EMAIL SIGN UP!
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
CIA's Push for Drone War Driven by Internal Needs
WASHINGTON - When David Petraeus walks into the Central Intelligence Agency Tuesday, he will be taking over an organization whose mission has changed in recent years from gathering and analyzing intelligence to waging military campaigns through drone strikes in Pakistan, as well as in Yemen and Somalia.
Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta. Panetta has long been firmly committed to the drone war. While serving as Director of the CIA he pushed the program to the public as a strategy to destroy Al-Qaeda, even though he knew the CIA was striking mainly Afghan Taliban and their allies, not Al-Qaeda. (Michael Reynolds / European Pressphoto Agency) But the transformation of the CIA did not simply follow the expansion of the drone war in Pakistan to its present level. CIA Director Michael Hayden lobbied hard for that expansion at a time when drone strikes seemed like a failed experiment.
The reason Hayden pushed for a much bigger drone war, it now appears, is that it had already created a whole bureaucracy in the anticipation of such a war.
During 2010, the CIA "drone war" in Pakistan killed as many as 1,000 people a year, compared with the roughly 2,000 a year officially estimated to have been killed by the SOF "night raids" in Afghanistan, according to a report in the Sept. 1 Washington Post.
A CIA official was quoted by the Post as saying that the CIA had become "one hell of a killing machine", before quickly revising the phrase to "one hell of an operational tool".
The shift in the CIA mission's has been reflected in the spectacular growth of its Counter-terrorism Center (CTC) from 300 employees in September 2001 to about 2,000 people today – 10 percent of the agency's entire workforce, according to the Post report.
The agency's analytical branch, which had been previously devoted entirely to providing intelligence assessments for policymakers, has been profoundly affected.
More than one-third of the personnel in the agency's analytical branch are now engaged wholly or primarily in providing support to CIA operations, according to senior agency officials cited by the Post. And nearly two-thirds of those are analyzing data used by the CTC drone war staff to make decisions on targeting.
Some of that shift of internal staffing to support of the drone has followed the rise in the number of drone strikes in Pakistan since mid-2008, but the CIA began to lay the institutional basis for a bigger drone campaign well before that.
Crucial to understanding the role of internal dynamics in CIA decisions on the issue is the fact that the drone campaign in Pakistan started off very badly. During the four years from 2004 through 2007, the CIA carried out a total of only 12 drone strikes in Pakistan, all supposedly aimed at identifiable high-value targets of Al-Qaeda and its affiliates.
The George W. Bush administration's policy on use of drones was cautious in large part because the President of Pakistan, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, was considered such a reliable ally that the administration was reluctant to take actions that would risk destabilizing his regime.
Thus relatively tight constraints were imposed on the CIA in choosing targets for drone strikes. They were only to be used against known "high-value" officials of Al-Qaeda and their affiliates in Pakistan, and the CIA had to have evidence that no civilians would be killed as a result of the strike.
Those first 12 strikes killed only three identifiable Al-Qaeda or Pakistani Taliban figures, But despite the prohibition against strikes that would incur "collateral damage", the same strikes killed a total of 121 civilians, as revealed by a thorough analysis of news media reports.
A single strike against a madrassa on Oct. 26, 2006 that killed 80 local students accounted for two-thirds of the total of civilian casualties.
Despite that disastrous start, however, the CIA had quickly become deeply committed internally to building a major program around the drone war. In 2005, the agency had created a career track in targeting for the drone program for analysts in the intelligence directorate, the Sept. 2 Post article revealed.
That decision meant that analysts who chose to specialize in targeting for CIA drone operations were promised that they could stay within that specialty and get promotions throughout their careers. Thus the agency had made far-reaching commitments to its own staff in the expectation that the drone war would grow far beyond the three strikes a year and that it would continue indefinitely.
By 2007, the agency realized that, in order to keep those commitments, it had to get the White House to change the rules by relaxing existing restrictions on drone strikes.
That's when Hayden began lobbying President George W. Bush to dispense with the constraints limiting the targeting for drone attacks, according to the account in New York Times reporter David Sanger's book "The Inheritance". Hayden asked for permission to carry out strikes against houses or cars merely on the basis of behavior that matched a "pattern of life" associated with Al-Qaeda or other groups.
In January 2008, Bush took an unidentified first step toward the loosening of the requirements that Hayden sought, but most of the restrictions on drone strikes remained in place. In the first six months of 2008, only four strikes were carried out.
In mid-2008, however, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell returned from a May 2008 trip to Pakistan determined to prove that the Pakistani military was covertly supporting Taliban insurgents - especially the Haqqani network - who were gaining momentum in Afghanistan.
A formal assessment by McConnell's staff making that case was produced in June and sent to the White House and other top officials, according to Sanger. That forced Bush, who had been praising Musharraf as an ally against the Taliban, to do something to show that he was being tough on the Pakistani military as well as on the Afghan insurgents who enjoyed safe havens in northwest Pakistan.
Bush wanted the drone strikes to focus primarily on the Afghan Taliban targets rather than Al-Qaeda and its Pakistani Taliban allies. And according to Sanger's account, Bush quickly removed all of the previous requirements for accurate intelligence on specific high-value targets and for assurances against civilian casualties.
Released from the original constraints on the drone program, the CIA immediately increased the level of drone strikes in the second half of 2008 to between four and five per month on average.
As Bob Woodward's account in "Obama Wars" of internal discussions in the early weeks of the Barack Obama White House shows, there were serious doubts from the beginning that it could actually defeat Al- Qaeda.
But Leon Panetta, Obama's new CIA director, was firmly committed to the drone war. He continued to present it to the public as a strategy to destroy Al-Qaeda, even though he knew the CIA was now striking mainly Afghan Taliban and their allies, not Al-Qaeda.
In his first press conference on Feb. 25, 2009, Panetta, in an indirect but obvious reference to the drone strikes, said that the effort to destabilize Al-Qaeda and destroy its leadership "have been successful".
Under Panetta, the rate of drone strikes continued throughout 2009 at the same accelerated pace as in the second half of 2008. And in 2010 the number of strikes more than doubled from 53 in 2009 to 118.
The CIA finally had the major drone campaign it had originally anticipated.
Two years ago, Petraeus appeared to take a somewhat skeptical view of drone strikes in Pakistan. In a secret assessment as CENTCOM commander on May 27, 2009, which was leaked to the Washington Post, Petraeus warned that drone strikes were fueling anti-U.S. sentiments in Pakistan.
Now, however, Petraeus's personal view of the drone war may no longer be relevant. The CIA's institutional interests in continuing the drone war may have become so commanding that no director could afford to override those interests on the basis of his own analysis of how the drone strikes affect U.S. interests.
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
28 Comments so far
Show AllGeneral David Pertaeus is the new Albert Anastasia of Murder Incorporated.
I agree with you, but let's keep our perspective here. ALL tactics of war are an abomination -- and we pay for it -- and we have blood on our hands.
TO Visiting Professo
(((Notice that at no point in this process was the public ever allowed to comment or influence policy concerning drone attacks--on the contrary, the policy was announced after the fact and the public had no choice but to accept it.)))
Thanking U, it seem so casual & yes its flawed beyond description, not to mention its all over the place, similar dualities in the so called free world.
The government you CANNOT C & THE ILLUSIONARY ONE for which U go & put a piece of paper in a box every many years.
No SOCIAL CONTRACT NO MORE.
No, the question is, how can we stop it? Starting with, how can we get our fellow Americans to look straight at this, so we will begin to have sufficient public backing to put a stop to it? The truth is that most Americans prefer to avert their eyes, or see it through a filter of phony patriotism and lies, which the MSM is happy to provide.
It's unspeakably filthy--it's clear that it isn't important to the deciders that these strikes accomplish any actual objectives, it doesn't matter how intensely they hate us, or who the victims are or how many. What matters is that the US taxpayers' dollars continue to flow into the enormous pockets of the military contractors, who have fattened on blood to the point of monstrous obesity. And that the comfy careers of various CIA desk people and various army "bombers" in the Nevada desert (and other places perhaps) continue with perks, without risk of any kind.
I can see why people believe in hell. We need one, for people so depraved!
Remote control killing. No boots on the ground. Mistakes can be written off as technological errors. No one very high up on the food chain every get's their hands even remotely dirty. Doesn't get much better than that, for war gamers.
Must be the same thrill to it as was taken when guns were invented. No one has to be personally responsible for the deaths accomplished with the new tool.
The "I'm not responsible....christianity , god told me to do it and/Satan made me do it, but I'm not responsible"' . This is what is used to absolving oneself of responsibility, this is the appeal; of today's pretend christians, a institutionalized false doctrine, which attracts people to become christians. The Drone atrocities of murder, mayhem, brutalizing women, children and the case for the Drone being a divine gift from god to be used for ungodly purposes, along with the false doctrines of the phony preachers ensures being raptured, a word not found in the bible, the Drone commandos, everyone a captain Kirk,, everyone a super hero without having to be responsible, the perfect christian, according to the false doctrines.
I can only think of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Ah yes, as the US and Israel further push the use of unmanned killing machines let's look once examine the term "banality of evil" as it applies to the "pilots" of said machines, shall we?
It's not murder if it's like a video game right?
Expose on American drone pilots:
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/21/world/la-fg-drone-crews21-2010feb21
Expose on Israeli drone use against Gaza:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/08/23/israeli-video-games-in-gaza/
An expose on the all-female drone pilot brigade in Israel:
http://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-video-game-killing-technology/8919
Just to make things worse..Wait till everyone has a drone.....
Gareth Porter's interesting account of how the Bush/Obama drone wars evolved concludes "The CIA's institutional interests in continuing the drone war may have become so commanding that no Director could afford to override those insterests on the basis of his own analysis of how the drone strikes effect US interests."
In other words, since General David Petraeus has finally sent all his dress uniforms off to the dry cleaners and has officially now become a civilian, the first order of business, for the first day on the job, is for the mainstream US media to immediately absolve the new Director of the Central Intelligence Agency of all responsibility for actually exercising leadership control over the federal agency bureaucracy he now heads.
Porter's article tells us some great stuff (like how the drone wars started very badly with a lot of civilian casualties when a madrassa was incinerated, and that the Agency created a special career path in 2005 for analysts who would specialize in targeting drone strikes as a prelude for Bush's CIA Director Michael Hayden's push for legal authority/policy permission to formalize this mission creep in 2008). What it skips over is the significance of the endlessly revolving door between the Pentagon brass and the CIA's top leadership. And vice versa.
Steven Coll's "Ghost Wars" chronicles how the advent of drone technology in the late 1990's created a gigantic turf battle between the soldiers and the spooks over whether the Pentagon, or the black ops boys at Langley, would have institutional control over the Predators. If these were deemed military weapons, the ordinary command heirarchy and the laws of war would apply. If drones were considered paramilitary weapons (hi tech targeted assassination devices), then the spies could make up the rules as they went along. According to Coll, the outgoing Clinton administration punted, and left resolution of the political accountability issue for the winner of the 2000 presidential election to resolve.
The Bushies decided to have their cake and eat it too. There would be parallel command and control systems - one set of fingers on the button beholden to the military, a separate set of fingers for the CIA. Sometimes a Hellfire strike was product of a classified Special Ops military mission. Other times, the Hellfire carnage came courtesy of a classified CIA paramilitary black op. When a mission was successful, coordinated intelligence sharing could be credited. If the mission were a fiasco, everybody had deniability to avoid the inevitable blowback both internationally and domestically.
The Obama administration has perpetuated this hocus pocus, neither-fish-nor-fowl conceptual treatment of Predator drones. While the procurement budgets for General Atomics unmanned killing platforms skyrocketed for both the Pentagon and the CIA, the cross breeding of the elites at the top of the institutional command heirarchies looked more and more like musical chairs. Robert Gates from the professional CIA ranks returns to Washington from academe to run the Pentagon as Secretary of Defense. General Hayden slips into civvies in order to be Director of Central Intelligence. Leon Panetta, a career civilian politician, takes over control of the CIA, then resigns as Director two years later in order to become Gates' replacement as SecDef. That opens up the job of Director of CIA for who else but the poster boy for 21st Century counterinsurgency warfare, General David Petraeus?
I have preached this sermon before. This cross fertilization at the top, in the middle, and at the bottom of the bureaucratic chain of command of the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency gives us the worst (not the best) of both cultures, and probably the worst of all possible worlds.
First, either Congress or a President with true leadership abilities should take the CIA permanently out of the killing business. Period. Enough with the James Bond license to kill bullshit. If anybody is going to kill anybody labeled an "enemy" in the name of the government of the United States, it is an act of war. As such, it should be the exclusive responsibility of the active duty military to do the dirty deed.
Second, once Langley's set of Predator firing buttons has been permanently disabled, political accountability for calling down a drone strike belongs to the uniformed military command structure, up to and particularly including the commander in chief. If a president abuses that authority either by unilaterally committing an unlawful act of war without prior Congressional approval, or by committing a war crime, the remedies are impeachment or criminal prosecution under international law.
Gareth Porter is absolutely correct when he observes that former General, new-CIA Director David Petraeus's "personal view of the drone war may no longer be relevant." That, friends and neighbors, is precisely the problem.
Meaningful civilian political control of the military - accountability for the behavior and misbehavior of soldiers and spies - becomes an impossibility when the guy put in charge has been pre-neutered, assuring the boys in the field they may continue to roam free. Boo-Rah!
Bill from Saginaw
Agree, except that if Petraeus wanted to stop or rein in the drones, he could. What the heck does can't "afford to" mean, anyway? A soldier knows how to fight for what he believes is right. What is astounding is that so many believe drone killing is right.
Soft coup, anyone?
Assume that Centcom Commander Petraeus's secret (leaked) 2009 opinion, skeptical of drone strikes because they fueled anti-Americanism among the Afghan and Pakistani locals, in fact is the new CIA Director's genuinely held opinion. Why would Obama (who cracks sick jokes in front of the national media about using drones to zap horny teenage boys hankering after his daughters) shuffle General Petraeus from active duty military into spook attire, in order that drone-loving Leon Panetta could leave Langley to go run the Pentagon?
True, as Director of Central Intelligence David Petraeus could stop or rein in the CIA's use of drones with the stroke of a pen (or presumably, by simply refusing to sign off on further proposed drone strikes in the first place). He could not "afford" to do so, in the political parlance of Washington bureaucratic turf warfare, because he would be simultaneously betraying his own new black ops fiefdom and surrendering back to DefSec Panetta's Pentagon a choice morsel of meat that the soldiers and the spooks had fought over like junkyard dogs for nearly a decade now.
People would talk, and the spooks' talk about both Petraeus and Obama would turn very ugly. West Point counterinsurgency guru Petraeus did not make the cover of Time and Newsweek as the savior of the floundering US mission in Iraq by ignoring his own overblown political image. He "could not afford" to piss off both his Commander-in-Chief, and his new rank and file CIA subordinates in a single stroke, while implicitly handing the spooks' newfangled hi tech war waging authority back over to his old buddies at the Pentagon.
That's what I mean when I say that, with the full blessing of the mainstream US media, Petraeus made the transition from soldier to civilian pre-neutered. We get the worst of spy culture and soldier culture, blurred together seemlessly from top to bottom of the DC beltway power pyramid, with control over the military/industrial/national security complex purely an illusion.
Just what the baddest of the bad boys always wanted.
Bill from Saginaw
thanks to Bill from Saginaw
"""That's what I mean when I say that, with the full blessing of the mainstream US media, Petraeus made the transition from soldier to civilian pre-neutered. We get the worst of spy culture and soldier culture, blurred together seemlessly from top to bottom of the DC beltway power pyramid, with control over the military/industrial/national security complex purely an illusion. """
Could not agree more, there is an other point although subtle it is important, it is the fatigue & MORAL laundering factor.
Also In times like this the line between internal/external security becomes thinner & thinner.
Unless jobs are created by the millions, will sea far more boots on doors at midnight, hopefully not.
I'm no partisan of Ron Paul but he is right a pity he is surrounded with dinos.
ITS THE CORPORATIONS SILLY including MIC.
In the end the US will have to make a choice between expansion or reinventing itself.
There are plenty of options if it choose so.
Further evidence that our glorious leaders are criminally insane.
How many Americans are going to vote for the lesser of 2 madmen in 2012?
Evil does not hide any more
The last guy to openly muse about busting up the CIA got murdered in Dallas in 1963. Science fiction has always played with the topic of machines learning to make other machines, and then eliminating humans. Looks as though that techno-leap need not be made after all, with humans so witlessly willing to fly the drones. Build a wacky, high-tech "weapons system" and a mission will be designed for it.
When I read the by-line for this article, I thought "internal needs" referred to inside the U.S. I think the real focus of drone use in Pakistan is practicing the use of drones in urban warfare with an eye on the U.S. I think that is why there was a tiff between FAA and DoD regarding who would control the drones now used on the Mexican border, and who would control their use in the interior of the country.
Very astute, this is the reality. And these technologies are fully employed here, and were tested here, with the "training" exercises here as well. Just like the School Of The Americas was "exporting" torture and terror experts, the methodologies were developed and employed here first. And Obama has already made it policy that the US president can murder US Citizens with extreme prejudice, this is the policy that will allow the method, here in the USA.
It's the military industrial CIA complex. In Eisenhower's days, it could be represented as a diagram with arrows and overlaps connecting different circles. Now, obviously the circles have almost completely merged with each other.
I believe the military contractors and security contractors now run the show and make up missions that use their products and services. I'll bet my bottom dollar that some in the military and CIA who still have a bit of idealism and integrity (of the sort that old school military and CIA can have, you know to protect soldiers and to protect country) are getting pretty pissed at the stupidity and waste.
How much do drones actually cost to build and how much does the USA pay for them? I don't know and doubt the public has access to such information, but I would bet that the USA pays a very hefty premium to its pals in the MIC. Every time the USA shoots one of these drones at innocent civilians, some private corporation makes a huge profit AND the USA has to buy a new one to replace the one that just killed the innocent villagers and their children.
What a brilliant business model. When they run out of Muslims, they can use them against the American workers who dare to stand up to slave labor conditions.
The CIA is still looking for intelligence - so they can wipe it out.
The purpose of the drone killings, and expanding it beyond murdering top Al-Queda members into murdering anyone indiscriminately, is to expand career-tracking for CIA personnel. That's pretty damn sick. At least the Nazis had an ideological rationale for their systematic murdering. But since the CIA's is in the interest of advancing careers, it's not terrorism.
Recently listened to a radio discussion about the drone terror campaign. A high ranking member of the military drone squadron spoke about training and how brave his 'pilots' are bla blah. An obvious benefit is, these guys can kill and be home for dinner with the family.
A question arose about the legality of another nation or group piloting a drone and blowing up one of the armchair terrorists while they were in the act of commuting to or from the job.
The commander was quick to respond, saying this act would be illegal as the 'pilot' was not in the theater of war. While commuting to and from the workplace he is just another commuter, heading to the ole 9-5.
My jaw hit the keyboard.
this drone war is likely due to the fact that the government well knows it has the poorest fighting force in it's history being massacred in the middle east with a full one third of them on mood altering drugs. that and the fact that eighteen a day are committing suicide. this generation of nasty video games and the belief, despite the comique nature of it, that the US has the "mightiest" fighting force in the history of the world. a load of garbage. you can't win in a war you're not right in. history demonstrates that fact without variation. The CIA idiots and their joysticks kill more civilians by far than ALLEGED al qaeda or taliban operatives. i hope the US realizes soon it HAS LOST THE OIL IN THE MIDDLE EAST AS WELL AS THE WARS. the US is a past nation. it has no place in the world now.
The irony of oil is that the Pentagon is using volumes of oil to protect the oil for the Pentagon to protect oil supplies. It is the largest consumer of oil on the planet. The Pentagon pay between $400 and $800 per gallon of oil it uses wastes in the ME.
the Pentagon pays nothing.
YOU DO!
the taxpayer.
the Pentagon can afford to squander.
I don't pay taxes, legally, of course. Paying taxes to a criminal government is a criminal act in itself. The problem being that the criminal government makes laws that make it a crime to not pay for their crimes.This makes being a patriot a crime because an act of patriotism is not funding the criminal USG. The USG forces contributions, withholding taxes, by taxing labor to pay for their Wall St., Wash.DC., Axis of Evil criminal conspiracy of racketeering and worldwide gangsterism, funded by the forced contributions. This does not even consider the 100's of $billions paid yearly for the COUNTERFEIT DEBT, funded by forced contributions.