Washington Decoded

Drone Wars

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By Jefferson Flanders

 

MADRID, 12 March 2013 (or 2017) - Former US President Barack Obama today abruptly canceled a scheduled trip to Spain after learning that he might be arrested on war crimes charges stemming from past American drone attacks on Al Qaeda leaders. The Nobel Peace Prize winner postponed his planned address to Madrid University students after judge Baltasar Garzón, acting on a request by human rights lawyers, issued arrest warrants for Obama and former CIA Director Leon Panetta under the legal doctrine known as “universal jurisdiction.” It allows for the local prosecution of grave human rights crimes regardless of where they were committed.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) have all condemned US “Predator” and “Reaper” strikes on Al Qaeda and Taliban members as illegal extrajudicial executions, and have characterized collateral civilian deaths as a violation of international human rights law.

    Does this scenario seem far-fetched? It’s not.

    US government officials face the real possibility of  future arrest and trial in Europe over Washington’s “drone war” in Pakistan—the targeted killing of Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders using missiles fired from remotely-controlled Predator and Reaper aircraft (or UCAV, for Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles in military jargon). And the problem underscores a fundamental deficit in US policy since 2001: an inability or unwillingness by Washington to directly confront the limitations of international law in dealing with terrorism in the post-9/11 world.

    The use of drones in regions where US forces are not declared combatants represents, in a nutshell, many of the moral and legal quandaries the United States has struggled with since 9/11. If the conflict with Al Qaeda is a war without borders, then targeted killings are scarcely different than taking down a combatant in any war. But if a state of armed conflict doesn’t exist, or if targeted killings aren’t regarded as a legitimate act of self-defense, then these attacks violate current international law.

    Looking at it another way, if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the mastermind behind 9/11, were driving in the Pakistani tribal areas in a Land Rover today, according to US  policy, it would be entirely legitimate to put him in the cross-hairs of a lethal drone. Instead, he is slated to stand trial in New York where he will be presumed innocent and where the emphasis will be on proving his guilt. Theoretically at least, KSM could walk out of court a free man.

    This inexplicable contradiction underscores the inability of the United States and the world community to devise new legal conventions in the wake of 9/11. An internationalist-minded president would seek to shape international law to present conditions, rather than continually bending the law until it snaps back, with unintended consequences.

Unspeakably Awful

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JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters

By James W. Douglass

Orbis Books. 510 pp. $30

By John McAdams

    James Douglass treads a familiar path in JFK and the Unspeakable. It is yet another book that claims John Kennedy was killed because he had decided to withdraw from Vietnam. Kennedy’s “rejection of Cold War politics was considered treasonous by forces in his own government,” according to Douglass, and supposedly made JFK’s violent removal an urgent necessity.[1]

     What makes Douglass’s volume unique is that his argument is dressed up in verbiage  unfamiliar to JFK assassination buffs. Most authors of books on the assassination  attempt to cloak their political views, and pretend to arrive at the truth about the  assassination after a supposedly objective analysis of the facts. Douglass wears his politics on his sleeve. He is a Catholic “peace activist” and disciple of Thomas Merton, whose observations infuse the book. Self-styled activists like Douglass have a long history of being opposed to the use of military power by the United States, although they don’t seem to mind as much when military power is used by America’s adversaries. And while they employ religious rhetoric to justify and rationalize their unilateral pacifism, their worldview, ultimately, is indistinguishable from that of secular leftists like Oliver Stone (who, not surprisingly, is a big fan of Douglass’s book).

    Douglass’s key villain—the “Unspeakable” of his title—turns out to be the same kind of opaque nemesis that Stone is fond of conjuring up. The best identification Douglass can offer is “shadowy intelligence agencies using intermediaries and scapegoats under the cover of ‘plausible deniability,’” and even more vaguely, “an evil whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe.”[2] How convenient: a culprit who is indescribable. In essence, though, Douglass’s evil-doer is indistinguishable from that bogeyman of vulgar, atheistic, and leftist radicals from the ‘60s: the “military-industrial complex,” except that he adds to the stew the Central Intelligence Agency.

Drugs, Corruption, and Justice in Vietnam and Afghanistan: A Cautionary Tale

 

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By Merle L. Pribbenow

    

    On October 27, 2009, The New York Times published a dramatic article about Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai. The article alleged that the president’s brother is a major Afghan drug trafficker as well as being a paid asset of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The byline to the article listed three names, including that of James Risen, the well-known author of State of War, a recent and controversial book about US intelligence operations under the Bush Administration. And like the sensational allegations Risen made in State of War, the Times article was based almost entirely on anonymous sources.

    While noting that Ahmed Wali Karzai categorically denied any involvement in drug  trafficking, and that he also denied being a paid agent of the CIA, the article went on to quote unnamed U.S. “military and political” officials as stating that the Agency’s relationship with Karzai had become a source of “anger and frustration among American military officers and other officials of the Obama administration.” While admitting that the evidence against Wali Karzai was “largely circumstantial,” the article charged that Karzai’s alleged involvement in the opium trade meant that Karzai was viewed as a “malevolent force” in Afghanistan (a peculiar and incendiary choice of words). The article also repeated critical comments made by anonymous US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) sources about the US government’s failure to take action against Karzai and his alleged narcotics connections.

    As a retired CIA officer who served in South Vietnam, the Times story struck a very familiar chord with me.  Several decades ago, strikingly similar wartime allegations were made against a powerful government official, Lieutenant General Dang Van Quang, who was very close to South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu. Although I retired from the CIA more than a decade ago and have absolutely no personal knowledge, one way or the other, about the accuracy of the charges made against President Karzai’s brother, I believe that before the press, the American public, and senior Obama administration officials blindly accept as accurate the charges made in the Times article, it might be useful to review the earlier Vietnamese case. Lessons from General Quang’s case may be applicable to the allegations being made about President Karzai’s brother.

Richard Nixon's Own Deep Throat

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The Washington Post’s supposedly best-kept secret during its Watergate coverage—the identity of its inside source—was no secret to Richard Nixon

By Max Holland

    When W. Mark Felt unmasked himself as Deep Throat, in May 2005, the ballyhoo was dampened by a distinct feeling of anticlimax. As the FBI’s number two man in 1972, Felt was the first real suspect: speculations that he had been Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward’s über-source appeared in print as early as 1974. And despite 30 years of denials, he never lost his status as the most likely leaker in most observers’ eyes. His eventual admission was less a thunderbolt than a confirmation of what was already widely believed.[1]

    Much more surprising is that the Nixon White House knew about Felt, with a degree of certainty far beyond mere suspicion, almost from the start. On  October 19, 1972, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, told the president that Felt was the Post’s primary source. This conversation was revealed in November 1996, when the National Archives released the so-called “abuse of governmental power” tapes.[2] In hindsight, it should have been seen as an important clue about Deep Throat’s identity. However, it received little attention, probably because it conflicted with the popular narrative of the scandal, which holds that Felt was both principled and incognito.[3]

   Haldeman, of course, turned out to be right, which begs the question: how did he know? The answer is that the White House had its own secret sources, including one who had access to The Washington Post’s inner workings. We might think of him as Nixon’s Deep Throat.

    Uncovering the identity of this Deep Throat is a thornier matter. While it was one of the lawyers working for or in proximity to the Post on Watergate-related matters, apart from that fact, it may be that nothing more definitive can ever be said. Even so, exploring the possibilities one by one helps illuminate how Washington worked then, and probably how it still really works. As Benjamin Franklin once observed about keeping confidences, “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”

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What Haldeman Knew

   On October 10, 1972, The Washington Post published what Woodward would later describe as “perhaps [the] most important” Watergate story he and Carl Bernstein ever wrote.[4] Stretching over three columns on the upper right quadrant of the front page, the piece began,

FBI agents have established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President.

    Until then, the Post’s coverage had been piecemeal and inchoate: a steady drip of articles with intriguing information but unclear implications, whose ins and outs could be followed only by dedicated lawyers or political junkies. The October 10 story was the first to put the break-in in context. With it, Watergate became a story of national import.[5]

    Nine days later, Nixon and Haldeman had a desultory but revealing afternoon conversation about Watergate coverage. Nixon had sensed for weeks that someone, somewhere, was supplying the Post with its incremental but relentless scoops.[6] The FBI was high on his list of suspects, even though several factors argued against its involvement. L. Patrick Gray, the acting director since J. Edgar Hoover’s death in May 1972, was beholden to Nixon for his appointment, and the Bureau had  a reputation for discipline insofar as sensitive White House matters were concerned. It seemed especially hard to conceive that the FBI would leak information contrary to the interests of a president who seemed certain to win  re-election a month hence. But Haldeman’s information, captured on the president’s voice-activated tape recorder, left little doubt.