began by asking him to describe just who Ríos Montt is.

ALLAN NAIRN: Ríos Montt was the dictator of Guatemala during 1982, ’83. He seized power in a military coup. He was trained in the U.S. He had served in Washington as head of the Inter-American Defense College. And while he was president, he was embraced by Ronald Reagan as a man of great integrity, someone totally devoted to democracy. And he killed many tens of thousands of civilians, particularly in the Mayan northwest highlands. In this particular trial, he is being charged with 1,771 specific murders in the area of the Ixil Mayans. These charges are being brought because the prosecutors have the names of each of these victims. They’ve been able to dig up the bones of most of them.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how this campaign, this slaughter, was carried out and how it links to, well, the current government in Guatemala today.

ALLAN NAIRN: The army swept through the northwest highlands. And according to soldiers who I interviewed at the time, as they were carrying out the sweeps, they would go into villages, surround them, pull people out of their homes, line them up, execute them. A forensic witness testified in the trial that 80 percent of the remains they’ve recovered had gunshot wounds to the head. Witnesses have—witnesses and survivors have described Ríos Montt’s troops beheading people. One talked about an old woman who was beheaded, and then they kicked her head around the floor. They ripped the hearts out of children as their bodies were still warm, and they piled them on a table for their parents to see.

The soldiers I interviewed would describe their interrogation techniques, which they had been taught at the army general staff. And they said they would ask people, “Who in the town are the guerrillas?” And if the people would respond, “We don’t know,” then they would strangle them to death. These sweeps were intense. The soldiers said that often they would kill about a third of a town’s population. Another third they would capture and resettle in army camps. And the rest would flee into the mountains. There, in the mountains, the military would pursue them using U.S.-supplied helicopters, U.S.- and Israeli-supplied planes. They would drop U.S. 50-kilogram bombs on them, and they would machine-gun them from U.S. Huey and Bell helicopters, using U.S.-supplied heavy-caliber machine guns.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s turn to a clip of you interviewing a soldier in the highlands. This is from a Finnish documentary—is that right? And when was this done? When were you talking to soldiers there?

ALLAN NAIRN: This was in September of 1982 in the Ixil zone in the area surrounding the town of Nebaj.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to a clip of this interview.

GUATEMALAN SOLDIER: [translated] This is how we are successful. And also, if we have already interrogated them, the only thing we can do is kill them.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] And how many did you kill?

GUATEMALAN SOLDIER: [translated] We killed the majority. There is nothing else to do than kill them.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] So you killed them at once?

GUATEMALAN SOLDIER: [translated] Yes. If they do not want to do the right things, there is nothing more to do than bomb the houses.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] Bomb? With what?

GUATEMALAN SOLDIER: [translated] Well, with grenades or collective bombs.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] What is a collective bomb?

GUATEMALAN SOLDIER: [translated] They are like cannons.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] Do you use helicopters?

GUATEMALAN SOLDIER: [translated] Yes.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] What is the largest amount of people you have killed at once?

GUATEMALAN SOLDIER: [translated] Well, really, in Sololá, around 500 people.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] And how do they react when you arrive?

GUATEMALAN SOLDIER: [translated] Who?

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] The people from the small villages.

GUATEMALAN SOLDIER: [translated] When the army arrives, they flee from their houses. And so, as they flee to the mountains, the army is forced to kill them.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] And in which small village did the army do that kind of thing?

GUATEMALAN SOLDIER: [translated] That happened a lot of times.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] Specifically, could you give me some examples where these things happened?

GUATEMALAN SOLDIER: [translated] In Salquil, Sumal Chiquito, Sumal Grande, Acul.

AMY GOODMAN: When did you interview this soldier, Allan?

ALLAN NAIRN: This was in September of ’82.

AMY GOODMAN: What were you doing there?

ALLAN NAIRN: Making a documentary for Scandinavian television.

AMY GOODMAN: So you have soldiers talking about killing civilians, the brutal interrogations that they were engaged in. Why would they be telling you this? You’re a journalist. They’re talking about crimes they’re committing.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, because this is their everyday life. They do this all the time. They do it under orders from the top of the chain of command, at that time Ríos Montt. And they had hardly ever seen journalists at that time. It was very rare for an outside journalist or even a local journalist to go into that area.

AMY GOODMAN: So let’s take this to the current day, to the president of Guatemala today, because at the same time you were interviewing these soldiers, you interviewed the Guatemalan president—at least the Guatemalan president today in 2013.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yes, the senior officer, the commander in Nebaj, was a man who used the code name “Mayor Tito,” Major Tito. It turns out that that man’s real name was Otto Pérez Molina. Otto Pérez Molina later ascended to general, and today he is the president of Guatemala. So he is the one who was the local implementer of the program of genocide which Ríos Montt is accused of carrying out.

AMY GOODMAN: This is a huge charge. I mean, right now, it’s an historic trial when it’s 25 years after a past president is now being charged. Let’s go to a clip of Otto Pérez Molina, the current president of Guatemala, but this is 1982 in the heartland area of Quiché in northwest Guatemala, northwest of Guatemala City. In this video clip, Otto Pérez Molina is seen reading from political literature found on one of the bodies. This is your interview with him.

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] “The poor artisan fights alongside the worker. The poor peasant fights alongside the worker. The wealth is produced by us, the poor. The army takes the poor peasants. Together, we have an invincible force. All the families are with the guerrilla, the guerrilla army of the poor, toward final victory forever.” These are the different fronts that they have.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] So here they are saying that the army killed some people.

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] Exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, this is astounding. This is the current president of Guatemala standing over these bodies. Tell us more.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, as one of the soldiers says in the sound in the background, the—Pérez Molina interrogated these men. And soon after, they were—they were dead. And one soldier told me off camera that in fact after Pérez Molina interrogated them, they finished them off.

AMY GOODMAN: This man, Pérez Molina, the president, actually was going by a code name at the time. When was it clear that this is Pérez Molina? Though we have a very clear shot of him.

ALLAN NAIRN: For a long time, Pérez Molina was trying to obscure his past and apparently hide the fact that he played this role in a supervisory position during the highland massacres. During the Guatemalan presidential campaign, which Pérez Molina eventually won, about two years ago, I got calls while I was in Asia from the Guatemalan press, from The Wall Street Journal, asking whether I could vouch for the fact that Mayor Tito, the man in the video who I encountered in the northwest highlands in the midst of the massacres—whether I could vouch for the fact that Mayor Tito was in fact General Otto Pérez Molina, the presidential candidate. And I said that I couldn’t, just from looking at the current videos. You know, people can change a lot visually over 30 years, so I said I couldn’t be sure. It turns out that—and during the campaign, when reporters would ask the Pérez Molina campaign, “Is Pérez Molina Mayor Tito?” they would dodge the question. They would evade. They were running from it. It turns out, though, we just learned this week, that Pérez Molina had admitted back in 2000 that he was Mayor Tito. But then, apparently afterward, he thought better of it and was trying to bury it. And now, this is potentially trouble for him. He’s currently president, and so, under Guatemalan law, he enjoys immunity. But once he leaves the presidency, he could, in theory, be subject to prosecution, just as Ríos Montt is now being prosecuted.

AMY GOODMAN: That could be a serious motivation for him declaring himself president for life.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, Ríos Montt seized power by a coup, but one of the important facts about the situation now is that the military men don’t have the power that they used to. The fact that this trial is happening is an indication of that. This trial is happening because the survivors refused to give up. They persisted—the survivors have been working on this for decades, pushing to bring Ríos Montt and the other generals to justice. They refused to give up. They got support from international—some international human rights lawyers. And within the Guatemalan justice system, there were a few people of integrity who ascended to positions of some authority within the prosecutorial system, within the judiciary. And so, we now have this near-political miracle of a country bringing to trial its former dictator for genocide, while the president of the country, who was implicated in those killings, sits by.

AMY GOODMAN: Allan, this video that we have of you interviewing Pérez Molina—again, as you said, he admitted to the Guatemalan newspaper, Prensa Libre, in 2000 that he used the nickname Tito—is quite astounding. So let’s go to another clip, where you’re talking to him about the kind of support that he wants.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] The United States is considering giving military help here in the form of helicopters. What is the importance of helicopters for all of you?

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] A helicopter is an apparatus that’s become of great importance not only here in Guatemala but also in other countries where they’ve had problems of a counterinsurgency.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] Like in Vietnam?

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] In Vietnam, for example, the helicopter was an apparatus that was used a lot.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] Can you also use it in combat?

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] Yes, of course. The helicopters that are military types, they are equipped to support operations in the field. They have machine guns and rocket launchers.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] What type of mortars are you guys using?

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] There’s various types of mortars. We have small mortars and the mortars Tampella.

ALLAN NAIRN: Tampella.

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] Yes, it’s a mortar that’s 60 millimeters.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] Is it very powerful? Does it have a lot of force to destroy things?

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] Yes, it’s a weapon that’s very effective. It’s very useful, and it has a very good result in our operation in defense of the country.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] Is it against a person or…?

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] Yes, it’s an anti-personnel weapon.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] Do you have one here?

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] It’s light and easy to transport, as well.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] So, it’s very light, and you can use it with your hand.

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] Exactly, with the hand.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] Where did you get them?

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] These, we got from Israel.

ALLAN NAIRN: [translated] And where do you get the ammunition?

MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] That’s also from Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: So, this is, again, the current president, Pérez Molina, of Guatemala, the general you met in the highlands in 1982, asking for more aid. Talk about the relationship between Guatemala then and the United States.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, the U.S. was the sponsor of the Guatemalan army, as it had been for many decades, as the U.S. has and continues to sponsor dozens and dozens of repressive armies all over the world. In the case of Guatemala, if you go into the military academy and you see the pictures of the past presidents of military academy, some of them are actually Americans. They’re actual American officers there who were openly running the Guatemalan military training. By the ’80s, when the Ríos Montt massacres were being carried out, the U.S. Congress was under the impression that they had successfully stopped U.S. military aid to Guatemala. But in fact it was continuing. The CIA had an extensive program of backing the G-2, the G-2, the military intelligence service, which selected the targets for assassination and disappearance. They even—they even built a headquarters for—a secret headquarters for the G-2 near the Guatemala City airport. They had American advisers working inside the headquarters. Out in the field, Guatemalan troops were receiving from the U.S. ammunition, weapons.

And most importantly, the U.S., beginning under the Carter administration but continuing under Reagan and after, asked the Israelis to come in and fill the gap that was caused by congressional restrictions. So Israel was doing massive shipments of Galil automatic rifles and other weapons. And Pérez Molina, as you saw in the video, actually had one of his subordinates come over and show me an Israeli-made mortar. That mortar and the helicopters he was asking for from the U.S., those were the kind of weapons they would use to bomb villages and attack people as they were fleeing in the mountains. In listening to the testimony in the trial up to this moment, I was struck by the fact that almost every witness mentioned that they had been attacked from the air, that either their village had been bombed or strafed or that they were bombed or strafed as they were fleeing in the mountains. This testimony suggests that the use of this U.S. and Israeli aircraft and U.S. munitions against the civilians in the Ixil highlands was actually much more extensive than we understood at the time.

Beyond that, beyond the material U.S. support, there’s the question of doctrine. Yesterday in the trial, the Ríos Montt defense called forward a general, a former commander of the G-2, as an expert witness on the defense side. And at the end of his testimony, the prosecution read to this general an excerpt from a Guatemalan military training document. And the document said it is often difficult for soldiers to accept the fact that they may be required to execute repressive actions against civilian women, children and sick people, but with proper training, they can be made to do so. So, the prosecutor asked the Ríos Montt general, “Well, General, what is your response to this document?” And the general responded by saying, “Well, that training document which we use is an almost literal translation of a U.S. training document.” So this doctrine of killing civilians, even down to women, children and sick people, was, as the general testified, adopted from the U.S. Indeed, years before, the U.S. military attaché in Guatemala, Colonel John Webber, had said to Time magazine that the Guatemalan army was licensed to kill guerrillas and potential guerrillas. And, of course, the category of potential guerrillas can include anyone, including children.

And the point of guerrilla civilians is actually very important to understanding this. Those bodies that Pérez Molina was standing over in Nebaj in 1982 in the film we saw, those were actually an exception to the rule, because the truth commission which investigated the massacres in Guatemala found that 93 percent of the victims were civilians killed by the Guatemalan army. But there was also some combat going on between the army and guerrillas. And in that case, in the video we saw, the bodies Pérez Molina was standing over were guerrillas, guerrillas that the army had captured. And one of them in captivity had set off a hand grenade as a suicide act, but apparently, from what I saw and what the soldiers told me, apparently they survived the blast, and they were then turned over to Pérez Molina for interrogation. He interrogated them, and then, as we saw, they turned up dead. But in the vast majority of cases, they were civilians, completely unarmed people, who were targeted by Ríos Montt’s army for elimination.

And I asked Ríos Montt about this practice on two different occasions, first in an interview with him two months after he seized power in 1982, and then later, years later, after he had been thrown out of power. And when I asked him in ’82 about the fact that so many civilians were being killed by the army, he said, “Look, for each one who is shooting, there are 10 who are standing behind him,” meaning: Behind the guerrillas there are vast numbers of civilians. His senior aide and his spokesman, a man named Francisco Bianchi, who was sitting next to him at this interview, then expanded on the point. Bianchi said the guerrillas—well, the indigenous population—he called them “indios,” which is a slur in Guatemalan Spanish—

AMY GOODMAN: For Indians.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yes—were collaborating with the guerrilla, therefore it was necessary to kill Indians. “And people would say,” Bianchi continued, “‘Oh, you’re massacring all these innocent Indians”—”innocent Indios,” in his words. But Bianchi then said, “But, no, they are not innocent, because they had sold out to subversion.” So this is the—this is the doctrine of killing civilians, and particularly Mayans, because the army saw them collectively as a group. They didn’t view them as individuals, but they saw them collectively as a group as sold out to subversion. And this was a doctrine that the U.S. supported.

AMY GOODMAN: Journalist Allan Nairn. The interview we did was recorded last week just before he left for Guatemala to testify in the trial against the Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. But at the last minute, his testimony was canceled late yesterday. The trial was canceled. We’ll continue with the interview in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Mercedes Sosa, here on Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report, as we continue our coverage of the historic trial of former U.S.-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. Allan Nairn joined us in our studio last week before he flew to Guatemala. His testimony was canceled. The trial was canceled last night. But I asked Allan to talk about how he managed to interview the Guatemalan dictator, Ríos Montt, two months after he seized power in the 1980s.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, he was—he was giving press interviews. This was an interview in the palace. I was there with a couple of other reporters. Ríos Montt was very outspoken. He would go on TV and say, “Today we are going to begin a merciless struggle. We are going to kill, but we are going to kill legally.” That was his style, to speak directly. And it’s in great contrast to what he’s doing today. I mean, it’s very interesting from point of view of people who’ve survived these kind of generals who live on the blood of the people, not just in Guatemala but in Salvador, in East Timor, in Indonesia, in countless countries where the U.S. has backed this kind of terror. You have the spectacle now of this general, who once made poor people tremble at the sight of him, at the mention of him, now he’s hiding. In the trial, he refuses to talk. He will not defend himself. He’s like a common thug taken off the streets who invokes his Fifth Amendment—invokes his Fifth Amendment rights. But back then, when he had the power, when no one could challenge him, he would speak fairly openly. In fact, the second time I spoke to him, a number of years after, I asked Ríos Montt whether he thought that he should be executed, whether he should be tried and executed because of his own responsibility for the highland massacres, and he responded by jumping to his feet and shouting, “Yes! Put me on trial. Put me against the wall. But if you’re going to put me on trial, you have to try the Americans first, including Ronald Reagan.”

AMY GOODMAN: Allan Nairn, at the time in Guatemala, you not only were interviewing, well, now the current president, Pérez Molina, who was in the highlands at the time standing over dead bodies, but you were also talking to U.S. officials, and I want to go to this issue of U.S. involvement in what happened in Guatemala. Tell us about U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs Stephen Bosworth, a man you got to interview at the time during the Ríos Montt years.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, Bosworth was, at the time, an important player in U.S. Central American policy. And he, along with Elliott Abrams, for example, attacked Amnesty International when Amnesty was trying to report on the assassinations of labor leaders and priests and peasant organizers and activists in the Mayan highlands. And he also was denying that the U.S. was giving military assistance to the Guatemalan army that was carrying out those crimes.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s turn to the interview you did with then U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs Stephen Bosworth.

STEPHEN BOSWORTH: Well, I think the important factor is that there has been, over the last six months, evidence of significant improvement in the human rights situation in Guatemala. Since the coming into power of the Ríos Montt government, the level of violence in the country, politically inspired violence, particularly in the urban areas, has declined rather dramatically. That being said, however, I think it’s important also to note that the level of violence in the countryside continues at a level which is of concern to all. And while it is difficult, if not impossible, to attribute responsibility for that violence in each instance, it is clear that in the countryside the government does indeed need to make further progress in terms of improving its control over government troops.

AMY GOODMAN: You also, Allan Nairn, asked the then-U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs Stephen Bosworth precisely what was the U.S. military presence and role in Guatemala. This is how Bosworth responded.

STEPHEN BOSWORTH: We have no military presence or role. We have, as a part of our diplomatic establishment, a defense attaché office and a military representative. But that is the same sort of representation that we have in virtually all other countries in the world. We do not have American trainers working with the Guatemalan army. We do not have American military personnel active in Guatemala in that—in that sort of area.

ALLAN NAIRN: There are no American trainers there?

STEPHEN BOSWORTH: No.

ALLAN NAIRN: None performing the types of functions that go on in El Salvador, for instance?

STEPHEN BOSWORTH: No, there are not.

AMY GOODMAN: That was then-U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs Stephen Bosworth. Respond to what he said, and tell us who he later became, who he is today in the U.S. government.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, first, just about everything that Bosworth said there was a lie. He said that the killings were down. In fact, they increased dramatically under Ríos Montt. He said, quite interestingly, that it was impossible to know and attribute responsibility for what was happening. Well, the Conference of Catholic Bishops had no difficulty knowing and attributing responsibility. They said that the killings have reached the extreme of genocide. They were saying this at the moment that the massacres were happening and at the moment that Bosworth was denying it. And they and the survivors and the human rights groups were all clearly blaming it on the army.

And then, finally, he said that the army has to be careful to maintain control over its troops. Well, there was a very strict control. In fact, the officers in the field in the Ixil zone that I interviewed at the time said they were on a very short leash and that there were only three layers of command between themselves in the field and Ríos Montt. And, in fact, a few weeks earlier, there had been only two layers of command between themselves and Ríos Montt.

Then, Bosworth went on to say that the U.S. was not giving any military assistance to Guatemala, but I guess it was a couple weeks after that interview when we went down to Guatemala, I met a U.S. Green Beret, Captain Jesse Garcia, who was training the Guatemalan military in combat techniques, including what he called how—in his words, “how to destroy towns.” This was apart from the weapons and U.S. munitions that I mentioned before, apart from the CIA trainers who were working in the CIA-built headquarters of the G-2, the military intelligence service that was doing the assassinations and disappearances.

AMY GOODMAN: The G-2 being the Guatemalan G-2. Now, today Stephen Bosworth is the dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University. But before that, in 2009, well, he played a key role in the Obama administration.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yes, rather than being—you know, in what you might consider to be a normally functioning political system, if a high government official lied like that about matters of such grave, life-and-death importance and was involved in the supply of arms to terrorists, in this case the Guatemalan military, you would expect him at the minimum to be fired and disgraced, or maybe brought up on charges. But Bosworth was actually promoted. And under the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton chose him as the special envoy to North Korea. He’s been in the news a great deal in recent times because of his very prominent role there.

AMY GOODMAN: In 1995, Allan Nairn was interviewed on Charlie Rose about his piece in The Nation called “CIA Death Squad,” in which he described how Americans were directly involved in killings by the Guatemalan army. He was interviewed alongside Elliott Abrams, who challenged what he was saying. Abrams had served as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs under President Reagan from 1981 to 1985. This clip begins with Elliott Abrams.

ELLIOTT ABRAMS: Wait a minute. We’re not here to refight the Cold War. We’re here to talk about, I thought, a specific case in which an allegation is being made that—of the husband of an American and, another case, an American citizen were killed, and there was a CIA connection with—allegedly with the person allegedly involved in it. Now, I’m happy to talk about that kind of thing. If Mr. Nairn thinks we should have been on the other side in Guatemala—that is, we should have been in favor of a guerrilla victory—I disagree with him.

ALLAN NAIRN: So you’re then admitting that you were on the side of the Guatemalan military.

ELLIOTT ABRAMS: I am admitting that it was the policy of the United States, under Democrats and Republicans, approved by Congress repeatedly, to oppose a communist guerrilla victory anywhere in Central America, including in Guatemala.

CHARLIE ROSE: Alright, well, I—

ALLAN NAIRN: A communist guerrilla victory.

CHARLIE ROSE: Yeah, I—

ALLAN NAIRN: Ninety-five percent of these victims are civilians—peasant organizers, human rights leaders—

CHARLIE ROSE: I am happy to invite both of you—

ALLAN NAIRN: —priests—assassinated by the U.S.-backed Guatemalan army. Let’s look at reality here. In reality, we’re not talking about two murders, one colonel. We’re talking about more than 100,000 murders, an entire army, many of its top officers employees of the U.S. government. We’re talking about crimes, and we’re also talking about criminals, not just people like the Guatemalan colonels, but also the U.S. agents who have been working with them and the higher-level U.S. officials. I mean, I think you have to be—you have to apply uniform standards. President Bush once talked about putting Saddam Hussein on trial for crimes against humanity, Nuremberg-style tribunal. I think that’s a good idea. But if you’re serious, you have to be even-handed. If we look at a case like this, I think we have to talk—start talking about putting Guatemalan and U.S. officials on trial. I think someone like Mr. Abrams would be a fit—a subject for such a Nuremberg-style inquiry. But I agree with Mr. Abrams that Democrats would have to be in the dock with him. The Congress has been in on this. The Congress approved the sale of 16,000 M-16s to Guatemala. In ’87 and ’88—

CHARLIE ROSE: Alright, but hold on one second. I just—before—because the—

ALLAN NAIRN: They voted more military aid than the Republicans asked for.

CHARLIE ROSE: Again, I invite you and Elliott Abrams back to discuss what he did. But right now, you—

ELLIOTT ABRAMS: No, thanks, Charlie, but I won’t accept—

CHARLIE ROSE: Hold on one second. Go ahead. You want to repeat the question, of you want to be in the dock?

ELLIOTT ABRAMS: It is ludicrous. It is ludicrous to respond to that kind of stupidity. This guy thinks we were on the wrong side in the Cold War. Maybe he personally was on the wrong side. I am one of the many millions of Americans who thinks we were happy to win.

CHARLIE ROSE: Alright, I don’t—

ALLAN NAIRN: Mr. Abrams, you were on the wrong side in supporting the massacre of peasants and organizers, anyone who dared to speak, absolutely.

CHARLIE ROSE: What I want to do is I want to ask the following question.

ALLAN NAIRN: And that’s a crime. That’s a crime, Mr. Abrams, for which people should be tried. U.S. laws—

ELLIOTT ABRAMS: Why don’t you—yes, right, we’ll put all the American officials who won the Cold War in the dock.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Elliott Abrams—he served as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs under President Reagan from ’81 to ’85—debating investigative journalist Allan Nairn on the Charlie Rose show. Actually, Congressmember Robert Torricelli, then from New Jersey, before he became senator, was also in that discussion at another point. Allan, the significance of what Mr. Abrams was saying? He went on, Abrams, to deal with the Middle East.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yes. Well, he—when I said that he should be tried by a Nuremberg-style tribunal, he basically reacted by saying I was crazy, that this was a crazy idea that you could try U.S. officials for supplying weapons to armies that kill civilians. But people also thought that it was crazy that Ríos Montt could face justice in Guatemala. But after decades of work by the survivors of his Mayan highland massacres, today, as we speak, Ríos Montt is sitting in the dock.

AMY GOODMAN: Award-winning journalist Allan Nairn, speaking last week before he flew to Guatemala. On Thursday, a landmark genocide trial against former Guatemalan dictator Ríos Montt was suspended after the trial threatened to implicate the current president of Guatemala in the mass killings of civilians. Allan reports Guatemalan army associates had threatened the lives of case judges and prosecutors and that the case had been annulled after intervention by Guatemala’s president, General Otto Pérez Molina. Some of the video footage used in the show comes from a 1983 documentary directed by Mikael Wahlforss. We’ll link to it at democracynow.org and to Allan Nairn’s website, allannairn.org.

That does it for our show. Juan González will be speaking tonight in Chicago at 8:15 at the Gene Siskel Film Center at North State Street and tomorrow at noon at Wayne State University [in Detroit] at noon.

Friday, April 19, 2013

Find this story at 19 April 2013

Guatemala confronts a dark chapter

Guatemala City (CNN) — The soldiers killed Jacinto Lopez’s teenage daughter Magdalena by repeatedly stabbing her in the neck.

His in-laws were not spared. Barely anyone in the village was.

These atrocities, which took place in the remote Guatemalan town of Santa Maria Nebaj in July of 1982, have never been described in a courtroom.

Until now.

For the first time, Lopez has shared his terrifying story in the nation’s highest court.

And for the first time “anywhere in the world,” according to the United Nations, a former head of state is being tried for genocide by his own nation’s justice system. That man is Efrain Rios Montt, an ex-military dictator who ruled Guatemala from 1982 to 1983.

“They killed my family and destroyed our crops,” Lopez testified. “They took even my cows.”

The attack against the Lopez family was just one of countless assaults in the early 1980s during the war between the Guatemalan government and leftist rebels.

The military used the rebel threat as a guise to exterminate rural Ixil Mayan villages accused of harboring insurgents, prosecutors say. According to prosecutors, the campaign led to the genocide of more than 1,700 Ixil Mayans.

Previous accusations of genocide, such as in Rwanda or against Serbia, have been presided over by international judges. The Guatemala attacks are considered by many experts as the only incident of genocide in the Western Hemisphere during the modern era.

Map: Guatemala
Map: Guatemala

Map: Guatemala

The trial reignites debate over the United States’ controversial pro-government policies in the region during the 1980s. It also offers a fascinating look in real time at how a nation is choosing to face its own demons. Painful public testimony could help heal the national betrayal reflected in the faces of many Mayan victims.

Lopez, now 82 years old, is among dozens of witnesses who have testified at the trial being heard by the nation’s three-judge Supreme Court.

Guatemala begins first genocide trial

Rios Montt, 86, is accused of authorizing a military strategy so brutal that it was labeled “scorched earth.” His attorneys say the former dictator did not order any of the atrocities.

The genocide charges rest on the assertion that the army, under Rios Montt’s orders, specifically targeted the Ixil because of their ethnicity, and not just because they were suspected of harboring rebels. The charge has been made before, but not in court. A 1999 report by a Guatemalan truth commission concluded that “agents of the state committed acts of genocide against groups of Mayan people.”

During the opening remarks of the trial, an attorney for Rios Montt laid the foundation for the argument that no such ethnic targeting took place.

“I never heard a speech that said ‘kill the Ixil, exterminate the Ixil,'” defense lawyer Francisco Garcia Gudiel said. Rios Montt “never gave an order, written or spoken, to exterminate a single Ixil in this country.”

The United States stands accused in the court of public opinion. Critics say Washington turned a blind eye to the abuses, and worse. The Reagan administration claimed violence was decreasing during Rios Montt’s tenure, and in 1983, lifted a U.S. arms embargo. But there are bookends for this dark chapter of Central American history. More recently, the United States has pushed for Guatemalan judicial reform that has made this trial possible.

Horrific memories

For generations, the Ixil have lived in mountainous villages in the country’s northwest, mostly isolated from the rest of Guatemala and the world. According to the country’s 2002 census, Guatemalan Ixil number around 95,000, less than 1% of the nation’s population.

They still speak primarily the Ixil language, and most of the witnesses called to the stand so far have spoken through a translator. The horrific stories that more than 70 prosecution witnesses have revealed so far have been hard to hear in any language.

“I was 12 years old,” said one woman, whose identity was protected by the court. “They took me with the other women and they tied my feet and hands. They put a rag in my mouth … and they started raping me … I don’t know how many took turns. … I lost consciousness … and the blood kept running. … Later I couldn’t even stand or urinate.”

Stories about rape were so widespread that the trial set aside an entire day of testimony just for rape victims.

Their shocking stories prompted many of the hundreds of Guatemalans sitting in the courtroom to use their hands to cover their mouths. The powerful proceedings often wrapped the courtroom in profound silence, only to be broken by the sound of sobbing.

Pedro Chavez Brito was 6 or 7 years old when the military attacked his village in November 1982. Soldiers killed his mother, he told the court. In a frantic bid to escape, he hid with his pregnant sister and her two children among the family’s chickens.

It didn’t work.

When soldiers found them, they lashed Chavez’s sister to the stairs of their home, he testified. The soldiers then set the house on fire, killing her and her two children, Chavez testified. Seven other family members may have died in the fire, he said.

Chavez, like many other survivors, lived to share his story because he fled into the unforgiving mountains.

That’s how Maria Cruz Raymundo and her family escaped, too. But conditions there were so harsh that her husband, daughter and son starved to death, she told the court.

More than 100 witnesses have taken the stand so far — a marathon of gruesome stories.

Another witness, Nicholas Bernal, testified that he, too, escaped to the mountains.

Bernal told the court he had watched soldiers kill his neighbors and then rip out their hearts and burn their bodies.

Each passing day of the trial reveals similar nightmarish stories. Human rights organizations such as the Center for Legal Action in Human Rights and Association for Justice and Reconciliation are broadcasting the trial live on the Internet. In addition, the U.S.-based Open Society Justice Initiative is providing daily summaries on a dedicated website. Testimony in this report is culled from all these sources and state news media.

Shifting U.S. behavior

When Rios Montt assumed power in a coup in 1982, Guatemala was already in the throes of a violent civil war that would last 36 years. The insurgency, and extrajudicial killings by the military, had been going on for two decades as part of the broader conflicts between leftist rebels and hardline governments across the region.

By the time a peace accord was reached in 1996, an estimated more than 200,000 had perished.

Photos: Searching for the ‘disappeared’ in Guatemala

Rios Montt faces charges of genocide and crimes against humanity connected to his 16 months as dictator. He is being tried together with his then-chief of military intelligence, Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez.

Sanchez is accused of designing and executing the army’s strategy.

When Rios Montt became president, human rights violations had already prompted the United States to cut off aid to the Guatemalan government. But a political scandal in the U.S. in the 1990s revealed that in fact the CIA continued to provide money to Guatemalan military intelligence sources for years during the civil war.

Now-declassified secret CIA cables indicate that the United States had knowledge of the atrocities being committed against the Ixil Mayans, but did little about them, according to Victoria Sanford, director of the Center for Human Rights & Peace Studies at the City University of New York.

“At best they chose to look away, but often they were covering it up,” Sanford said.

In one CIA document, from February 1983, the agency reports to Washington that an increase in violence against civilians is because of “right-wing violence.”

But the U.S. ambassador at the time added a note to the same memo with a distinct explanation: “I am firmly convinced that the violence described … is government of Guatemala ordered and directed violence.”

Another CIA memo shows the U.S. government may have had knowledge of the violent tactics being used against the Ixil Mayans.

“When an army patrol meets resistance and takes fire from a town or village it is assumed that the entire town is hostile and it is subsequently destroyed,” the 1982 document states. “The well-documented belief by the army that the entire Ixil Indian population is (pro-rebel) has created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike.”

Critics blame the United States, in its anti-communist zeal, of standing by during these atrocities by denying them and lifting the arms embargo. Then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan went as far as to say that Rios Montt was being given a “bum rap” by critics. At the same time, the United States was backing other strongmen in Latin America against leftists.

But if the United States deserves criticism for openly supporting Rios Montt’s rule, it also should be credited for supporting Guatemalan efforts to put the former dictator on trial, said Anita Isaacs, a professor of political science at Haverford College whose research focuses on Guatemalan politics.

She is a fierce critic of the U.S. role in the 1980s, but adds that “this trial wouldn’t be occurring were it not for the role played by the United States pushing for reform in Guatemala’s judicial system.”

In her view, the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala from 2008 to 2011, Stephen McFarland, was “single-handedly” responsible for shifting the country’s perception of the United States from meddling to supportive.

McFarland listened to survivors’ stories of the civil war and attended hearings in support of the victims, she said.

The trial

The historic nature of the trial isn’t lost on the nation’s public, although some say too much time has passed for the process to be fair.

Even current President Otto Perez Molina, a former general who once commanded troops in the Ixil lands, has said he believes there was no genocide. Instead, some see the attacks as a kind of national defense campaign.

The Guatemalan military viewed the Ixil Mayans as rebel collaborators who threatened the government.

This view is shared by protesters with military ties who have stood outside the courthouse, holding signs demanding respect for the military and a fair trial. One demonstrator, Victor Manuel Argueta, told the state-run AGN news agency that the soldiers are “proud of what we did during the civil war.”

The army in the early 1980s, he said, “was dedicated to defending the people from those who wanted to usurp power.” The trial, he said, is nothing more than a “political lynching.”

Declassified U.S. documents repeated the Guatemalan military’s assertion that the Ixil were protecting the rebels.

But dozens of studies by anthropologists have indicated that it was much more complex than that, said Kate Doyle, director of the Guatemala Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, a leading research institute.

Some Ixil Mayans joined the guerrillas as combatants and others provided food or protection, but still others were not connected to the rebels. Some even actively opposed the rebels, she said.

Since the trial began, Rios Montt has fired his attorneys and then rehired them.

Defense attorneys have argued there’s no evidence proving that Rios Montt ordered any of the abuses.

His lawyers have repeatedly and unsuccessfully demanded that the chief judge recuse herself. They say the judge violated Rios Montt’s rights by pressing on with the trial when his attorneys were not prepared.

A victory, no matter the outcome?

The victims’ stories are haunting, and the desire for justice strong, but the task of proving genocide isn’t easy.

Prosecutors must prove the attacks targeted a specific ethnic group with the intention of destroying it, said Naomi Roht-Arriaza, a law professor at the University of California Hastings College of Law.

To convict Rios Montt, prosecutors must also convince the judges that he was responsible.

What’s at stake is less clear. The genocide charges are without precedent. If Rios Montt and Rodriguez Sanchez are convicted, their maximum possible sentences are unknown.

In 2011, a Guatemalan court sentenced four soldiers to 6,060 years in prison each for their role in the 1982 massacre at Dos Erres, a village where 201 people were killed. Thirty years for each death. A fifth soldier was sentenced to the same last year. The unheard-of sentences were for crimes against humanity, not genocide.

Given Rios Montt’s age, many assume that he will serve little, if any, time in prison if convicted.

For the moment, legal observers say the trial itself stands as a huge triumph.

A national conversation

…

CNN’s Mariano Castillo reported and wrote this story from Atlanta. Journalist Miguel Salay contributed from Guatemala City.

April 11, 2013 — Updated 1243 GMT (2043 HKT) CNN.com

Find this story at 11 April 2013

© 2013 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.

Act of Terror: arrested for filming police officers – video

When police carried out a routine stop-and-search of her boyfriend on the London Underground, Gemma Atkinson filmed the incident. She was detained, handcuffed and threatened with arrest. She launched a legal battle, which ended with the police settling the case in 2010. With the money from the settlement she funded the production of this animated film, which she says shows how her story and highlights police misuse of counterterrorism powers to restrict photography.

Find this story at 29 April 2013

Ochtendgloren: Nachtelijke politionele phishing acties

Bestrijding van de criminaliteit door het afsluiten van snelwegen lijkt een uitvloeisel van de aanpak van nodale controle en informatiegestuurde politie. De redenering is eenvoudig. Boeven en andere slechteriken in de woorden van overheidsfunctionarissen gebruiken snelwegen als aan- en afvoerroutes van criminele waar. Door de snelweg af te sluiten en iedereen te controleren wordt de criminaliteit bestreden. Deze ongerichte controle acties gericht tegen niet verdachte burgers lijken proeftuinen voor het samenwerken van tientallen opsporingsdiensten en meer dan honderd functionarissen. Het denken binnen het opsporingsapparaat is duidelijk gekanteld. Iedereen is verdachte op de rijkswegen. Het Kwaad beweegt zich. In het verleden vooral in het oosten van het land, waar de operatie Ochtendgloren zijn oorsprong kent, maar de laatste jaren ook in het westen en zuiden, waar inmiddels vergelijkbare operaties onder de naam Avondlicht worden gehouden.
Kritische kanttekeningen, vragen, evaluaties, analyses, het is allemaal niet nodig. Twijfelaars van de maatregel worden net zolang onder druk gezet tot ze instemmen en een kritische beschouwing van dit zware middel is nergens in de stukken te vinden. Dat is verontrustend in een rechtstaat waar politie en justitie steeds meer middelen en mogelijkheden krijgen. Zonder nuances worden rechten van burgers alleen maar meer ingeperkt.

Meerdere keren per jaar worden snelwegen in Nederland door meer dan honderd functionarissen afgesloten om vele honderden automobilisten systematisch te controleren. Alhoewel het formeel om verkeerscontroles gaat blijkt de werkelijke motivatie de bestrijding van de middencriminaliteit te zijn; inbrekers en overvallers die zich per auto verplaatsen. Analyse van deze criminaliteit en de effectiviteit van de kostbare operaties ontbreekt echter. Cijfers laten duidelijk zien dat er aan de veiligheid in de gemeenten langs de snelwegen weinig verandert. De incidentele successen die er tijdens de operaties worden geboekt lijken meer op toevalstreffers dan serieus politiewerk. Waarom er gemikt wordt op grote logge operaties die dagen van te voren en van kilometers afstand zijn te zien, roept vooral vragen op. In de woorden van iemand die post op flitsservice.nl onder de nick-name ‘vw-driver’: “Vanavond weer een actie Ochtengloren langs de A1 bij parkeerplaatsen Boermark en De Hop nabij Holten. Hoezo? Staat er weer het bekende materiaal opgesteld op de parkeerplaatsen?” En een andere bijdrage is van een persoon die zich uitgeeft als ‘classpool’ voegt er aan toe dat er ruime ervaring is bij het omzeilen van de controles: “Het blijft werkelijk een amateuristisch opgezette actie. In beide richtingen kon je voor de controle de snelweg af, stukje binnendoor van 5 minuten en de snelweg weer op.”
Ondertussen leveren de operaties volgens de betrokken instanties zelf een dusdanig risico voor ambtenaar en burger op dat de locaties als veiligheidsrisicogebied moeten worden aangemerkt. Deze aanmerking biedt gelijk de juridische basis om automobilisten nog eens extra te verwennen door ze preventief te fouilleren. Gestart als reactie op een schietpartij van bekenden van de politie worden nu duizenden Nederlanders onderworpen aan criminaliteitscontroles, terwijl zij niet verdacht zijn van het plegen van een misdrijf. En het resultaat. Cijfers van het Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek laten vooral zien dat het aantal diefstallen en inbraken stijgt. Rijssen-Holten, de gemeente die het fanatiekst is bij het inzetten van Ochtendgloren vertoont een stijging van het aantal inbraken met 25%. Als de politie na het ochtendgloren huiswaarts keert, hebben de “slechteriken uit het westen” in alle rust de huizen van brave burgers leeg kunnen halen. Niet de samenleving verhardt, maar het ongerichte optreden van overheidsdiensten gericht op 100% repressief optreden laat zien wie er nu werkelijk verhardt in zijn standpunt. Of het veiliger wordt is allang geen issue meer.

Find this story at 24 November 2010

Operatie Ochtendgloren – Buro Jansen & Janssen

 

 

Actie preventief fouilleren A2 en camping was misbruik van bevoegdheid

24 april 2013 – De Nationale ombudsman, Alex Brenninkmeijer, is van oordeel dat de politie Oost Nederland misbruik van haar bevoegdheden heeft gemaakt bij acties van preventief fouilleren langs de A2 bij Geldermalsen en op een camping in Kerkdriel. De gemeente Geldermalsen en het OM hebben geen oog gehad voor de waarborgen voor de burger. In beide gevallen was geen sprake van een veiligheidsrisico waarbij preventief fouilleren zou kunnen worden ingezet. Brenninkmeijer: ‘Ik kan me niet aan de indruk onttrekken dat uit opportunisme is geprobeerd om preventief fouilleren aan het reeds beschikbare arsenaal opsporings- en controlemogelijkheden toe te voegen.’

De ombudsman deed een onderzoek uit eigen beweging naar een grootschalige preventief fouilleeractie in de nacht van 25 op 26 oktober 2012 op twee locaties langs de A2 bij Geldermalsen. Ook onderzocht hij een preventief fouilleeractie op de camping ‘Maaszicht’ in Kerkdriel. De actie langs de A2 werd gerechtvaardigd onder verwijzing naar een groot aantal inbraken. En de actie in Kerkdriel had als achtergrond de politiemensen te beschermen bij hun zoekactie. Allebei geen reden waarvoor preventief fouilleren is toegestaan, want preventief fouilleren is gericht op openbare orde en niet op opsporen van strafbare feiten.

Gelet op wat in het voortraject van beide acties is gebeurd, komt het de ombudsman voor dat de burgemeester en de officier van justitie marionetten van de politie Oost Nederland (voorheen politiekorps Gelderland-Zuid) zijn geweest. Brenninkmeijer: ‘Ik ben bezorgd over het gemak waarmee de bestuurders en de officieren van justitie in beide gevallen aan de waarborgen voor de burger voorbij zijn gegaan.’ De Nationale ombudsman doet de aanbeveling om het middel preventief fouilleren niet meer in combinatie met andere controleacties in te zetten, dit om misbruik van het middel preventief fouilleren te voorkomen.
In een eerder rapport (2011/252) waarschuwden de Nationale ombudsman en de gemeentelijke ombudsmannen van Amsterdam en Rotterdam voor het gevaar dat preventief fouilleren oneigenlijk wordt gebruikt voor de opsporing van strafbare feiten.

Find this story at 24 April 2013

Book review: ‘The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth’ By Mark Mazzetti

On May 1, 2011, CIA Director Leon Panetta was in command of the single most important U.S. military operation since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001: the Navy SEAL Team 6 assault on a mysterious compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden was suspected to be hiding. The SEALs were sneaking into Pakistan without the permission of its government on a covert “deniable” mission in a country that was supposedly allied to the United States. Because U.S. law forbids the military to do this kind of work, the SEALs were turned over to the control of the CIA and were “sheep-dipped” to become, in effect, spies under Panetta’s nominal control.

Yet isn’t the CIA’s real job to steal other countries’ secrets, rather than to carry out targeted killings?

A few years before the bin Laden operation, Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, then the head of Joint Special Operations Command, had turned the Army’s Delta Force and Navy SEAL Team 6 into a fighting machine in Iraq and Afghanistan that increasingly mounted operations to gather intelligence — what McChrystal termed “a fight for knowledge.”

Yet aren’t Special Operations forces the “door kickers” whom you send in to kill or capture terrorists rather than the guys who collect intelligence?

Since the 9/11 attacks, a dramatic shift has occurred in the way the United States deploys its military and intelligence forces. In his new book, “The Way of the Knife,” Mark Mazzetti documents the militarization of the CIA and the stepped-up intelligence focus of Special Operations forces. As Mazzetti observes in his deeply reported and crisply written account, over the past decade “the CIA’s top priority was no longer gathering intelligence on foreign governments and their countries, but man hunting.” The bin Laden operation was far from the only deadly mission that Panetta presided over.

Panetta’s tenure at CIA, Mazzetti writes, was known for its “aggressive — some would come to believe reckless — campaign of targeted killings.” He authorized 216 CIA drone strikes in Pakistan that killed at least 1,196 people, mostly militants, but also a smaller number of civilians, according to a count by the New America Foundation. Panetta, a devout Catholic, observed that he had “said more Hail Marys in the last two years than I have in my whole life.”Conversely, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was deeply irritated when the CIA rather than the military led the ground operation in late 2001 that ejected the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. He came to the conclusion that “the only answer was to make the Pentagon more like the CIA.”

The emergence of a “military-intelligence complex” has proved devastating to al-Qaeda and its affiliates. The CIA drone campaign in Pakistan has killed much of the terror network’s leaders and largely eliminated Pakistan’s tribal regions as the key training ground for the group; as a result, al-Qaeda hasn’t been able to mount a successful assault on the West since the suicide attacks on the London transportation system in 2005.

Meanwhile, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) not only killed bin Laden, but also largely destroyed the vicious leadership of al-Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate, which had precipitated the civil war in Iraq by its numerous attacks on the Shia community. JSOC’s campaign against al-Qaeda played a key role in tamping down the Iraqi civil war and helped enable a steady decline in violence in Iraq since 2007.

Until recently this history had not been well understood because units like SEAL Team 6 that make up Joint Special Operations Command aren’t even officially acknowledged. McChrystal’s recent authoritative memoir, “My Share of the Task,” has done much to illuminate this important chapter in the evolution of American military operations.

If there is an “Obama doctrine,” it is to fight the war against al-Qaeda and its allies with drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen and with small numbers of clandestine Special Operations forces on the ground in countries such as Somalia. This new kind of fighting gives Mazzetti the title of his book, “The Way of the Knife.” It’s a form of warfare that avoids “messy, costly wars that topple governments and require years of American occupation.”

The benefits of the way of the knife are obvious: Few Americans are put at risk, and the costs are relatively low in a time of budgetary constraints. But as Mazzetti points out, this type of knife fighting is not as surgical as some of its proponents think, for it “creates enemies just as it has obliterated them.” It also has “lowered the bar for waging war, and it is now easier for the United States to carry out killing operations at the ends of the earth than at any other time in its history.”

CIA drone strikes are emblematic of this point. In Pakistan, a country with nuclear weapons, drone attacks are deeply unpopular, angering many of the 180 million Pakistanis. This is a high cost to pay. In 2010, a record 122 strikes occurred in Pakistan, yet few of the victims were leaders of al-Qaeda, suggesting that this tactic was being used without much thought for the larger strategic picture. The CIA drone program, which was conceived of as a way to kill the leaders of militant groups, had evolved into a counterinsurgency air force that killed mostly lower-level members of the Taliban in Pakistan.

But some big payoffs emerge from the blending of the roles of the military and the CIA that are well illustrated by the execution of the bin Laden raid. The first 15 minutes of the raid were consumed in killing bin Laden’s two bodyguards, his son and the al-Qaeda leader himself. But during the next 23 minutes, the SEALs picked up every computer, thumb drive and file they could lay their hands on in bin Laden’s compound. More than half of the time that the SEALs were on the ground in Pakistan they were performing what is known among intelligence professionals as SSE, or sensitive site exploitation.

As a result, the CIA was able to launch drone strikes — presided over by Panetta, not the military — that killed a number of al-Qaeda leaders, such as Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, who had appeared prominently in the documents the SEALs had recovered at the Abbottabad compound. The documents revealed that Rahman was not the middle-tier al-Qaeda official he had originally been pegged, but bin Laden’s chief of staff.

While the “The Way of the Knife” recounts the important shifts in the architecture of the U.S. military and intelligence communities, it also reveals the many eccentric characters who emerged during this era of shifting portfolios and illustrates another important theme of the book: the privatization of intelligence operations, which were traditionally a core government function.

In this new environment, ambitious individuals take on outsize roles. Consider Michele Ballarin, a former Republican candidate for Congress and socialite living on a 100-acre farm in Virginia’s horse country who became obsessed with Somalia at the same time that the CIA and JSOC were increasingly focusing on the rise of al-Shabab, a Somali al-Qaeda affiliate that had taken control of much of the country. Simultaneously, al-Shabab was recruiting dozens of U.S. citizens, predominately from the Somali diaspora in Minnesota.

Following a chance meeting with a group of Somali Americans, Ballarin became intrigued by their country and soon was traveling regularly to Somalia, outfitted in Gucci and toting Louis Vuitton bags, and so dazzling that the Somalis dubbed her “Amira,” Arabic for princess. Soon the Virginia socialite was embroiled in hostage negotiations with Somali pirates who had seized a ship carrying clandestine cargo of Russian tanks worth many millions. And Ballarin was put on the Pentagon’s payroll to provide intelligence about Somalia’s many armed groups, although it is unclear from Mazzetti’s account whether she discovered anything very useful.

Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, a CIA legend who had played a starring role during the Iran-contra scandal, also seized an opportunity in the new world of government-sponsored private intelligence collection. In 2009, the 77-year-old Clarridge, long retired and dismissive of the CIA as risk-averse, was running his own private spying operation along the Afghan-Pakistani border. He hatched a plan to dig up evidence that Afghan President Hamid Karzai was a heroin addict, a rumor that was floating around Kabul. Under the scheme, Clarridge would insert an agent into Karzai’s palace to collect his beard trimmings and then would run drug tests on them. He dropped the plan when it became obvious that the Obama administration had no intention of pushing Karzai from power.

Working the phones late at night from his home in the San Diego suburbs, Clarridge maintained a network of spies who were gathering information on Taliban groups such as the Haqqani network. Through a Pentagon contract overseen by Lockheed Martin, Clarridge and his team were paid $22 million for their work and filed “hundreds of intelligence reports to military commanders in Afghanistan.” The CIA had always been unhappy about Clarridge’s freelance spying operation, and his contract was not renewed in 2010. He was angry that his former employer “seemed to be the reason that the operation had been shut down.”

Mazzetti, a national security correspondent for the New York Times, asserts that the “war on terror” has damaged the CIA’s ability to understand the really important political developments in the Muslim world, such as the Arab Spring. As a senior Obama official explained, noting the agency’s emphasis on drone strikes and hunting down al-Qaeda leaders: “The CIA missed Tunisia. They missed Egypt. They missed Libya.”

…

THE WAY OF THE KNIFE The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth By Mark Mazzetti Penguin Press. 381 pp. $29.95

By Peter Bergen, Published: April 5

Find this story at 5 April 2013

© The Washington Post Company

Arundhati Roy on Iraq War’s 10th: Bush May Be Gone, But “Psychosis” of U.S. Foreign Policy Prevails

On the eve of the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the global justice activist and author Arundhati Roy joins us to discuss the war’s legacy. Roy is the author of many books, including “The God of Small Things,” “Walking with the Comrades,” and “Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers.” Roy argues the imperial mentality that enabled the United States to invade Iraq continues today unabated across the world. “We are being given lessons in morality [by world leaders] while tens of thousands are being killed, while whole countries are shattered, while whole civilizations are driven back decades, if not centuries,” Roy says. “And everything continues as normal.” [includes rush transcript]
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: March 19th marks the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. According to a new report by Brown University, a decade of war led to the deaths of roughly 134,000 Iraqi civilians and potentially contributed to the deaths of many hundreds of thousands more. According to the report, the Iraq War has cost the U.S. more than $2 trillion, including half-a-trillion dollars in benefits owed to veterans. The report says the war has devastated rather than helped Iraq, spurring militant violence, setting back women’s rights and hurting the healthcare system. Most of the more than $200 billion supposedly set aside for reconstruction in Iraq was actually used for security or lost amid rampant fraud and waste. Many in Iraq continue to suffer the consequences of the invasion. This is Basma Najem, whose husband was shot dead by U.S. forces in Basra in 2011.

BASMA NAJEM: [translated] We expected that we would live in a better situation when the occupation forces, the U.S. forces, came to Iraq. We expected that the situation would be improved. But contrary to our expectation, the situation deteriorated. And at the end, I lost my husband. I have no breadwinner in this world now, and I have six kids. I could not imagine my life would be changed like this. I do not know how it happened.

AMY GOODMAN: The consequences of the war are still visible here in the United States, as well. Military veterans continue to face extremely high levels of unemployment, traumatic brain injury, PTSD and homelessness. Almost a quarter of recent veterans come home injured either physically or emotionally, and an estimated 18 veterans commit suicide every day. This is Ed Colley, whose son, Army Private Stephen Colley, took his own life in 2007.

EDWARD COLLEY: We lost our son shortly after he returned from Iraq. He had asked for help, but he didn’t get the help that he needed. And clearly, he was trying to do what he could for himself and could think of no other cure, obviously, than to take his own life.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about this 10th anniversary, we’re joined by the award-winning writer and activist Arundhati Roy, one of the most vocal critics of the Iraq War. In a moment, she’ll join us from Chicago. But first let’s go back to 2003 to a speech she gave at Riverside Church here in New York.

ARUNDHATI ROY: When the United States invaded Iraq, a New York Times/CBS News survey estimated that 42 percent of the American public believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And an ABC News poll said that 55 percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein directly supported al-Qaeda. None of this opinion is based on evidence, because there isn’t any. All of it is based on insinuation or to suggestion and outright lies circulated by the U.S. corporate media, otherwise known as the “free press,” that hollow pillar on which contemporary American democracy rests. Public support in the U.S. for the war against Iraq was founded on a multitiered edifice of falsehood and deceit, coordinated by the U.S. government and faithfully amplified by the corporate media.

Apart from the invented links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, we had the manufactured frenzy about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. George Bush the Lesser went to the extent—went to the extent of saying it would be suicidal for Iraq—for the U.S. not to attack Iraq. We once again witnessed the paranoia that a starved, bombed, besieged country was about to annihilate almighty America. Iraq was only the latest in a succession of countries. Earlier, there was Cuba, Nicaragua, Libya, Granada, Panama. But this time it wasn’t just your ordinary brand of friendly neighborhood frenzy. It was frenzy with a purpose. It ushered in an old doctrine in a new bottle: the doctrine of preemptive strike, also known as the United States can do whatever the hell it wants, and that’s official. The war against Iraq has been fought and won, and no weapons of mass destruction have been found, not even a little one.

AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati Roy, speaking in October of 2003 at Riverside Church here in New York, seven months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Arundhati has written many books, including The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize. Her other books include Walking with the Comrades and Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, among others. She now joins us from Chicago.

Arundhati Roy, welcome to Democracy Now! As you watch yourself 10 years ago and reflect back 10 years ago to this week when the U.S. invaded Iraq, your thoughts today?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, Amy, before that, we remember how—I think it was 50 million people across the world who marched against the war in Iraq. It was perhaps the biggest display of public morality in the world—you know, I mean, before the war happened. Before the war happened, everybody knew that they were being fed lies. I remember saying, you know, it’s just the quality of the lies that is so insulting, because we are being—used to being lied to.

But, unfortunately, now, all these years later, we have to ask ourselves two questions. One is: Who benefited from this war? You know, we know who paid the price. I heard—I heard you talking about that, so I won’t get into that again. But who benefited from this war? Did the U.S. government? Did the U.S. people benefit? Did they get the oil contracts that they wanted, in the way that they wanted? The answer is no. And yet, today you hear Dick Cheney saying he would do it all over again in a second.

So, unfortunately, we are dealing with psychosis. We are dealing with a psychopathic situation. And all of us, including myself, we can’t do anything but keep being reasonable, keep saying what needs to be said. But that doesn’t seem to help the situation, because, of course, as we know, after Iraq, there’s been Libya, there’s Syria, and the rhetoric of, you know, democracy versus radical Islam. When you look at the countries that were attacked, none of them were Wahhabi Islamic fundamentalist countries. Those ones are supported, financed by the U.S., so there is a real collusion between radical Islam and capitalism. What is going on is really a different kind of battle.

And, you know, most people are led up a path which keeps them busy. And in a way, all of us are being kept busy, while the real business at the heart of it—I mean, apart from the people who suffered during the war. Let’s not forget the sanctions. Let’s not forget Madeleine Albright saying that a million children dying in Iraq because of the sanctions was a hard price but worth it. I mean, she was the victim, it seems, of the sanctions; you know, her softness was called upon, and she had to brazen herself to do it. And today, you have the Democrats bombing Pakistan, destroying that country, too. So, just in this last decade, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria—all these countries have been—have been shattered.

You know, we heard a lot about why—you know, the war in Afghanistan was fought for feminist reasons, and the Marines were really on this feminist mission. But today, all the women in all these countries have been driven back into medieval situations. Women who were liberated, women who were doctors and lawyers and poets and writers and—you know, pushed back into this Shia set against Sunnis. The U.S. is supporting al-Qaeda militias all over this region and pretending that it’s fighting Islam. So we are in a situation of—it is psychopathic.

And while anyone who resisted is being given moral lessons about armed struggle or violence or whatever it is, at the heart of this operation is an immorality and a violence and a—as I keep using this word—psychopathic violence, which even the people in the United States are now suffering for. You know, there is a connection, after all, between all these wars and people being thrown out of their homes in this country. And yet, of course we know who benefits from these wars. May not be the oil contracts, but certainly the weapons industry on which this economy depends for—you know, for a great part. So, all over, even between India and Pakistan now, people are advocating war. And the weapons industry is in with the corporations in India.

So, we are really being made fools of. You know, this is what is so insulting. We are being, you know, given lessons in morality while tens of thousands are being killed, while whole countries are shattered, while whole civilizations are driven back decades, if not centuries. And everything continues as normal. And you have—you have people, like criminals, really, like Cheney, saying, “I’ll do it again. I’ll do it again. I won’t think about it. I’ll do it again.” And so that’s the situation we are in now.

AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati, a decade after the invasion of Iraq, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair stood by his decision to go to war, saying it saved Iraq from a fate worse than Syria’s at the moment.

TONY BLAIR: I think if we’d—if we’d backed off and we’d left him in power, you just imagine, with what is happening in Syria now, if you’d left Saddam in charge of Iraq, you would have had carnage on an even worse scale in Syria and with no end in sight. So, you know, this was the most difficult decision I ever took and the most balanced decision. But I still—personally, I still believe we were better to remove him than leave him.

AMY GOODMAN: That was British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former prime minister. Arundhati Roy, your response?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, you know, I don’t know. Maybe they need to be put into a padded cell and given some real news to read, you know? I mean, how can you say this, after creating a situation in Iraq where no—I mean, every day people are being blown up? There are—you know, mosques are being attacked. Thousands are being killed. People have been made to hate each other. In Iraq, women were amongst the most liberated women in the world, and they have been driven back into having to wear burqas and be safe, because of the situation. And this man is saying, “Oh, we did such a wonderful thing. We saved these people.” Now, isn’t that like—isn’t it insane? I mean, I don’t know how to respond to something like that, because it’s like somebody looking at somebody being slaughtered and saying, “Oh, he must be enjoying it. We are really helping him,” you know? So, how do you argue rationally against these people?

AMY GOODMAN: Can you—

ARUNDHATI ROY: We just have to think about what we need to do, you know? But we can’t have a conversation with them in this—at this point.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you see President Obama going in a different direction?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Of course not. I don’t see him going in a different direction at all. I mean, the real question to ask is: When was the last time the United States won a war? You know, it lost in Vietnam. It’s lost in Afghanistan. It’s lost in Iraq. And it will not be able to contain the situation. It is hemorrhaging. It is now—you know, of course you can continue with drone attacks, and you can continue these targeted killings, but on the ground, a situation is being created which no army—not America, not anybody—can control. And it’s just, you know, a combination of such foolishness, such a lack of understanding of culture in the world.

And Obama just goes on, you know, coming out with these smooth, mercurial sentences that are completely meaningless. I was—I remember when he was sworn in for the second time, and he came on stage with his daughters and his wife, and it was all really nice, and he said, you know, “Should my daughters have another dog, or should they not?” And a man who had lost his entire family in the drone attacks just a couple of weeks ago said, “What am I supposed to think? What am I supposed to think of this exhibition of love and family values and good fatherhood and good husbandhood?” I mean, we’re not morons, you know? It’s about time that we stopped acting so reasonable. I just don’t feel reasonable about this anymore.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back and talk about what’s happening in Kashmir, a place you’ve been focusing on recently, Arundhati. Arundhati Roy is the award-winning writer, renowned global justice activist. Among her books, The God of Small Things, her most recent book, Walking with the Comrades, and Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.

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Monday, March 18, 2013

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CIA director faces a quandary over clandestine service appointment

As John Brennan moved into the CIA director’s office this month, another high-level transition was taking place down the hall.

A week earlier, a woman had been placed in charge of the CIA’s clandestine service for the first time in the agency’s history. She is a veteran officer with broad support inside the agency. But she also helped run the CIA’s detention and interrogation program after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and signed off on the 2005 decision to destroy videotapes of prisoners being subjected to treatment critics have called torture.

The woman, who remains undercover and cannot be named, was put in the top position on an acting basis when the previous chief retired last month. The question of whether to give her the job permanently poses an early quandary for Brennan, who is already struggling to distance the agency from the decade-old controversies.

Brennan endured a bruising confirmation battle in part over his own role as a senior CIA official when the agency began using water-boarding and other harsh interrogation methods. As director, he is faced with assembling the CIA’s response to a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee that documents abuses in the interrogation program and accuses the agency of misleading the White House and Congress over its effectiveness.

To help navigate the sensitive decision on the clandestine service chief, Brennan has taken the unusual step of assembling a group of three former CIA officials to evaluate the candidates. Brennan announced the move in a previously undisclosed notice sent to CIA employees last week, officials said.

“The director of the clandestine service has never been picked that way,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official.

The move has led to speculation that Brennan is seeking political cover for a decision made more difficult by the re-emergence of the interrogation controversy and the acting chief’s ties to that program.

She “is highly experienced, smart and capable,” and giving her the job permanently “would be a home run from a diversity standpoint,” the former senior U.S. intelligence official said. “But she was also heavily involved in the interrogation program at the beginning and for the first couple of years.”

The former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in discussing internal agency matters, said that Brennan “is obviously hesitating” at making the chief permanent.

CIA officials disputed that characterization. “Given the importance of the position of the director of the National Clandestine Service, Director Brennan has asked a few highly respected former senior agency officers to review the candidates he’s considering for the job,” said Preston Golson, a CIA spokesman.

The group’s members were identified as former senior officials John McLaughlin, Stephen Kappes and Mary Margaret Graham.

Golson said Brennan will make the decision but added that “asking former senior agency officers to review the candidates will undoubtedly aid the selection process by making sure the director has the benefit of the additional perspectives from these highly experienced and respected intelligence officers.”

Other candidates to run the clandestine service include a former station chief in Pakistan and the director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center . Neither person can be named because they are undercover.

The service is the most storied part of the CIA. It sends spies overseas and carries out covert operations including running the agency’s ongoing drone campaign.

The service has also long been perceived as a male bastion that has blocked the career paths of women even while female officers have ascended to the top posts in other divisions, including the directors of analysis and science.

No woman has held the job of CIA director or led the clandestine service until now.

The acting chief, who according to public records is in her 50s, is part of a generation that over the past two decades has pushed through many obstacles confronting women. The CIA refused to comment on her background, but former colleagues said she mastered several languages and served multiple tours in Moscow and other cities overseas. She also held senior posts at CIA headquarters.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, she took on a senior assignment at the Counterterrorism Center, which put her in the chain of command on the interrogation and detention program, former officials said.

In a fateful decision, the CIA set up a video camera at its secret prison in Thailand shortly after it opened in the months after the attacks. The agency recorded more than 90 tapes of often-brutal interrogations, footage that became increasingly worrisome to officials as the legal basis for the program began to crumble.

When the head of the Counterterrorism Center, Jose Rodriguez, was promoted to head of the clandestine service in 2004, he took the female officer along as his chief of staff. According to former officials, the two repeatedly sought permission to have the tapes destroyed but were denied.

In 2005, instructions to get rid of the recordings went out anyway. Former officials said the order carried just two names: Rodriguez and his chief of staff.

The officer went on to hold top positions in London and New York before returning to Langley as deputy chief of the clandestine service. She became acting director on Feb. 28, when the previous head of the service, John Bennett, retired.

The Justice Department has twice investigated the tapes’ destruction and brought no charges against anyone at the CIA.

Former senior CIA officials said that outcome should clear any obstacles to the acting director getting the job permanently. But the seemingly dormant controversy over the interrogation program was revived by Brennan’s nomination and completion of a 6,000-page report from the Senate Intelligence Committee that accuses the agency of exaggerating the program’s results.

The acting director is mentioned in several passages of the report, according to officials familiar with its contents, although they declined to provide more details.

Amid calls for the public release of the report, Brennan faces having to devise a response that doesn’t alienate his workforce or the lawmakers who confirmed him for his job.

…

By Greg Miller and Julie Tate, Published: March 27

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© The Washington Post Company

Symbols of Bush-era Lawlessness Flourish Under Obama Guantanamo Bay prison plans expansion, while CIA official linked to torture cover-up gets promoted

During the George W. Bush years, two of the most controversial elements of what was then called the Global War on Terror were the CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation (RDI) program and the creation of the prison camps at Guantanamo Bay. The RDI program included waterboarding and other forms of torture, as well as so-called black site prisons where detainees were held incommunicado after being abducted by the CIA, and sometimes tortured by members of the host country’s security forces.

Guantanamo Bay and the RDI program are both back in the news now, each for their own unsavory reasons, and their reemergence should be a reminder of how fully the Obama administration has embraced the logic underpinning the Bush regime’s response to 9/11. The Pentagon is now requesting nearly $200 million for Guantanamo Bay infrastructure upgrades, including $49 million for a new unit for “special” prisoners – likely the so-called high-value detainees currently housed at Camp 7, which include self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The Pentagon’s reasoning is that neither the president nor Congress have any plans to close the prison anytime soon, so these repairs are necessary.

This massive capital request comes as detainees are engaged in an increasingly dire hunger strike to protest their indefinite detention and to signal their lack of hope for transfer or release. Instead of closing Guantanamo Bay, the Obama administration stands poised to do the very opposite – pour more money into what is already the country’s most expensive prison.

Meanwhile, participation in the CIA’s controversial RDI program has resulted for at least one person not in prosecution or professional sanctions, but rather in a promotion. For the last several weeks, an unnamed woman has been acting director of the National Clandestine Service – the part of the CIA that runs spying and covert operations, including the CIA’s drone program – as first reported by the Washington Post. This is the first time a woman has held that position. But this particular woman was a major figure in the RDI program, once ran a black site prison, and has been linked to the destruction of interrogation tapes that almost certainly documented the CIA’s use of torture.

In 2005, the unnamed woman was chief of staff for Jose Rodriguez, then the acting director for the clandestine service. Rodriguez ordered the destruction of at least 92 tapes CIA agents made of the interrogations of two high-value detainees, Abu Zubayah and Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri – at least some of which included waterboarding, which is widely regarded as a form of torture. The New York Times reported that the woman “and Jose were the two main drivers for years for getting the tapes destroyed” – an anonymous quote they attributed to a “former senior CIA officer.” In his memoir, Rodriguez said that the woman drafted the cable allowing the destruction of the tapes after meeting with CIA lawyers.

…

by John Knefel
APRIL 02, 2013

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Copyright ©2013 Rolling Stone

MI6 ‘arranged Cold War killing’ of Congo prime minister

Claims over Patrice Lumumba’s 1961 assassination made by Labour peer in letter to London Review of Books
Ben Quinn

Congo premier Patrice Lumumba waves in New York in July 1960 after his arrival from Europe. Photograph: AP

Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister was abducted and killed in a cold war operation run by British intelligence, according to remarks said to have been made by the woman who was leading the MI6 station in the central African country at the time.

A Labour peer has claimed that Baroness Park of Monmouth admitted to him a few months before she died in March 2010 that she arranged Patrice Lumumba’skilling in 1961 because of fears he would ally the newly democratic country with the Soviet Union.

In a letter to the London Review of Books, Lord Lea said the admission was made while he was having a cup of tea with Daphne Park, who had been consul and first secretary from 1959 to 1961 in Leopoldville, as the capital of Belgian Congo was known before it was later renamed as Kinshasa following independence.

He wrote: “I mentioned the uproar surrounding Lumumba’s abduction and murder, and recalled the theory that MI6 might have had something to do with it. ‘We did,’ she replied, ‘I organised it’.”

Park, who was known by some as the “Queen of Spies” after four decades as one of Britain’s top female intelligence agents, is believed to have been sent by MI6 to the Belgian Congo in 1959 under an official diplomatic guise as the Belgians were on the point of being ousted from the country.

“We went on to discuss her contention that Lumumba would have handed over the whole lot to the Russians: the high-value Katangese uranium deposits as well as the diamonds and other important minerals largely located in the secessionist eastern state of Katanga,” added Lea, who wrote his letter in response to a review of a book by Calder Walton about British intelligence activities during the twilight of the British empire.

Doubts about the claim have been raised by historians and former officials, including a former senior British intelligence official who knew Park and told the Times: “It doesn’t sound like the sort of remark Daphne Park would make. She was never indiscreet. Also MI6 never had a licence to kill.”

…

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 2 April 2013 01.23 BST

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© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

MI6 organised execution of DRC leader Lumumba, peer claims

British spies admitted helping to organise the detention and execution of the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1960s, a peer has claimed.
British spies admitted helping to organise the detention and execution of Patrice Lumumba the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1960s, a peer has claimed. Photo: AP

Baroness (Daphne) Park of Monmouth, who was the senior MI6 officer in the African country at the time, said she had “organised it”, according to the Labour peer Lord Lea.

Independence leader Patrice Lumumba was arrested, tortured and executed just months after becoming the first democratically elected prime minister of the DRC in 1960.

Although rebel forces carried out the killing, it has long been claimed that foreign intelligence agencies played a part.

Belgium, from which Lumumba won independence, apologised in 2002 for having some responsibility by failing to prevent his death, while in 2006 documents showed the CIA had plotted to assassinate him but the plot was abandoned.

However, Lord Lea of Crondall, claims he was told by Baroness Park herself that MI6 had also played a role.

He made the revelation in response to a review of a book by Calder Walton in to British intelligence in the London Review of Books.

Lord Lea wrote: “Referring to the controversy surrounding the death of Patrice Lumumba in1960, Bernard Porter quotes Calder Walton’s conclusion: ‘The question remains whether British plots to assassinate Lumumba ever amounted to anything. At present, we do not know’ .

“Actually, in this particular case, I can report that we do. It so happens that I was having a cup of tea with Daphne Park – we were colleagues from opposite sides of the Lords – a few months before she died in March 2010.

…

By Tom Whitehead

6:46PM BST 01 Apr 2013

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© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2013

MI6 told to reveal truth behind Lumumba death

Patrice Lumumba was the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Congo AFP/Getty Images

MI6 should open its archives to reveal the truth behind Britain’s alleged involvement in the assassination of African leader Patrice Lumumba in the 1960s, the author of a new book on intelligence said yesterday.

…

Michael Evans, Francis Elliott and Charles Bremner
Last updated at 12:25AM, April 3 2013

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© Times Newspapers Limited 2013

Patrice Lumumba: 50 Years Later, Remembering the U.S.-Backed Assassination of Congo’s First Democratically Elected Leader

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of what is now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Lumumba’s pan-Africanism and his vision of a united Congo gained him many enemies. Both Belgium and the United States actively sought to have him killed. The CIA ordered his assassination but could not complete the job. Instead, the United States and Belgium covertly funneled cash and aid to rival politicians who seized power and arrested Lumumba. On January 17, 1961, after being beaten and tortured, Lumumba was shot and killed. [includes rush transcript]
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZALEZ: This week marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. He was the first democratically elected leader of what is now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Congo had been a colony of Belgium since the late 1800s, which ruled over it with brutality while plundering its rich natural resources. Patrice Lumumba rose as a leader of the Congo’s independence movement and, in 1960, was elected as the first prime minister of the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Lumumba’s pan-Africanism and his vision of a united Congo gained him many enemies. Both Belgium and the United States actively sought to have Lumumba overthrown or killed. The CIA ordered his assassination but could not complete the job. Instead, the United States and Belgium covertly funneled cash and aid to rival politicians who seized power and arrested President Lumumba. This is how it was reported in a Universal Studios newsreel in December of 1960.

UNIVERSAL STUDIOS NEWSREEL: A new chapter begins in the dark and tragic history of the Congo with the return to Leopoldville of deposed premier Lumumba, following his capture by crack commandos of strongman Colonel Mobutu. Taken to Mobutu’s headquarters past a jeering, threatening crowd, Lumumba — Lumumba, but promised the pro-red Lumumba a fair trial on charges of inciting the army to rebellion. Lumumba was removed to an army prison outside the capital, as his supporters in Stanleyville seized control of Orientale province and threatened a return of disorder. Before that, Lumumba suffered more indignities, including being forced to eat a speech, which he restated his claim to be the Congo’s rightful premier. Even in bonds, Lumumba remains a dangerous prisoner, storm center of savage loyalties and equally savage opposition.

AMY GOODMAN: On January 17th, 1961, after being beaten and tortured, the Congolese prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was shot and killed.

For more, we go to Adam Hochschild. He’s the author of King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa and the forthcoming book To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion. He teaches at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, is co-founder of Mother Jones magazine, had an op-ed in the New York Times this week called “An Assassination’s Long Shadow.” Adam Hochschild is joining us from San Francisco.

Explain this “long shadow,” Adam.

ADAM HOCHSCHILD: Well, Amy, I think the assassination of Lumumba was something that was felt by many people to be a sort of pivotal turning point in the saga of Africa gaining its independence. In the 1950s, there were movements for independence all over Africa. There was a great deal of idealism in the air. There was a great deal of hope in the air, both among Africans and among their supporters in the United States and Europe, that at last these colonies would become independent. And I think people imagined real independence — that is, that these countries would be able to set off on their own and control their own destiny economically as well as politically. And the assassination of Lumumba really signaled that that was not to be, because, for Belgium, as for the other major European colonial powers, like Britain and France, giving independence to an African colony was OK for them as long as it didn’t disturb existing business arrangements. As long as the European country could continue to own the mines, the factories, the plantations, well, OK, let them have their politics.

But Lumumba spoke very loudly, very dramatically, saying Africa needs to be economically independent, as well. And it was a fiery speech on this subject that he gave at the actual independence ceremonies, June 30th, 1960, where he was replying to an extremely arrogant speech by King Baudouin of Belgium. It was a speech he gave on this subject that I think really began the process that ended two months later with the CIA, with White House approval, decreeing that he should be assassinated.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, of course, for most Americans, who — we’re not, perhaps, as familiar with African colonialism, since that was basically a European project throughout the 19th century — the role of Belgium and the importance of the Congo as really the jewel of Africa in terms of its wealth and resources — how did the Congo suffer before Lumumba came to power?

ADAM HOCHSCHILD: Well, the story really begins, in the modern era, in 1885, when — or 1884 to ’85, when all the major countries of Europe led — preceded by the United States, actually; we were the very first — recognized the Congo not as a Belgian colony, but as the private, personally owned colony of King Leopold II of Belgium, a very greedy, ambitious man who wanted a colony of his own. At that point, Belgium was not sure that it wanted a colony. Leopold ruled this place for 23 years, made an enormous fortune, estimated at over a billion in today’s American dollars. Finally, in 1908, he was forced to give it up to become a Belgian colony, and then he died the following year. And the Belgians ran it for the next half-century, extracting an enormous amount of wealth, initially in ivory and rubber, then in diamonds, gold, copper, timber, palm oil, all sorts of other minerals. And as with almost all European colonies in Africa, this wealth flowed back to Europe. It benefited the Europeans much more than the Africans.

And the hope that many people had when independence came all over Africa, for the most part, you know, within a few years on either side of 1960, people had the hope that at last African countries would begin to control their own destiny and that they would be the ones who would reap the profits from the mines and the plantations and so on. Lumumba put that hope into words. And for that reason, he was immediately considered a very dangerous figure by the United States and Belgium. The CIA issued this assassination order with White House approval. And as was said at the beginning, they couldn’t get close enough to him to actually poison him, but they got money under the table to Congolese politicians who did see that he was assassinated, with Belgian help. It was a Belgian pilot who flew the plane to where he was killed, a Belgian officer who commanded the firing squad.

And then, the really disastrous thing that followed was this enthusiastic United States backing for the dictatorial regime of Mobutu, who seized total power a couple years later and ran a 32-year dictatorship, enriched himself by about $4 billion, and really ran his country into the ground, was greeted by every American president, with the sole exception of Jimmy Carter, who was in office during those 32 years. And he left the country a wreck, from which it has still not recovered.

AMY GOODMAN: Adam Hochschild, I want to play a clip of the former CIA agent John Stockwell talking about the CIA’s plans to assassinate the prime minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba.

JOHN STOCKWELL: The CIA had developed a program to assassinate Lumumba, under Devlin’s encouragement and management. The program they developed, the operation, didn’t work. They didn’t follow through on it. It was to give poison to Lumumba. And they couldn’t find a setting in which to get the poison to him successfully in a way that it wouldn’t appear to be a CIA operation. I mean, you couldn’t invite him to a cocktail party and give him a drink and have him die a short time later, obviously. And so, they gave up on it. They got cold feet. And instead, they handled it by the chief of station talking to Mobutu about the threat that Lumumba posed, and Mobutu going out and killing Lumumba, having his men kill Lumumba.

INTERVIEWER: What about the CIA’s relationship with Mobutu? Were they paying him money?

JOHN STOCKWELL: Yes, indeed. I was there in 1968 when the chief of station told the story about having been, the day before that day, having gone to make payment to Mobutu of cash — $25,000 — and Mobutu saying, “Keep the money. I don’t need it.” And by then, of course, Mobutu’s European bank account was so huge that $25,000 was nothing to him.

AMY GOODMAN: That was former CIA agent John Stockwell talking about the CIA’s plans to assassinate Lumumba. Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Adam, I’d like to ask you — you were in the Congo shortly after Lumumba’s death. Could you talk about — we have about a minute — could you talk about your personal experiences there and what you saw?

ADAM HOCHSCHILD: Yes, I was there. I was just a college student at the time. And I wish I could say that I was smart and politically knowledgeable enough to realize the full significance of everything I was seeing. I was not, and it was really only in later years that I began to understand it. But what I do remember — and this was, as I say, six months or so after he was killed — was the sort of ominous atmosphere in Leopoldville, as the capital was called then, these jeeps full of soldiers who were patrolling the streets, the way the streets quickly emptied at dusk, and then two very, very arrogant guys at the American embassy who were proudly talking over drinks one evening about how this person, Lumumba, had been killed, whom they regarded, you know, not as a democratically elected African leader, but as an enemy of the United States. And so, of course, I, as a fellow American, they expected to be happy that he had been done away with. There was something quite chilling about that, and it stuck with me. But I think it’s only in much later years that I fully realized the significance.

AMY GOODMAN: Adam Hochschild, I want to thank you very much for being with us, author of several books, including King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed.

Friday, January 21, 2011

Find this story at 21 January 2013

Quiet Sinners: Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire by Calder Walton

It’s pretty obvious why British governments have been anxious to keep the history of their secret service secret for so long. In the case of decolonisation, which is the subject of Calder Walton’s book, revelations about dirty tricks even after fifty years might do irreparable damage to the myth carefully cultivated at the time: which was that for Britain, unlike France, say, or the Netherlands, or Belgium, the process was smooth and friendly. Britain, so the story went, was freely granting self-government to its colonies as the culmination of imperial rule, which had always had this as its ultimate aim – ‘Empire into Commonwealth’, as the history books used to put it. If for no other reason, the myth was needed in order to make ordinary Britons feel better.

Letters

Vol. 35 No. 7 · 11 April 2013

From David Lea

Referring to the controversy surrounding the death of Patrice Lumumba in1960, Bernard Porter quotes Calder Walton’s conclusion: ‘The question remains whether British plots to assassinate Lumumba … ever amounted to anything. At present, we do not know’ (LRB, 21 March). Actually, in this particular case, I can report that we do. It so happens that I was having a cup of tea with Daphne Park – we were colleagues from opposite sides of the Lords – a few months before she died in March 2010. She had been consul and first secretary in Leopoldville, now Kinshasa, from 1959 to 1961, which in practice (this was subsequently acknowledged) meant head of MI6 there. I mentioned the uproar surrounding Lumumba’s abduction and murder, and recalled the theory that MI6 might have had something to do with it. ‘We did,’ she replied, ‘I organised it.’

We went on to discuss her contention that Lumumba would have handed over the whole lot to the Russians: the high-value Katangese uranium deposits as well as the diamonds and other important minerals largely located in the secessionist eastern state of Katanga. Against that, I put the point that I didn’t see how suspicion of Western involvement and of our motivation for Balkanising their country would be a happy augury for the new republic’s peaceful development.

David Lea
London SW1

Bernard Porter
Harper, 411 pp, £25.00, February, ISBN 978 0 00 745796 0
[*] Cambridge, 449 pp., £25, December 2012, 978 1 107 00099 5.

Find this story at 21 March 2013

German spies accused of racism, Islamophobia

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency is a hotbed of “institutional racism,” where Islamophobic, racist and offensive remarks are an everyday occurrence, a newspaper reported on Friday.
Westerwelle slams media limits for neo-Nazi trial (10 Apr 13)
Search for Nazi death camp guards widens (9 Apr 13)
Radical German Muslims join fight in Syria (7 Apr 13)

Germany’s security service the Verfassungsschutz is a hornet’s nest of conflict, envy, jealousy and inappropriate insults, wrote the Süddeutsche Zeitung, citing inside sources.

And they aren’t just innocent office jokes. Employees of the department tasked with observing militant Islamists reportedly throw around deeply offensive, Nazi-affiliated words in private of the kind which would be unthinkable in a public setting.

These range from Herrenrasse, the German for “master race” to Muselmann – originally a German word meaning “Muslim man” later used by the Nazis as a slang word for emaciated death camp inmates who had surrendered to their fate – to Ölauge, a derogatory name for “greasy” dark-eyed foreigners.

In one case currently the subject of an internal investigation, an agency employee is said to have offended co-workers in his office by positioning a doll of a Teutonic Knight with his sword pointing at a miniature mosque, wrote the paper.

The highly secretive intelligence agency declined to comment on the investigation into the doll incident, but the paper reported mixed views among internal sources.
While some insisted the incident was an isolated, one-off occurrence, others told paper the issue of racism was not being dealt with at all within the agency.

…

Published: 22 Mar 13 10:50 CET | Print version

Find this story at 22 March 2013
The Local/jlb

Family of slain Spanish teen demand inquiry of far-right killer

The family of a teenager whose murder by a far-right commando rocked Spain in 1980 called Friday for an official inquiry after a newspaper reported that her killer has worked for police as an advisor since his release from jail.

Yolanda Gonzalez, a 19-year-old Socialist Party activist who had appeared in photographs at the head of student protest marches, was shot two times in the head at close range in a field near Madrid by a far-right commando who suspected her of belonging to the armed Basque separatist group ETA.

Gonzalez’s murder shocked Spain, which at the time was going through a tumultuous transition to democracy following the death of right-wing dictator General Francisco Franco.

The man who shot Gonzalez, Emilio Hellin Moro, a former member of the Grup 41 commando with ties to the far-right party Fuerza Nueva, changed his name to Luis Enrique Hellin after he was released from jail in 1996 after serving 14 years of a 43-year jail sentence, top-selling newspaper El Pais reported last month.

According to the left-leaning paper, the 63-year-old expert on IT-related criminal investigations secured contracts under the changed name with Spain’s security forces, acting for years as an advisor to Spain’s top court and proving training courses to police on how to carry out electronic eavesdropping and comb computers and cellphones for evidence.

…

Agence France-PresseMarch 8, 2013 17:30

Find this story at 8 March 2013
Copyright 2013 GlobalPost

James Steele: America’s mystery man in Iraq – video

A 15-month investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic reveals how retired US colonel James Steele, a veteran of American proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, played a key role in training and overseeing US-funded special police commandos who ran a network of torture centres in Iraq. Another special forces veteran, Colonel James Coffman, worked with Steele and reported directly to General David Petraeus, who had been sent into Iraq to organise the Iraqi security services

• Watch a five-minute edited version of this film narrated by Dearbhla Molloy

• Revealed: Pentagon’s link to Iraqi torture centres

Find this story at 6 March 2013

Revealed: Pentagon’s link to Iraqi torture centres

Exclusive: General David Petraeus and ‘dirty wars’ veteran behind commando units implicated in detainee abuse

The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the “dirty wars” in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country’s descent into full-scale civil war.

Colonel James Steele was a 58-year-old retired special forces veteran when he was nominated by Donald Rumsfeld to help organise the paramilitaries in an attempt to quell a Sunni insurgency, an investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic shows.

After the Pentagon lifted a ban on Shia militias joining the security forces, the special police commando (SPC) membership was increasingly drawn from violent Shia groups such as the Badr brigades.

A second special adviser, retired Colonel James H Coffman, worked alongside Steele in detention centres that were set up with millions of dollars of US funding.

Coffman reported directly to General David Petraeus, sent to Iraq in June 2004 to organise and train the new Iraqi security forces. Steele, who was in Iraq from 2003 to 2005, and returned to the country in 2006, reported directly to Rumsfeld.

The allegations, made by US and Iraqi witnesses in the Guardian/BBC documentary, implicate US advisers for the first time in the human rights abuses committed by the commandos. It is also the first time that Petraeus – who last November was forced to resign as director of the CIA after a sex scandal – has been linked through an adviser to this abuse.

Coffman reported to Petraeus and described himself in an interview with the US military newspaper Stars and Stripes as Petraeus’s “eyes and ears out on the ground” in Iraq.

“They worked hand in hand,” said General Muntadher al-Samari, who worked with Steele and Coffman for a year while the commandos were being set up. “I never saw them apart in the 40 or 50 times I saw them inside the detention centres. They knew everything that was going on there … the torture, the most horrible kinds of torture.”

Additional Guardian reporting has confirmed more details of how the interrogation system worked. “Every single detention centre would have its own interrogation committee,” claimed Samari, talking for the first time in detail about the US role in the interrogation units.

“Each one was made up of an intelligence officer and eight interrogators. This committee will use all means of torture to make the detainee confess like using electricity or hanging him upside down, pulling out their nails, and beating them on sensitive parts.”

There is no evidence that Steele or Coffman tortured prisoners themselves, only that they were sometimes present in the detention centres where torture took place and were involved in the processing of thousands of detainees.

The Guardian/BBC Arabic investigation was sparked by the release of classified US military logs on WikiLeaks that detailed hundreds of incidents where US soldiers came across tortured detainees in a network of detention centres run by the police commandos across Iraq. Private Bradley Manning, 25, is facing a prison sentence of up to 20 years after he pleaded guilty to leaking the documents.

Samari claimed that torture was routine in the SPC-controlled detention centres. “I remember a 14-year-old who was tied to one of the library’s columns. And he was tied up, with his legs above his head. Tied up. His whole body was blue because of the impact of the cables with which he had been beaten.”

Gilles Peress, a photographer, came across Steele when he was on assignment for the New York Times, visiting one of the commando centres in the same library, in Samarra. “We were in a room in the library interviewing Steele and I’m looking around I see blood everywhere.”

The reporter Peter Maass was also there, working on the story with Peress. “And while this interview was going on with a Saudi jihadi with Jim Steele also in the room, there were these terrible screams, somebody shouting: ‘Allah, Allah, Allah!’ But it wasn’t kind of religious ecstasy or something like that, these were screams of pain and terror.”

The pattern in Iraq provides an eerie parallel to the well-documented human rights abuses committed by US-advised and funded paramilitary squads in Central America in the 1980s. Steele was head of a US team of special military advisers that trained units of El Salvador’s security forces in counterinsurgency. Petraeus visited El Salvador in 1986 while Steele was there and became a major advocate of counterinsurgency methods.

Steele has not responded to any questions from the Guardian and BBC Arabic about his role in El Salvador or Iraq. He has in the past denied any involvement in torture and said publicly he is “opposed to human rights abuses.” Coffman declined to comment.

An official speaking for Petraeus said: “During the course of his years in Iraq, General Petraeus did learn of allegations of Iraqi forces torturing detainees. In each incident, he shared information immediately with the US military chain of command, the US ambassador in Baghdad … and the relevant Iraqi leaders.”

The Guardian has learned that the SPC units’ involvement with torture entered the popular consciousness in Iraq when some of their victims were paraded in front of a TV audience on a programme called “Terrorism In The Hands of Justice.”

SPC detention centres bought video cameras, funded by the US military, which they used to film detainees for the show. When the show began to outrage the Iraqi public, Samari remembers being in the home of General Adnan Thabit – head of the special commandos – when a call came from Petraeus’s office demanding that they stop showing tortured men on TV.

“General Petraeus’s special translator, Sadi Othman, rang up to pass on a message from General Petraeus telling us not to show the prisoners on TV after they had been tortured,” said Samari. “Then 20 minutes later we got a call from the Iraqi ministry of interior telling us the same thing, that General Petraeus didn’t want the torture victims shown on TV.”

Othman, who now lives in New York, confirmed that he made the phone call on behalf of Petraeus to the head of the SPC to ask him to stop showing the tortured prisoners. “But General Petraeus does not agree with torture,” he added. “To suggest he does support torture is horseshit.”

Thabit is dismissive of the idea that the Americans he dealt with were unaware of what the commandos were doing. “Until I left, the Americans knew about everything I did; they knew what was going on in the interrogations and they knew the detainees. Even some of the intelligence about the detainees came to us from them – they are lying.”

Just before Petraeus and Steele left Iraq in September 2005, Jabr al-Solagh was appointed as the new minister of the interior. Under Solagh, who was closely associated with the violent Badr Brigades militia, allegations of torture and brutality by the commandos soared. It was also widely believed that the units had evolved into death squads.

The Guardian has learned that high-ranking Iraqis who worked with the US after the invasion warned Petraeus of the consequences of appointing Solagh but their pleas were ignored.

The long-term impact of funding and arming this paramilitary force was to unleash a deadly sectarian militia that terrorised the Sunni community and helped germinate a civil war that claimed tens of thousands of lives. At the height of that sectarian conflict, 3,000 bodies a month were strewn on the streets of Iraq.
CV: James Steele

Vietnam

Jim Steele’s first experience of war was in Vietnam, where from 1965 to 1975 US combat units were deployed against the communist North Vietnamese government and Viet Cong. 58,000 Americans were killed, dealing a blow to the nation’s self-esteem and leading to a change in military thinking for subsequent conflicts.

El Salvador

A 1979 military coup plunged the smallest country in Central America into civil war and drew in US training and funding on the side of the rightwing government. From 1984 to 1986 Steele – a “counterinsurgency specialist” – was head of the US MilGroup of US special forces advisers to frontline battalions of the Salvadorean military, which developed a fearsome international reputation for its death-squad activities. Prof Terry Karl, an expert at Stanford University on El Salvador’s civil war, said that Steele’s main aim was to shift the fight from so-called total war, which then meant the indiscriminate murder of thousands of civilians, to a more “discriminate” approach. One of his tasks was to put more emphasis on “human intelligence” and interrogation.

Nicaragua

…

Mona Mahmood, Maggie O’Kane, Chavala Madlena and Teresa Smith
The Guardian, Wednesday 6 March 2013 20.04 GMT

Find this story at 6 March 2013
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Telecoms firm hails ‘significant victory’ as judge blocks FBI’s data demands

Credo Mobile speaks out after judge orders US government to stop issuing ‘national security letters’ to access citizens’ data

Judge Susan Illston declared the NSLs unconstitutional as they breached the first amendment rights of the parties being served the orders. Photograph: Frank Polich/Reuters

The Californian telecoms company thought to be behind a stunning court victory that has blown a hole in the FBI’s highly secretive system for collecting US citizens’ private data has hailed the “significant” legal breakthrough.

Credo, based in San Francisco, spoke out after a federal judge ordered the US government to stop issuing what are called “national security letters” – demands for data that contain in-built gagging clauses that prevent the recipients disclosing even the existence of the orders or their own identity.

In a carefully worded release, the firm fell short of revealing itself as the instigator of the legal action that resulted in Friday’s development. But it is understood by the Guardian that the telecommunications firm was indeed the unnamed litigant behind the action.

Michael Kieschnick, chief executive of Credo Mobile, hailed the judge’s order as “the most significant court victory for our constitutional rights since the dark day when George W Bush signed the Patriot Act”.

It is extremely rare for a telecoms company to challenge the system of national security letters, or NSLs, which have mushroomed since 9/11 under the Patriot Act. Credo, a subsidiary of Working Assets Inc, that directs some of its profits to support civil liberties groups, has been a long-standing advocate for reform of the NSL.

It is believed to be the company behind a May 2011 lawsuit in which the FBI was sued for breach of its rights after the company was served with a federal demand for private data belonging to its customers. The FBI shot back by counter-suing the company.

The lawsuit was made anonymously, with the name of the company redacted from court papers made available to the media. But last July the Wall Street Journal conducted an analysis of the likely telecoms companies that could have brought the legal action, and concluded that the litigant was probably Credo.

In her ruling, Judge Susan Illston declared the NSLs unconstitutional as they breached the first amendment rights of the parties being served the orders.

Kieschnick said: “This decision is notable for its clarity and depth. From this day forward, the US government’s unconstitutional practice of using national security letters to obtain private information without court oversight and its denial of the first amendment rights of national security letter recipients have finally been stopped by our courts.”

NSLs have been an increasingly important part of the US government’s approach to counter-terrorism, though their growing use has been matched by mounting unease on the party of civil libertarians.

Last year the FBI sent out more than 16,000 of the letters relating to the private data – mainly financial, internet or phone records – of more than 7,000 Americans.

Previous court action has led to the FBI being accused of abusing its powers under the NSL statute by issuing the letters far more extensively than in the limited counter-terrorism situations for which they were devised.

The letters are among the most secretive tools of any deployed by the US state. The demand for data comes with a gagging order attached – meaning that the recipient of the NSL is not allowed even to discuss the letter in public.

…

• This article has been amended since publication.

Ed Pilkington in New York
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 16 March 2013 19.30 GMT

Find this story at 16 March 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Protester wins surveillance database fight

John Catt, who has no criminal record, wins legal action to have records deleted from police database of suspected extremists

An 88-year-old campaigner has won a landmark lawsuit against police chiefs who labelled him a “domestic extremist” and logged his political activities on a secret database.

The ruling by three senior judges puts pressure on the police, already heavily criticised for running undercover operatives in political groups, to curtail their surveillance of law-abiding protesters.

The judges decided police chiefs acted unlawfully by secretly keeping a detailed record of John Catt’s presence at more than 55 protests over a four-year period.

The entries described Catt’s habit of drawing sketches of the demonstrations. Details of the surveillance, which recorded details of his appearance such as “clean-shaven” and slogans on his clothes, were revealed by the Guardian in 2010.

The pensioner, who has no criminal record, is among thousands of political campaigners recorded on the database by the same covert unit that has been embedding spies such as Mark Kennedy – a police officer who infiltrated environmental protest groups – in political movements for more than a decade.

On Thursday Lord Dyson, who is the Master of the Rolls, and two other appeal court judges ordered Bernard Hogan-Howe, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, to delete Catt’s file from the database, ruling that the surveillance had significantly violated his human rights.

The judges noted that the police could not explain why it was necessary to record Catt’s political activities in minute detail.

Lawyers for the police had argued that the anti-war activist regularly attended demonstrations against a Brighton arms factory near his home, which had at times descended into disorder.

The judges dismissed arguments from Adrian Tudway, the police chief then in charge of the covert unit, that police needed to monitor Catt because he “associates closely with violent” campaigners against the factory of the EDO arms firm.

They said it was “striking” that Tudway had not said the records held on the pensioner had helped police in any way.

“Mr Tudway states, in general terms, that it is valuable to have information about Mr Catt’s attendance at protests because he associates with those who have a propensity to violence and crime, but he does not explain why that is so, given that Mr Catt has been attending similar protests for many years without it being suggested that he indulges in criminal activity or actively encourages those that do.”

The judges added that it appeared that officers had been recording “the names of any persons they can identify, regardless of the particular nature of their participation”.

Catt said: “I hope this judgment will bring an end to the abusive and intimidatory monitoring of peaceful protesters by police forces nationwide.

“Police surveillance of this kind only serves to undermine our democracy and deter lawful protest.”

A similar court of appeal ruling four years ago forced the Met to remove 40% of photographs of campaigners held on another database.

In a separate ruling, which also challenged the police’s practice of storing the public’s personal data on databases, the three judges ordered the Met to erase a warning that had been issued against an unnamed woman.

Three years ago officers had warned the woman for allegedly making a homophobic comment about a neighbour. But she argued that police had treated her unfairly as she had not been given an opportunity to respond to the allegation.

She took legal action to prevent the Met keeping a copy of the warning notice on their files for 12 years. She feared it could be disclosed to employers when they checked her criminal record.

…

Rob Evans, Paul Lewis and Owen Bowcott
The Guardian, Thursday 14 March 2013 16.46 GMT

Find this story at 14 March 2013
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Software that tracks people on social media created by defence firm

Exclusive: Raytheon’s Riot program mines social network data like a ‘Google for spies’, drawing ire from civil rights groups

A multinational security firm has secretly developed software capable of tracking people’s movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites.

A video obtained by the Guardian reveals how an “extreme-scale analytics” system created by Raytheon, the world’s fifth largest defence contractor, can gather vast amounts of information about people from websites including Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.

Raytheon says it has not sold the software – named Riot, or Rapid Information Overlay Technology – to any clients.

But the Massachusetts-based company has acknowledged the technology was shared with US government and industry as part of a joint research and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security system capable of analysing “trillions of entities” from cyberspace.

The power of Riot to harness popular websites for surveillance offers a rare insight into controversial techniques that have attracted interest from intelligence and national security agencies, at the same time prompting civil liberties and online privacy concerns.

The sophisticated technology demonstrates how the same social networks that helped propel the Arab Spring revolutions can be transformed into a “Google for spies” and tapped as a means of monitoring and control.

Using Riot it is possible to gain an entire snapshot of a person’s life – their friends, the places they visit charted on a map – in little more than a few clicks of a button.

In the video obtained by the Guardian, it is explained by Raytheon’s “principal investigator” Brian Urch that photographs users post on social networks sometimes contain latitude and longitude details – automatically embedded by smartphones within “exif header data.”

Riot pulls out this information, showing not only the photographs posted onto social networks by individuals, but also the location at which the photographs were taken.

“We’re going to track one of our own employees,” Urch says in the video, before bringing up pictures of “Nick,” a Raytheon staff member used as an example target. With information gathered from social networks, Riot quickly reveals Nick frequently visits Washington Nationals Park, where on one occasion he snapped a photograph of himself posing with a blonde haired woman.

“We know where Nick’s going, we know what Nick looks like,” Urch explains, “now we want to try to predict where he may be in the future.”

Riot can display on a spider diagram the associations and relationships between individuals online by looking at who they have communicated with over Twitter. It can also mine data from Facebook and sift GPS location information from Foursquare, a mobile phone app used by more than 25 million people to alert friends of their whereabouts. The Foursquare data can be used to display, in graph form, the top 10 places visited by tracked individuals and the times at which they visited them.

The video shows that Nick, who posts his location regularly on Foursquare, visits a gym frequently at 6am early each week. Urch quips: “So if you ever did want to try to get hold of Nick, or maybe get hold of his laptop, you might want to visit the gym at 6am on a Monday.”

Mining from public websites for law enforcement is considered legal in most countries. In February last year, for instance, the FBI requested help to develop a social-media mining application for monitoring “bad actors or groups”.

However, Ginger McCall, an attorney at the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Centre, said the Raytheon technology raised concerns about how troves of user data could be covertly collected without oversight or regulation.

“Social networking sites are often not transparent about what information is shared and how it is shared,” McCall said. “Users may be posting information that they believe will be viewed only by their friends, but instead, it is being viewed by government officials or pulled in by data collection services like the Riot search.”

Raytheon, which made sales worth an estimated $25bn (£16bn) in 2012, did not want its Riot demonstration video to be revealed on the grounds that it says it shows a “proof of concept” product that has not been sold to any clients.

Jared Adams, a spokesman for Raytheon’s intelligence and information systems department, said in an email: “Riot is a big data analytics system design we are working on with industry, national labs and commercial partners to help turn massive amounts of data into useable information to help meet our nation’s rapidly changing security needs.

…

Ryan Gallagher
The Guardian, Sunday 10 February 2013 15.20 GMT

Find this story at 10 February 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Raytheon’s “Riot” Social-Network Data Mining Software

A video touting software created by Raytheon to mine data from social networks has been attracting an increasing amount of attention in the past few days, since it was uncovered by Ryan Gallagher at the Guardian.

As best as I can tell from the video and Gallagher’s reporting, Raytheon’s “Riot” software gathers up only publicly available information from companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. In that respect, it appears to be a conceptually unremarkable, fairly unimaginative piece of work. At the same time, by aspiring to carry out “large-scale analytics” on Americans’ social networking data—and to do so, apparently, on behalf of national security and law enforcement agencies—the project raises a number of red flags.

In the video, we see a demonstration of how social networking data—such as Foursquare checkins—is used to predict the schedule of a sample subject, “Nick.” The host of the video concludes,

Six a.m. appears to be the most frequently visited time at the gym. So if you ever did want to try to get ahold of Nick—or maybe get ahold of his laptop—you might want to visit the gym at 6:00 a.m. on Monday.

(The reference to the laptop is certainly jarring. Remember, this is an application apparently targeted at law enforcement and national security agencies, not at ordinary individuals. Given this, it sounds to me like the video is suggesting that Riot could be used as a way to schedule a black-bag job to plant spyware on someone’s laptop.)

At the end of the video, there’s also a brief visual showing how Riot can use such data to carry out a link analysis of a subject. In link analysis, people’s communications and other connections to each other are mapped out and analyzed. It first came to the attention of many people in and out of government via an influential 2002 slide presentation by data mining expert Jeff Jonas showing how the 9/11 hijackers might have easily been linked together had the government focused on the two who were already wanted by the authorities. As Jonas later emphasized in the face of attempts to make too much of this:

Both Nawaf Alhamzi and Khalid Al-Midhar were already known to the US government to be very bad men. They should have never been let into the US, yet they were living in the US and were hiding in plain sight—using their real names…. The whole point of my 9/11 analysis was that the government did not need mounds of data, did not need new technology, and in fact did not need any new laws to unravel this event!

Nevertheless, link analysis appears to have been wholeheartedly embraced by the national security establishment, especially the NSA, and to be justifying unconstitutionally large amounts of data collection on innocent people.

We don’t know that Raytheon’s software will ever play any such role—it just appears to aspire to do so. As with any tool, everything depends on how it’s used. But the fact is, we’re living in an age where disparate pieces of information about us are being aggressively mined and aggregated to discover new things about us. When we post something online, it’s all too natural to feel as though our audience is just our friends—even when we know intellectually that it’s really the whole world. Various institutions are gleefully exploiting that gap between our felt and actual audiences (a gap that is all too often worsened by online companies that don’t make it clear enough to their users who the full audience for their information is). Individuals need to be aware of this and take steps to compensate, such as double-checking their privacy settings and being aware of the full ramifications of data that they post.

At the same time, the government has no business rooting around people’s social network postings—even those that are voluntarily publicly posted—unless it has specific, individualized suspicion that a person is involved in wrongdoing. Among the many problems with government “large-scale analytics” of social network information is the prospect that government agencies will blunderingly use these techniques to tag, target and watchlist people coughed up by programs such as Riot, or to target them for further invasions of privacy based on incorrect inferences. The chilling effects of such activities, while perhaps gradual, would be tremendous.

Finally, let me just make the same point we’ve made with regards to privacy-invading technologies such as drones and cellphone and GPS tracking: these kinds of tools should be developed transparently. We don’t really know what Riot can do. And while we at the ACLU don’t think the government should be rummaging around individuals’ social network data without good reason, even a person who might disagree with us on that question could agree that it’s a question that should not be decided in secret. The balance between the intrusive potential of new technologies and government power is one that should be decided openly and democratically.

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:08pm

Find this story at 12 February 2013

© ACLU

‘Google for spies’ software mines social networks to track users’ movements and could even predict what you’ll do next

Raytheon’s Riot software sifts through data from suspects’ online accounts
Critics say it will be used for monitoring citizens’ online lives
Similar to Geotime software bought by London’s Met police two years ago

New software which mines data from social networks to track people’s movements and even predict future behaviour poses a ‘very real threat to personal freedom’, civil rights groups warned today.

Multinational defence contractor Raytheon has developed the ‘extreme-scale analytics’ software which can sift through vast quantities of data from services like Facebook, Twitter and Google.

Critics have already dubbed it a ‘Google for spies’ and say it is likely to be used by governments as a means of monitoring and tracking people online to detect signs of dissent.

‘Google for spies’: A screengrab of a video demonstrating Raytheon’s Riot software, which mines the personal data from social networking websites to track people’s movements and even predict their future behaviour

Raytheon claims it has not yet sold the software – known as Rapid Information Overlay Technology, or Riot – to any clients but admitted it had shared the technology with the U.S. government in 2010.

However, it is similar to another social tracking software known as Geotime which the U.S. military already uses and was in recent years purchased for trials by London’s Metropolitan Police.

Such tools are likely to form the backbone of future surveillance systems which will exploit the information we share online to automatically monitor citizens’ behaviour.

Val Swain, from the Network for Police Monitoring, told MailOnline that police had already publicly indicated they want to use ‘advanced analytical software’ to keep tabs on social media.

‘The HMIC report ‘rules of engagement’ on the policing of the riots included a recommendation for the development of a ‘data-mining engine’ to scan across publicly available social media,’ she said.

‘Technologically advanced methods now exist that make this possible.

‘This [kind of] software is extremely powerful, able to identify and monitor people who are ‘of interest to the police”, even if they have committed no criminal activity.

‘The software identifies ‘people, organisations and concepts’ and even sentiments, as the software is able to automatically pick up on ‘emotional states’.

‘It was also recommended that this software be used as part of a vast “intelligence hub” to be developed by the new National Crime Agency.’

There’s nowhere to hide: The software aggregates data from suspects’ social media profiles to build a detailed picture of their movements, their current whereabouts and where they are likely to go next

A restricted video put together by Raytheon as a ‘proof of concept’ demonstration to potential buyers was obtained by British daily the Guardian and published on its website today.

It shows an executive for the security firm, Brian Urch, explaining how photos posted on social media from smartphones frequently contain metadata revealing the precise location where they were taken.

As an example, Mr Urch demonstrates how this information can be used to track a Raytheon worker called ‘Nick’, whose social media profiles reveal he frequently visits Washington National Park.

Nick is pictured on one occasion posing with a blonde woman, revealing to any agency using Riot what he looks like.

‘Now we want to predict where he may be in the future,’ Mr Urch said. He demonstrates how Riot can display a diagram of the relationships between individuals online by looking at their Twitter communications.

We know your friends: As an example, the video shows how a Raytheon worker called Nick can be tracked. This is an image he posted onto a social network, which can be analysed to reveal the location it was taken

The software is also able to mine information from Facebook and track GPS location data from Foursquare, which over 25million people use on their smartphones to share their whereabouts with friends.

This Foursquare data can be analysed to show the top 10 locations visited by individuals using the service, and also at what times they went there.

Nick, for example, frequently checks into Foursquare at a particular gym at 6am.

‘So if you ever did want to try to get hold of Nick, or maybe get hold of his laptop, you might want to visit the gym at 6am on a Monday,’ says Mr Urch.

Riot’s features are similar to that of Geotime, which MailOnline revealed two years ago had been bought by the Met Police.

Geotime aggregates information gathered from social networking sites, GPS devices like the iPhone, mobile phones, financial transactions and IP network logs to build a detailed picture of an individual’s movements.

The Met, Britain’s largest police force, confirmed at the time that it had purchased the software and refused to rule out its use in investigating public order disturbances.

Open book: This pie chart reveals the top 10 places that Nick has visited, as harvested from his Foursquare account

How to find Nick: This graphic breaks down the details of the times and dates that Nick has visited the gym

The effectiveness of both Riot and Geotime would be multiplied by plans by the UK government to install ‘black box’ spy devices on Britain’s internet and mobile infrastructure to track all communications traffic.

Those plans, part of the Data Communications Bill, have been stalled by opposition from some Liberal Democrats, but an influential committee of MPs last week revealed that British spy agencies were keen for them to go ahead.

The spy network would rely on a technology known as Deep Packet Inspection to log data from communications ranging from online services like Facebook and Twitter, Skype calls with family members and visits to pornographic websites.

The government argues that swift access to communications data is critical to the fight against terrorism, paedophilia and other high-level crime, but it has been delayed after the Liberal Democrats dropped support for the bill.

Already in use: Two years ago London’s Metropolitan Police confirmed it had purchased Geotime, another program with similar online tracking functions to that of Raytheon’s Riot software

If it were to go ahead, such a spy network would offer a wealth of easily accessible data for software such as Riot and Geotime to work with.
HOW RIOT COULD BE PART OF THE GOVERNMENT’S SPYING PLANS

Social media tracking software like Riot and Geotime could have their effectiveness multiplied by plans to install ‘black box’ surveillance devices across the UK’s internet and mobile communications infrastructure.

At the moment spy agencies rely on communications providers willingly revealing personal information from users’ accounts to investigate suspects’ communications.

But a report by an influential committee of MPs has revealed such agencies are keen to implement a nationwide surveillance regime that would give them automatic access to the data.

The network will rely on a technology known as Deep Packet Inspection to log data from communications ranging from online services like Facebook and Twitter, to Skype calls with family members and visits to pornographic websites.

Authorities say swift access to communications is critical to the fight against terrorism and other high-level crime, but civil liberties have reacted with outrage, saying that the technology will give the government a greater surveillance capability than has ever been seen before.

MI5 chief Jonathan Evans told the committee: ‘Access to communications data of one sort or another is very important indeed. It’s part of the backbone of the way in which we would approach investigations.

‘I think I would be accurate in saying there are no significant investigations that we undertake across the service that don’t use communications data because of its ability to tell you the who and the when and the where of your target’s activities.’

A key part of security agencies’ plans is a ‘filter’ which would make the data collected easily searchable – a function that could be carried out by software like Riot.

Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, explained that this would work as a kind of search engine for everyone’s private data, linking it together from the various online and telecoms accounts people use to communicate.

‘This would put data from your mobile phone, email, web history and phones together, so the police can tell who your friends are, what your opinions are, where you’ve been and with who,’ he said.

‘It could make instant surveillance of everything you do possible at the click of a button.’

Either program could form the backbone of the government’s planned ‘filter’, a kind of search engine for personal data described by the report from Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee published last week.

Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, which campaigns for freedom online, explained: ‘This would put data from your mobile phone, email, web history and phones together, so the police can tell who your friends are, what your opinions are, where you’ve been and with who.

‘It could make instant surveillance of everything you do possible at the click of a button.’

Ms Swain revealed that Raytheon is just one company which is developing this kind of software for sale to governments and domestic spy agencies.

‘IBM are also marketing analytic software which has this functionality, and there are a number of others,’ she said.

‘It is being used by companies who want to identify, understand and influence existing and potential customers, and it is extremely expensive.

‘The police will use this, not just to investigate crime, but to identify and stop crime and disorder, even before it happens.

‘Some may consider that a good thing – but the level of social control involved poses a very real threat to individual freedom.

‘The software will inevitably be used to monitor political dissent and activity, as well as crime and disorder. Surveillance already exercises a ‘chilling effect’ over basic freedoms – this can only make things a great deal worse.’

Her sentiments were echoed by Nick Pickles, director of privacy and civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch.

He said: ‘Privacy as we know it is being slowly eroded and it’s not just our friends that are looking at what we share.

‘A wide range of companies are trying to develop tools that capture data online and analyse it in difference ways, exploiting the growing amount of information we share online and the wider opportunities to track us.

‘If the only barrier is the amount of computing power at your disposal, clearly Governments have the potential to use these tools to profile and analyse their populations in ways never before possible.

‘This kind of tool joins the dots of our online lives, exploiting data for whatever purpose the user wants.

‘The best way to protect yourself is to control the data you share, but Governments around the world need to be clear with their citizens how they are using these kinds of tools and if they are trying to search for criminals before they have committed a crime.’

…

By Damien Gayle

PUBLISHED: 10:19 GMT, 11 February 2013 | UPDATED: 12:13 GMT, 11 February 2013

Find this story at 11 February 2013

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

Zero Dark Thirty director given ‘roadmap’ behind U.S. stealth mission to kill Osama bin Laden

Kathryn Bigelow given classified information by high ranking official
She was also briefed by CIA and military officials and Navy Seals
Campaign group said the White House has acted improperly

The director of an Oscar-nominated film about the killing of Osama bin Laden was given classified information about the operation by United States intelligence chiefs.

Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow and her screenwriting partner Mark Boal were provided with a complete ‘roadmap’ of how the raid was planned during a 45 minute meeting with Michael Vickers – the country’s highest ranking civilian intelligence official.

The filmmakers also received briefings from top CIA and military intelligence officers and Navy Seals who carried out Operation Neptune Spear – attacking bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan in May 2011.

Secrecy: Zero Dark Thirty filmmakers Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal were given classified information

The transcript of the interview, which took place three months after the terrorist leader’s death, has this week been published by the National Security Archive (NSA) at George Washington University in Washington.

Classified: Intelligence chief Michale Vickers gave information to the filmmakers during an interview

It follows a freedom of information request by campaign group Judicial Watch. Its president Tom Fitton had said the White House acted improperly by giving ‘politically-connected filmmakers extraordinary and secret access to bin Laden raid information’

Following the raid, the White House and Pentagon held a series of contradictory briefings and the NSA argues that an authoritative account of the operation has never been published.

The group accused the Obama administration of sharing the ‘intimate details’ to help the filmmakers release a movie ‘perfectly timed to give a home-stretch boost’ last year’s re-election campaign.

The NSA said much of the operation in Abbottabad is still ‘shrouded in secrecy’, with many details of the raid having never been released.

Chris Farrell, of Judicial Watch, told The Independent: ‘Either you admit you gave special excess to your pet film directors, or you make the information available to everyone.’

A statement on the Judicial Watch website said that the film pushed the Obama narrative, and added: ‘Barack Obama comes off as a hero character.

‘We see him morally preening on a news program and hear him described as ’thoughtful and analytical.’

Oscar nominated: Navy SEALs prepare to breach a locked door in bin Laden’s compound in Dark Zero Thirty

Raid: Pakistani security officials stand guard as workers demolish the compound in Abbottabad

‘Boal and Bigelow seemed to have gone out of their way (short of producing a two-hour campaign commercial) to project the Obama administration as ‘gutsy’ for ordering the raid.’

Hunted: Bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in May 2011

An investigation into whether Mr Vickers broke any rules by briefing Ms Bigelow and Mr Boal has been launched by the Department of Defense.

Mr Boal and Ms Bigelow, who spent several years working on the film, have insisted that they went through the proper official channels in the intelligence community and did not have access to any classified information.

Zero Dark Thirty opened across the U.S. on January 11 and has been nominated for five Oscars including Best Picture, Best Actress for Jessica Chastain and Best Original Screenplay. It was nominated for four Golden Globes, with Chastain winning Best Actress.

Mr Boal and Ms Bigelow have both won Oscars fro the Hurt Locker. Ms Bigelow has defended her latest film’s torture scene, saying criticism of the practices might be better directed towards government policymakers.

After bin Laden – who was hunted by the US since the 9/11 terrorist attacks – was killed, the Obama administration said his body was buried at sea off the USS Carl Vinson in accordance with Islamic tradition.

The raid was completed shortly after 1am local time when he was shot once in the chest and once in the head by a Navy Seal who announced, ‘For God and country Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo’, because Geronimo was the code-name given to the al-Qaeda leader.

…

By Alex Gore

PUBLISHED: 17:53 GMT, 19 January 2013 | UPDATED: 09:00 GMT, 20 January 2013

Find this story at 19 January 2013

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

How did Bigelow access America’s secrets about torture and Bin Laden’s assassination for Zero Dark Thirty?

Oscar contender is triggering growing criticism from US senators that the movie supports ‘waterboarding’

It has received five Oscar nominations and created a buzz among movie fans around the world.

But Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, which recounts the operation that traced and killed Osama bin Laden, is at the centre of growing controversy over the unprecedented access to classified information granted to the director and her screenwriter colleague, while most of these details remain unavailable to the general pubic.

Documents collected, collated and published this week by the National Security Archive of George Washington University in Washington show that only a portion of information about Operation Neptune Spear, the codename for the CIA-led, decade-long hunt for Bin Laden, has so far been declassified.

In contrast, Ms Bigelow and her colleague Mark Boal received briefings from high-ranking CIA and military intelligence officers, Navy SEALs who took part in the operation and other officials. A CIA spokeswoman said at the time, the agency had decided to support the director because “it makes sense to get behind a winning horse. Mark and Kathryn’s movie is going to be the first and the biggest”.

The attacks of 9/11 on New York and Washington traumatised the US and led to various policy decisions whose ramifications are still being felt. The vow of then US President George Bush to capture the al-Qa’ida leader “dead or alive” led to the US and UK invasion of Afghanistan and a hunt for Bin Laden that concluded in May 2011 when US Special Forces raided a walled compound in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad where he had been hiding.

In the hours and days after the raid, White House and Pentagon officials briefed the media about aspects of the raid. Yet there were a number of contradictions contained within those briefings, and more than 18 months later many details remain unknown. Photographs of Bin Laden, for instance, supposedly taken after he was shot dead and when his body was buried at sea from aboard the USS Carl Vinson have not been made public, and the Obama administration has refused media requests under the Freedom of Information Act to release them.

Indeed, the National Security Archive said much of the operation was still “shrouded in secrecy”. It added: “The government’s recalcitrance over releasing information directly to the public about the 21 century’s most important intelligence search and military raid, and its decision instead to grant the film’s producers exclusive and unprecedented access to classified information about the operation, means that for the time being – for bad or good – Hollywood has become the public’s account of record for Operation Neptune Spear.”

Even before its release, Ms Bigelow’s film had already created controversy because of a scenes showing torture that the film suggests were essential to obtaining information that led the CIA to the garrison town of Abbottabad.

Such has been the furore that senior US senators Diane Feinstein and John McCain publicly complained the film was supporting the use of techniques such as “waterboarding”. Ms Bigelow has defended her film, recently telling the BBC: “It’s part of the story. To omit it would have been whitewashing history.”

Yet others say, the issue of the access given to the 61-year-old director is equally controversial. Chris Farrell, of Judicial Watch, a Washington-based non-profit organisation, said it had been involved in extensive litigation with the authorities to obtain withheld documents. He claimed the government was trying to have it both ways. “Either you admit you gave special access to your pet film director, or else you make the information available to everyone,” he said.

What has added to the perception that Ms Bigelow received special treatment are various moves by the authorities to halt other people releasing information about Operation Neptune Spear. The NSA said last November, seven US special forces soldiers involved in the Abbottabad operation were reprimanded for providing classified material to a video game manufacturer.

…

Andrew Buncombe
Friday, 18 January 2013

Find this story at 18 January 2013

© independent.co.uk

 

 

U.S. Weighs Base for Spy Drones in North Africa

WASHINGTON — The United States military is preparing to establish a drone base in northwest Africa so that it can increase surveillance missions on the local affiliate of Al Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups that American and other Western officials say pose a growing menace to the region.

For now, officials say they envision flying only unarmed surveillance drones from the base, though they have not ruled out conducting missile strikes at some point if the threat worsens.

The move is an indication of the priority Africa has become in American antiterrorism efforts. The United States military has a limited presence in Africa, with only one permanent base, in the country of Djibouti, more than 3,000 miles from Mali, where French and Malian troops are now battling Qaeda-backed fighters who control the northern part of Mali.

A new drone base in northwest Africa would join a constellation of small airstrips in recent years on the continent, including in Ethiopia, for surveillance missions flown by drones or turboprop planes designed to look like civilian aircraft.

If the base is approved, the most likely location for it would be in Niger, a largely desert nation on the eastern border of Mali. The American military’s Africa Command, or Africom, is also discussing options for the base with other countries in the region, including Burkina Faso, officials said.

The immediate impetus for a drone base in the region is to provide surveillance assistance to the French-led operation in Mali. “This is directly related to the Mali mission, but it could also give Africom a more enduring presence for I.S.R.,” one American military official said Sunday, referring to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

A handful of unarmed Predator drones would carry out surveillance missions in the region and fill a desperate need for more detailed information on a range of regional threats, including militants in Mali and the unabated flow of fighters and weapons from Libya. American military commanders and intelligence analysts complain that such information has been sorely lacking.

The Africa Command’s plan still needs approval from the Pentagon and eventually from the White House, as well as from officials in Niger. American military officials said that they were still working out some details, and that no final decision had been made. But in Niger on Monday, the two countries reached a status-of-forces agreement that clears the way for greater American military involvement in the country and provides legal protection to American troops there, including any who might deploy to a new drone base.

The plan could face resistance from some in the White House who are wary of committing any additional American forces to a fight against a poorly understood web of extremist groups in North Africa.

If approved, the base could ultimately have as many as 300 United States military and contractor personnel, but it would probably begin with far fewer people than that, military officials said.

Some Africa specialists expressed concern that setting up a drone base in Niger or in a neighboring country, even if only to fly surveillance missions, could alienate local people who may associate the distinctive aircraft with deadly attacks in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

Officials from Niger did not respond to e-mails over the weekend about the plan, but its president, Mahamadou Issoufou, has expressed a willingness to establish what he called in a recent interview “a long-term strategic relationship with the U.S.”

“What’s happening in northern Mali is a big concern for us because what’s happening in northern Mali can also happen to us,” Mr. Issoufou said in an interview at the presidential palace in Niamey, Niger’s capital, on Jan. 10, the day before French troops swept into Mali to blunt the militant advance.

Gen. Carter F. Ham, the head of the Africa Command, who visited Niger this month to discuss expanding the country’s security cooperation with the United States, declined to comment on the proposed drone base, saying in an e-mail that the subject was “too operational for me to confirm or deny.”

Discussions about the drone base come at a time when the French operation in Mali and a militant attack on a remote gas field in the Algerian desert that left at least 37 foreign hostages, including 3 Americans, dead have thrown a spotlight on Al Qaeda’s franchise in the region, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and forced Western governments and their allies in the region to accelerate efforts to combat it.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death and the turmoil of the Arab Spring, there was “an effort to establish a beachhead for terrorism, a joining together of terrorist organizations.”

According to current and former American government officials, as well as classified government cables made public by the group WikiLeaks, the surveillance missions flown by American turboprop planes in northern Mali have had only a limited effect.

Flown mainly from Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, the missions have faced stiff challenges as militant leaders have taken greater precautions in using electronic communications and have taken more care not to disclose delicate information that could be monitored, like their precise locations.

General Ham said in an interview on his visit to Niger that it had been difficult for American intelligence agencies to collect consistent, reliable intelligence about what was going on in northern Mali, as well as in other largely ungoverned parts of the sub-Saharan region.

“It’s tough to penetrate,” he said. “It’s tough to get access for platforms that can collect. It’s an extraordinarily tough environment for human intelligence, not just ours but the neighboring countries as well.”

…

January 28, 2013
By ERIC SCHMITT

Find this story at 28 January 2013

© 2013 The New York Times Company

Revealed: who can fly drones in UK airspace

Missile manufacturer, police forces and golf video company among more than 130 groups licensed to use technology

A surveillance drone used by Merseyside police, one of three forces that have permission to use UAVs. Photograph: John Giles/PA

Defence firms, police forces and fire services are among more than 130 organisations that have permission to fly small drones in UK airspace, the Guardian can reveal.

The Civil Aviation Authority list of companies and groups that have sought approval for the use of the unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, has not been published before – and it reflects the way the technology is now being used. The BBC, the National Grid and several universities are now certified to use them – as is Video Golf Marketing, which provides fly-over videos of golf courses.

Including multiple or expired licences, the CAA has granted approval to fly small UAVs more than 160 times.

“People are going to see more and more of these small vehicles operating around the country,” said John Moreland, general secretary of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Systems Association (UAVS), a trade body with more than 100 members. “There are any number of uses for them, and the technology is getting easier to use and cheaper all the time. These vehicles can operate anywhere in the UK, within reason.”

However, privacy campaigners have grave concerns about the proliferation of the technology and want an urgent review of regulations. “The increasing use of drones by private companies and government bodies poses a unique set of problems,” said Eric King, head of research at campaign group Privacy International.

“The CAA considers health and safety issues when deciding whether or not to grant licences to operate drone technology, but this is a very low bar. We need new regulation to ensure privacy and other civil liberties are also taken into account during the decision-making process.”

In the last two years the CAA has required anyone who wants to fly a small UAV in British airspace to apply for permission. The aircraft must weigh less than 20kg and operators have to abide by certain rules. These include not flying them higher than 122 metres (400ft), or further away from the operator than 500 metres – this is deemed the pilot’s “line of sight”.

The CAA list shows that three police forces, Merseyside, Staffordshire and Essex, have permission to use UAVs, as do three fire services, Dorset, West Midlands and Hampshire.

Some of Europe’s biggest defence companies can also fly them, including BAE Systems, Qinetiq and missile manufacturer MBDA. A company that supplies UAVs and other equipment to the Ministry of Defence, Marlborough Communications, is also registered, along with crime-scene and counter-terrorism specialist GWR & Associates.

Shane Knight, a spokesman for Marlborough, said: “If you can put these systems up in the sky, and they are safe, then they have many uses. If you are a police force, a fire or ambulance service, and, for instance, you are responding to a large fire, then you have a choice of sending out your people to do reconnaissance of an area, or you could use one of these small UAVs. Why put people in danger when you can use one of these systems? These UAVs are getting much better, and much smaller.”

The National Grid uses them to inspect power lines, while the Scottish Environment Protection Agency wants one to patrol and photograph remote areas, said Susan Stevens, a scientist in the agency’s marine ecology department. “The UAV equipment is currently being trialled,” she said.

“As an operational service it will have many uses, such as capturing aerial imagery of estuaries, wetlands and riverbanks, and to provide a snapshot of the environment before and after development work,” she said.

Moreland said the unmanned systems suffered from the perception that they were all “killer robots” flying in the sky, but he thought this would diminish as the public got used to seeing them.

“We are going to see all sorts of systems coming out over the years,” he said. “The operating bubble is going to expand like mad. Some of these systems will be able to look after themselves, and others will rely on the quality of the operators.

“You don’t have to be a qualified pilot … The person could come from a modelling background, or he may be a video game player. There are plenty of people you could imagine being able to control these systems in a delicate way.”

Gordon Slack, who owns Video Golf Marketing, said he had taught himself to use his UAV. “Once you know how to operate it, it is not too complicated. We’ve done six videos for golf courses, with a few more in the pipeline.”

…

(Owner ID number/Company name)

1 HoverCam

2 Meggitt Defence Systems

3 EagleEye (Aerial Photography) Ltd

4 Remote Services Limited

5 High Spy RC Aerial Photography

6 Magsurvey Limited

7 Pi In The Sky

8 Qinetiq

9 Eye In The Sky

10 AngleCam

11 Helicam Ltd

12 Flying Minicameras Ltd

13 S & C Thermofluids Ltd

14 Remote Airworks (pty) Ltd

15 National Grid

16 Dragonfly Aerial Photography

17 BlueBear Systems Research

18 William Walker

19 European UAV Systems Centre Ltd

20 In-House Films Ltd

21 MBDA UK Ltd

22 European UAV Systems Centre

23 Dorset Fire & Rescue Service

24 Conocophillips Limited

25 Hampshire Fire & Rescue Service

26 West Midlands Fire Service

27 Advanced Ceramics Research

28 UA Systems Ltd (Swisscopter)

29 Hybrid Air Vehicles Ltd

30 Flight Refuelling Limited

31 BAE Systems (Operations) Ltd

32 Lindstrand Technologies Ltd

33 Upper Cut Productions

34 Cranfield University

35 Peregrine Media Ltd

36 Horizon Aerial Photography

37 Rory Game

38 Alan Stevens

39 Helipix LLP

40 Re-use*

41 Mike Garner

42 Cyberhawk Innovations Ltd

43 Staffordshire Police TPU

44 Merseyside Police

45 Health and Safety Laboratory

46 David Hogg

47 MRL Ltd

48 MRL Ltd

49 Re-use*

50 Dominic Blundell

51 Re-use*

52 Re-use*

53 Skylens Aerial Photography

54 Bonningtons Aerial Surveys

55 Small UAV Enterprises

56 British Technical Films

57 CARVEC Systems Ltd

58 Flying-Scots’Cam

59 Pulse Corporation Ltd (t/a Overshoot Photography)

60 Motor Bird Ltd

61 Advanced Aerial Imagery

62 AM-UAS Limited

63 Re-use*

64 Gatewing NV

65 Questuav Ltd

66 Advanced UAV Technology Ltd

67 Air 2 Air

68 MW Power Systems Limited

69 Re-use*

70 Roke Manor Research Ltd

71 Re-use*

72 NPIA

73 Pete Ulrick

74 Re-use*

75 SSE Power Distribution

76 University of Worcester

77 Re-use*

78 Rovision Ltd

79 Callen-Lenz Associates Ltd (Gubua Group)

80 SKM Studio

81 GWR Associates

82 Phoenix Model Aviation

83 Copycat

84 HD Skycam

85 Re-use*

86 Gary White

87 Aerial Target Systems Ltd

88 Aerial Target Systems

89 Re-use*

90 Video Golf Marketing Ltd

91 Re-use*

92 Helivisuals Ltd

93 Essex Police

94 Marlborough Comms Ltd

95 Re-use*

96 Siemans Wind Power A/S

97 Altimeter UK Ltd t/a Visionair

98 T/A Remote Imaging

99 Re-use*

100 Daniel Baker

101 Sky Futures

102 Aerovironment Inc

103 Spherical Images Ltd

104 Flying Camera Systems

105 Highviz Photography

106 ESDM Ltd

107 Flying Camera Systems Limited

108 Edward Martin

109 Digital Mapping and Survey Ltd

110 EDF NNB GenCo Ltd

111 EDF

112 Re-use*

113 AerialVue Ltd

114 Minerva NI Limited

115 Flying Fern Films Ltd

116 Out Filming Ltd

117 Hexcam Ltd

118 McKenzie Geospatial Surveys Ltd

119 Resource UAS

120 Plum Pictures

121 Jonathan Malory

122 Mas-UK Ltd

123 Bailey Balloons Ltd

124 David Bush

125 Southampton University

126 Helipov

127 Costain Ltd

128 Sky-Futures

129 Jonathan Blaxill

130 Roke Manor Research Ltd

131 Colin Bailie

132 British Broadcasting Corp

133 Simon Hailey

134 Re-use*

135 Trimvale Aviation

136 PSH Skypower Ltd

137 Aerosight Ltd

171 Re-use*

173 Colin Bailie

174 Simon Field

175 Re-use*

176 Aerial Graphical Services

177 Think Aerial Photography

178 Hedge Air Limited

179 Scottish Environment Protection Agency

180 Skypower Limited

181 Elevation Images

182 Universal Sky Pictures

183 MBDA UK Ltd

184 Helicammedia

185 Oculus Systems Ltd

186 MASA Ltd

187 Doozee Aerial Systems Ltd

188 Selex Galileo

189 Whisperdrone

190 Z-Axis

191 Rotarama Ltd

192 Re-use*

193 BBC (Natural History Unit)

194 Flying Camera Company

195 Flying Camera Company

* Short-term approval that was granted, but now no longer applies

Source: CAA

Nick Hopkins
The Guardian, Friday 25 January 2013 20.02 GMT

Find this story at 25 January 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

The incredible U.S. military spy drone that’s so powerful it can see what type of phone you’re carrying from 17,500ft

The ARGUS-IS can view an area of 15 sq/miles in a single image
Its zoom capability can detect an object as small as 6in on the ground
Developed by BAE as part of a $18million DARPA project
System works by stringing together 368 digital camera chips

A sinister airborne surveillance camera gives the U.S. military the ability to track movements in an entire city like a real-time Google Street View.

The ARGUS-IS array can be mounted on unmanned drones to capture an area of 15 sq/miles in an incredible 1,800MP – that’s 225 times more sensitive than an iPhone camera.

From 17,500ft the remarkable surveillance system can capture objects as small as 6in on the ground and allows commanders to track movements across an entire battlefield in real time.

Scroll down for video

Beat that, Google: An image taken from 17,500ft by the U.S. military’s ARGUS-IS array, which can capture 1,800MP zoomable video feeds of an entire medium-sized city in real time

‘It is important for the public to know that some of these capabilities exist,’ said Yiannis Antoniades, the BAE engineer who designed the system, in a recent PBS broadcast.

The aerospace and weapons company developed the ARGUS-IS array as part of a $18.5million project funded by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa).

In Greek mythology, Argus Panoptes, guardian of the heifer-nymph Io and son of Arestor, was a primordial giant whose epithet, ‘Panoptes’, ‘all-seeing’, led to his being described with multiple, often one hundred, eyes.

Like the Titan of myth, the Pentagon’s ARGUS-IS (a backronym standing for Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance-Imaging System) works by stringing together an array of 368 digital camera imaging chips.

An airborne processor combines the video from these chips to create a single ultra-high definition mosaic video image which updates at up to 15 frames a second.

All-seeing: This graphic illustrates how the U.S. military’s ARGUS-IS array links together images streamed from hundreds of digital camera sensors to watch over a huge expanse of terrain in real time

What it looks like: The ARGUS-IS (a backronym standing for Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance-Imaging System) strings together an array of 368 digital camera imaging chips into a single unit

That tremendous level of detail makes it sensitive enough to not only track people moving around on the ground thousands of feet below, but even to see what they are doing or carrying.

The ARGUS array sends its live feed to the ground where it connects to a touch-screen command room interface.

Using this, operators can zoom in to any area within the camera’s field of view, with up to 65 zoom windows open at once.

Each video window is electronically steerable independent of the others, and can either provide continuous imagery of a fixed area on the ground or be designated to automatically keep a specified target in the window.

Sinister: The system tracks all moving objects in its field of view, highlighting them with coloured boxes, allowing operators to track movements across an area as and when they happen

The system automatically tracks any moving object it can see, including both vehicles and individuals on foot, highlighting them with coloured boxes so they can be easily identified.

It also records everything, storing an approximate million terabytes of data a day – the equivalent of 5,000 hours of high-definition video footage.

‘So you can go back and say I’d like to see what happened at this particular location three days, two hours [and] four minutes ago, and it will actually show you what happened as if you were watching it live,’ said Mr Antoniades.

iPad next? The feed from the ARGUS is transmitted to a touch-screen command and control interface

Windows: Operators can open a window to zoom in to any area within the camera’s field of view, with up to 65 open and running at once

Total surveillance: The view of Quantico, Virginia, highlighted in the PBS film

For the PBS programme reporting the technology, Mr Antoniades showed reporters a feed over the city of Quantico, Virginia, that was recorded in 2009.

…

By Damien Gayle

PUBLISHED: 14:56 GMT, 28 January 2013 | UPDATED: 19:56 GMT, 28 January 2013

Find this story at 28 January 2013

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

Election Spurred a Move to Codify U.S. Drone Policy

WASHINGTON — Facing the possibility that President Obama might not win a second term, his administration accelerated work in the weeks before the election to develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones, so that a new president would inherit clear standards and procedures, according to two administration officials.

The matter may have lost some urgency after Nov. 6. But with more than 300 drone strikes and some 2,500 people killed by the Central Intelligence Agency and the military since Mr. Obama first took office, the administration is still pushing to make the rules formal and resolve internal uncertainty and disagreement about exactly when lethal action is justified.

Mr. Obama and his advisers are still debating whether remote-control killing should be a measure of last resort against imminent threats to the United States, or a more flexible tool, available to help allied governments attack their enemies or to prevent militants from controlling territory.

Though publicly the administration presents a united front on the use of drones, behind the scenes there is longstanding tension. The Defense Department and the C.I.A. continue to press for greater latitude to carry out strikes; Justice Department and State Department officials, and the president’s counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, have argued for restraint, officials involved in the discussions say.

More broadly, the administration’s legal reasoning has not persuaded many other countries that the strikes are acceptable under international law. For years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the United States routinely condemned targeted killings of suspected terrorists by Israel, and most countries still object to such measures.

But since the first targeted killing by the United States in 2002, two administrations have taken the position that the United States is at war with Al Qaeda and its allies and can legally defend itself by striking its enemies wherever they are found.

Partly because United Nations officials know that the United States is setting a legal and ethical precedent for other countries developing armed drones, the U.N. plans to open a unit in Geneva early next year to investigate American drone strikes.

The attempt to write a formal rule book for targeted killing began last summer after news reports on the drone program, started under President George W. Bush and expanded by Mr. Obama, revealed some details of the president’s role in the shifting procedures for compiling “kill lists” and approving strikes. Though national security officials insist that the process is meticulous and lawful, the president and top aides believe it should be institutionalized, a course of action that seemed particularly urgent when it appeared that Mitt Romney might win the presidency.

“There was concern that the levers might no longer be in our hands,” said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity. With a continuing debate about the proper limits of drone strikes, Mr. Obama did not want to leave an “amorphous” program to his successor, the official said. The effort, which would have been rushed to completion by January had Mr. Romney won, will now be finished at a more leisurely pace, the official said.

Mr. Obama himself, in little-noticed remarks, has acknowledged that the legal governance of drone strikes is still a work in progress.

“One of the things we’ve got to do is put a legal architecture in place, and we need Congressional help in order to do that, to make sure that not only am I reined in but any president’s reined in terms of some of the decisions that we’re making,” Mr. Obama told Jon Stewart in an appearance on “The Daily Show” on Oct. 18.

In an interview with Mark Bowden for a new book on the killing of Osama bin Laden, “The Finish,” Mr. Obama said that “creating a legal structure, processes, with oversight checks on how we use unmanned weapons, is going to be a challenge for me and my successors for some time to come.”

The president expressed wariness of the powerful temptation drones pose to policy makers. “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,” he said.

Despite public remarks by Mr. Obama and his aides on the legal basis for targeted killing, the program remains officially classified. In court, fighting lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times seeking secret legal opinions on targeted killings, the government has refused even to acknowledge the existence of the drone program in Pakistan.

But by many accounts, there has been a significant shift in the nature of the targets. In the early years, most strikes were aimed at ranking leaders of Al Qaeda thought to be plotting to attack the United States. That is the purpose Mr. Obama has emphasized, saying in a CNN interview in September that drones were used to prevent “an operational plot against the United States” and counter “terrorist networks that target the United States.”

But for at least two years in Pakistan, partly because of the C.I.A.’s success in decimating Al Qaeda’s top ranks, most strikes have been directed at militants whose main battle is with the Pakistani authorities or who fight with the Taliban against American troops in Afghanistan.

In Yemen, some strikes apparently launched by the United States killed militants who were preparing to attack Yemeni military forces. Some of those killed were wearing suicide vests, according to Yemeni news reports.

“Unless they were about to get on a flight to New York to conduct an attack, they were not an imminent threat to the United States,” said Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who is a critic of the strikes. “We don’t say that we’re the counterinsurgency air force of Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, but we are.”

Then there is the matter of strikes against people whose identities are unknown. In an online video chat in January, Mr. Obama spoke of the strikes in Pakistan as “a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists.” But for several years, first in Pakistan and later in Yemen, in addition to “personality strikes” against named terrorists, the C.I.A. and the military have carried out “signature strikes” against groups of suspected, unknown militants.

Originally that term was used to suggest the specific “signature” of a known high-level terrorist, such as his vehicle parked at a meeting place. But the word evolved to mean the “signature” of militants in general — for instance, young men toting arms in an area controlled by extremist groups. Such strikes have prompted the greatest conflict inside the Obama administration, with some officials questioning whether killing unidentified fighters is legally justified or worth the local backlash.

Many people inside and outside the government have argued for far greater candor about all of the strikes, saying excessive secrecy has prevented public debate in Congress or a full explanation of their rationale. Experts say the strikes are deeply unpopular both in Pakistan and Yemen, in part because of allegations of large numbers of civilian casualties, which American officials say are exaggerated.

…

November 24, 2012
By SCOTT SHANE

Find this story at 24 November 2012

© 2013 The New York Times Company

Ban ‘Killer Robots’ Before It’s Too Late; Fully Autonomous Weapons Would Increase Danger to Civilians

(Washington, DC) – Governments should pre-emptively ban fully autonomous weapons because of the danger they pose to civilians in armed conflict, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. These future weapons, sometimes called “killer robots,” would be able to choose and fire on targets without human intervention.

The 50-page report, “Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots,” outlines concerns about these fully autonomous weapons, which would inherently lack human qualities that provide legal and non-legal checks on the killing of civilians. In addition, the obstacles to holding anyone accountable for harm caused by the weapons would weaken the law’s power to deter future violations.

“Giving machines the power to decide who lives and dies on the battlefield would take technology too far,” said Steve Goose, Arms Division director at Human Rights Watch. “Human control of robotic warfare is essential to minimizing civilian deaths and injuries.”

“Losing Humanity” is the first major publication about fully autonomous weapons by a nongovernmental organization and is based on extensive research into the law, technology, and ethics of these proposed weapons. It is jointly published by Human Rights Watch and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic.

Human Rights Watch and the International Human Rights Clinic called for an international treaty that would absolutely prohibit the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons. They also called on individual nations to pass laws and adopt policies as important measures to prevent development, production, and use of such weapons at the domestic level.

Fully autonomous weapons do not yet exist, and major powers, including the United States, have not made a decision to deploy them. But high-tech militaries are developing or have already deployed precursors that illustrate the push toward greater autonomy for machines on the battlefield. The United States is a leader in this technological development. Several other countries – including China, Germany, Israel, South Korea, Russia, and the United Kingdom – have also been involved. Many experts predict that full autonomy for weapons could be achieved in 20 to 30 years, and some think even sooner.

“It is essential to stop the development of killer robots before they show up in national arsenals,” Goose said. “As countries become more invested in this technology, it will become harder to persuade them to give it up.”

Fully autonomous weapons could not meet the requirements of international humanitarian law, Human Rights Watch and the Harvard clinic said. They would be unable to distinguish adequately between soldiers and civilians on the battlefield or apply the human judgment necessary to evaluate the proportionality of an attack – whether civilian harm outweighs military advantage.

These robots would also undermine non-legal checks on the killing of civilians. Fully autonomous weapons could not show human compassion for their victims, and autocrats could abuse them by directing them against their own people. While replacing human troops with machines could save military lives, it could also make going to war easier, which would shift the burden of armed conflict onto civilians.

Finally, the use of fully autonomous weapons would create an accountability gap. Trying to hold the commander, programmer, or manufacturer legally responsible for a robot’s actions presents significant challenges. The lack of accountability would undercut the ability to deter violations of international law and to provide victims meaningful retributive justice.

While most militaries maintain that for the immediate future humans will retain some oversight over the actions of weaponized robots, the effectiveness of that oversight is questionable, Human Rights Watch and the Harvard clinic said. Moreover, military statements have left the door open to full autonomy in the future.

“Action is needed now, before killer robots cross the line from science fiction to feasibility,” Goose said.

November 19, 2012

Find this story at 19 November 2012

© Copyright 2012, Human Rights Watch

Military Stats Reveal Epicenter of U.S. Drone War

Forget Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and all the other secret little warzones. The real center of the U.S. drone campaign is in plain sight — on the hot and open battlefield of Afghanistan.

The American military has launched 333 drone strikes this year in Afghanistan. That’s not only the highest total ever, according to U.S. Air Force statistics. It’s essentially the same number of robotic attacks in Pakistan since the CIA-led campaign there began nearly eight years ago. In the last 30 days, there have been three reported strikes in Yemen. In Afghanistan, that’s just an average day’s worth of remotely piloted attacks. And the increased strikes come as the rest of the war in Afghanistan is slowing down.

The secret drone campaigns have drawn the most scrutiny because of the legal, geopolitical, and ethical questions they raise. But it’s worth remembering that the rise of the flying robots is largely occurring in the open, on an acknowledged battlefield where the targets are largely unquestioned and the attending issues aren’t nearly as fraught.

“The difference between the Afghan operation and the ones operations in Pakistan and elsewhere come down to the fundamental differences between open military campaigns and covert campaigns run by the intelligence community. It shapes everything from the level of transparency to the command and control to the rules of engagements to the process and consequences if an air strike goes wrong,” e-mails Peter W. Singer, who runs the Brookings Institution’s 21st Century Defense Initiative. (Full disclosure: I have a non-resident fellowship there.) “This is why the military side has been far less controversial, and thus why many have pushed for it to play a greater role as the strikes slowly morphed from isolated, covert events into a regularized air war.”

The military has 61 Predator and Reaper “combat air patrols,” each with three or four robotic planes. The CIA’s inventory is believed to be just a fraction of that: 30 to 35 drones total, although there is thought to be some overlap between the military and intelligence agency fleets. The Washington Post reported last month that the CIA is looking for another 10 drones as the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) become more and more central to the agency’s worldwide counterterror campaign.

In Pakistan, those drones are flown with a wink and a nod, to avoid the perception of violating national sovereignty. In Yemen, the robots go after men just because they fit a profile of what the U.S. believes a terrorist to be. In both countries, people are considered legitimate targets if they happen to be male and young and in the wrong place at the wrong time. The White House keeps a “matrix” on who merits robotic death. Congress (outside of the intelligence committees) largely learns about the programs through the papers.

None of these statements is true about the drone war in Afghanistan, where strikes are ordered by a local commander, overseen by military lawyers, conducted with the (sometimes reluctant) blessing of the Kabul government, and used almost entirely to help troops under fire. The UAVs aren’t flown to dodge issues of sovereignty or to avoid traditional military assets. They’re used because they work better — staying in the sky longer than traditional aircraft and employing more advanced sensors to make sure the targets they hit are legit.

Figures on the air war in Afghanistan, supplied by the U.S. military.

The U.S. military is now launching more drone strikes — an average of 33 per month — than at any moment in the 11 years of the Afghan conflict. It’s a major escalation from just last year, when the monthly average was 24.5. And it’s happening while the rest of the American war effort is winding down: There are 34,000 fewer American troops than there were in early 2011; U.S. casualties are down 40 percent from 2010′s toll; militant attacks are off by about a quarter; civilian deaths have declined a bit from their awful peak.

Even the air war is shrinking. Overall surveillance sorties are down, from an average of 3,183 per month last year to 2,954 in 2012. (Drones flew 860 of those sorties in 2011, and now fly 761 per month today.) Missions in which U.S. aircraft fire their weapons have declined, too. That used to happen 450 times per month on average in 2011. This year, the monthly total dropped to 360.

…

By Noah Shachtman11.09.124:00 AM

Find this story at 11 September 2012

Wired.com © 2013 Condé Nast. All rights reserved.

Yemen: reported US covert action 2012

The Data
The events detailed have been reported by US and Yemeni government, military and intelligence officials, and by credible media, academic and other sources. Strikes include ground operations, naval attacks and airstrikes – by drone, cruise missile and conventional aircraft.

Many of the US attacks have been confirmed by senior American or Yemeni officials. However some events are only speculatively attributed to the US, or are indicative of US involvement. For example precision night-time strikes on moving vehicles, whilst often attributed to the Yemen Air Force, are more likely to be the work of US forces. We therefore class all Yemen strikes as either confirmed or possible.

As Yemen came under severe pressure during the Arab Spring and militants seized control of cities and towns in the south, the US significantly stepped up its attacks, most notablysept with drone strikes. Since mid 2011 US counter terrorism operations in Yemen have been conducted by both the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency. Attacks are aimed at al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and more recently, Ansar al-Sharia.

The Bureau will continue to add to its knowledge base, and welcomes input and corrections from interested parties.

Click here for our 2001-2011 Yemen data.

January

YEM040
January 31 2012
♦ 10-14 reported killed
At least ten militants were killed in a drone strike in southern Yemen. Local residents said a drone struck two vehicles east of Lawdar. An al Qaeda eulogy to militant Mouwhahhad al-Maaribi’s life described how he was killed in the strike, along with nine others. It stated that four missiles were fired at the cars, killing Maarabi, along with Ibrahim Al-Najdi, Abed Al Farraj Al-Shamri and Saleh Al-Akili. In addition, missiles were reportedly fired at a school in which militants were hiding. Abdul Munim al-Fathani, wanted by the US for alleged links to the attacks on the USS Cole in 2000, was reportedly among the dead. One report noted

Nasir al Wuhayshi, the emir or leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, ‘broke down in tears …on the road between ‘Azzan in Shabwa and Mudiyah in Abyan province, upon seeing the body of the leader Abdul Mun’im Salim Amqidah al Fatahani.

Wuhayshi’s brother was reportedly killed by a US drone strike a month earlier, on December 22. (YEM040) Talhah al Yemeni and Abdulmalik al-Dahyani, AQAP leaders, were also killed. The LA Times reported that the attacks were carried out by JSOC. Yemeni journalist Nasser Arrabyee reported on his blog that other fatalities included: Abu Ali Al Shabwani, Ahmed Noyran, Muthana Mawala Al Maramy, and Abu Al Khatab Al Marabi. Tareq Al Dhahab, AQAP leader in Rada, survived according to a local resident. A source close to AQAP allegedly told Xinhua by phone that militants Khadri Em-Soudah and Ahmed Mu’eran Abu Ali, an al Qaeda leader in Shabwah governorate, also died.

Three men were later executed by Ansar al Sharia on February 12 in connection with this attack.

Type of action: Air assault, drone strike
Location: Lawdar/Modya, Abyan province
References: Reuters, CNN, Long War Journal, Xinhua, Nasser Arrabyee, Associated Press, BBC, LA Times, CBS, Critical Threats, MEMRI

YEM041
Late January 2012
General Mohammed al-Sumali, commander of Yemen’s 25th Mechanized Brigade, told journalist Jeremy Scahill that ‘the US carried out a series of airstrikes in late January and… at least two other strikes around Zinjibar that targeted al Qaeda leaders.’

Type of action: Air assault, air strikes
Locations: Abyan/ Zinjibar
Reference: The Nation

February

February 12 2012
♦ 3 killed
Three men were initially reported as being ‘beheaded at dawn’ by Yemeni militant group Ansar al Sharia for allegedly giving information to the US to allow it to conduct drone strikes in the area. Although residents of the towns of Jaar and Azzan told Reuters that two Saudis and one Yemeni were executed, a spokesman for Ansar al Sharia later said ‘none of those executed were Saudi citizens, but all three had been working for the intelligence services of the kingdom, a close ally of the United States‘.

In August 2012, video emerged indicating that one of the men – Saleh Ahmed Saleh Al-Jamely – was crucified by Ansar al Sharia. The group indicated that he had been killed in connection with the drone strike on January 31. MEMRI reported that

The other two men, Hassan Naji Hassan Al-Naqeeb – accused of recruiting, delivering chips, and paying spies; and Ramzi Muhammad Qaid Al-Ariqi – accused of spying for the Saudi intelligence by taking photographs of several buildings, were executed in public, but not crucified.

Locations: Jaar, Shebwa
References: The Nation, Reuters, Al Jazeera, The Examiner, MEMRI

February 26 2012
Following mass protests Ali Abduallah Saleh stepped down as President of Yemen. The US government stated that it would work together with Yemen’s new government to ’kill or capture about two dozen of al Qaeda’s most dangerous operatives, who are focused on attacking America and its interests‘. Saleh’s vice-president Abed Rabu Mansour Hadi was inaugurated as President on February 25. In his televised speech, Hadi swore to keep up Yemen’s fight against al Qaeda-linked militants. President Obama’s chief counter terrorism adviser John Brennan visited Yemen on February 18-19. He told a press briefing: ’Everything we do in the counter-terrorism realm, we do in full partnership with our Yemeni counterparts… Our assistance takes many forms: training, advice, different types of equipment.’ On Yemen’s new president, Brennan said that Hadi ‘is committed as well to destroying al Qaeda, and I consider him a good and strong counter-terrorism partner‘.

References: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, US Embassy Yemen, Wall Street Journal

March

March 2 2012
An armoured vehicle carrying a ‘US security team’ came under fire in southern Yemen. While the Pentagon reported that noone was injured in the attack, there were competing claims that either a CIA or FBI official had been killed. Yemeni militant group Ansar al Sharia sent journalists a text reading: ‘The mujihadeen killed a CIA officer on Thursday while he was in Aden province, after tracking him and determining he was cooperating with the Sanaa government.’ Two days later AQAP issued its own statement on an Islamist website, claiming that they had killed:

an American who worked as a high-ranking officer in American intelligence, and that was after monitoring his movements for a long period of time. And targeting him comes after an increase in the American movements in Yemen in the shadow of the new political conditions, and also for bringing in large numbers of American soldiers to Aden city.’

Type of action: Militant ground attack
Location: Aden
References: Reuters, Global Post, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Jihadology

March 6 2012
CNN reported that amid escalating violence by Islamic extremists following the Yemeni election; ‘US trainers are helping the Yemeni government in its effort to retake al-Kowd’. On March 4, a military base near al-Kowd, Abyan, was attacked by Ansar al Sharia militants, claiming the lives of around 90 Yemeni government soldiers.

Location: al-Kowd, Abyan
References: CNN, Jeremy Scahill

YEM042
March 9 2012
♦ 23 – 34 reported killed
♦ ‘Many’ civilians reported killed (2 named)
♦ Up to 55 reported injured
A late evening airstrike on Bayda by US drones struck a gathering of alleged militants. As many as 34 ‘AQAP militants died including ‘four senior leaders‘ – one named as Hadaar al-Homaiqani, a local AQAP leader. Bayda’s governor claimed that ‘two Pakistanis, two Saudi nationals, and one Syrian and one Iraqi‘ were among the dead. A source in the city told Reuters that ‘Flames and smoke could be seen rising from the area,’ while a military official reported that ‘the attack targeted a gathering of al Qaeda elements and a number of them were killed.’ An AQAP spokesman told Xinhua:

More than two US drones are still striking several posts of al-Qaida in three villages outside al-Bayda’s central city.

On April 1 a US official confirmed the attack,with the Los Angeles Times reporting: ‘American missiles soon rained down. The al-Qaida commander was killed, along with 22 other suspected militants, most of them believed to be young recruits receiving military training, U.S. officials said’.

In May 2012 the Washington Post reported that ‘many civilians’ had died in the attack, according to interviews with victims’ relatives and human rights activists. Two brothers of local businessman Salim al-Barakani – one a teacher, the other a cellphone repairman, were among the civilians killed. Al-Barakani told the paper that after the attack:

Villagers were too afraid to go to the area. Al-Qaeda militants took advantage and offered to bury the villagers’ relatives. “That made people even more grateful and appreciative of al-Qaeda,” said Barakani, the businessman. “Afterwards, al-Qaeda told the people, ‘We will take revenge on your behalf.’ ”

Type of action: Air strike, drones and possible aircraft
Location: Bayda
References: Reuters, Bikyamasr, Reuters, Xinhua, AGI, Reuters, Guardian, BBC, Associated Press, Long War Journal, CNN, Daily Times (Pakistan), Yemen Times, UPI, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post

Yemen protest Feb 2011 Washington DC (Colin David Anderson/ Flickr)

YEM043
March 10 2012
♦ 24 reported killed
Air strikes in Jaar and Zinjibar killed up to 24 alleged militants. Although initially reported as the work of the Yemen Air Force, a senior Yemen government official told CNN that the attacks were the work of the US, part of a three-day offensive.

Type of action: Air strike, possible US aircraft or drones
Location: Jaar and Zinjibar
References: Long War Journal, CNN, Yemen Times, UPI

YEM044
March 11 2012
♦ 3 reported killed
An air attack on a militant-occupied factory where arms were allegedly stored killed three near Jaar. Ansar al Sharia said that US drones carried out the early evening strike, with up to five drones reportedly taking part. A senior Yemeni official confirmed the US involvement to CNN: ‘The United States did not inform us on the attacks. We only knew about this after the US attacked.’ However local residents reported that ‘planes’ bombarded the town. AFP also reported that two missiles were fired ‘from the sea‘.

Type of action: Air strike, possible US drones, aircraft and/or missiles
Location: Jebel Khanfar near Jaar
References: Reuters, CNN, AFP, Radio Free Europe, Yemen Times, UPI, Long War Journal, Washington Post

Click here for our 2001-2011 Yemen data

YEM045
March 13 2012
♦ 4-5 reported killed
The ferocious air campaign against al Qaeda and its allies continued with a drone or air strike on a moving vehicle which killed up to five alleged militants. According to the Yemen Post ’a high-ranking security official confirmed that Nasser al-Thafry [aka Zafari], AQAP leader in Al-Byatha was found dead‘ though he may have been killed in linked clashes with Yemen’s security forces. CNN reported that the strike appeared to be the work of the US, which appears highly likely given its precision nature. Six air raids by the Yemen Air Force were also reported in nearby Jaar, as militant group Ansar al Sharia carried out a suicide bombing in revenge, it said, for recent US drone strikes.

Type of action: Air strike, possible US drone or aircraft
Location: Bayda province
References: Yemen Post, Africasia, BBC, Al Arabiya, AFP, Long War Journal, CNN

YEM046
March 18 2012
♦ 14-18 reported killed
Missiles ‘fired from the sea’ onto al Qaeda positions in north-eastern Zinjibar, Abyan province, killed at least 16 suspected militants, TV network al Arabiyah reported. Reiterating this news, the Yemen Times also reported that heavy shelling had targeted fields and badly damaged crops. ‘We are not sure whether Yemeni aircraft or US unmanned drones are responsible for the airstrikes,’ one farmer told the Yemen Times. Reuters called the strike a ‘naval bombardment‘, and the Long War Journal surmised that; ‘If missiles were indeed fired from the sea (and we have no confirmation of this, only the word of an anonymous Yemeni official), then they were most likely fired by US Navy warships. The Yemeni Navy does not possess the capacity to conduct such strikes; its missile boats and corvettes fire only anti-ship missiles. Xinhua reported a local Yemen official as confirming it was a joint US Naval – Yemen Air Force offensive, but placed the naval bombardment at nearby Jaar.

Type of action: Air and naval bombardment, possibly US warships
Location: Zinjibar, Abyan Province
Reference: Al-Arabiya, Reuters, Yemen Times, Voice of Russia, Long War Journal, Sky News, Xinhua, Xinhua

YEM047
March 18 2012
♦ 8 reported killed
♦ 1 civilian reported wounded
Also on Sunday March 18, what was reported as a government warplane bombed Islamist militants in the southern city of Jaar, ‘causing people to flee their homes‘. While al Arabiya stated that there were no immediate reports of casualties, the Associated Press later stated that eight militants were killed in the strike. Residents said a civilian was wounded when an airstrike hit a post office used as a hospital in Jaar. A witness told Xinhua that, along with militant hideouts, some residential buildings in the city were also damaged in the heavy shelling. ‘The strikes demolished more than four houses located in the center of Jaar city. Many people fled their houses for fear of repeated air raids,’ the witness said. This has been reported as an airstrike by the Yemeni government, and there is no suggestion that US planes were involved. However there are reports that a considerable number of Yemeni Air Force personnel were on strike until March 19. This casts doubt on the government’s capacity to launch an aerial bombardment.

Type of action: Air strike, possibly by Yemeni government
Location: Jaar
Reference: Al Arabiya, Reuters, Associated Press, Xinhua

YEM048
March 22 2012
♦ 29-30 reported killed
♦ 24+ reported wounded
According to local Yemen officials, three areas in Zinjibar were struck by US drone strikes, killing at least 30 al Qaeda fighters. The website Arab Monitor stated that ‘dozens’ were wounded in the attacks, which targeted alleged al Qaeda bases. Witnesses also said that a ‘warplane also fired a missile at three vehicles of the al-Qaida group in downtown Zinjibar carrying foreign fighters‘. Associated Press stated that 29 militants had been killed in a ‘rocket and artillery barrage, spread out over a 24-hour period‘ which ended on the night of Thursday March 22. Naval vessels also allegedly took part in the extended bombardment, which some sources claimed were the work of the US Navy. The Pentagon later said that; ‘No American warships from the service’s Fifth Fleet or elsewhere in the region were involved in those operations.’

Type of action: Air strike, US drones, with linked naval bombardment, possibly US
Location: Zinjibar, Abyan Province
References: Xinhua, Arab Monitor, Associated Press, DefCon Hill

YEM049
March 30 2012
♦ 5 killed
♦ 6-9 injured including 5 civilians
♦ 1 civilian killed
Four alleged Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) militants died (possibly local leaders) and three were ‘critically injured’ after a US drone struck their vehicles, according to Yemen military and security officials. The attack, in Azan, Shabwa province, came as the men left Friday prayers according to Associated Press. However, a civilian, Mohamed Saleh Al-Suna was also killed and six others injured in the strike, officials and eyewitnesses told Reuters. The six civilians were in a car travelling in the opposite direction. Five of the civilian injured were identified by the Yemen Times as Saleh Ali Ba Zyad, Saleh Abdulfatha Hamid, Abdullah Mohamed Hamid, Hamza Khaled Ba Zayad, and Ali Hassan. In a linked second drone attack nearby a house was also struck, injuring four people. A US official confirmed both this strike and a CIA attack in Pakistan on the same day.

Ansar al Sharia later attacked a gas pipeline in the area, texting journalists to say:

The mujahideen blew up the pipeline … in retaliation for the strike for which Crusader America and its obedient slave in Sanaa are responsible.’

The Yemen strikes came on the same day that AQAP was reported to have appointed new leaders in southern Yemen to replace those lost in recent US drone strikes.

Type of action: Air strike, US drone strikes
Location: Azan, Shabwa Province
References: Associated Press, Monsters & Critics, Reuters, Reuters, Daily Telegraph, Al Jazeera, Xinhua, PTI, CNN, The National, Yemen Times, Yemen Fox

Old Sanaa city at dusk in 2012 (Photo Juadluz83/ Flickr)

April

YEM050
April 1-3 2012
♦ Up to 38 killed
Multiple airstrikes killed as many as 38 ‘suspected al Qaeda militants’ in Lahj and Abyan over a 48-hour period, according to CNN. A number of officials confirmed US involvement, with one local official telling the agency that ‘The U.S. is involved in a number of the latest attacks, but that does not mean our air force is not in control of the raids occurring.’ He said that the United States ‘has taken part in three of the airstrikes, but said Yemen’s air force is leading the operation. He did not detail the type of support provided,’ according to CNN.

Type of action: Air strike, US drone strikes
Location: Lahjh and Abyan
References: CNN

Click here for our 2001-2011 Yemen data

YEM051
April 7 2012
♦ 0-8 killed
News agencies reported a night time US drone strike on a moving vehicle in Shabwa province. The Yemen Air Force lacks the technical ability to carry out such a strike. The Wall Street Journal reported that the target was AQAP number three, Qasim al-Raimi. It reported that ‘After nightfall Saturday, Mr Raimi and three followers started driving on a road out of Shebwa toward Marib, residents said. Around 10 pm, a missile struck the road near their car, but missed the vehicle, according to two local security officials.’ However according to an unnamed tribal chief, the strike ‘killed eight Al-Qaeda suspects’, who he identified as ‘five Yemenis and three Arab foreigners.’Al-Qaeda militants were aboard a vehicle on their way from Shabwa to (nearby) Marib province when a US drone fired a missile at their vehicle, killing them all. The chief also reported that drones were seen ‘flying over several areas in Shabwa, especially those which are Al-Qaeda strongholds — Rawdah, Huta, and Azzan’. The attack was the eighth confirmed drone strike of 2012. The Egyptian al Qaeda operative Abu Musab al Masri was reported dead by the Long War Journal, killed in an April drone strike on Shabwa province. Long War Journal cited a vague date reported by the Madad News Agency in surmising YEM051 or YEM055 as the possible strikes responsible.

Type of action: Air strike, US drone strike
Location: Shabwa Province
References: AFP, Associated Press, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Xinhua, Yemen Post, Long War Journal

YEM052
April 9 2012
♦ 16 killed
The Yemen Defence Ministry reported that ‘Yemeni-U.S. joint air raids bombed al-Qaida hideouts in the southern province of Abyan, killing at least 16 militants’, according to Xinhua.Other agencies did not specify US involvement.

Type of action: Air strike with Yemen, possible US drone strike
Location: Abyan Province
References: Xinhua, Reuters, Associated Press, Long War Journal, Yemen Post

YEM053
April 11 2012
♦ 10-14 killed
♦ 10 injured
A targeted evening strike on an ‘al Qaeda convoy’ reportedly killed up to 14 alleged militants near Loder, Abyan Province. AP reported that the vehicle had been stolen from a government barracks days earlier. A local government official told Xinhua that the attack was the work of a US drone, and that ‘there are foreign nationals among the killed.’ The Yemen Defence Ministry later said that Saudi, Pakistani and Somali nationals had been killed, but did not specify any US involvement. As many as 72 alleged militants died in Yemen military operations around Loder that day, with a senior government official saying:

The battle of Loder is considered a decisive one for the army against the terrorist groups and a prelude to the cleansing of all towns seized by militants in the province of Abyan.

Two senior militants were reported killed in the fighting – Imad al-Manshaby and Ahmed Mohammed Taher – though it was not clear if they had died in the vehicle attack. As many as three other airstrikes may also have taken place around the town.

Type of action: Air strike, probable US drone
Location: Loder village, Abyan
Reference: Xinhua, Bickyamasr, Associated Press, Gulf Times (AFP), Reuters, AFP, Yemen Post, Bikyamasr

YEM054
April 14 2012
♦ 3 killed
An evening airstrike on a vehicle killed at least three Ansar al-Sharia members, among them reportedly Mohammed al-Sabri, a ‘leading militant’. Yemen’s airforce reportedly lacks the ability to launch precision strikes on moving vehicles. Associated Press cited two Yemen military officials as saying that US drones had carried out the attack in Bayda province, with a security official telling AFP the same. Eyewitness Abdel-Salam al-Ansi told the agency that he heard a strong explosion and had rushed outside: ‘The car had been turned into a ball of fire.’ A Yemen Defence Ministry statement referred only to an ‘airstrike’ and reported that three ‘local al-Qaeda leaders’ had died. Ansar al-Sharia also later said that three of its fighters had died in a US drone strike.

Type of action: Airstrike, US drone strike
Location: al Zahir district, Bayda province
References: Associated Press, Lebanon Daily Star, Reuters, Xinhua, AFP, Yemen Post, Al Arabiya

YEM055
April 16 2012
♦ 5-7 killed
Up to five drone strikes killed at least five militants in the southeastern Shabwa province. CNN reported militant hideouts, checkpoints, training facilities and weapons warehouses were targeted in the strikes. The Yemen defence ministry initially claimed the attacks were carried out by Yemeni warplanes. Two security officials and one defence ministry official later told CNN US drones targeted the militants. This was echoed by a security official cited by AFP who reported a local official claiming a US drone targeted five militants late on Monday. A local security official told Xinhua leading foreign fighters were killed in the strikes. An intelligence officer told Xinhua the foreigners were a Syrian and an Algerian. Two defence officials told CNN the US has conducted at least 11 attacks on Yemeni soil in the preceding week. Long War Journal reported Egyptian al Qaeda militant Abu Musab al Masri killed in an April drone strike on Shabwa. Citing a vague date reported by the Madad News Agency, Long War Journal surmised either YEM051 or YEM055 as the responsible strikes.

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US drone
Location: Azzan district, Shabwa province
References: CNN, AFP, Xinhua, Long War Journal

YEM056
April 18 2012
♦ 6-10 killed
An air strike near the southern village of Loder has killed at least six militants according to a Defence Ministry statement. Reuters could not independently confirm who launched the strike and AFP said the government did not say if the air force or US drones were responsible. Xinhua reported the attack destroyed a number of armoured vehicles captured by the militants. Local residents told Xinhua that two further air strikes targeting militant positions on Jabal Khanfer, a hill over looking the city of Jaar in Abyan province. At least four militants were killed in this second action according to the Yemen Post.

Type of action: Air strike, possible US drone
Location: Loder village and Jaar city, Abyan province
References: AFP, Reuters, Xinhua, Yemen Post

April 19 2012
The Washington Post triggered significant debate on the future direction of US drone strikes in Yemen, revealing extensive details of US targeting policy in Yemen. It reported that the CIA was seeking the right to launch so-called ‘signature strikes’ in Yemen – attacks on alleged militants the Agency did not know the identity of. According to a senior Administration official, present CIA tactics ‘still [have] a very firm emphasis on being surgical and targeting only those who have a direct interest in attacking the United States.’ In contrast, the Pentagon’s JSOC ‘has broader authority than the CIA to pursue militants in Yemen and is not seeking permission to use signature strikes, US officials said.’ Since most of the recent US strikes were against low-ranking or unknown militants, this indicated that most current attacks were by JSOC rather than the CIA. Officials also expressed concern that the US risked being perceived as ‘taking sides in a civil war’. [see also April 26]

Location: Washington DC
Reference: Washington Post, The Atlantic, CNN, Gregory Johnsen, New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek

YEM057
April 21 2012
♦ 12 – 17 killed
♦ 5 injured
As many as 17 alleged militants were killed in a series of of strikes in the south of the country. The Defence Ministry said 17 alleged militants had been killed in a raid near Loder. But an unnamed local government official told Xinhua two Yemeni Air Force jets killed 12 militants in the strike. Kuwaiti agency KUNA reported the strike targeted a house where a group of militants were meeting, citing a defence ministry announcement. The Yemen Post reported this strike killed at least 11 and destroyed captured military vehicles and that a separate strike killed two more militants in Abyan province. AFP said it was unclear whether the strike was carried out by the Yemen Air Force or US drones.

Type of action: Air strike, possible US drone
Location: Loder, Abyan province
References: Xinhua, Yemen Post, AFP, KUNA

YEM058
April 22 2012
♦ 4 killed
At least four militants were killed when a drone strike destroyed two of three cars driving through the desert area of Sanda in central Marib province. Two senior security officials told CNN that US drones conducted the strike. The Yemen Air Force lacks the technical ability to carry out such a precise strike and has suffered serious problems of morale and discipline this year. The Yemen Post reported the recently ousted President’s son Ahmed Ali Abdullah Saleh, commander of the Republican Guard, had ordered a battalion of infantry to storm the Air Force base in the capital Sana’a on the same day as this attack. The Yemeni Embassy in Washington announced 34-year-old senior AQAP militant Mohammed Saeed Al-Umada (aka Ghareeb al-Taizi) was killed in the strike. This was confirmed by AQAP. Al-Umada died along with two of his aides the embassy said. In October AQAP released the names of two more militants who died in the attack, Hassah Hussein Dalel and Basher al Najidi. In 2005 al-Umada was convicted of supporting the 2002 bombing of French oil tanker Limburg which killed one crew member and injured a dozen more. In February 2006 he escaped from his Sanaa jail along with 22 other militants who would go on to become the core of AQAP. Among the escapees were Qasim al-Raimi (aka al-Raymi) and Nasser al-Wuhayshi. Al-Raimi was AQAP’s military commander and had survived strikes in 2009 (YEM003), 2010 (YEM006) and 2012 (YEM051). Al-Wuhayshi was regional leader of al-Qaeda who was thought to be meeting Anwar al-Awlaki when the first attempt was made to assassinate the American born radical cleric (YEM004). In 2008 a Yemeni court sentenced al-Umada in absentia to at least 10 years in prison for targeting the country’s energy infrastructure. The Washington embassy said al-Umada was fourth on Yemen’s most-wanted list. A senior Yemen Defence Ministry official told CNN:

This is a success for the war on terror. Al-Umda has been on the run for years and his absence will help in limiting the terror network’s operation in Yemen.

Al-Umada is alleged to have received training from Osama Bin Laden at the al-Farouq camp. The embassy said he commanded several AQAP military operations and provided the organisation with financial and logistical support.

Type of action: Airstrike, US drone strike
Location: Sanda, Marib province
References: AP, Xinhua, Bloomberg, AFP, KUNA, Reuters, CNN, Reuters, CNN, Xinhua, KUNA, Critical Threats, AP, WLSAM, CNN, Al Wefaq News (Arabic)

YEM059
April 23 2012
♦ 3 killed
♦ 2 injured
A possible drone strike hit vehicles in Shabwa province leaving three dead and two injured. Local Mohammed Bindighar told AP he had seen drones circling overhead almost daily for the last five months. The strike came as the Yemen Defence Ministry announced at least 23 alleged al-Qaeda militants have been killed as the Yemen Army battles with insurgents for control of the south and east of the country.

Type of action: Possible US drone
Location: Nasab, Shabwa province
References: AP, AFP, Reuters, Bikyamasr

YEM060
April 23 2012
♦ 0 – 4 killed
Fighting around the southern town of Loder killed up to 15 alleged militants with as many as four killed in an airstrike. The Yemen Army bombarded the town overnight as they continued their efforts to reclaim ground in Abyan. Local sources told AFP a Yemeni fighter plane hit a vehicle, killing four. But the Yemen Air Force lacks the technical ability to carry out precision strikes on moving vehicles. It has suffered considerable problems with morale and discipline in 2012. A tribal leader told Reuters he feared this assault on Loder may have jeopardised negotiations for the release of a Saudi Arabian diplomat kidnapped outside his Aden residence on March 28.

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US drone
Location: Loder, Abyan province
References: AP, AFP, Xinhua, Reuters, Bikyamasr

April 26 2012
A week after reports that the CIA was seeking authorisation to launch signature strikes, the White House gave the tactic the green light. Because the CIA would reportedly only target high-value terrorists, and not foot soldiers fighting an insurgency, the new targeting policy was called ‘signature lite’ by one US defence official. Others reported that the tactic had been renamed Terrorist Attack Disruption Strikes, or TADS. A previous request in 2011 for an expanded strike programme had been rebuffed.

Yemeni government sources told AP that President Hadi had given permission for the CIA ‘to increase the pace of their strikes’ but had drawn the line at signature strikes. Although fearful of civilian and non-militant tribesmen being killed inadvertently, the Yemeni government was said to be keen to increase counter-terrorism aid from the US. This included drone strikes as well as more military trainers and advisors. But US officials expressed concern that America may be dragged into another regional conflict. A senior US defence official told the WSJ:

We have to be careful about what they want help with. Do they [the Yemenis] want help taking out terrorist targets, or do they want help with their civil war?

There was some suggestion of a schism in Washington’s counter terrorism community. The WSJ reported that some military and intelligence officials privately complained that the White House policy in Yemen was too cautious.

References: Wall Street Journal, AP, New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Newsweek, New York Times

YEM061
April 26 2012
♦ 3 killed
At least three alleged militants were killed in a possible drone strike in the southern city of Mudiyah. Reuters reported the strike targeted the alleged militants in a vehicle. Residents said they saw two drones after hearing an explosion. A second drone strike hit Mudiyah the same day according to local sources. There were no reported casualties. Critical Threats reported that Yemeni warplanes targeted sites in Shaqwa, on the Abyan coast.

Type of action: Possible US drone
Location: Mudiyah, Shaqwa, Abyan province
References: Reuters, Critical Threats

YEM062
April 29 2012
♦ 3 killed
Three alleged militants were killed driving through the northern province of al-Jawf. A tribal source told AFP the car was completely destroyed and all its occupants killed. The source said the three were al-Qaeda militants traveling to give condolences to families of militants killed in fighting in Abyan. AP reported Yemeni officials ‘had no details on the source of the attack or the identity of the three.’ But to hit a moving vehicle requires technical abilities that is reportedly beyond the Yemen Air Force. This strike comes on the same day 73 Yemeni soldiers were released from captivity in Jaar. The men were captured on March 4 when Ansar al-Sharia overran an army camp near Zinjibar, the capital of Abyan province.

Type of action: Possible US drone
Location: al-Jawf
References: AP, AFP

YEM063
April 30 2012
♦ 4 killed
Four alleged militants were killed in an airstrike near the town of Loder. The strike hit a vehicle according to a local government official. The Yemen Air Force reportedly does not have the capabilities to carry out a precision strike on a vehicle. The strike came as government forces battled ‘dozens of militants’ who had attacked an army barracks on the outskirts of Loder. Up to 21 militants, soldiers and tribesmen died in the battle. But because access to the area was restricted Reuters said they could not independently verify the casualty figures. The same day Ansar al Sharia announced they had seized 20 tanks from the Yemen Army in Abyan.

Type of action: Air strike, possible US drone
Location: Loder, Abyan province
References: Reuters, Xinhua, AFP

YEM064
April 30 2012
♦ 3 killed
A strike hit a vehicle near Zinjibar killing three alleged al Qaeda militants. A Yemeni presidential aide told CNN the Yemen government had approved a series of US drone strikes on militant positions in the south of the country. Since mid-April there had been at least two US drone strikes a day, the aide continued.

On June 20 a jihadist website reported that Muhammad Fazi al Harasheh, aka Abu Hammam al Zarqawi, had died in a drone strike on a vehicle. Zarqawi was the nephew of former Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, killed by the US in 2006. Initial reports suggested he had been killed by a landmine. Although the precise date of his death is unknown, this April 30 strike appears to most closely match the description. The Long War Journal reported a militant statement as saying ‘They were unable to kill him in the battles, so they sent spies to guide them to him. “A drone came to bomb the car in which he and one of the brother were riding, and so his pure soul went to its maker.’

Type of action: Air strike, possible US drone
Location: Zinjibar, Abyan province
References: AP, CNN, Long War Journal

Click here for our 2001-2011 Yemen data

May

YEM065
May 2 2012
♦ 10 – 15 killed
Three Yemeni security officials told CNN a US drone attacked a militant training camp outside the southern town of Jaar, killing up to 15. The strike was one of a series targeting Jaar, Zinjibar and Loder planned for the proceeding weeks the officials said. An anonymous Yemeni presidential aide told CNN the US had been launching at least two strikes a day since mid April. The aide continued:

This is part of the strategy to uproot al Qaeda from areas they control…The Yemeni government is giving the green light for the attacks and targets chosen carefully.

The strike resembled previous US drone strikes according to AP but added the US would not comment on it. Local residents told Xinhua the Yemen Air Force launched two air strikes on the training camp.

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US drone
Location: Jaar, Abyan province
References: AP, Xinhua, CNN, CNN

YEM066
May 6 2012
♦ 2-4 killed
♦ 1 civilian reported killed
An Al Qaeda bomber wanted for his role in the deadly 2000 bombing of the USS Cole was killed in a CIA drone strike on a vehicle in the remote mountain valley of Wadi Rafad. Fahd al-Quso, who admitted to being part responsible for the death of 17 US sailors, died in the attack in Shabwa province. Also initially reported killed was al-Quso’s nephew Fahed Salem al-Akdam, described as a ‘senior AQAP leader.’ However the Washington Post later identified the man as 19-year old farm worker Nasser Salim, who was no relation to Quso. His uncle told the paper:

He was torn to pieces. He was not part of al-Qaeda. But by America’s standards, just because he knew Fahd al-Quso, he deserved to die with him.

Both Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the Yemen government confirmed al-Quso’s death, with Ansar al-Sharia telling Reuters that ‘Al Qaeda affirms the martyrdom of the Fahd al-Qasaa in an American attack this afternoon in Rafad.’ The New York Times cautioned that US officials still wanted ‘a few days‘ to confirm Quso’s death, which had been reported before. The strike led to retaliatory attacks against Yemen soldiers killing at least 32, according to al Arabiya and the BBC. Confirming the US role in the attack, an official told agencies:

Fahd al-Quso was a senior terrorist operative of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula who was deeply involved in ongoing terrorist plotting against Yemeni and U.S. interests at the time of his death. He was also involved in numerous attacks over many years that murdered Americans as well as Yemeni men, women and children.

Following the strike details emerged of al-Quso’s link to an AQAP attempt to blow up an airliner. Information gleaned from a Saudi Arabian spy in AQAP who foiled the group’s plot reportedly enabled the CIA to target al-Quso. British intelligence services MI5 and MI6 were allegedly involved and British authorities said to be ‘deeply distressed‘ that details of the apparently joint US-UK-Saudi Arabia operation had been leaked. Reuters reported President Obama’s counter terrorism adviser John Brennan inadvertently let slip the presence of the spy within AQAP, an admission that ended the operation prematurely.

Type of action: Airstrike, confirmed US drone
Location: Wadi Rafad, Shabwa province
References: BBC, Associated Press, Antiwar.com, IANS, Press Association, Reuters, New York Times, CNN, Al Arabiya, AFP, Al Jazeera, KUNA, MSNBC, Yemen Observer, ABC News, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, BBC, Reuters, Washington Post, FBI Wanted poster

May 8th 2010
The Pentagon announced that it was sending ‘military trainers’ to Yemen, previously withdrawn during the Arab Spring uprising. A Pentagon spokesman said that ‘We have begun to reintroduce small numbers of trainers into Yemen.’ A second US official told AP that ‘the arriving troops are special operations forces, who work under more secretive arrangements than conventional U.S. troops and whose expertise includes training indigenous forces.’ The agency also reported that the US now has ‘a substantial naval presence near Yemen’, with around 2,000 US Marines deployed nearby.

Location: Yemen
References: Associated Press, AntiWar.com

Yemen’s Counter Terrorism unit in 2010 – key target for US training (Flickr/Ammar Abd Rabbo)

YEM067
May 10 2012
♦ 5-12 killed
A series of strikes in the small hours killed up to 8 in Abyan province. There were confused reports of the death toll, targets and source of the attacks. CNN reported that a drone targeted a convoy of vehicles carrying senior leaders of Ansar al Sharia, killing eight, adding that the strike preceded three airstrikes on Jaar by the Yemen Air Force. But a source told AFP ‘three explosions rocked the town at midnight’ when a drone struck a residence in Jaar, killing eight alleged militants meeting inside. Residents told al Arabiya 12 militants were killed by a US drone as they met outside Jaar and the Yemen Observer reported 10 killed in a number of strikes by a US drone and the Yemen Air Force. AP reported the strike ‘completely leveled’ a house where alleged militants were meeting, but said only five died. One of the dead was later reported as a senior AQAP member responsible for armaments called Jallad or al-Galadi. According to AFP the strike was precise and destructive:

‘Eight militants were killed and their bodies were left in pieces,’ the source told AFP as witnesses said parts of the two story building were completely destroyed. No other houses were affected in what appeared to be surgical strikes based on precise information.

However Jaar residents told Reuters the strike hit outside the town and appeared to come from the sea while Xinhua reported a Yemen Navy bombardment hit AQAP positions in Jaar, killing nine. A government official told Xinhua the attack struck several compounds and two local al Qaeda leaders were believed to be among the dead. Local sources told the Yemen Observer one was known as Abu Huthaifa Al Sanani.

Type of action: Airstrike, possible naval bombardment, possible US drone
Location: Jaar, Abyan province
References: CNN, AFP, Reuters. Associated Press, Xinhua, Critical Threats, AFP, Associated Press, Al Arabiya, Yemen Observer, Al Jazeera

YEM068
May 10 2012
♦ 2-4 reported killed
AP reported two more alleged militants killed in a second strike on Shaqra, northeast of the provincial capital Zinjibar. The Yemen Observer reported AQAP claims that a drone killed four men in the strike. Al Qaeda confirmed the organisation’s second-in-command for Abyan province Kheldoon Al Sayed died in the strike. But AQAP denied senior member Qasim al Raimi also perished. Al Raimi survived two strikes in April 2012, YEM051 and YEM055. Al Jazeera reported that only two died in the strike, reporting an anonymous Yemeni official as saying that ‘one of those killed was al-Qaeda’s second-in-command for Lawder, a town further north that was controlled by the group last year until its residents drove the fighters out.’

In Washington the same day, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta discussed US military and intelligence operations in Yemen:

We will go after al-Qaida wherever they are and wherever they try to hide. And one of the places that they clearly are located is Yemen. We’ve obviously – the United States, both military and intelligence communities, have gone after al-Qaida, and we continue to go after al-Qaida… We have operations there. The Yemenis have actually been very cooperative in the operations that we have conducted there. And we will continue to work with them to go after the enemies that threaten the United States.

Type of action: Airstrike, possible naval bombardment, possible US drone
Location: Shaqra near Zinjibar, Abyan province
References: CNN, AFP, Reuters, Associated Press, Xinhua, Critical Threats, AFP, Associated Press, Al Arabiya, Yemen Observer, Al Jazeera, Bikya Masr, US Department of Defense

YEM069
May 12 2012
♦ 6-7 reported killed
A reported US drone strike took place in al-Hosoon, near the city of Marib. A tribal chief told Reuters that ‘a drone fired two rockets at two vehicles, killing five Al-Qaeda members.’ Reuters later revised its report to say that seven died in the attack. The Yemen Ministry of Information later said that six had died, named as Mohsen Abdul-Rahman Al-Youssefi, Saleh Mohammed Jaber Shabwani, Abu Mutib Al-Yamani, Abu Laith Al-Hadrami and two unidentified Saudis. In October AQAP released a list of militants killed in the strike, adding Abu Mohammed al Shihiri and Abu Abdullah al Sanaani to the four names released by the Ministry of Information. The attack – and two others that day – were likely linked to a Yemen military offensive attempting to recapture territory in the south. Reuters reported:

Yemeni air force planes dropped leaflets on Saturday urging civilians to leave areas held by militants targeted by the army offensive, prompting a mass exodus from parts of Abyan.

AFP also reported a Yemeni military official as saying that US forces were providing ‘logistical support’ for the offensive.

Type of action: Possible US drone strike
Location: Al-Hosoon village, near Marib
References: Reuters, Associated Press, Reuters, Xinhua, BBC, CNN, ABC News, Al Arabiya, The National, Al Jazeera, Yemen Post, Yemen Ministry of Information (via Abyan Press, in Arabic), Al Wefaq Press (Arabic)

YEM070
May 12 2012
♦ 10 reported killed
Agencies reported a second strike of the day, also on a convoy of vehicles: ‘One drone fired rockets at a convoy of three pick-up trucks travelling on a desert road in Hareeb area of Shabwa province. Seven militants were killed and all the three vehicles were destroyed,’ the agency said, saying that ‘the Al Qaeda militants were reportedly planning to attend a meeting in the area.’ CNN reported that only one of the vehicles was destroyed, with the other two escaping. Security officials told the news organisation that ‘the dead included three al Qaeda leaders.’

Yemen’s Ministry of Information later named those killed as Ali Hassan Ali Gharib Al -Shabwani from the Shabwan family; Hassan Saud Hassan Bin Mouaily, from the Obayda clan; Hamid Nasir Al-Aqraa, from the Jadaan clan; Mohsen Saeed Kharassan, from the Jadaan clan; Ahmed Saleh Mohammed Al-Faqeer, from the Murad clan; Abdullah Ali Muhammad Miqan aka Al-Quti, from the Obeida clan; and Mohammed Saleh Bakeer Al-Faqeer, from the Murad clan (all from Marib province). Two men from Shabwa province were reported killed, Aref Issa Chabwi and Mubarak, Saleh Al-Nasser Al-Nassi, along with ‘terrorist’ Abu Obeida Al-Masri, an Egyptian.

Type of action: Possible US drone strike
Location: Between Marib and Shabwa
References: Xinhua, BBC, CNN, Al Arabiya, The National, Al Jazeera, Yemen Ministry of Information (via Abyan Press, in Arabic), Al Wefaq Press (Arabic)

YEM071
May 12 2012
♦ 6-10 killed
A possible third drone strike of the day killed between 6 and 10 alleged al Qaeda militants at a ‘hideout‘, according to a local Yemeni official.

Type of action: Possible US drone strike
Location: Al-Aeen, near Aden, Shabwa Province
References: Reuters, Associated Press, Reuters, Xinhua, Reuters, ABC News, Al Arabiya

YEM072
May 14 2012
♦ 10 killed
As the Yemen government continued its offensive against insurgents and militants in the south of the country a series of airstrikes targeted alleged militants in Abyan. Government jets reportedly hit alleged al Qaeda positions in Shaqra, near the city of Zinjibar, killing ten. A militant leader called al-Muhajir was later named among the dead although it remains unclear if he perished in YEM072 or YEM073.

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US
Location: Shaqra, Abyan province
References: Associated Press, Associated Press, AFP, International Business Times, Critical Threats, Yemen Post

YEM073
May 14 2012
♦ 6 killed
In a separate strike, missiles were fired at a moving vehicle near the town of Loder. The vehicle was destroyed and six were killed in a strike reportedly carried by Yemeni aircraft. But the Yemeni armed forces have suffered considerable morale and disciplinary problems since a popular uprising unseated the president. Furthermore the Yemen Air Force reportedly lacks the ability to launch precision strikes on moving vehicles which casts doubt on whether the airstrikes were carried out by Yemen or US forces.

Type of action: Possible US drone strike
Location: Loder, Abyan province
References: Associated Press, Associated Press, AFP, International Business Times, Critical Threats, Yemen Post

YEM074
May 14 2012
♦ 2 injured, both children
In a third strike of the day two children were reported wounded in Jaar. AP reported a Yemeni warplane missed its target and accidentally fired on civilians.

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US
Location: Jaar, Abyan province
References: Associated Press, Associated Press

YEM075
May 15 2012
♦ 14-16 killed
♦ 12-26 civilians reported killed
♦ 20-21 civilians reported injured
A double airstrike in Jaar reportedly killed at least a dozen civilians and injured as many as 21, as well as killing 2-3 alleged ‘Al Qaeda militants.’ The BBC reported that the civilians ‘were hit as they were trying to dig out the bodies of those killed in the initial attack.’ Initial reports claimed that the attack was the work of the Yemen Air Force, with Xinhua describing ‘a botched air strike carried out by Yemeni warplanes’ on a residential building near a militant compound. However, shortly afterwards CNN reported that the attack had been carried out by US drones, killing eight civilians and injuring a further seven, along with three ‘senior al Qaeda leaders.’

Middle East Online also reported that the strike was the work of US drones, stating that eight civilian bodies had been pulled from the wreckage of a house, and that a further four of 25 civilians injured had later died. Two alleged militants were also killed, it said. In a slightly different version of events, Reuters said that a strike had hit cars and a house, killing ten militants, with a follow-up attack killing six civilians. On May 18 USA Today reported an eyewitness to the attack, Samir al Mushari, as saying that 26 civilians died in the two possible drone strikes. A witness told NPR in June 2012 that the first strike killed one man in the house and the second strike killed at least 12 people instantly. ‘”They were cut…in pieces,” he says. A wall where the second strike hit is still covered in blood.’ The residents who spoke to NPR claimed the strike was carried out by a US strike fighter that was grey and ‘looked like an eagle,’ not a drone or Yemen Air Force jet. Abdullah was badly burnt in the second strike. He told NPR the man who died in the first strike was just an ordinary citizen.

Amnesty International said a pregnant woman died in the strike. Aged in her thirties, Mariam Abdo Said was a passer-by hit by flying shrapnel. In a December 2012 report, the NGO said a pair of strikes destroyed a house in Jaar, killing its civilian owner Nuweir al Arshani, and killed 13 more civilians including Abdo Said. A witness said ‘at around 8am or 8.30am, an aircraft flying low over Jaar roared towards al Hurur…and bombed Nuweir’s home.’ Passers-by gathered at the scene and the aircraft ‘returned and bombed and fired into the crowd.’

Amnesty also published the names of 12 men killed in the follow-up attack:

Majed Ahmed Abdullah Awad – aged 26
Salem Mohsen Haidar al Jalladi – aged around 35
Adeeb Ahmed Ghanem al Doba’i
Mohammed Abdullah Saleh Hussein
Munir bin al Haji bin al Assi,
Ahmed Abdullah Ahmed al Shahari
Salem Abdullah Ahmed Abkar
Hussien Mubarak Ahmed
Abd al Rahman Motahhar
Hafez Abdullah Mubarak
Mohsen Ali Salem
Amir al Azzani

Hassan Ahmed Abdullah spoke to al Akbar about his brother who died in the strike. He said:

About 15 minutes later [after the initial strike], another plane suddenly struck the same building killing 15 people, including my brother. He was wounded by shrapnel in his chest, liver, and neck. He also had burns on 50 percent of his body.’

The ICRC later reported that it was ‘extremely concerned‘ at possible airstrikes on civilian locations and urged all warring parties to protect civilian life. The civilian death toll was the highest attributed to US action in Yemen since an attack on a former police station in Mudiya killed up to 30 civilians on July 14 2011. In a possible worrying development, there were reports that drones had returned to the attack after crowds had gathered at the scene of the initial strike in Jaar. If confirmed, this would mark the first known case in which US drones had attacked rescuers in Yemen. In an investigation with the Sunday Times earlier this year the Bureau exposed a similar practice in Pakistan, identifying a dozen US strikes on rescuers that had killed more than 50 civilians.

Type of action: Air strikes, possible US drone strikes
Location: Jaar, Abyan province
References: Xinhua, CNN, Middle East Online, AFP, Reuters, Al Arabiya, Associated Press, The National, Reuters, Yemen Post, New York Times, BBC, ICRC, USA Today, National Public Radio, Al Akbar, Amnesty International

May 15 2012
Associated Press reported that almost 60 US troops were just 65 kilometres from the front lines, at al-Annad airbase, from where they were were ‘coordinating assaults and airstrikes and providing information to Yemeni forces.’ A Yemen official said that ‘They brought their mobile houses and buildings for a long stay,’ with another saying that the US personnel were overseeing strikes by U.S. drone aircraft.

US and Yemeni officials told the LA Times that at least 20 US special forces soldiers based in Yemen were involved in the concerted Yemeni offensive trying to retake lost ground in the south. The paper said the troops were using ‘satellite imagery, drone video, eavesdropping systems and other technical means’ to target militants. The US contingent is expected to grow according to a senior military official. A source with knowledge of the intelligence operations told the paper teams of CIA officers and US contractors had been operating in Yemen for some time, hunting militants and generating intelligence networks for drone strikes. The White House insisted ‘the US military role in Yemen is limited’ and Natonal Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said:

We have not, and will not, get involved in a broader counterinsurgency effort. That would not serve our long-term interests and runs counter to the desires of the Yemeni government and its people.

Militants launched an attack on the al-Annad airbase on May 13, killing one Yemeni soldier. The reports appeared to contradict Pentagon claims on May 8 that US military advisers were being sent back to Yemen for ‘routine’ training purposes. In a separate development, a blogger identified the presence of eight US F15-E Strike Eagles at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti. Yemen’s own air force is not capable of precision strikes, with speculation that US or Saudi aircraft may instead have been carrying out attributed attacks.

Type of action: Assault co-ordination
Location: al-Annad airbase, Lahj Province
Reference: Associated Press, The National, Voice of America, The Aviationist, Wired, Los Angeles Times

YEM076
May 16 2012
♦ 16 killed
♦ 5-14 injured
At least 16 alleged militants were killed in a strike which wounded up to 14 more. AFP reported two strikes targeted a farm near Moudia, outside Loder. Officials said AQAP commander Samir al Fathani (aka Samir Salem al-Moqayda) was killed. Al Fathani’s brother Abdul Munim al Fathani was involved in the bombing of the USS Cole reported AP. He was killed in a drone strike in January 2012 (YEM040). A local military official told Xinhua a Yemen Air Force fighter jet targeted two AQAP squads in the strike. The attack came amid a concerted offensive by the Yemen armed forces in Abyan province. As many as 20,000 soldiers were reportedly involved in the push with assistance from US special forces. Witnesses told AFP the US Navy was also involved in the attacks although the naval bombardment was not confirmed by official sources.

Type of action: Air strikes, possible US drone, possible US Navy
Location: Moudia, Abyan province
References: Associated Press, Albawaba, AFP, Reuters, Xinhua, Xinhua, BBC, Middle East Online

YEM077
Mid-May 2012
♦ 6 killed
♦ 0-1 civilian killed
Two strikes hit Jaar in mid-May. One hit a house local people said was being rented by Ansar al Sharia militants. Neighbour Adnan Ahmed Saleh told NPR ‘I got back inside, closed the door, and then the first rocket hit’. The house next door to his was destroyed. The next day AQAP-linked militants ‘cleaned up the mess’ and ‘paid compensation for the house. The second strike targeted AQAP leader Nadir Shedadi. It his home but only killed Shedadi’s cousin Wael al Dhai, a civilian according to residents.

Type of action: Airstrikes, possible US
Location: Jaar, Abyan
References: National Public Radio, National Public Radio

YEM078
May 17 2012
♦ 2-3 killed
♦ 0-2 injured
Three alleged militants were killed in a possible US drone strike in the eastern province of Hadhramout. Reuters reported a car apparently carrying explosives was destroyed when the overnight strike targeted a convoy. The strike came at 00.45 and was audible from 15 km distance reported the Yemen Times. Local residents said the three were all members of a militant cell. AP reported two men in another car in the convoy were wounded in the strike. A local security official told Xinhua a US drone fired two missiles on a moving pick-up truck as it passed through the Shibam area, killing two alleged militants. The defence ministry said two of the dead were local AQAP leaders, calling them Zeid bin Taleb and Mutii Bilalafi. They were both on the Yemeni government’s most wanted list for terrorist attacks in the country the official told Xinhua. A security source told the Yemen Times the convoy consisted of two cars, the second of which was damaged in the attack. The source told the paper one of the dead was a ‘prominent leader of Al-Qaida’ called Mohammed al Raimi. Al Raimi (aka al-Raymi) survived two strikes in April 2012, YEM051 and YEM055, and was credited with being AQAP third in command. Eye witnesses told Yemen Times four survivors from the second car were driven from the scene of the strike 25 minutes after the event in a Toyota Hilux.

The strike appears to be the first to have been reported in real time on Twitter. A Yemeni lawyer and activist reported drone sightings on the social media network before the attack and said two vehicles were destroyed. The strike came as Yemeni officials announced they have ‘cleansed Loder [of al Qaeda],’ as part of a heavy military offensive in the south of the country. A local official told AFP the Yemen Air Force had launched several airstrikes that night on the southern cities of Shaqra and Arqoub but with no reported casualties.

Type of action: Possible US drone strikes
Location: Shibam, Hadhramout province
References: Reuters, AFP, Xinhua, AFP, AP, AGI, BBC, Hadramout Today (Arabic), Mukalla Star (Arabic), Seyoun Press (Arabic), BBC, Yemen Times, The Bureau

YEM079
May 17 2012
♦ 5-8 killed
♦ 0-2 civilians reported killed
As many as eight people were killed in an afternoon strike in the town of Shaqra. Security officials told CNN eight militants traveling in a convoy were killed in a drone strike which was followed by a series of airstrikes by the Yemen Air Force. Reuters reported three militants and two civilians were killed in a Yemeni airstrike according to local residents and officials. But AP reported six militants were killed when a strike hit a vehicle in the town. AFP said six militants were killed in a strike on a checkpoint in Shaqra. An unknown number of people were killed when a strike hit alleged militants in a car fleeing Loder, Reuters added. This strike came as Yemen government forces celebrated driving insurgents out of the land around Loder, the scene of fierce battles between militants and forces loyal to the government.

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US
Location: Shaqra, Abyan province
References: Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, Associated Press, CNN

Anti-drone protestors take to the streets in Chicago, May 2012 (World Can’t Wait/ Flickr)

YEM080
May 18 2012
♦ 3 killed
♦ 6 reported wounded
Associated Press reported a single Yemeni warplane struck a checkpoint in Shaqra in Abyan province. Three alleged militants were killed and six wounded the agency said.

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US
Location: Shaqra, Abyan province
References: Associated Press

YEM081
May 19 2012
♦ 3-5 killed
As fighting between government and insurgent forces continued in the south of Yemen a local official told Reuters three alleged militants were killed in an air strike in the vicinity of Jaar. Military officials told Associated Press that Yemeni warplanes had ‘pounded targets some 5 km (3 miles) outside Jaar’ without giving any casualty figures. Local residents told AFP Yemen Air Force jets launched four strikes on Jaar’s western entrance and the Yemen Post reported five militants were killed in ‘several airstrikes’ carried out by Yemen Air Force jets.

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US
Location: Jaar, Abyan province
References: Reuters, Al Arabiya, Oman Tribune, Associated Press, AFP, Yemen Post

YEM082
May 19 2012
♦ 2 killed
A second air strike of the day destroyed a vehicle in the southern province of Bayda. The attack killed the two occupants provincial governor Mohammed al Ameri told the defense ministry website. The dead were alleged militants from Somalia and Yemen. Sources told AFP and Associated Press the strike was carried out by a US drone. The Yemen Air Force is not capable of carrying out such a precise strike, targeting a moving vehicle.

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US drone
Location: Bayda province
References: Reuters, Al Arabiya, Oman Tribune, Associated Press, AFP

YEM083
May 20 2012
♦ 0-9 killed
A factory to the north of Jaar was targeted in an airstrike as fighting in the city continued. Up to nine casualties were reported by Reuters, citing local residents who said a vehicle carrying the bodies of alleged insurgents was seen speeding from the factory. The strike came as an American trainer was seriously wounded. The US team of military instructors were attacked while training the Yemeni coastguard in Hudaida on the Red Sea coast. Ansar al Sharia claimed responsibility for the attack.

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US
Location: Jaar, Abyan province
References: Reuters, CNN

May 21-22 2012
A suicide bomber later named as Haitham Hamid Hussein Mufarih caused carnage in Sanaa during a military parade rehearsal metres from the Presidential Palace. The attack killed over 100 soldiers and wounded at least 300 more. Ansar al Sharia claimed responsibility for the attack, telling Xinhua: ‘The sophisticated operation was designed to target Defense Minister Mohammed Nasser Ahmed and the US advisers who operate the war against our families in Abyan province in southern Yemen. This is only the beginning of Jihad,’ the group vowed.’ The Defense Minister was unhurt in the blast. A security official told AFP that two men were arrested shortly afterwards wearing belts ‘each packed with 13 kilograms’ of explosives. The Yemen Observer later reported their names as Mohammed Nahshal and Jihad Saeed Al Austa. One Yemeni investigator told Reuters that preliminary findings suggested the bomber, who was dressed in army uniform, was a rogue soldier recruited by militants who had evaded security checks. Ahmed Sobhi, a soldier who witnessed the explosion, described the carnage to the Associated Press:

There are piles of torn body parts, limbs and heads. This is unbelievable. I am still shaking. The place turned into hell. I thought this only happens in movies.

The parade went ahead the following day. President Abdullah Mansur Hadi attended but was flanked by heavy security. ‘The war on terrorism will continue until it is uprooted and annihilated completely, regardless of the sacrifices,’ he said in an address. President Obama told a press conference at the NATO summit in Chicago: ‘We are going to continue to work with the Yemeni government to try to identify AQAP leadership and operations and try to thwart them.’ He added that ‘there’s no doubt that in a country that is still poor, that is still unstable, it is attracting a lot of folks that previously might have been in FATA [in Pakistan] before we started putting pressure on them there.’ Following the attack President Hadi fired a number of top security officials. General Ammar Saleh was sacked as director of the National Security Bureau, with head of central security Abdul Malik al Tayyeb also dismissed.

Type of action: Suicide bombing
Location: Sanaa
References: Sky (Australia), Reuters, Al Jazeera, Associated Press, Al Jazeera, CNN, BBC, New York Times (via Boston Globe), UPI, Zeenews, Channel 4 News, Xinhua, AFP, BNO News, AFP, Yemen Observer

YEM084
May 27 2012
♦ 7+ killed
In a series of strikes on the south of Yemen at least seven alleged militants were killed when a factory in Jaar was bombed reported Reuters. The factory targeted was to to the west of the city and was allegedly a base used by Ansar al Sharia.

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US
Location: Jaar, Abyan province
References: Reuters

YEM085
May 27 2012
♦ 10 killed
In a second strike of the day a house allegedly used as a meeting place by AQAP militants was ‘pounded‘ by warplanes reported Xinhua. Ten alleged AQAP fighters were killed including two local leaders according to a tribal chief.

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US
Location: Jaar, Abyan province
References: Xinhua

YEM086
May 27 2012
♦ 6 killed
The third strike of the day on Jaar destroyed a pick-up truck. The attack killed the six occupants, all AQAP militants reported Xinhua. The Yemen Air Force reportedly lacks the ability to launch precision strikes on moving vehicles which casts doubt on whether the airstrikes were carried out by Yemen or US forces.

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US drone
Location: Jaar, Abyan province
References: Xinhua

YEM087
May 28 2012
♦ 3-5 killed
♦ 4 reported wounded
♦ 0-2 civilians killed
Up to five alleged militants were killed and four wounded in a possible drone strike in the centre of the country. Anwar al Awlaki‘s brothers-in-law Qaed and Nabil al Dahab were targeted but survived. A government official told Xinhua they were hit ‘while travelling from the area of Manasih to al Himmah near the town of Radda in al Bayda.’ According to the Associated Press the al Dahabs’ sister was al Awlaki’s wife. Qaed al Dahab is reportedly AQAP’s Bayda provincial leader. Xinhua reported Qaed and his brother Nabil inherited command of the AQAP branch in the province after Yemeni intelligence officers killed its leader, their brother, Sheikh Tariq al Dahab in February. A tribal source told AFP that ‘Dahab survived but five of his guards were killed.’ The Yemen Defence Ministry told Reuters ‘several militants’ were killed in the strike but the agency quoted an SMS message from militant group Ansar al Sharia saying the strike resulted in ‘the deaths of two bystanders and one [militant] brother.’ A local official told Reuters a militant commander and his brother were the targets of the strike, but both survived.

The Washington Post later quoted US intelligence officials as questioning whether the men represented an ‘imminent threat‘ to US interests:

“It’s still an open question,” a U.S. counterterrorism official said. The siblings were related by marriage to Anwar al-Awlaki, an al-Qaeda operative killed in September, but they have not been connectedto a major plot. Their focus has been “more local,” the official said. But “look at their associations and what that portends.”

Type of action: US drone strike
Location: Manaseh, Bayda province
References: Associated Press, AFP, Reuters, The Guardian, Yemen Post, Xinhua, Al Jazeera, Washington Post

YEM088
May 28 2012
♦ 5 killed
In the second strike of the day five alleged militants were killed in the eastern province of Hadhramout, including local commander Saleh Abdul Khaleq Ali Jaber. Local media later named others killed as Hussein Rabi, Malik Bakotain and Muhammad Al Saqqaf. A fifth badly burnt body was not identified. Media reported that the strike targeted a vehicle carrying the men to the provincial capital al Mukalla from Azan, a town in the Ansar al Sharia-controlled province of Shabwa. Local sources told the Yemen Post the attack was launched by a US drone. But others contradicted this, telling the newspaper the missiles were fired from a ship off the Yemeni coast. The Associated Press also reported conflicting accounts, with security officials saying the attack was an airstrike and military officials calling it a naval operation. AFP reported that the attack was carried out by the Yemen Air Force although the air force reportedly lacks the technical ability to carry out a precision strike on a moving vehicle.

Type of action: Possible airstrike, US drone strike or naval strike
Location: Al Mukalla, Hadhramout province
References: Yemen Post, Reuters, Associated Press, Sacramento Bee, AFP, Xinhua, AFP, Al Jazeera, Mukalla Star (Arabic)

One of two Coastguard vessels delivered to Yemen by US in March 2012 (US Coastguard/ Flickr)

June

YEM089
June 1 2012
♦ 11-12 killed
Local officials and residents told agencies that a US drone had killed 11 -12 men they suspected of being Islamic militants, who were meeting at a house (or ‘communications compound’) in al Mahfad. Residents told Xinhua: ‘For the first time, several foreigners were killed by the air strike that targeted an al-Qaida complex in Mahfad.‘ Three of the dead were Somali. it was claimed, with the drone allegedly firing three missiles onto the compound.

Type of action: Possible drone strike
Location: al-Mahfad, Abyan province
References: Reuters, Xinhua

June 3 2012
The Washington Post reported what had long been suspected: that US conventional aircraft were involved in airstrikes in Yemen alongside drones. National security correspondent Greg Miller reported:

The airstrikes in Yemen this year have been split fairly evenly between operations carried out by CIA Predators and those conducted by JSOC using Reapers and other drones as well as conventional aircraft, U.S. officials said.

The report also said that High Value Targets were no longer the US’s sole objective in Yemen. ‘Officials said the campaign is now also aimed at wiping out a layer of lower-ranking operatives through strikes that can be justified because of threats they pose to the mix of U.S. Embassy workers, military trainers, intelligence operatives and contractors scattered across Yemen.’

On the same day it was reported that a number of air strikes had ‘struck Al-Qaeda hideouts inside Jaar, destroying many buildings.’

Location: Yemen
Reference: Washington Post, Yemen Times

YEM090
June 7 2012
♦ 2 killed
♦ 7 reportedly wounded
Two al Qaeda comanders were killed ‘while they were inspecting a checkpoint‘ a local security official told Xinhua. Seven other alleged AQAP militants were reportedly wounded in the attack which the official attributed to the Yemen Air Force. Suspicions that US conventional aircraft were involved in airstrikes in Yemen were confirmed by US officials on June 3. Although the Yemeni armed forces operate strike fighters the force has been described as ‘barely functional’ and having insufficient equipment to defend its own airspace.

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US
Location: Mudiyah town, Abyan province
References: Xinhua, Washington Post

YEM091
June 7 2012
♦ 3 reported killed
An ‘al Qaeda vehicle’ was targeted in a strike near Jaar which residents said was carrying militants and heavy weapons. Xinhua reported witnesses saying some al Qaida militants were believed to have been killed or injured in the attack. Associated Press reported three alleged militants died in the strike. AP attributed the attack to ‘warplanes’ but the Yemen Air Force does not have the capacity to carry out precision strikes on a moving vehicle. US drones are operating in the country and a Washington Post of June 3 confirmed US conventional jets were also flying strike missions in Yemen.

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US drone
Location: Jaar, Abyan province
References: Xinhua, Associated Press, Washington Post

YEM092
June 7 2012
♦ 5 killed
♦ 3 wounded
Five alleged al Qaeda fighters were killed in an airstrike on the eastern outskirts of Jaar. AFP reported three more were injured in the strike attributed to the Yemen Air Force by a local official. Reuters reported the strike hit a weapons cache as the ICRC said Abyan was on the verge of an ‘acute humanitarian crisis.’ This strike came amid a continuing Yemeni offensive in Abyan province against AQAP and Ansar al Sharia. Reuters reported the use of helicopters in the fighting, a departure from Yemeni tactics from the protracted conflict with Huthi secessionists. In battles with the Huthis in the north of the country the Yemen military was unwilling to use helicopters for anything other than transport for fear of losses to small arms fire.

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US
Location: Jaar, Abyan province
References: AFP, Reuters, AFP, Reuters, Rand Corporation

YEM093
June 11 2012
♦ 3 killed
Three alleged senior militants were killed in an airstrike on their vehicle. They were killed ‘while they were moving to oversee the fighting with army troops on the outskirts of Jaar.’ The strike was attributed to Yemeni ‘warplanes’ but the Yemen Air Force has been described as ‘barely functional‘. It lacks the technical capacity or equipment to carry out precision strikes on moving vehicles.

Type of action: Possible drone strike
Location: Jaar, Abyan province
References: Xinhua

YEM094
June 11 2012
♦ 16 killed
As the Yemen military and allied militias continued their offensive on Jaar an airstrike killed 16 alleged militants. Attributed to the Yemen Air Force, it had been confirmed that US strike fighters had been carrying out raids on Yemen. And the Yemen Air Force had been declared incapable of defending its own airspace and ‘barely functional‘ casting doubt on the source of the strike.

Type of action: Airstrikes, possible US
Location: Jaar, Abyan province
References: Associated Press, Washington Post, Reuters

YEM095
June 13 2012
♦ 10-18 killed
♦ ‘Dozens’ reportedly wounded
US drones hit southeastern Yemen, killing as many as 27 alleged militants. In a statement the defense ministry said as many as 30 alleged militants were killed and ‘dozens’ wounded in up to three airstrikes. But a local official subsequently downgraded this estimate. It was not clear if the strikes were by US drones or the Yemen Air Force jets. An alleged militant position, a car, an insurgent weapons cache and a convoy were all said to have been targeted. Reporting was muddled because of intense battles that had taken place in the area. Ansar al Sharia said five strikes by US drones had targeted Azzan province that day. They said the attack had hit a civilians house and a mosque but with no casualties

The previous day Yemeni security forces and local militia had retaken the towns of Jaar and Zinjibar after a year of militant occupation. AQAP and Ansar al Sharia forces had retreated from the towns to Shabwa and ‘several hundred al Qaeda militants are believed to have fled to Azzan.’ US drones had reportedly been active in the region before the strike. Security officials told CNN at least 14 drone strikes had hit targets in Abyan and Shabwa provinces in the preceding two days. One of these strikes reportedly targeted Ansar al Sharia commander Jalal Beleidi’s convoy. The offensive to oust insurgents from Abyan was launched in mid-May with intelligence and operational support from US Special Forces. The campaign, ‘orchestrated by US military advisers and bankrolled by neighboring Saudi Arabia’, had ‘routed’ the insurgents. Yemeni forces had fought alongside local militia, groups of armed civilians who were funded by the Saudis.

Type of action: Airstrikes, possible US drone
Location: Azzan, Shabwa province
References: CNN, AFP, Associated Press, Xinhua, BBC, AFP, al Jazeera, Reuters, Yemen Post

YEM096
June 13 2012
♦ 9 killed
A US drone struck a house and car in Azzan, killing nine alleged militants in the early morning. Coming on a day when Azzan was targeted by multiple airstrikes, a local official said a drone targeted the house with the nine alleged AQAP members within. A medical official confirmed the toll Military officials said a car parked near the house was destroyed in the strike which al Qaeda claimed was carried out by a drone.

Type of action: US drone strike
Location: Azzan, Shabwa province
References: CNN, AFP, Associated Press, BBC, AFP, al Jazeera, Reuters, Yemen Post

YEM097
June 14 2012
♦ Unknown
The Yemen Times reported a US drone strike hit Azzan in Shabwa province, described as AQAP’s ‘last stronghold’ in the province. The reporter Ali Saeed subsequently told the Bureau via email that the strike came on Thursday evening. Casualty figures were unknown he added, because ‘the army has not yet entered the area’ his military source in Shabwa told him.

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US drone
Location: Azzan, Shabwa province
References: Yemen Times

YEM098
June 15 2012
♦ 5 killed
♦ 2 injured
Chinese news agency Xinhua reported an ‘airstrike’ in Shabwa province which killed five alleged militants, including ‘two senior al Qaeda commanders.’ The attack reportedly took place in a ‘mountainous region’ though few other details were given. A local security official told the news agency: ‘We have seen five corpses on a pick-up truck, all of them burned. The injured were taken to an al-Qaida-run hospital in Azzan town in Shabwa. Two groups of al-Qaida militants were hit from the air. Smokes could be seen rising after the air attack.’ The Yemen Times reported the Yemen Air Force carried out several raids on Azzan town on Friday although the paper made no mention of casualties.

Type of action: Airstrike
Location: Shabwa province
References: Xinhua, Yemen Times

YEM099
June 15 2012
♦ 7 civilians reported killed, six of them children
♦ 0-1 injured
A house in Shaqra was hit in a strike that killed six children and one woman. It was ‘not clear whether the Yemeni air force launched the strike, or whether it came from a US military or CIA drone.’ NPR told the Bureau the strike came after Friday prayers. Ali al Armoudi survived the strike and told NPR his four-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter ‘died in his arms on the way to the hospital.’

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US drone
Location: Shaqra, Abyan province
References: National Public Radio, National Public Radio

June 15 2012
In what was viewed by some as a significant move towards greater transparency, the United States officially acknowledged for the first time its military combat operations in Yemen and Somalia. In Yemen strikes are carried out both by the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, and by the CIA. The partial declassification only refers to JSOC’s attacks. A letter from President Obama to Congress – a six monthly obligation under the War Powers Resolution passed in 1973 – stated:

The U.S. military has also been working closely with the Yemeni government to operationally dismantle and ultimately eliminate the terrorist threat posed by al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the most active and dangerous affiliate of al-Qa’ida today. Our joint efforts have resulted in direct action against a limited number of AQAP operatives and senior leaders in that country who posed a terrorist threat to the United States and our interests.

There were similar references to operations in Yemen. Previously any such details were reported only in a confidential annex to the reports. The Wall Street Journal noted that much of the impetus for partial disclosure came from General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His spokesman told the paper: ‘When U.S. military forces are involved in combat anywhere in the world, and information about those operations does not compromise national or operational security, Gen. Dempsey believes the American public should be kept appropriately informed.’ But the paper also noted that ‘officials said details about specific strikes in Yemen and Somalia would continue to be kept secret.’

The unexpected move by Obama came three days after 26 members of the US Congress wrote to Obama urging him to be transparent on covert drone strikes.They wrote:

The implications of the use of drones for our national security are profound. They are faceless ambassadors that cause civilian deaths, and are frequently the only direct contact with Americans that the targeted communities have. They can generate powerful and enduring anti-American sentiment.

The American Civil Liberties Union, while welcoming the partial declassification of military strikes in Yemen and Somalia, called for further disclosure: ‘The public is entitled to more information about the legal standards that apply, the process by which they add names to the kill list, and the facts they rely on in order to justify targeted killings.’ And Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists told the New York Times: ‘While any voluntary disclosure is welcome, this is not much of a breakthrough. The age of secret wars is over. They were never a secret to those on the receiving end.’

Location: Washington DC
References: The White House, The Pentagon, Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, National Public Radio, AntiWar.com, Bloomberg, New York Times, Letter from US Congressmen, Al Jazeera, CNN

President Obama breaks official silence on Yemen strikes (Official White House/ Pete Souza)

June 18 2012
The ‘mastermind‘ of the Yemeni army’s counter-offensive against AQAP and Ansar al Sharia strongholds in the south of the country was killed by a suicide bomber in the southern city of Aden. Major General Salem Ali Qatan, head of Yemen’s southern command, was killed in his car as he traveled in convoy through the port. The bomber reportedly threw himself onto the General’s car. Up to three of Qatan’s bodyguards were killed in the blast that wounded five bystanders. The Major General’s death came as the Yemeni government announced a series of successes in the counter-offensive. The Yemeni army retook a succession of towns and cities held by AQAP and Ansar al Sharia for up to a year.

Location: Aden
References: Daily Telegraph, Yemen Post, Associated Press, Xinhua, Reuters, McClatchy, New York Times, AFP, Yemen Post

YEM100
June 19 2012
♦ 3 killed
Militant Salah al-Jawhari was killed with two others when his vehicle was destroyed in the south of al-Baida province. Although Yemen’s state news agency claimed that the attack was the work of the Yemen Air Force, Reuters reported local residents as ‘saying a drone had fired missiles at al-Jawhari’s vehicle – indicating it was a U.S. attack.’ Other reports suggested the attack was the work of Yemen’s security services. Al-Jawhari was reportedly a bomb-maker, linked to the May 21 suicide bombing which killed more than 100 soldiers.

On the same day US CENTCOM commander General James Mattis, visiting Sanaa, was reported by the US Embassy to have discussed ‘ways that the United States can cooperate with the Yemeni military to fight the mutual threat of al-Qaida.’

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US drone
Location: Al-Yafea district, al-Baida province
References: Reuters, Associated Press, US Embassy Sanaa, KUNA, AFP, Yemen Times, Yemen Fox

YEM101
June 20 2012
♦ 1 killed
♦ 1 civilian killed
An airstrike by an unknown party in northern Abyan killed Hussein Saleh, a worker with the International Committee of the Red Cross. According to an ICRC spokesman ‘it was an air strike. We have no additional details whatsoever.’ An ICRC spokeswoman told the Bureau by email that Saleh ‘was out side an ICRC vehicle when shrapnel hit him. He died from the shrapnel injuries. The strike did not hit the ICRC vehicle directly.’ Three other ICRC staff with Saleh were unhurt in the strike the spokeswoman added. Another ICRC member told the BBC that it was not clear whether the attack was the work of a US drone or the Yemen Air Force. However a local official told Reuters the strike was the work of Yemeni aircraft. The Yemen military reportedly carried out two other strikes that day. The 35-year old father, whose wife was expecting their fifth child, died while assessing humanitarian needs in the area alongside three colleagues, it was initially reported. Later it was claimed the team was attempting to secure the release of a kidnapped French colleague. He was ‘in charge of networking for all [Red Cross] teams in the south’, according to an ICRC film released six months after his death. Eric Marclay, head of the ICRC delegation in Yemen, said of Mr Saleh:

We are devastated by the tragic loss of our friend and colleague Hussein. He was a very motivated and devoted staff member. He played a tremendously crucial role within his team, helping hundreds of thousands of people in the south, and lost his life while performing humanitarian work.

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US drone
Location: Mahfadh village, Abyan
References: Reuters, BBC, ICRC, Reuters. al Jazeera, CNN, Reuters, Associated Press, ICRC

I Know Where I’m Going from Intercross.

YEM102
June 20 2012
♦ 5-30 killed
♦ 6+ injured
As many as 30 alleged militants were reported killed in a series of airstrikes in southern Yemen. AP reported Yemen military officials as saying that ‘at least six air raids targeted moving vehicles and al-Qaida positions in Mahfad, the last stronghold of al-Qaida in Abyan province.’ While some agencies put the fatality numbers as low as 5, others stated that as many as 30 people died in the attacks. CNN reported a security official as saying the strikes were part of a mopping up operation after the recent offensive.

Hundreds of militants escaped unharmed when government forces retook Zinjibar and Jaar towns. The current operation is to hunt those terrorists down, and today a big number of them were killed.

The mayor of Mahfed Yaslam al-Anburi told reporters that the majority of militants died in two areas: ‘Here were 30 deaths in al-Qaeda ranks for sure. Yemeni aircraft carried out a series of raids against concentrations of al-Qaeda fighters, mainly in the Wadi Dhiman and Dayda valleys, killing 30 and wounding many others.’ In what appears to have been another strike, Al Jazeera reported that ‘a tribal chief said three suspected fighters were killed and four wounded in an air raid targeting a group of al-Qaeda fighters in a desert region between Abyan and Shabwa provinces.’

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US drone
Location: Mahfed, Abyan
References: BBC, Reuters, Associated Press, Al Jazeera, CNN, Associated Press

YEM103
June 25 2012
♦ 3 killed
♦ ‘Some’ reported injured
A US drone has killed three alleged AQAP members, including one senior commander. The identities of those killed were not reported but a security official said a drone fired two missiles on a convoy which destroyed their pick-up truck. Military officials said the vehicles had been pursued by US drones, causing fear among local residents. The vehicle was targeted on a desert road on the edge of the strategically important city of Aden. The convoy was hit as it traveled away from Abyan province. A US intelligence official confirmed American involvement but would not say if it a CIA or military drone carried out the strikes.

The Yemen military had driven AQAP and Ansar al Sharia from their positions in Abyan in the previous week. This was reportedly the first drone strike on a target in the outskirts of of the port. The strike came a day after ten unnamed alleged AQAP members escaped from ‘a heavily guarded’ prison in the Mansoura district of Aden.

Type of action: US drone strike
Location: Aden
References: Xinhua, Xinhua, Yemen Post, UPI, Yemen Fox, Long War Journal

July

YEM104
July 3 2012
♦ 2-5 killed
♦ 2 reported injured
Up to five alleged militants were killed in an evening drone attack. The Defence Ministry said two of the dead were senior AQAP figures named Hussein Rubay and Fahad al-Harithy. It was not clear if one or two drones took part in the strike, and if one or two cars were hit. Witnesses said while four bodies were pulled from the wreckage of the first vehicle. But said ‘the flames were so intense in the second vehicle that no one could approach to check for any casualties.’

The strike came as the Defence Ministry announced it had detained a group of 14 militants from three separate terrorist cells somewhere in the country. The group was made up of ‘four Egyptians, two Jordanians, a Somali, a Tunisian and a man from Dagestan in Russia’s North Caucasus.’

Type of action: US drone strike
Location: Bayhan, Shabwah province
References: Associated Press, Reuters, AFP, Xinhua, Yemen Post, AFP, Yemen Post

YEM105
July 4 2012
♦ 3-13 killed
♦ 7 reported injured
Airstrikes have targeted the only town in Abyan province ‘where jihadists still have a strong presence.’ As many as four airstrikes hit ‘suspected places and hideouts to where [sic] Al-Qaeda members sought shelter.’ The death toll varied with a military official saying three militants died while a local official said 13 were killed. A Pakistani and two other foreign fighters were said to be among the dead. The Defence Ministry told reporters Yemeni strike fighters carried out the attacks. But the Yemen Air Force has been described as ‘barely functional‘ and incapable of even defending Yemen’s airspace. US officials have confirmed American strike jets are flying missions over Yemen from nearby Djibouti.

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US
Location: Mahfad, Abyan province
References: AFP, Associated Press, Xinhua, Yemen Post, Washington Post

YEM106
July 23 2012
♦ 5 killed
♦ Unknown injured
A night time precision airstrike killed at least five in a number of reported ‘air strikes’ in southern Abyan province’s al-Mahfad. The area is said to be the last geographic stronghold of AQAP and Ansar al-Sharia, and AP reported Yemeni media as saying that ‘the militants were consolidating their positions in al-Mahfad, quoting witnesses who said they saw military hardware headed to the area in in trucks.’ Although the attacks were attributed to the Yemen Air Force it is known not to have the technical capability to carry out such strikes. US aircraft and armed drones may therefore have been responsible.

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US
Location: Mahfad, Abyan province
References: Associated Press, Wired

YEM107
July 28 2012
♦ Unknown killed
The Yemen Air Force reportedly bombed two al Qaeda compounds in Abyan province. According to a local resident one of the compounds was a disused militant training site. A security official said:

It was not immediately clear if any of the al-Qaida militants or some of their local leaders were killed in the air strikes. The bombing was in response to Wednesday’s al-Qaida attack on pro-government checkpoints.

The attacks were attributed to the Yemeni jets but the Air Force lacks the technical capability of the to carry out precision strikes. US aircraft and armed drones may therefore have been responsible.

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US
Location: Mahfad, Abyan province
References: Xinhua

August

YEM108
August 4 2012
♦ 3-5 killed
♦ 2 injured
Up to five were killed and two more injured while traveling through east Yemen. A possible US drone targeted the men in an evening strike. ‘A drone fired two missiles at an all-terrain vehicle…killing its five occupants,’ according to a local official. The bodies ‘were found completely burnt with the completely destroyed car’. According to local residents the men were ‘leading members’ of al Qaeda. Security forces sealed off the scene of the strike. In the week following the strike AQAP released the name of one of the dead, Abu al Bara’a al Saya’ari, described as a driver.

The drone strike came after an alleged AQAP suicide bomber killed and injured more than 90 people in Jaar. The bomber attacked a funeral service held at the house of Abdul Latif al-Sayed, leader of the local militia that fought alongside government troops. Al Sayed reportedly defected from al Qaeda before the militants were driven out of Jaar. He survived the blast but two of his brothers were killed.

Type of action: US drone strike
Location: Al Qotn, Hadhramaut province
References: AFP, BBC, AFP, International Business Times, Gulf News, The Hindu, Deutsche Welle, Bloomberg, Associated Press, Al Jazeera, Xinhua, Reuters, Al Arabiya, 9News, Yemen Observer, Saba, Long War Journal

YEM109
August 6 2012
♦ 7 killed
Suspected US drones targeted two vehicles, killing seven in an evening strike. Among the dead was alleged local AQAP leader and bomb-maker Abdullah Awad al Masri (aka Abu Osama al Marebi). While his nationality is not known, his surname, al Masri, was said to indicate he was Egyptian. The state news agency said the other six casualties were all militants. They were named as Abu Ja’afar al Iraqi, a Bahraini, Abu al-Bara’a al Sharori, a Saudi, Abu Musa’ab al Nasri and Abu Hafsah al Mesri, Egyptians, Abu Hafsah al Tounisi, a Tunisian, and Ebrahim al Sakhi, Yemeni.

Some reports said one of vehicles destroyed was a motorcycle ridden by al Masri with one other. An anonymous source said: ‘Four explosions rocked the area, which was overflown by two drones in the evening.’ Residents said they ‘recognised the sound of the drone, which they said had flown over the area for hours before firing the missile.’ On August 15 a jihadist website reported that a Tunisian named as Muhammad bin Muhammad (possibly Abu Hafsah al Tounisi) had died in the attack.

Type of action: US drone strike
Location: Rada’a city, al Bayda province
References: Xinhua, Reuters, AFP, Associated Press, AFP, Saba, Long War Journal, Nasser Arrabyee, Yemen Post, Xinhua, Yemen Times, Yemen Observer, Long War Journal

YEM110
August 7 2012
♦ 2-3 killed
♦ 2 injured
Up to three people were killed and two injured in an evening air strike. Yemeni officials said drones targeted the men which, if confirmed, would be the second US strike on the area in four days. The three men were traveling in ‘a small pick-up truck’ which ‘was completely destroyed at the scene’ according to a security official. The Defense Ministry reportedly described the attack as an ‘air raid’ that killed ‘two militants in a vehicle loaded with large quantities of explosive devices’.

Type of action: Possible US drone strike
Location: Al Qotn, Hadhramaut province
References: Associated Press, Xinhua, Long War Journal, Reuters, Yemen Times

August 8 2012
US chief counter terrorism adviser John Brennan discussed Yemen in an extended speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. In a short section dealing with counter-terrorism operations Brennan stated:

So long as AQAP seeks to implement its murderous agenda, we will be a close partner with Yemen in meeting this common threat. And just as our approach to Yemen is multidimensional, our counterterrorism approach involves many different tools — diplomatic, intelligence, military, homeland security, law enforcement and justice. With our Yemeni and international partners, we have put unprecedented pressure on AQAP. Recruits seeking to travel to Yemen have been disruptive — disrupted. Operatives deployed from Yemen have been detained. Plots have been thwarted. And key AQAP leaders who have targeted U.S. and Yemeni interest have met their demise, including Anwar al-Awlaki, AQAP’s chief of external operations.

Of course, the tension has often focused on one counterterrorism tool in particular, targeted strikes, sometimes using remotely-piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones. In June the Obama administration declassified the fact that in Yemen, our joint efforts have resulted in direct action against AQAP operatives and senior leaders. This spring, I addressed the subject of targeted strikes at length and why such strikes are legal, ethical, wise and highly effective.

Today I’d simply say that all our CT efforts in Yemen are conducted in concert with the Yemeni government. When direct action is taken, every effort is made to avoid any civilian casualty. And contrary to conventional wisdom, we see little evidence that these actions are generating widespread anti-American sentiment or recruits for AQAP. In fact, we see the opposite, our Yemeni partners are more eager to work with us. Yemenese citizens who have been freed from the hellish grip of AQAP are more eager, not less, to work with the Yemeni government. In short, targeted strikes against the most senior and most dangerous AQAP terrorists are not the problem, they are part of the solution.

Location: Washington DC
References: Council on Foreign Relations (transcript), C-Span, Voice of America, Los Angeles Times, Wired, AntiWar, Firedoglake (blog), Yemen Peace Project, Washington Post, AFP, Foreign Policy

YEM111
August 28 2012
♦ 2-3 killed
After twenty days without a reported strike, a suspected drone killed at least two people in vehicle driving from Hadramout to Mareb province. A second car reportedly escaped unscathed. A security source said one of the killed was a Saudi militant named Salim Mubarak Al-Saiary. A provincial security official said ‘a wanted Saudi national who joined al Qaida group in Yemen one year ago‘ was killed in the strike, adding: ‘The U.S. air raid was coordinated with the Yemeni intelligence agency.’ A source in the Supreme Security Committee told the state news agency that Yemeni security and military forces destroyed a car carrying weapons and explosives, killing two. While Yemeni security officials told Reuters it was a drone strike, the defence ministry called it an air strike. However the Yemen Air Force lacks the technical capability to carry out precision strikes.

Type of action: US drone strike
Location: Qahb al-Hisan, Hadramout province
References: Associated Press, Yemen Post, Xinhua, AFP, Reuters, Alsahwah.net, SABA, Al Akhbar, dpa/Trend.az, Reuters, AFP

YEM112
August 29 2012
♦ 6-7 killed
♦ 2 civilians reported killed
As many as seven people were initially reported killed as they travelled through the village of al Qatn. Witnesses said a US drone fired three missiles at car with at least one hitting the target. Local residents pulled ‘charred bodies‘ from the wreckage that were ‘badly mangled by the airstrike‘. There was ‘a huge explosion’ that rocked the area, one local resident said, adding that military aircraft remained hovering ‘over several al-Qaida-held sites in Hadramout’s suburbs.’ The defense ministry said three militants were killed in the strike.

Two civilians were also reported killed in the strike according to Haykal Bafana, the Yemeni lawyer and activist who reported YEM078 in real time on Twitter. The car was targeted between houses, he reported on the social media network. A policeman, Walid Abdullah bin Ali Jaber, and a ‘mosque caretaker/imam‘, Salem Ahmed bin Ali Jaber (pictured right), were killed in their house in Khashamir village. The imam was reported to have delivered anti- al Qaeda sermons in the past. Blogger Nasser Arrabyee later claimed that militants had been visiting the Salafist cleric to threaten him when the strike took place:

The cleric is called Salem Ahmed Ali Jaber, teacher and mosque speaker, in Al Kutn. Jaber is Salafi who studied in the main Salafi center of Saada. And he was always speaking against Al Qaeda. In his recent sermons he said Al Qaeda is against Islam. According to local sources Al Qaeda sent on Wednesday four operatives to the cleric Jaber to blame him and while the five people were in the meeting a US drone came and killed them all.

Residents claimed that up to eight drones were flying over locations across the province that night. Demonstrators took to the streets locally to protest the deaths of civilians, local papers reported. Two days later hundreds more protested. According to Xinhua ‘four prominent tribal leaders also joined the demonstration, shouting “No for killing innocent people” and “End alliance with the U.S government,” witnesses added.’

Type of action: US drone strike
Location: Al Qatn district, Hadramout province
References: Reuters, The News Tribe, Xinhua, Associated Press, AFP, Twitter, Twitter, Yemen Post, Nasser Arrabyee (blog), Mukalla Star (Arabic), Bloomberg, Demmon (Arabic), Yemen Observer, PakObserver, Xinhua

YEM113
August 31 2012
♦ 8 killed
Eight people were killed as they drove through Hadramout province, reportedly local commanders of the Yemen-based al Qaeda offshoot. One report said the men were traveling in an armoured car between Qatan and Khashgha when they were struck at 7.30am. Six bodies were taken to Seiyun hospital while two extremely burnt corpses were left at the scene. The defense ministry said the men were all heavily armed, with a local official speculating that they were on their way to carry out an attack. Local and military officials reported that a US drone carried out the strike (defense ministry officials initially claimed the attack was a Yemen airstrike.)

The Yemen defense ministry subsequently announced that Khaled Musalem Batis (aka Bates or Batees) died in the strike. Batis had been captured previously by security forces but escaped prison during the 2011 uprising. He was described as a top al-Qaida militant wanted for allegedly masterminding a 2002 al Qaeda attack on a French oil tanker MV Limburg. A Bulgarian sailor died in that attack. The day before the drone strike Guantanamo detainee Ahmed Mohammed Ahmed Haza al-Darbi (37) was charged with plotting the Limburg bombing.

Type of action: US drone strike
Location: Hawra, Hadramout province
References: Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, Xinhua, Bloomberg, Yemen Post, Gulf News, Associated Press, Nasser Arrabyee (blog), Reuters, PakObserver, Yemen Post, Daily Telegraph, KUNA, Associated Press, The News Tribe

September

YEM114
September 2 2012
♦ 12 killed
♦ 12 civilians reported killed, including 3 children
♦ 4-8 reported injured
US drones or jets killed 12 civilians in a botched attack on an alleged senior militant. The fourth airstrike in six days, the casualties including women and three children according to local sheikh Ahmed Ali. Other locals said a 10-year-old girl and her 40-year-old mother were killed. ‘The bodies were charred like coal. I could not recognize the faces,’ said Ahmed al Sabooli the dead girl’s 22-year-old brother. The airstrike was initially said to have targeted a car carrying alleged militant Abdulraouf al Dahab at 4pm local time. Abdulraouf’s half-brothers Qayid and Nabil al Dhahab survived a US drone strike in May this year (YEM088). They reportedly became local al Qaeda leaders in Radaa after Yemeni intelligence services killed their brother Sheikh Tariq al Dahab in February.

A provincial police official, tribal officials and local residents said that a minibus was hit by mistake, killing civilians. At first military officials said Yemen Air Force jets killed civilians returning to their village based on faulty intelligence. However the Yemen Air Force lacks the technical capability to carry out a precision strike on a moving target, and the Yemen Post reported that the attack was the work of US drones. Eyewitnesses also reported that a drone carried out the strike. In December 2012 US officials acknowledged responsibility for the attack. They told the Washington Post a ‘Defense Department aircraft, either a drone or a fixed-wing warplane’ carried out the strike. Witnesses told the paper they saw three aircraft over the strike, two of them Yemeni.

Witnesses also told Human Rights Watch researcher Letta Tayler that drones and jets were over the area on the day of the strike. Their testimony and the shrapnel they recovered from the site pointed to US involvement but could not determine if the drones or strike fighters launched the attack. Recounting the aftermath of the strike, a local sheikh Nawaf Massoud Awadh told Tayler: ‘About four people were without heads. Many lost their hands and legs…These were our relatives and friends.’ The dead were named by Al Masdar as

Abdullah Muhammad Ali AlQadari (25 years)
Mabrook Mouqbal Al Qadari (13 years)
Nasser Salah (60 years)
Raselah Ali (55 years, Nasser Salah’s wife)
Daolah Nasser (10 years, Nasser Salah’s daughter)
Abdullah Ahmed AbedRabbo Robich (28 years)
Saddam Hussein Mohamed Massad (28 years)
Ismail Mabkhout Mohamed (30 years)
AbedalGhani Mohammed Mabkhout (12 years)
Masoud Ali Ahmed Mouqbal (45 years)
Jamal Mohammed Abad (30 years)

The injured were listed as the driver Nasser Mabkhout, Mohammed Abdo Jarallah and Sultan Ahmed Mohammed Sarhan (27). The victims’ families, joined in protests by hundreds of others, ‘vowed to retaliate‘. As CNN reported:

Families of the victims closed main roads and vowed to retaliate. Hundreds of angry armed gunmen joined them and gave the government a 48-hour deadline to explain the killings, which took place on Sunday. Eyewitnesses said that families attempted to carry the victims’ corpses to the capital, Sanaa, to lay them in front of the residence of newly elected President Abdurabu Hadi, but were sent back by local security forces. “You want us to stay quiet while our wives and brothers are being killed for no reason. This attack is the real terrorism,” said Mansoor al-Maweri, who was near the scene of the strike.

Yemen’s government later established a commission of inquiry into the deaths, the worst civilian tally since May. However three months after the strike complained that ‘the government is trying to kill the case’ and that ‘the government wants to protect its relations with the US.’ Xinhua reported that a number of MPs ‘summoned Interior Minister Mohammed Qahtan to an emergency meeting to clarify over the civilian casualties of the U.S. drone strike’ and that Minister of Human Rights Houria Mash’hour ‘condemned the “U.S. meddling” in Yemeni internal affairs, saying that most casualties of the U.S. drones were civilians and calling for an immediate end to the U.S. interference and drone strikes.’ US chief counter terrorism adviser John Brennan also spoke with President Hadi on September 4, though it is not known if the Radaa strike was discussed.

Type of action: US Airstrike, possible US drone or aircraft
Location: Radaa, al Bayda province
References: Reuters, KUNA, AFP, al Jazeera, Xinhua, Associated Press, Yemen Post, Bloomberg, Voice of Russia/RIA, CNN, Mareb Press (Arabic), AFP , Yemen Post, Saba, Saba, Xinhua, al-Sahwa, Al Masdar (Arabic), CNN, Washington Post, Foreign Policy, McClatchy

YEM115
September 5 2012
♦ 5-6 killed
♦ 3 injured
♦ 0-1 civilians reported killed
Up to six people were killed and three injured when a US drone reportedly fired eight missiles a house in Hadrhamout. As many as four of the dead were reportedly civilians, three foreigners and one Yemeni. The strike came at dawn the day after Yemen’s government announced a commission of inquiry into the civilian deaths from a US drone strike (YEM114). An anonymous US intelligence official confirmed a US drone carried out the strike. A Yemeni security official said ‘none of those killed were on the government’s list of most-wanted terrorists.’ The anonymous official told CNN:

Those killed were mostly new al Qaeda members who were seeking to recruit more fighters from within the province. Only one of those killed had been with the network for more than three years.

Initial reports said that two middle-ranking or senior members of the local branch of al-Qaida were also among the dead, and a Yemeni military official said a ‘senior al-Qaida member‘ named as Murad Ben Salem was killed in the strike. However, an anonymous source told the Bureau that Murad, while he may have had militant links, was a worker in a nearby sesame oil press. The source also reported that two foreign al Qaeda members were killed, an Iraqi and a Syrian. Other reports said a second Saudi and an Iraqi were among the dead. Witnesses said eight men escaped the building. ‘Weapons found in the house after the attack are enough to conduct more than a dozen terrorist operations,’ according to a senior security official. Reuters was the sole agency later to report that AQAP number two Said al Shehri died in the attack. All others reported that the strike took place on September 10.

Type of action: US drone strike
Location: Al Ain village, Hadramout province
References: Reuters, AFP, Associated Press, Reuters, Xinhua, DPA, Mareb Press (Arabic), Bloomberg, CNN, Al-Akhbar, AntiWar.com, Nasser Arrabyee (blog), Long War Journal

Protests took place in three Yemen cities to demand an end to US drone strikes on September 7

YEM115a
September 8 2012
♦ 4 killed
The Yemen Observer was the sole source to report that US drones killed four people including the brother of an al-Qaeda leader the US had attempted to kill days earlier. Abdulraoof Ahmad Nasser al-Thahab was supposedly driving his car in the Qaifa area of Radaa when a drone attacked him.

“Information right now indicates that Abdulraoof along with three other al-Qaeda members were killed while they were outside Radaa’,” said the officer on anonymity condition. The officer said the attack that took place in Almanasih area of Qaifah, al-Qaeda main stronghold.

Type of attack: Possible airstrike/ drone strike
Location: Qaifa near Radaa
References: Yemen Observer

YEM116
September 10 2012
♦ 6-15 killed
♦ 3 injured
Seven people including AQAP’s second-in-command Said al Shehri (aka al Shihri) were reportedly killed in a strike on a car and house in Hadrhamout, eastern Yemen, according to US and Yemeni officials. Al Shehri had previously survived a drone strike in September 2011 (YEM030). He ‘was prisoner number 327 at Guantanamo Bay, captured as he tried to cross the border into Pakistan from Afghanistan late in 2001.’ In 2007 he was released, returning to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, where he was put through a rehabilitation program. However within months he reportedly absconded, becoming a founding members of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He was suspected of involvement in a 2008 car bomb attack on the US embassy in Sanaa. Sixteen died, including the six attackers. A diplomat told the FT al Shehri was ‘the senior leadership figure in AQAP who was involved in external attack planning.’ Katherine Zimmerman said al Shehri’s death would have a medium-term impact on AQAP but it ‘still has room to maneuver in Yemen’ and ‘its operational network is largely intact.’

The Press Association initially reported Yemeni military officials as saying that ‘a local forensics team had identified al-Shehri’s body with the help of US forensics experts on the ground.’ The agency added:

Yemeni military officials said they had believed the United States was behind the operation because its own army does not the capacity to carry out precise aerial attacks and because Yemeni intelligence-gathering capabilities on al-Shehri’s movements were limited.

However an anonymous Yemeni official subsequently told Asharq al Awsat: ‘Saeed Ali al Shehri was not killed in the raid that targeted a number of Al-Qaeda’s fighters in Dadramawt a few weeks ago.’ The source told the London-based paper DNA tests had shown a corpse was not that of al Shehri. He said authorities ‘were confused because of a wound on the leg of the deceased that matched a wound that al Shehri has that requires him to use a walking stick.’ The paper reported that DNA samples were taken from ’15 bodies of al Qaeda members who were killed in the air raid and who are still yet to be identified.’ But it was subsequently claimed that DNA tests had not yet been carried out. An ‘American-German’ team was said to have been coming to Yemen to carry out the tests. Sources in Abyan also told the Yemen Observer al Shehri was still alive, 10 days after the strike. One said al Shehri was not at the scene of the strike. A second said ‘I am one hundred percent sure he [al Shehri] is alive. So close sources from al Shehri have also affirmed he is still alive.’ The following month, a recording purporting to be al Shehri emerged, in which he claimed the false rumours of his death were ‘to cover up the killing of innocent Muslim civilians’.

Type of action: Possible US drone strike
Location: Al Ain village, Hadramout province
References: Reuters, Associated Press, BBC, NBC News, Nasser Arrabyee (blog), Associated Press, CNN, Voice of America, IBT, Daily Telegraph, Press Association, Fox News, Xinhua, AFP, New York Times, New York Times, Reuters, Financial Times, American Enterprise Institute, AP (video), Asharq Al-Awsat, Yemen Post, Yemen Observer, Yemen Post, Associated Press

September 11 2012
A car bomb tore through the Yemeni defense minister’s convoy, killing 12. Seven bodyguards and five bystanders died but the minister Major General Mohammed Nasser Ahmed survived. The blast wounded 15 people on a main road between the cabinet office and state radio station. Reporting from the scene of the blast, journalist Iona Craig tweeted: ‘Body parts blasted into trees. Really grim scenes.’ But 11 hours later she posted on the social network: ‘Amazed to see Yemen’s Defence Minister out and about tonight in Sana’a after his close call earlier today.’ This was reportedly the fourth attempt on the defense minister’s life since the new government formed in December 2011. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. The New York Times reported journalists on social media were speculating the attack was AQAP’s revenge for the death of their leader, Said al Shehri, the previous day (YEM116). State television reported Ali al Ansi, the head of the National Security Agency, was fired after the attack.

Location: Sanaa
References: New York Times, Reuters, New York Times, Twitter, Twitter

YEM117
September 20 2012
♦ 2-4 killed
♦ 3 injured
An airstrike killed at least two people in Abyan province. A local official told Xinhua: ‘Fighter jets of the Yemeni air forces pounded a gathering of the al-Qaida militants on the eastern outskirts of Mahfad town in Abyan.’ The men killed in the strike were said to have been ‘al-Qaida insurgents believed to be behind a series of deadly attacks in Abyan.‘ The Air Force lacks the technical capability of the to carry out precision strikes. US aircraft and armed drones may therefore have been responsible. A Yemeni news website reported the strike was carried out by a US drone. If true this would be the first drone strike since the US embassy in Sanaa was attacked during protests at a YouTube video widely condemed as offensive to Muslims. The strike came two days after the Yemen government announced a new counter terror strategy in al Mahfad to target militants who fled Zinjibar and Jaar after the US-backed Yemeni offensive earlier in the year.

Type of action: Airstrike, possible US drone strike
Location: Al Mahfad, Abyan province
References: Xinhua, Aden al Ghad (Arabic), Al Sahwah, Guardian

September 20 2012
Victims of the botched Rada’a strike of September 2 (YEM115) were buried in Dhamar, 100km south of Sanaa. Eleven civilians were killed, including three children, when missiles from a suspected US drone hit their minibus. It was reported that the intended target had been Abdulraouf al Dahab, a local militant leader.

Location: Dhamar, Dhamar province
References:Reuters, Xinhua

October

YEM118
October 4 2012
♦ 3-6 killed
♦ 2-4 injured
A suspected drone strike targeted suspected al Qaeda or Ansar al Sharia militants in the mountainous desert region of al-Saeed in Shabwa province in the late morning, killing at least three and injuring several others. Local media reported five missiles being fired in a multiple strike. Abu Addarda’a, an Egyptian militant, was among at least three who died in the attack, local sources reported. Akhbar al-Youm (Arabic) named the others killed as Sa’ad Atef al Awaliqi (aka Saad bin Atek), leader of al Qaida Azzan Emirate in Shabwa; Mosa’ad al Habishi (aka Hajir al Barasi), a field commander; a ‘Saudi militant’ and two unidentified alleged militants from Hadramout province. Al Awlaki and al Habishi were members of the Awlaqi tribe, tribal leader Abdulmajid al Awlaqi told AFP. Abu al Zubair (aka Adel al Abab), described as fourth-in-command of AQAP, was also killed, according to a report in Quds al Arabi a fortnight after the strike. A local tribal chief told AFP that al Abab had jumped out of his car and run away when he saw a drone ‘but he was hit in the head by a shrapnel.’ He added:

We buried Abab and an Egyptian comrade in a cemetery in Saeed, while other dead (militants) were taken to their villages

AP and AFP reported that the strike targeted two vehicles of alleged militants, killing all passengers in one of the vehicles. But a local official speaking to ANI/Xinhua added that missiles hit ’al-Qaida-held [sic] sites successfully’ in addition to vehicles, and quoted locals saying the strike targeted a gathering of al Qaeda in the region. The militants had weapons and explosives in the vehicle, an anonymous security official said, adding that two militants had been injured and one had escaped. A separate security official told the agency: ‘U. S. drones were behind Thursday’s air bombing’, while witnesses reported seeing two warplanes over the area and military helicopters pursuing vehicles, as well as hearing rocket fire. Local media showed photographs of a car alleged to have been destroyed in the attack.

On the same day the US State Department re-classified Ansar al-Sharia as an alias of al Qaeda. According to a statement,

AAS – which is based in Yemen and is a separate entity from Ansar al-Shari’a in Libya – was established to attract potential followers to shari’a rule in areas under the control of AQAP. However, AAS is simply AQAP’s effort to rebrand itself, with the aim of manipulating people to join AQAP’s terrorist cause. AAS has publicly stated that the particular brand of shari’a they hope to implement is the same as that espoused by the Afghan Taliban and the Islamic State of Iraq, a militant umbrella group and designated Foreign Terrorist Organization that includes al-Qa’ida in Iraq.

Type of action: Air strike, possible drone strike
Location: Al-Saeed, Shabwa
References: AP, AFP, ANI/Xinhua, Aden Tomorrow (Arabic), Barakish (Arabic), 9 News, Reuters, Alahale (Arabic), Wall Street Journal, US State Department statement, CNN, Yemen Post, Akhbar al-Youm (Arabic), Yemen Ministry of Defence, Al Quds (Arabic), AFP, Xinhua, Long War Journal, Long War Journal, AFP

YEM119
October 18 2012
♦ 7-9 killed
♦ Several injured
In a dawn attack, a series of missiles were fired at a targets on the outskirts of Jaar, apparently targeting al Qaeda militants on the verge of launching a suicide attack on military targets. Two of those killed were wearing explosive belts, security sources told Reuters; anonymous officials confirmed to AP that the strikes ‘followed tips from locals of an imminent al-Qaida attack on the town’. Reuters reported three separate strikes targeted a farmhouse, although ANI/Xinhua claimed the strikes hit two separate gatherings of alleged al Qaeda militants and AP quoted locals saying they had seen two cars ablaze. An unnamed official and residents claimed the missiles were fired by a US drone, although eyewitnesses told ANI/Xinhua they had seen military planes flying overhead at the time of the attack. The Yemeni Ministry of Defence claimed the attack was carried out by the Yemeni 119th Infantry Brigade, although it is common for the Yemeni government to claim responsibility for attacks carried out by the US on its turf.

Residents told Reuters they had found ‘six charred bodies and the scattered remains of three others’, while AP and others reported ’at least seven’ killed. Several sources named Nader al-Shaddadi, who was said to be a senior al Qaeda militant, as being killed; Barakish and Aden al Ghad both named Morsel Mohsen Hassan and Kamal Ali Abker as being killed. Barakish also named Adan Ahmed Ali al Sha’ar and Awadh Hamman, adding that four further bodies had not been identified. Aden al Ghad named Abdullah Hussein Yousif Somali, Arfan al Shaher and Mohammed al Shaher. Reuters later said that five of the alleged militants killed were local teenagers. After the attack, there were reports that ’hundreds of Jaar’s residents, both men and women, gathered in front of the headquarters of the resistance committees in Jaar and fired in the air to celebrate Shadadi’s death. One resident told AFP that Shadadi, a Jaar resident himself, “had brought great harm to our city and he is responsible for all the devastation and the war” in the area.’

Type of action: Air strike, possible drone strike
Location: Jaar
References: Associated Press, AFP, AFP, ANI/Xinhua, Reuters, Barakish (Arabic), Aden al Ghad (Arabic), 26 September (Arabic) Al Jazeera, BNO News, Yemen Post, New York Times, Long War Journal, Saba, Reuters

YEM120
October 21 2012
♦ 4 killed
An evening strike on a car killed ‘at least four’ alleged al Qaeda members in Maarib province, several miles outside Maarib city, sources reported. Local al Qaeda commander Sanad Ouraidan al Aqili (aka Sanad Abdulla al Aqili) was reported to be among the dead. ‘Aqili’s three companions, whose bodies were blown to pieces, have not been identified yet,’ a local policeman told AFP. ‘A warplane targeted a car in the Wadi Abida area that was suspicious [suspected] of carrying Al-Qaeda militants,’ a local source said, although other tribal sources and Yemeni officials claimed the missiles were fired by a US drone. The Yemen Air Force does not have the technical capacity to carry out precision strikes, or operate at night. Al Aqili’s brother was killed three months before fighting in Abyan province, according to a local sheikh. He told the Yemen Observer that villagers had said al Qaeda used a car to remove the bodies.

Type of action: Air strike, possible drone strike
Location: Maarib
References: Associated Press, AFP, Reuters, Yemen Post, Long War Journal, Xinhua, AFP, Voice of America, Yemen Observer

October 26 2012
The US military confirmed for the first time that armed drones fly out of Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, ‘the busiest Predator drone base outside of Afghan war zone’. In a detailed investigation the Washington Post also revealed about 300 JSOC personnel coordinate counterterrorism operations in Yemen from the 500-acre base. This mission is codenamed Copper Dune. The paper also confirmed that a squadrone of F-15E Strike Eagles ‘fly combat sorties over Yemen’ from Lemonnier. Sixteen drones and four fighter jets take-off or land from the base every day. The aircraft can be over Yemen ‘in minutes’. The investigation also confirmed US Air Force drones from Djibouti were used with CIA drones flown from a secret base in the Arabian Peninsula in the strike that killed Anwar al Awlaki (YEM029).

Location: Djibouti
Reference: Washington Post

YEM121
October 28 2012
♦ 3-4 killed
♦ At least 1 wounded
At least three people were killed in a suspected drone strike in northern Yemen. Local al Qaeda commander Omar Saleh al-Tais (aka Attais) was initially reported killed. But Saada governor Sheikh Faris Manna and an interior ministry official said he was wounded in the strike. Two of the dead were said to be Saudis who officials said they were helping finance al Qaeda activities. The third man was Yemeni according to the Yemeni Ministry of Defence. A Yemeni security official said the drones struck at 10am and a local official said two houses were hit in the attack although other reports said just one was targeted. The strike hit a week after the last recorded attack, on the final day of the Muslim festival of Eid al Adha. A tribal source told AFP it ‘was the first by a US drone in the northern Saada province.’ It was the first airstrike in Saada recorded by the Bureau since January 2010 (YEM006). The state news agency reported militants had been trying to turn Wadi al Abu Jabara into ‘a passageway between Mareb and Jawf in the north and Shabwa and Abyan in the south.’ Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi strongly denounced the strike, calling US operations a ‘vicious campaign against the Yemeni people’.

Type of action: Possible drone strike
Location: Wadi al Abu Jabara, Saada
References: AFP, Reuters, Associated Press, Xinhua, 26 September (Arabic), Xinhua, Long War Journal, SABA, BNO, Yemen Post

November 6 2012
US aid to Yemen grew for the third year in a row, reports Foreign Policy. Also for the third time in as many years, 2012 saw AQAP ‘set a new high in the number of fighters in its ranks. Current estimates range from 1,000 to a few thousand.’ After a decade of ‘on-again, off-again aid to Yemen’ AQAP is stronger than in September 2001.

Location: Washington
Reference: Foreign Policy

November

YEM122
November 7 2012
♦ 2-3 killed
♦ 2-3 reported injured, including 1 child
As many as three people were killed in a suspected US drone strike. Their vehicle was destroyed less than 24 hours after President Obama was reelected for a second term. The men were driving through Beit al Ahan, nine miles outside Sanaa and the birthplace of ousted former President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The strike hit the car within site of Saleh’s large compound, reported freelance journalist Adam Baron. Alleged al Qaeda militant Adnan al Qathi (aka al Qadi) and his bodyguards Rabiee Lahib and Radwan al Hashidi were killed. A boy reportedly related to al Qathi was among the wounded. Al Qathi reportedly got out of his vehicle to make a phone call shortly before the strike hit.

Al Qathi was reportedly arrested and sentenced to four years for his involvement in a September 2008 attack on the US embassy in Sanaa. Tribesmen and army officials reportedly obtained his release. However Yemen analyst Gregory Johnsen said of his alleged involvement in the attack:

That is an interesting allegation since the entire cell in that attack came from a single mosque in the Red Sea port city of Hudaydah.

The Los Angeles Times described al Qathi as ‘a mercurial man of many guises, including radical militant, peace mediator, preacher of violence and army general.’ Local media reported al Qathi was a colonel in the powerful 1st Armored Division and related to its commander General Ali Mohsen al Ahmar. In December 2012 President Hadi reshuffled the military chain of command and General al Ahmar, who switched allegiance from President Saleh to the opposition during the 2011 popular uprising, was stripped of command of the 1st Armoured Division.

Al Qathi was a well known figure in Beit al Ahan and his sympathy for AQAP’s cause was no secret – his home ‘sticks out because of a mural on one side that shows al Qaida’s signature black flag’ – but his family disputed reports that he was a militant. They claimed that had they known Qathi was a drone target they would have made him cooperate with the authorities. His brother Himyar al Qathi said: ‘We could have made sure he turned himself in…If Adnan was guilty of any crime, then arrest him, put him on trial.’ Residents said al Qathi could have been captured easily and analyst Abdulghani al Iryani said: ‘It is nearly inconceivable to imagine that he could not have been taken into custody alive.’ A former US intelligence official said al Qathi’s 2008 arrest and release would not have been enough to put his name on an assassination list. And significant questions were raised over the threat al Qathi posed. Yemeni officials said President Hadi had approved the strike on al Qathi after deciding attempting to arrest him in Beit al Ahan would have led to more deaths. The officials told the LA Times they were ‘unaware of any intelligence linking Qadhi to an active plot.’

Sanaa-based analyst Abdulrazzak al Jamal told Xinhua a relative of al Qathi had confirmed to him the three men were killed. He said the strike was carried out by US drones and that drones were seen over the area for three days. A Yemeni security official called the strike a ‘Yemeni-U.S. joint airstrike operation’. But an official at al Daylami air base in Sanaa confirmed the strike took place but said ‘the raid was not carried out by any Yemeni warplane.’ Local tribal leaders told Associated Press the strike was carried out by the Yemen Air Force. But the Yemen Air Force does not have the capacity to launch precision strikes at night. Although the US would not confirm a drone targeted al Qathi, Yemeni officials and local villages said a US airstrike killed him. US drones and F-15E Strike Eagles are known to be flying armed sorties over Yemen from a base in Djibouti. A White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on this strike.

Type of Action: Possible US drone strike
Location: Beit al Ahan village, Sanaa province
Reference: Xinhua, AFP, Associated Press, Twitter, Huffington Post, Big Think blog, Marib (Arabic), News Yemen (Arabic), BBC, Washington Post, Yemen Post, Twitter, McClatchy Newspapers, Big Think blog, Los Angeles Times, Critical Threats,Los Angeles Times

November 28 2012
A Saudi Arabian diplomat was assassinated on the streets of Sanaa. Assistant military attache Khaled al Emizi was gunned down with his Yemeni bodyguard Jalal Mubarak Shaiban. An armed group dressed in Yemen security forces uniforms carried out the killing. No group claimed responsibility and although AQAP were suspected they denied carrying out the killing.

Location: Sanaa
References: Global Times, AFP, IBT, BBC, Washington Post, Associated Press, Yemen Times, Reuters, CNN, Al Ahram

December

YEM123
December 24 2012
♦ 2-3 killed
♦ 3 reported wounded
At least two men were killed when a suspected US drone destroyed their vehicle in the southern Bayda province; local press reported the strike took place at around 5pm. It was the first strike in Yemen for 47 days. There was confused reporting of the identity of the casualties. One casualties was described as either a Jordanian or Syrian militant. More was known of a second casualty, a Yemeni. While AFP named him as Abdullah Hussein al Waeli from Marib province, a wanted man ‘after he escaped from prison two years ago’. Associated Press and Reuters named him as Abdel-Raouf Naseeb, a ‘mid-level al Qaeda Yemeni operative’. A Naseeb family member confirmed his death, according to both agencies. Reuters said Naseeb had fled to Bayda from neighbouring Lawdar province earlier in 2012, during a military offensive. And Associated Press and Reuters said he had previously survived the first US drone strike outside Afghanistan. On November 3 2002 (YEM001) a CIA Predator drone killed six men, among them Qa’id Salim Sinan al Harithi – alleged mastermind of the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole – and US citizen Abu Ahmad al Hijazi.

Type of Action: Possible US drone strike
Location: Manaseh, Bayda province
Reference: AFP, Associated Press, Reuters, Reuters, Gulf News, Long War Journal, Yemen Post, Xinhua, Xinhua

YEM124
December 24 2012
♦ 3-5 killed
Up to five more alleged militants were killed in the second suspected US drone strike of the day. The unmanned aircraft reportedly fired three missiles on the men riding motorcycles and armed with pistols according to one source. The strike hit east of the provincial capital Mukalla, described by an anonymous local official as: ’An area that is widely believed to be the main operating base of al-Qaida members in Hadramout’. It was the first strike on the eastern Hadramout province recorded by the Bureau for 15 weeks (YEM113). Gulf News quoted an unnamed senior security official saying: ‘Four of the people died at the scene and the fifth suffered heavy injuries and died later on in hospital. We do not know whether they are members of Al Qaida or not. Shiher residents suspect that there are outsiders.’ Two of those killed were later named on the Ansar al-Mujahideen site as Abdullah Bawazir and Nabil al Kaldi.

Type of Action: Possible US drone strike
Location: Shehr, Hadramout
Reference: AFP, Reuters, Gulf News, Long War Journal, Xinhua, Long War Journal, Yemen Post

by The Bureau | Published in Bureau Stories, Covert Drone War, Covert War on Terror – the Data, Drones data carousel

Find this story at 25 December 2012

When U.S. drones kill civilians, Yemen’s government tries to conceal it

Dhamar, Yemen — A rickety Toyota truck packed with 14 people rumbled down a desert road from the town of Radda, which al-Qaeda militants once controlled. Suddenly a missile hurtled from the sky and flipped the vehicle over.

Chaos. Flames. Corpses. Then, a second missile struck.

Within seconds, 11 of the passengers were dead, including a woman and her 7-year-old daughter. A 12-year-old boy also perished that day, and another man later died from his wounds.

The Yemeni government initially said that those killed were al-Qaeda militants and that its Soviet-era jets had carried out the Sept. 2 attack. But tribal leaders and Yemeni officials would later say that it was an American assault and that all the victims were civilians who lived in a village near Radda, in central Yemen. U.S. officials last week acknowledged for the first time that it was an American strike.

“Their bodies were burning,” recalled Sultan Ahmed Mohammed, 27, who was riding on the hood of the truck and flew headfirst into a sandy expanse. “How could this happen? None of us were al-Qaeda.”

More than three months later, the incident offers a window into the Yemeni government’s efforts to conceal Washington’s mistakes and the unintended consequences of civilian deaths in American air assaults. In this case, the deaths have bolstered the popularity of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terrorist network’s Yemen affiliate, which has tried to stage attacks on U.S. soil several times.

Furious tribesmen tried to take the bodies to the gates of the presidential residence, forcing the government into the rare position of withdrawing its assertion that militants had been killed. The apparent target, Yemeni officials and tribal leaders said, was a senior regional al-Qaeda leader, Abdelrauf al-
Dahab, who was thought to be in a car traveling on the same road.

U.S. airstrikes have killed numerous civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other parts of the world, and those governments have spoken against the attacks. But in Yemen, the weak government has often tried to hide civilian casualties from the public, fearing repercussions in a nation where hostility toward U.S. policies is widespread. It continues to insist in local media reports that its own aging jets attacked the truck.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has kept silent publicly, neither confirming nor denying any involvement, a standard practice with most U.S. airstrikes in its clandestine counterterrorism fight in this strategic Middle Eastern country.

In response to questions, U.S. officials in Washington, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said it was a Defense Department aircraft, either a drone or a fixed-wing warplane, that fired on the truck. The Pentagon declined to comment on the incident, as did senior U.S. officials in Yemen and senior counterterrorism officials in Washington.

Since the attack, militants in the tribal areas surrounding Radda have gained more recruits and supporters in their war against the Yemeni government and its key backer, the United States. The two survivors and relatives of six victims, interviewed separately and speaking to a Western journalist about the incident for the first time, expressed willingness to support or even fight alongside AQAP, as the al-Qaeda group is known.

“Our entire village is angry at the government and the Americans,” Mohammed said. “If the Americans are responsible, I would have no choice but to sympathize with al-Qaeda because al-Qaeda is fighting America.”

Public outrage is also growing as calls for accountability, transparency and compensation go unanswered amid allegations by human rights activists and lawmakers that the government is trying to cover up the attack to protect its relationship with Washington. Even senior Yemeni officials said they fear that the backlash could undermine their authority.

“If we are ignored and neglected, I would try to take my revenge. I would even hijack an army pickup, drive it back to my village and hold the soldiers in it hostages,” said Nasser Mabkhoot Mohammed al-Sabooly, the truck’s driver, 45, who suffered burns and bruises. “I would fight along al-Qaeda’s side against whoever was behind this attack.”

One airstrike among dozens

After Osama bin Laden’s death last year, Yemen emerged as a key battlefield in the Obama administration’s war on Islamist militancy. AQAP members are among those on a clandestine “kill list” created by the administration to hunt down terrorism suspects. It is a lethal campaign, mostly fueled by unmanned drones, but it also includes fixed-wing aircraft and cruise missiles fired from the sea.

This year, there have been at least 38 U.S. airstrikes in Yemen, according to the Long War Journal, a nonprofit Web site that tracks American drone attacks. That is significantly more than in any year since 2009, when President Obama is thought to have ordered the first drone strike.

The Radda attack was one of the deadliest since a U.S. cruise missile strike in December 2009 killed dozens of civilians, including women and children, in the mountainous region of al-
Majala in southern Yemen. After that attack, many tribesmen in that area became radicalized and joined AQAP.

“The people are against the indiscriminate use of the drones,” said Yemeni Foreign Minister Abubaker al-Qirbi. “They want better management of drones. And, more important, they want to have some transparency as far as what’s going on — from everybody.”

The concern over civilian casualties has grown louder since the spring, when the White House broadened its definition of militants who can be targeted in Yemen to include those who may not be well-known.

“We don’t attack in populated areas,” said an Obama administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of discussing the U.S. airstrikes here. “We don’t go after people in dwellings where we don’t know who everyone is. We work very hard to minimize the collateral damage.

“Having said all that, like any programs managed and operated by human beings, mistakes happen. We are not perfect.”

The rise in U.S. attacks came as AQAP and other extremists seized large swaths of southern Yemen last year, taking advantage of the political chaos of the country’s populist Arab Spring revolution. Before that, AQAP orchestrated failed attempts to send parcel bombs on cargo planes to Chicago in 2010 and to bomb a Detroit-bound U.S. airliner the previous year.

In January, AQAP-linked militants briefly seized Radda, placing them only 100 miles south of the capital, Sanaa. But they left after the government, agreeing to their demands, released several extremists from prison. By the summer, the radicals had also been pushed from towns in southern Yemen after a U.S.-backed military offensive initiated by President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who took office early this year after the country’s autocratic leader, Ali Abdullah Saleh, stepped down after 33 years in power.

But today, extremists linked to al-Qaeda are still in and around Radda, as well as in other parts of Yemen, staging attacks on government and military officials.

In recent months, villagers in Sabool, about 10 miles from Radda, said they have heard U.S. drones fly over the area as many as three or four times a day. Some described them as “little white planes.”

“It burns my blood every time I see or hear the airplanes,” said Ali Ali Ahmed Mukhbil, 40, a farmer. “All they have accomplished is destruction and fear among the people.”

On that September morning, his brother Masood stepped into the Toyota truck in Sabool. It was filled with villagers heading to Radda to sell khat, a leafy narcotic chewed by most Yemeni males. After they sold their produce, they headed back in the afternoon.

Nasser Ahmed Abdurabu Rubaih, a 26-year-old khat farmer, was working in the valley when he heard the explosions. He ran to the site and, like others, threw sand into the burning vehicle to douse the flames. As he sifted through the charred bodies on the road, he recognized his brother, Abdullah, from his clothes.

“I lost my mind,” Rubaih recalled.

Mukhbil’s brother Masood also was dead.

‘Trying to kill the case’

Some witnesses said that they saw three planes in the sky, two black and one white, and that the black ones were Yemeni jets. But both missiles struck the moving vehicle directly, and the terrain surrounding the truck was not scorched — hallmarks of a precision strike from a sophisticated American aircraft.

“If you say it wasn’t a U.S. drone, nobody will believe you,” said Abdel-Karim al-Iryani, a former Yemeni prime minister who is a senior adviser to Hadi. “A Yemeni pilot to be able to hit a specific vehicle that’s moving? Impossible.”

The Yemeni government publicly apologized for the attack and sent 101 guns to tribal leaders in the area as a symbolic gesture, which in Yemeni culture is an admission of guilt. But a government inquiry into the strike appears to be stalled, human rights activists and lawmakers said.

For the past three months, lawmakers have unsuccessfully demanded that senior government officials reveal who was responsible for the attack. Yemen’s defense and interior ministries, Hadi’s office, and the attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Washington played a crucial role in ousting Saleh and installing Hadi, a former defense minister. The United States also provides hundreds of millions of dollars to the military and security forces in counterterrorism assistance. U.S. officials regard Hadi as an even stauncher counterterrorism ally than Saleh.

“The government is trying to kill the case,” said Abdul Rahman Berman, the executive director of the National Organization for Defending Rights and Freedoms, or HOOD, a local human rights group. “The government wants to protect its relations with the U.S.”

After the 2009 strike in al-
Majala, the Yemeni government took responsibility for the assault. “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh told Gen. David H. Petraeus, who was then the head of U.S. Central Command, according to a U.S. Embassy e-mail leaked by the anti-secrecy Web site WikiLeaks.

Three weeks after the Radda attack, Hadi visited Washington and praised the accuracy of U.S. drone strikes in an interview with Washington Post editors and reporters, as well as publicly. “They pinpoint the target and have zero margin of error, if you know what target you’re aiming at,” he told an audience at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

‘That’s why we are fighting’

The day after the attack, tribesmen affiliated with al-
Qaeda blocked the roads around Radda and stormed government buildings. They set up a large tent and held a gathering to denounce the government and the United States. Fliers handed out around town read: “See what the government has done? That’s why we are fighting. . . . They are the agents of America and the enemy of Islam. . . . They fight whoever says ‘Allah is my God,’ according to America’s instructions.”

At the funeral, some mourners chanted “America is a killer,” said Mohammed al-Ahmadi, a human rights activist who attended.

A few days later, at a gathering, relatives of the victims urged Yemeni officials to be careful about the intelligence they provided to the Americans. “Do not rush to kill innocent people,” declared Mohammed Mukhbil al-Sabooly, a village elder, in testimony that was videotaped. “If such attacks continue, they will make us completely lose our trust in the existence of a state.”

…

By Sudarsan Raghavan, Published: December 25

Greg Miller in Washington and Ali Almujahed in Sanaa, Yemen, contributed to this report.

Find this story at 25 December 2012
© The Washington Post Company

Who is held to account for deaths by drone in Yemen?

There is a history of Yemeni officials lying to protect the US, and the Pentagon and CIA greeting queries with obfuscation

An unmanned US Predator drone takes off on a night sortie. Photograph: AP/Kirsty Wigglesworth

When news flashed of an air strike on a vehicle in the Yemeni city of Radaa on Sunday afternoon, early claims that al-Qaida militants had died soon gave way to a more grisly reality.

At least 10 civilians had been killed, among them women and children. It was the worst loss of civilian life in Yemen’s brutal internal war since May 2012. Somebody had messed up badly. But was the United States or Yemen responsible?

Local officials and eyewitnesses were clear enough. The Radaa attack was the work of a US drone – a common enough event. Since May 2011, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has recorded up to 116 US drone strikes in Yemen, part of a broader covert war aimed at crushing Islamist militants. But of those attacks, only 39 have been confirmed by officials as the work of the US.

The attribution of dozens of further possible drone attacks – and others reportedly involving US ships and conventional aircraft – remains unclear. Both the CIA and Pentagon are fighting dirty wars in Yemen, each with a separate arsenal and kill list. Little wonder that hundreds of deaths remain in a limbo of accountability.

With anger rising at the death of civilians in Radaa, Yemen’s government stepped forward to take the blame. It claimed that its own air force had carried out the strike on moving vehicles after receiving “faulty intelligence”. Yet the Yemeni air force is barely fit for purpose.

And why believe the Yemeni defence ministry anyway? Just 48 hours earlier it had made similar claims. But when it emerged that alleged al-Qaida bomber Khaled Musalem Batis had died in a strike, anonymous officials soon admitted that a US drone had carried out that killing.

There is a long history of senior Yemeni officials lying to protect Barack Obama’s secret war on terror. When US cruise missiles decimated a tented village in December 2009, at least 41 civilians were butchered alongside a dozen alleged militants, as a parliamentary report later concluded.

As we now know, thanks to WikiLeaks, the US and Yemen sought to cover up the US role in that attack. We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” President Saleh informed US Central Command (Centcom)’s General Petraeus.

Pakistan’s own former strongman, General Pervez Musharraf, had performed a similar deed for the CIA, with the army claiming early US drones strikes as its own work. A senior Musharraf aide told the Sunday Times, “We thought it would be less damaging if we said we did it rather than the US.” Only when civilian deaths became too unbearable in 2006 did Islamabad end that charade.

Still, dictators may have been better able to rein in US covert attacks than their democratic successors. When US special forces accidentally killed Jaber al-Shabwani, the deputy governor of Yemen’s Marib province in May 2010, Saleh was able to secure a year-long pause in the US bombing campaign.

With new president Abd-Rabbuh Mansour Hadi owing his position to the US he is unlikely to enjoy similar leverage, if Pakistan’s present impotence against CIA strikes is any guide.

The odds of finding out who was really responsible for Sunday’s deaths are not good. At the height of this year’s US-backed offensive against al-Qaida in May, at least a dozen civilians died in a double air strike in Jaar. As onlookers and rescuers came forward after an initial attack, they were killed in a follow-up strike.

The event was reminiscent of CIA tactics in Pakistan, and there is circumstantial evidence that US drones carried out the attack. Times reporter Iona Craig recalls the testimony of one survivor she met in Jaar:

“He didn’t know who carried out the strike but said they didn’t hear any planes or fighter jets before either strike and they dived to the ground when they saw a ‘missile’ with a jet stream of ‘white smoke behind it’, flying through the sky towards them before the second strike happened’.”

Four months on, neither Yemen nor the US has taken responsibility for that attack. According to Haykal Bafana, a lawyer based in Sanaa, “the greatest worry for people here is not only a lack of accountability but a lack of transparency. Civilians at risk in the areas being targeted are being given no information at all about how best to protect themselves.”

There is also the issue of compensation. Yemen’s government has now ordered an inquiry into the Radaa bombing. Yet following the 2009 killing of 41 civilians relatives were compensated with just a few hundred dollars, after details of Centcom’s role were deliberately hidden from that inquiry. In contrast, US forces in Afghanistan not only admitted responsibility in a recent incident, but paid out $46,000 (£29,000) for each person killed and $10,000 for those injured.

There is a growing gulf between what Yemen’s people are experiencing and what their government claims. Bafana says Yemen’s official news agency Saba has only used the word “drone” once since February 2011. A confirmed US strike on August 29 killed not only three alleged militants but a policeman and a local anti-al-Qaida imam, according to local reports. Those civilian deaths remain absent from Saba’s coverage.

…

Chris Woods
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 September 2012 12.28 BST

Find this story at 6 September 2012
© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Bloody Sunday murder inquiry planned

Police to launch criminal investigation into deaths of 14 people after British paratroopers opened fire on crowd, in 1972

British troops behind a wire barricade in Derry, on Bloody Sunday, when 13 people were killed at a protest march, in 1972. Photograph: Bentley Archive/Popperfoto/Getty Images

A murder inquiry into the Bloody Sunday killings in Derry is to begin in the new year.

Senior commanders from the Police Service of Northern Ireland on Thursday briefed relatives of the 14 people who died after British paratroopers opened fire on demonstrators in the city, in 1972.

Earlier this year, police signalled an intent to investigate the incident after they and prosecutors reviewed the findings of the Saville public inquiry into the controversial shootings. Until now it had been unclear when such an investigation would start.

After the 12-year inquiry, Lord Saville found that the killings were unjustified and none of the dead posed a threat when they were shot.

That contradicted the long-standing official version of events, outlined in the contentious 1972 Widgery report, which had exonerated soldiers of any blame.

…

Press Association
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 20 December 2012 17.31 GMT

Find this story at 20 December 2012

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

MoD pays out millions to Iraqi torture victims

Lawyers and human rights groups say 400 settlements show ‘systemic’ abuse

British soldiers take Iraqi prisoners: human rights groups and lawyers are calling for a public inquiry into the UK’s detention and interrogation practices in Iraq following the 2003 invasion. Photograph: Reuters

The Ministry of Defence has paid out £14m in compensation and costs to hundreds of Iraqis who complained that they were illegally detained and tortured by British forces during the five-year occupation of the south-east of the country.

Hundreds more claims are in the pipeline as Iraqis become aware that they are able to bring proceedings against the UK authorities in the London courts.

The MoD says it is investigating every allegation of abuse that has been made, adding that the majority of British servicemen and women deployed to Iraq conducted themselves “with the highest standards of integrity”.

However, human rights groups and lawyers representing former prisoners say that the abuse was systemic, with military interrogators and guards responsible for the mistreatment acting in accordance with both their training in the UK and orders issued in Iraq.

The campaigners are calling for a public inquiry into the UK’s detention and interrogation practices following the 2003 invasion. An inquiry would be a development the MoD would be eager to avoid.

Payments totalling £8.3m have been made to 162 Iraqis this year. There were payments to 17 individuals last year and 26 in the three years before that.

The average payment to the 205 people who have made successful claims has been almost £70,000, including costs. The MoD says it is negotiating payments concerning a further 196 individuals.

Lawyers representing former prisoners of the British military say that more than 700 further individuals are likely to make claims next year.

Most of those compensated were male civilians who said they had been beaten, deprived of sleep and threatened before being interrogated by British servicemen and women who had detained them on suspicion of involvement in the violent insurgency against the occupation. Others said that they suffered sexual humiliation and were forced into stress positions for prolonged periods.

Many of the complaints arise out of the actions of a shadowy military intelligence unit called the Joint Forward Interrogation Team (Jfit) which operated an interrogation centre throughout the five-year occupation. Officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross complained about the mistreatment of detainees at Jfit not long after it was first established.

Despite this, the interrogators shot hundreds of video films in which they captured themselves threatening and abusing men who can be seen to be bruised, disoriented, complaining of starvation and sleep deprivation and, in some cases, too exhausted to stand unaided.

A former soldier who served as a guard at Jfit told the Guardian that he and others were ordered to take hold of blindfolded prisoners by their thumbs in between interrogation sessions then drag them around assault courses where they could not be filmed.

He also confirmed that the prisoners were often beaten during these runs, and that they would then be returned for interrogation in front of a video camera.

The interrogators were drawn from all three branches of the forces and included a large number of reservists.

During proceedings brought before the high court in London, lawyers representing the former Jfit prisoners suggested the interrogation centre could be regarded as “Britain’s Abu Ghraib”.

Questioned about the compensation payments, an MoD spokesperson said: “Over 120,000 British troops have served in Iraq and the vast majority have conducted themselves with the highest standards of integrity and professionalism. All allegations of abuse will always be investigated thoroughly. We will compensate victims of abuse where it is right to do so and seek to ensure that those responsible are brought to justice.”

Lutz Oette, legal counsel at Redress, a London-based NGO which helps torture survivors get justice, said: “The payments provide a long overdue measure of redress. However, for the victims compensation without truth and accountability is a heavy price to pay. For justice to be done there is a need for a full independent inquiry to establish what happened and who is responsible.

“Looking at the number of claimants and scale of payments, there clearly seems to be a systemic problem. It is high time for this to be fully accounted for, first and foremost for the victims but also the British public, which has an obvious interest to know the truth behind the figures.”

Next month, the high court will hear a judicial review of the MoD’s refusal to hold a public inquiry into the abuses. Human rights groups and lawyers for the former prisoners say the UK government is obliged to hold an inquiry to meet its obligations under the European convention on human rights – and particularly under article three of the convention, which protects individuals from torture.

After a hearing, the high court highlighted matters supporting the allegations of systemic abuse. These included:

• The same techniques being used at the same places for the same purpose: to assist interrogation.

• The facilities being under the command of an officer.

• Military doctors examining each prisoner at various stages in their detention.

• Investigations by the Royal Military police that were concluded without anyone being held to account.

If the court does order a public inquiry, responsibility for any systemic abuse is likely to be traced up the military chain of command and beyond.

…

Ian Cobain
The Guardian, Thursday 20 December 2012 21.00 GMT

Find this story at 20 December 2012

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

High court quashes Hillsborough inquest verdicts

Ruling clears way for fresh inquest into 96 deaths, re-examining roles of police, Sheffield council and Sheffield Wednesday

Relatives of the 96 victims of the Hillsborough disaster have said they feel vindicated in their 23-year campaign for justice after the original inquest verdict of accidental death was quashed in the high court.

The landmark verdict clears the way for a new inquest into the deaths next year, re-examining the roles of the police and other emergency services, Sheffield council and Sheffield Wednesday Football Club, and leading to the possibility of new verdicts of unlawful killing.

The lord chief justice said it was “inevitable” that the emergence of fresh evidence about how and why the 96 victims died made it “desirable and reasonable for a fresh inquest to be heard”.

“However distressing or unpalatable, the truth will be brought to light,” Lord Judge said. “In this way, the families of those who died in the disaster will be properly respected. Our earnest wish is the new inquest will not be delayed for a moment longer than necessary.”

The decision came as a new police investigation into the disaster was announced by the home secretary, Theresa May. The former Durham chief constable Jon Stoddart will lead the new inquiry and liaise with a parallel Independent Police Complaints Commission review.

The application by the attorney general, Dominic Grieve, to quash the original verdicts was made in the wake of the publication in September of the Hillsborough Independent Panel (HIP) report and accepted by three high court judges.

New medical evidence revealed that 58 victims “definitely or probably” had the capacity to survive beyond the 3.15pm cut-off point imposed by the original coroner, Dr Stefan Popper. In a further 12 cases, the cause of death remained unclear.

Grieve said the application was unopposed and supported by all the families and the defendants, the coroner for South Yorkshire and the coroner for West Yorkshire.

The original coroner said that no evidence gathered after 3.15pm, when the first ambulance arrived on the pitch, would be considered because he believed that by that point all 96 victims were already dead. As a result, the role of the police and the emergency services in the aftermath of the disaster was not considered.

The attorney general told the court that medical evidence from Dr Bill Kirkup and Prof Jack Crane formed “the essential basis” for his application, meaning that the premise of the original inquest was unsustainable.

“The new medical evidence presented by the panel’s report leads to the conclusion that justice has not been done,” he said.

The lord chief justice said there was “ample evidence to suggest that the 3.15pm cut-off was seriously flawed” and that was sufficient on its own to justify the quashing of the original inquest.

It raised new questions about the conduct of police and the emergency services, he said.

But he said there were other reasons for ordering a new inquest, including the 116 amendments to police statements designed to cast them in a better light, and new evidence about the safety of the stadium.

Set up to reconsider all evidence relating to the disaster, including new documents made available for the first time, the HIP report raised serious concerns about the adequacy of the original inquest in Sheffield in 1990.

The review found that the decision to impose the cut-off severely limited examination of the response of the police and emergency services to the disaster on 15 April 1989, in which 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death in the Leppings Lane end of the stadium, and “raised profound concerns regarding sufficiency of inquiry and examination of evidence”.

The lord chief justice agreed, saying that “in our judgment the 3.15pm cut-off point provided not only the most dramatic but also the most distressing aspect” of the new evidence.

“In short, the unchallenged evidence of pathologists at the Taylor inquiry and the subsequent inquest is no longer accepted,” he said.

…

Owen Gibson
The Guardian, Wednesday 19 December 2012 21.50 GMT

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UK to press Maldives government over human rights abuses

Move comes as MPs and MSPs table questions to ministers after Guardian revealed ties between British and Maldives police

The Maldives police service is accused of serious and persistent abuses. Photograph: Ibrahim Faid/AFP/Getty Images

Foreign Office ministers are to raise serious concerns about human rights abuses in the Maldives after a Guardian investigation revealed close ties between the British and Maldives police.

Alistair Burt is to pressure the Maldives government to tackle serious and persistent abuses by its police service, including attacks on opposition MPs, torture and mass detentions of democracy activists, on an official visit next month.

MPs and MSPs are tabling questions to the foreign secretary, William Hague, and ministers in the Scottish government about disclosures in the Guardian that at least 77 police officers in the Maldives, including the current commissioner, Abdulla Riyaz, were trained by the Scottish Police College.

The college did not train Maldives officers in public order policing, but did include courses on human rights. Sources in the Maldives said a number of officers directly implicated in the recent violence were trained at the college, at Tulliallan in Fife.

Tory and Labour MPs at Westminster and MSPs active in a cross-party human rights group at Holyrood said the Foreign Office and Scottish ministers should immediately review those contracts.

The Guardian can also disclose that the Scottish Police college could soon extend its role in the Maldives by helping run degree courses for a new policing academy, despite the growing international condemnation of Maldives police conduct over the last 10 months.

The college and the Foreign Office are considering a formal proposal to supply teaching to the new academy. The Maldives president, Mohammed Waheed Hassan, who took power in February after the police helped to force the first democratically elected president, Mohamed Nasheed, from office, has used that deal to defend his regime’s track record on human rights.

In October Waheed wrote directly to senior public figures, including the airlines owner Sir Richard Branson and musician Thom Yorke, who had signed an open letter to the Guardian condemning his regime’s conduct, claiming that Scottish police were helping to reform policing in the Maldives.

John Glen MP, the parliamentary private secretary to the communities secretary, Eric Pickles, and a supporter of the opposition Maldives Democratic party, said he would be raising “grave concerns” that Waheed was using the Scottish Police college’s involvement to manipulate international opinion, in the Commons and directly with Burt.

Glen said: “There are grave implications for the Scottish Police college, which is in danger of being taken for a ride by a regime which is blatantly trying to legitimise the quality of its police force on the back of the established reputation of Scottish policing.”

John Finnie MSP, who chairs the Scottish parliament’s cross-party human rights group and is a former police officer, said he had written to Hague asking him to reconsider the training deal until democracy and civil liberties had been restored in the Maldives.

Finnie has also tabled questions to Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish justice secretary, asking whether he had any powers to stop the college training police in oppressive regimes, and would be raising the Guardian’s investigation with Stephen House, chief constable of the new single police force for Scotland.

…

Severin Carrell, Scotland correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 19 December 2012 07.00 GMT

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© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Maldives police accused of civil rights abuses being trained by Scottish police

Scottish Police College and former officers have trained some of the Maldives police facing allegations of brutality against pro-democracy protesters, opposition MPs and journalists

Maldivian policemen block protesters after the ‘coup d’etat’ in February, when the island nation’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Nasheed, stepped down. Photograph: Ibrahim Faid/AFP/Getty

The Maldives are marketed as a tourist paradise; a chain of idyllic coral islands with golden, palm-fringed beaches, where holidaymakers can bathe undisturbed in the warm, crystal-clear seas of the Indian Ocean.

But that image has been challenged by a series of damning reports by human rights investigators. They accuse the Maldives police service (MPS) of serious, repeated civil rights abuses against pro-democracy protesters, opposition MPs and journalists.

Violence in the Commonwealth nation sharply escalated this year after the forced departure of the Maldives’ first democratically elected president Mohamed Nasheed, in February. Human rights agencies believe that the alleged coup, and the violence since then, has shattered the islands’ slow, fragile journey to democracy.

That conflict, which has reportedly led to the mass detention of 2,000 opposition activists, assaults and arrests of 19 opposition MPs, as well as sexual assaults, torture and the indiscriminate use of pepper sprays – including twice against ex-president Nasheed, has raised significant questions about the role of British police in training and advising the islands’ controversial police service.

Opposition groups, Amnesty International and senior officials in the reformist Nasheed government, including the former high commissioner to the UK and the former chair of the Maldives’ police integrity commission, have told the Guardian about their serious concerns over the UK’s role.

They believe significant contradictions have emerged in the UK’s dealings with the Maldives police, which threaten to damage the UK’s reputation in south Asia.

Farah Faizal, the former Maldives high commissioner to the UK and a member of the UK-based Friends of the Maldives pressure group, said: “If they’ve been providing training all these years and the MPS in Maldives are carrying out all these brutal attacks on people then there are obviously questions for them [whether] it is the right training they’ve been getting.”

Opposition activists say the UK has been aware about the police force’s troubled reputation for years: senior British officers raised serious anxieties about human rights standards more than five years ago.

After a fact-finding mission in 2007, one senior retired Scottish officer, John Robertson, described the force’s special operations command as an “openly paramilitary organisation” and a “macho elite … most of whom lack basic police training”.

In 2009, two senior British officers recruited by British diplomats – Superintendent Alec Hippman of Strathclyde police and a former inspector of constabulary for England, Sir David Crompton, made a series of recommendations to improve policing, after discovering the Maldives police service was poorly equipped for modern policing.

After policing improved during Nasheed’s three-year term of office, the MPS has been heavily implicated in the violent, alleged coup when Nasheed was deposed in February this year. He stepped down – alleging that he was forced to at gunpoint – after several days of brutal clashes between the police, the Maldives’ military, senior members of Nasheed’s Maldives Democratic party and pro-democracy campaigners.

That violence has continued since the alleged coup, raising allegations that the opposition Maldives Democratic party is being suppressed before fresh but unconfirmed elections are due to take place next year.

That alarm intensified after former president Nasheed was arrested in October for allegedly arresting a judge, and ignoring a travel ban and several of his MPs were arrested on a private island for allegedly drinking alcohol.

In July, Amnesty International described the situation there as a “human rights crisis” following “a campaign of violent repression [which] has gripped the country since President Mohamed Nasheed’s ousting in February 2012.” Its report, The Other Side of Paradise, concluded “there are already signs that the country is slipping back into the old pattern of repression and injustice.”

Opposition groups are alarmed that former police officers acting privately and the Scottish Police College (SPC), backed by the Foreign Office, have continued training MPS officers and advising the force during a period of intense political conflict and mounting allegations of human rights abuses.

Faizal said she had been pressing the Foreign Office to take much tougher action on human rights in the islands. “I would hope they would definitely review what they’ve been doing because somebody has been paying for this: they should dramatically review what they’ve been doing and they need to tell these people in the MPS if they want to continue their relationship, they must be seen to be policing rather than act like thugs, just going around and beating people.

“They have to be a credit to the Scottish Police College if they do well, but right now, how the MPS is behaving is absolutely shocking.”

An investigation by the Guardian has found that Scottish police forces and the SPC have been closely involved in training Maldivian police, including its current commissioner, Abdulla Riyaz, for more than 15 years – when the Maldives were dominated by the unelected, autocratic President Abdul Mamoun Gayoom.

Since then, more than 67 MPS officers have been trained at the college at Tulliallan in Fife, their fees helping the SPC earn millions of pounds of extra income from external contracts. In 2009-10, the college received £141,635 from training MPS officers. The SPC said those fees did not make a profit, but was breakeven income.

The course, a diploma in police management in which human rights was “covered”, was taken by 67 Maldives officers. A separate group of MPS officers were also given human rights training in 2011, the college said. At least 10 middle- and senior-ranking Maldives officers are believed to have attended previously.

Links between Scottish and Maldives police began in 1997 when Riyaz and three other officers – then part of the Maldives’ military national security force, which ran all internal policing before a civilian police service was set up in 2003, had a five-month visit to Scotland the Highlands and islands.

Seconded to the Northern constabulary, Riyaz spent a month in the Western Isles and four months in Inverness, before taking a postgraduate diploma in alcohol and drugs studies at Paisley University in 1999. That tour of the Highlands was seven years before Gayoom, reacting slowly to pressure from its allies, including the UK government, split up his national security force into a military arm and a civilian police service in 2004. In January 2007, as Gayoom came under growing pressure for democratic reforms, including relinquishing his control over the judiciary, the police and state prosecution service, the SPC signed its open-ended training deal with the MPS.

The Foreign Office admitted it had “serious concerns” about the alleged police brutality and was pressing President Mohammed Waheed Hassan, to tackle the problem but added: “Targeted police capacity-building programmes can lead to increased police professionalism, responsiveness and accountability.

“Although progress is not always swift, we judge that UK engagement can make a positive contribution to consolidation of democracy and respect for human rights.”

The Scottish Police Services Authority (SPSA), which runs Tulliallan, admitted it does not monitor policing in the Maldives, or check on how its former students perform, and admitted it had no knowledge of the critical report by Robertson from 2007. It said that monitoring links with the Maldives was the Foreign Office’s responsibility, through the British high commission in Sri Lanka.

John Geates, the interim chief executive of the SPSA and the former police college director who signed the original deal with the Maldives in 2007, defended its relationship with the force.

“We believe that sharing our wealth of experience and expertise is a positive way of contributing to the development and delivery of fair and effective policing across the world,” Geates said.

“We are passionate about showing other police forces how to deliver community policing by consent which, by its nature, means the college does not work with western democracies where that culture and ethos already exists.”

Bruce Milne, a former head of training and educational standards at Tulliallan college and retired chief superintendent, now works in the Maldives as a private consultant through his firm Learning & Solutions, but there are differing accounts about his work there.

Milne, who left Tulliallan in June 2010, initially signing a deal to provide training up to degree level with a private corporate security firm set up by Riyaz called Gage Pvt, and an organisation called the Centre for Security and Law Enforcement Studies.

According to Gage’s Facebook page, that deal was signed at a famous Maldives tourist resort called Sun Islands in December 2011, when Riyaz was not working for the Maldives police. Formerly an assistant commissioner, Riyaz had been sacked in early 2010 during Nasheed’s presidency for alleged fraud. He was reinstated as commissioner in February 2012, after Nasheed was deposed.

Riyaz told the Guardian that the deal signed last December lapsed after he rejoined the police. Milne’s company website said his firm “is in the process of forming a partnership with the MPS to create and support the Institute for Security and Law Enforcement Studies (Isles), in affiliation with the Scottish Police College, a world-renowned police training establishment.”

The college denied that. It said: “There is no formal affiliation between Learning & Solutions and the SPC in relation to the Maldives.”

Milne refused to discuss his dealings with the MPS with the Guardian, but his profile on the social networking site LinkedIn states he has been “responsible for the provision of advise [sic] on organisational development to the Commissioner of Police and to provide assistance and direction in the development of Isles, a professional institute offering competitive education and training for police and security staff in the Maldives”.

Superintendent Abdul Mannan, a spokesman for the MPS, denied that Milne was working with the MPS. He said: “Learning & Solution [sic] is working with Police Co-operative Society, a co-operative society registered under the Co-operative Societies Act of Maldives, and not MPS, to deliver a BSc course through Isles.

“Learning and Solutions is one out of the many foreign partner institutions working with Polco to deliver courses through Isles and Polco welcomes all interested parties to work in partnership to help Maldives deliver its security and justice sector training needs.”

Mannan said the MPS was committed to improving the force’s standards and its human rights record; it now had an internal police standards body that was modernising its policies and procedures. The force was “trying to professionalise the organisation and solid international partners are helping us achieve this goal.

…

Severin Carrell, Scotland correspondent
The Guardian, Monday 17 December 2012 19.01 GMT

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© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Iraq abuse inquiry was a ‘cover-up’, whistleblower tells court

Louise Thomas gives evidence ahead of judicial review into government’s refusal to hold public inquiry into troop abuse claims

Iraqi prisoners stand behind razor wire. Lawyers say they have received complaints of abuse from more than 1,100 Iraqis. Photograph: Damir Sagolj/AFP/Getty Images

A former investigator into allegations that British troops abused Iraqi prisoners resigned because she did not want to be implicated in “a cover-up”, the high court has heard.

Louise Thomas, 45, left the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT) in July because she thought it was not a genuine investigation but a “face-saving inquiry”, she told the court on Tuesday.

Her evidence came at a preliminary hearing in advance of a judicial review, expected next month, into the government’s refusal to hold a public inquiry into allegations of mistreatment of Iraqis between 2003 and 2008.

Lawyers say they have now received complaints of abuse from more than 1,100 Iraqis and that IHAT’s investigations are insufficiently independent because they have been conducted by Royal Military Police (RMP) officers and other members of the armed forces.

Thomas, whose claims were highlighted by the Guardian in October, is a former police constable who worked for six months with IHAT at its British headquarters in Pewsey, Wiltshire.

She admitted in court she did have second thoughts at one stage and asked for her job back.

“After speaking to a few colleagues and realising we could make a difference I asked if I could stay,” she said. “[They] said they would try to change things. It was very frustrating working at IHAT.”

Thomas denied she was angry when she was refused permission to withdraw her resignation.

Her job at IHAT had been to review evidence taken from video sessions of recordings of interrogations of Iraqi suspects. One of the exercises was to see how they matched up to standards set by the Istanbul Protocols, which assess methods of torture.

Thomas alleged that many of the sessions had been misrecorded by earlier forensic investigators.

But Philip Havers QC, for the Ministry of Defence, accused her of exaggerating the number of misrecordings and said that notebooks showed only seven such alleged occurrences out of 181 videos she had assessed – a rate of 4%.

Thomas denied she was exaggerating and said other records would show there were more occasions.

If the high court agrees in January that there should be a full inquiry into the latest allegations of military abuse during the occupation of Iraq, it will be the third such investigation following the Baha Mousa and al-Sweady inquiries.

Asked by Havers whether she was still saying that “IHAT is not a genuine investigation but merely a face-saving inquiry”, Thomas replied: “Yes, I am.”

She said she believed IHAT was a “cover-up” and that she had resigned because she no longer wanted to be implicated in it.

The court was told that the hearing would not identify any of the soldiers who worked for the Joint Forces Interrogation Team (Jfit) in Iraq, any of the military operations involved or any of the Iraqi detainees.

“The reasons for the redactions is so as not to prejudice the ongoing (IHAT) criminal investigations,” Havers said.

John Birch, a former RMP officer who has been working with IHAT, said there were seven main strands of investigations being pursued, including a “murder review team” that was looking at Iraqi deaths.

He acknowledged that tapes from the early years of the occupation before 2005 were still missing. A shortage of digital video tapes meant that some of the later sessions had been recorded over.

…

Owen Bowcott, legal affairs correspondent
The Guardian, Tuesday 11 December 2012 19.44 GMT

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