Foreign Policy In Focus

Mental Illness a Prerequisite to Run for Public Office

It’s unbelievable what people would do to be in power. I know: It happens everywhere. I can’t believe that normal people in their right mind would run for elected position. There has to be something wrong in their value system to go through what they have to go through. What I saw here was much worse: so much humiliation to run for office.
--  Vihar Krastev

Escape From Ignorance and Chalga, John Feffer, Focal Points 

No End to Atonement in Sight

Germany apparently remains eternally wounded, dependent upon the healing power of remembrance. Germans must live with their trauma and occasionally reopen the wound to prevent it from festering. … "History or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising," Günter Grass concluded in his 2002 novel "Crabwalk."

'Our Mothers, Our Fathers': Next-Generation WWII Atonement, Roman Leick, Spiegel Online

From Marijuana and Heroin in Vietnam to Anti-psychotic Drugs in Afghanistan

… there has been a giant, 682 percent increase in the number of psychoactive drugs — antipsychotics, sedatives, stimulants and mood stabilizers — prescribed to our troops between 2005 and 2011. … The data suggest that military doctors may prescribe psychoactive drugs for off-label use as sedatives, possibly so as to enable soldiers to function better in stressful combat situations. 

Wars on Drugs, Richard A. Friedman, The New York Times

Iron Lady Surpasses Hitchens's Record for Most Disrespectful Obituaries of a Brit

… when I was a child she was just a strict woman telling everyone off and selling everything off. I didn't know what to think of this fearsome woman. … It always irks when rightwing folk demonstrate in a familial or exclusive setting the values that they deny in a broader social context. They're happy to share big windfall bonuses with their cronies, they'll stick up for deposed dictator chums when they're down on their luck, they'll find opportunities in business for people they care about. I hope I'm not being reductive but it seems Thatcher's time in power was solely spent diminishing the resources of those who had least for the advancement of those who had most.

Russell Brand on Margaret Thatcher: 'I always felt sorry for her children', Russell Brand, The Guardian

Giving the C.I.A. Its Head in Pakistan

[American ambassador to Pakistan Cameron] Munter was reporting daily back to Washington about the negative impact of the armed-drone campaign and about how the C.I.A. seemed to be conducting a war in a vacuum, oblivious to the ramifications that the drone strikes were having on American relations with Pakistan’s government.

How a Single Spy Helped Turn Pakistan Against the United States, Mark Mazzetti, The New York Times

Could the charges on which former C.I.A. agent John Kiriakou are being jailed be any flimsier?

You may have heard that John Kiriakou, who worked undercover and as a  terrorist logistics specialist for the C.I.A. before retiring, took a plea and admitted that he violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Scott Shane of the New York Times explains why. First, his family's financial difficulties that followed in the wake of his charges

… were complicated by Mr. Kiriakou’s legal fees. He said he had paid his defense lawyers more than $100,000 and still owed them $500,000; the specter of additional, bankrupting legal fees, along with the risk of a far longer prison term that could separate him from his wife and children for a decade or more, prompted him to take the plea offer, he said.

This is only the first case prosecuted under that act since Defense Department official Lawrence Franklin was charged with leaking to AIPAC, in 2005. Shane writes:

Thus Mr. Obama has presided over twice as many such cases as all his predecessors combined, though at least two of the six prosecutions since 2009 resulted from investigations begun under President George W. Bush. 

One can't help but conclude that the charges brought against Kiriakou were, in large part, an indication of just how angry the C.I.A. and the administration were with the criticism of waterboarding that, post-retirement, he'd aired out in the media. His actual crime, meanwhile? Shane's explanation is worth posting in its entirety.

In 2008, when I began working on an article about the interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, I asked him about an interrogator whose name I had heard: Deuce Martinez. He said that they had worked together to catch Abu Zubaydah, and that he would be a great source on Mr. Mohammed, the architect of the Sept. 11 attacks.

He was able to dig up the business card Mr. Martinez had given him with contact information at Mitchell Jessen and Associates, the C.I.A. contractor that helped devise the interrogation program and Mr. Martinez’s new employer.

Mr. Martinez, an analyst by training, was retired and had never served under cover; that is, he had never posed as a diplomat or a businessman while overseas. He had placed his home address, his personal e-mail address, his job as an intelligence officer and other personal details on a public Web site for the use of students at his alma mater. Abu Zubaydah had been captured six years earlier, Mr. Mohammed five years earlier; their stories were far from secret.

Mr. Martinez never agreed to talk to me. But a few e-mail exchanges with Mr. Kiriakou as I hunted for his former colleague would eventually turn up in Mr. Kiriakou’s indictment; he was charged with revealing to me that Mr. Martinez had participated in the operation to catch Abu Zubaydah, a fact that the government said was classified.

Yeah, I know: That's it? Shane solicits a quote from retired C.I.A. officer (and current Brookings Institution fellow and Daily Beast columnist) Bruce Riedel, for whom Kiriakou served capably while in the C.I.A.

 “To me, the irony of this whole thing is, very simply, that he’s going to be the only C.I.A. officer to go to jail over torture,” even though he publicly denounced torture, Mr. Riedel said. “It’s deeply ironic under the Democratic president who ended torture.”

It's as if there's a zero sum relationship between the accuracy of targeting and those targeted.

At the New York Times blog Opinionator on July 22, John Kaag and Sarah Kreps wrote a post titled The Moral Hazard of Drones. Using a passage from Plato's Republic they concluded: "To say that we can target individuals without incurring troop casualties does not imply that, we ought to." Meanwhile, this jumped out of the piece.

… the impressive expediency and accuracy in drone targeting may also allow policymakers and strategists to become lax in their moral decision-making about who exactly should be targeted. Consider the stark contrast between the ambiguous language used to define legitimate targets and the specific technical means a military uses to neutralize these targets. The terms “terrorist,” “enemy combatant,” and “contingent threat” are extremely vague and do very little to articulate the legitimacy of military targets. In contrast, the technical capabilities of weapon systems define and “paint” these targets with ever-greater definition. As weaponry becomes more precise, the language of warfare has become more ambiguous.

Then, of course, as first publicized by Daniel Klaidman at Newsweek, there's the signature strike*: "the targeting of groups of men who bear characteristics associated with terrorism, but whose identities aren't known." In other words, while drone strikes grow more accurate, defining a target is relegated to the realm of inexact science. It's as if a zero sum relationship exists between the accuracy of targeting and those targeted.

*In this context, "signature" is an unfortunate choice or words: it suggests that ill-defined targeting is the defining strike of the drone force.

"Mishap." "Sloppy." "Blunders." "A Pizza Hut in Beirut." Not necessarily words one expects to see all together in an international affairs news story about American spies. But this is the CIA we're talking about. Literally anything is possible, including a humiliating outing of foreign agents employed by the CIA to spy on Hezbollah and Iranian assets. Anonymous sources told the LA Times that the CIA station in Beirut is basically "out of business" as a result of this affair.  

At least a dozen sources -- who may now be "facing execution" -- were reportedly compromised through shocking operational deficiencies that made the spies easy pickings for Hezbollah's counterespionage agents. 

Hezbollah reportedly scored this coup by sending double agents to the aforementioned Pizza Hut used by the CIA handlers and agents, and by using phone tracking software that the U.S. knew back in 2009 was capable of compromising CIA agents' identities. That's the bigger issue: while Hezbollah, which is extremely vulnerable to electronic espionage, has upped its signals interception game, the U.S. knew about this risk but didn't change its operating procedures. As Forbes simply put it, "The lessons the CIA learned [from Israel] did not prevent their own spies from getting caught."

Iran allegedly managed to discover what websites CIA informants were using to relay intelligence to their handlers and tracked people down through the internet. This par for the course: for every Stuxnet "success" U.S. cyber spooks score, there is a failure called Haystack to match it. 

"Good luck finding that needle," read the tag line for Haystack program, trumpeted by the State Department as a tool for Iranian dissidents to use as a mask for their activities online. Well, Tehran found "that needle" several times over: Haystack failed to protect Iranian dissidents' identities and has been quietly, embarrassingly shelved. The Iranian regime found even more valuable needles this time: people willing to risk their lives to spy for the CIA. That is a much rarer commodity, and, one imagines, one likely to be a scarcer one from here on out at a time when good intelligence is needed most (the perfect storm of an election year and IAEA report). 

How could an intelligence agency once capable of pulling off Cold War coups reach this point? In the 1980s, Langley reportedly ran rings around the USSR's industrial espionage program thanks to clever use of a well-connected KGB agent. In 1991 it secretly shipped captured Iraqi tanks to Afghan fighters via Pakistan. And now, CIA agents are getting their covers blown over pan pizzas? 

The Atlantic's Max Fisher asks an important question here: "is this the cost of counterterrorism?"

Apparently so. The CIA has indeed become targeted towards counterterrorism. "Kill, capture or detain" have become the orders of the day, rather than "photograph, intercept and analyze." An intelligence agency with bloody hands -- all intelligence agencies have bloody hands, of course -- has become even more bloodied through blunders and a diversion of resources to increasingly eliminate, rather than assess, threats. We used to ship missiles to insurgents during the Cold War: now the CIA delivers them via drone. In both cases, we didn't really keep good track of them (in the fog of two wars, some may have ended up in places like Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan, while today they are mistakenly killing the wrong targets).

This fire and forget mentality stems in part from what happened to our intelligence services over Iran (and to a lesser extent, Lebanon) in the 1980s. This is very much the result of 9/11: the PATRIOT era begun by Bush (and expanded under Obama) hit Langley hard as the agency became increasingly politicized and scrutinized by the White House over al Qaeda activities and "Muslim" WMDs. So too did the FBI, NSA and National Security Council (NSC). But the basis for this approach to intelligence lies partly in Cold War Iran and Lebanon.

To say that U.S. covert operations in Iran and Lebanon have been marked by bad luck would be an understatement. Despite the importance of these two nations to U.S. grand strategy, the U.S.'s presence and influence in both countries has declined since the 1980s -- or, to put it another way, these two countries wriggled out of the Eisenhower Doctrine bug jar since the 1980s. 

From a "successful" little operation alongside the British known as "Operation Ajax" (aka, the 1953 coup that reinstalled the Shah), CIA successes in Iran have become few and far between. The botched rescue of the U.S. embassy hostages that resulting in the deaths of some of the would-be rescuers remains one of the defining image of the U.S.'s failure to effectively respond to the collapse of the Shah's regime. Kept at arm's length by SAVAK agents and Washington's bureaucratic inertia, events outpaced the CIA there and we "lost" Iran, a perception that neither malwares, MEK nor mysterious murders have yet erased. But our successes there have accomplished little, save embolden the regime and rally the Iranian public around an establishment that many actually hate far more than they fear and loathe the U.S. and Israel. We might keep setting aside money and meetings in the name of "Iranian democracy," but we can't even protect the Green Movement from their own government's webmasters. 

Our historical failure in Iran contributed to the gung ho attitude that the CIA went into Afghanistan with in the 1980s. We might have lost one side of the Strait of Hormuz to the Islamists, but by Saud, Carter and Reagan we weren't going to lose the other one to the Communists. What happened in Tehran colored our dealings with Islamabad, Quetta, Riyadh and Cairo during the Soviet-Afghan War, and many nations are still paying for our shortsighted approach towards those Islamists (it certainly didn't help that some of those most heavily involved in these dealings all perished together in a mysterious plane crash alongside the Taliban's godfather, Zia ul Haq). 

Lebanon has also been a bit of a sore spot since the 1980s, partly because of high-profile kidnappings of Americans in Beirut, including that of a CIA station chief, and the fact that neither sanctions nor Israeli intervention has managed to topple Hezbollah, or at least isolate it from Iran. The global Islamist renaissance that began in the 1970s found fertile soil in war-torn Lebanon.

With this success against the CIA, Hezbollah has scored yet another victory against the U.S.-Israeli alliance, though not nearly as signal a success as the "Party of God's" weathering of the 2006 Israeli offensive into southern Lebanon. Hezbollah's survival frustrates both Washington and Tel Aviv -- and the latter is increasingly looking back at the glory days of Operation Focus (1967) and Operation Opera (1981) as a means of dealing with its growing international isolation and regional upheavals. All the accompanying Churchillian references are not helping the matter.

The CIA does not have to worry too much that what happened in Lebanon and Iran this month will compromise its funding. It will, however, compromise its ability to deliver the White House objective intelligence and analysis from these countries at a bad time in Israeli and U.S. politics (i.e., the 2012 elections). 

Take note, though, of who you start reading about in the papers as "sources" for U.S. intelligence. The news provided by the Ahmed Chalabis of the world is worse than no news at all. And with the operations inside these countries in bad shape -- and chickenhawks being chickenhawks -- we will be hearing from the new Ahmed Chalabis very soon on how to proceed in Iran. 

If we aren't already.

Paul Mutter is a graduate student at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus.

Lost in the debate over whether the Obama administration had the right to carry out the extra-legal execution of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born Yemeni cleric and al-Qaeda member, is who pulled the trigger? It is not a minor question, and it lies at the heart of the 1907 Hague Convention, the 1949 Geneva Conventions, and the 1977 additions to the '49 agreement: civilians cannot engage in war.

In the main, laws of war focus on the protection of civilians. For instance, Article 48, the “Basic Rule” of Part IV of the 1977 Geneva Conventions, states, “In order to ensure respect for and protection of civilian populations and civilian objects, the Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between civilian populations and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives.”

What follows in the 1977 Conventions are nine articles specifying what the general rule means, ranging from prohibitions against attacking power plants and water sources and spreading “terror among civilian populations” to destroying the “natural environment.” There are many civilian-related sections in other parts of the Conventions, but the 10 articles that make up Chapter I, Section I, Part IV on “Civilian Population” are the clearest guidelines about what is allowed when civilians are caught up in war.

The Conventions were mainly a response to the horrors of World War II, where civilian deaths were more than twice those on the military side. Of the approximate 80 million people who died in WW II, 55 million of them were civilians. In comparison, out of some 17 million who died in World War I, seven million were civilians.

The logic behind Article IV of the Conventions is that civilians are innocent bystanders, with no ability to defend themselves or inflict damage on an antagonist. However, if civilians take part in hostilities, they lose their protected status. If the warring parties have an obligation to protect non-combatants, civilians also have obligations, the most important of which is that they do not act as soldiers.

In short, if someone takes a pot shot at you, it is irrelevant if he or she is a civilian, by their actions they are no longer innocent bystanders.  Members of a resistance movement may not wear uniforms or be part of a military organization, but if they blow up your Humvee or ambush your patrol, they are combatants.

Which is why the question of who killed Anwar al-Awlaki (and over 2,000 people in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen killed by drones) is relevant. If the cleric was killed as part of a military operation—as with, for instance the assassination of Osama bin-Laden—then the arguments are around issues like whether we have the right to execute enemies without a trial (the Conventions say we don’t), or violate another nation’s sovereignty.

But al-Awlaki was not taken out by Navy Seals, he was assassinated by a member of the Central Intelligence Agency, the organization that runs the drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. CIA members are civilians. Indeed, the new director, David Petraeus, formally resigned his Army commission to make that point. Even if he had not, however, the CIA is not a military organization and is not under the control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Why is this important?  Because if civilians in the U.S. are killing combatants in another country, then those civilians lose their protection under the Conventions. Worse, it means all U.S. civilians become potential targets. If a CIA employee based in Afghanistan, the Arabian Peninsula, or Djibouti in Africa kills a Pakistani, Somalian, or Afghan with a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone, one can hardly complain if everyday U.S. citizens are targeted for retaliation.

One could argue that, since al-Awlaki was an American citizen, the hit didn’t really contravene the Conventions and the arguments should be over whether you can order the killing of an American citizen without due process. However, others targeted by the drone war—like members of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the Haqqani Group, and the Somali Shabaab—do not fall in this category.

According to the CIA, the drone wars have killed no civilians. “There hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop,” John O’Brennan, the Obama administration’s counterterrorism advisor told the New York Times.

That assertion is almost beyond ridiculous. Even a supporter of the drone war like Bill Roggio, editor of The Long War Journal, says the claim is “absurd.” The United Kingdom based Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that out of the 2,292 people killed by drones in Pakistan, 775 of them were civilians. Pakistan journalist Noor Behram puts the total much higher, telling  The Guardian (UK), “For every 10 to 15 people killed [by drones], maybe they get one militant.”

The U.S. claim, however false, allows the drone war to continue. There is nothing in the Conventions that bars lying.

The Obama administration (and the previous Bush administration) argue that drone war is part of the “war on terror” that Congress mandated after the 9/11 attacks: hence we are at “war” with at least the Taliban and its allies, the Shabaab, and al-Qaeda. But the CIA still has no authority to execute a war. The last two run by the organization—the war in Laos and the Contra war against Nicaragua—were not only unmitigated disasters, they were illegal.

Many countries have already stretched the Geneva Conventions to the breaking point with regards to civilians and the treatment of prisoners. For instance, by using the term “collateral” to describe civilian deaths, a country sidesteps the Convention’s stricture against “deliberate targeting” of civilians by claiming the damage was “inadvertent.” By calling insurgents “combatants” rather than “soldiers,” the U.S. has waterboarded people, thus finessing both the Conventions and the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture.

One could get cynical about this—aren’t civilians always the victims of war?—but in their own uneven way, the Geneva Conventions have protected civilians. Indeed, it was the Conventions that led to what is now an almost worldwide ban on landmines and may end up eliminating cluster weapons in the future. The fact that laws don’t always work, or that people of ill will figure how to contravene them, is an argument for greater adherence to the rules, not ignoring or contravening them.

The danger is that the U.S. is blurring the difference between civilian and military, and that is a dangerously slippery slope. We already have a former general running the CIA, and former CIA Director Leon Panetta heads up the Defense Department. If we reach a point where there is nothing to distinguish our military institutions from our civilian ones, then all of us are fair game.

For more of Conn Hallinan's essays visit Dispatches From the Edge. Meanwhile, his novels about the ancient Romans can be found at The Middle Empire Series.