Jamie Dettmer reports: What makes someone join Al Qaeda? In the case of Abu Yahya al-Libi, the Al Qaeda luminary killed in an American drone strike in Pakistan last June, his older brother has no doubt. Americans are culpable for his sibling’s embrace of terrorism. He draws a direct line between al-Libi’s recruitment by al Qaeda and the suffering he endured at the hands of American interrogators using techniques similar to those portrayed in the movie Zero Dark Thirty.

Al-Libi’s slaying may have been one of the reasons Libyan jihadists attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi last September, an assault that led to the death of ambassador Christopher Stevens. In the days leading up to the attack, Al Qaeda’s amir, Ayman al-Zawahiri, focused his annual 9/11 message on the drone war, eulogized al-Libi and called on “Libyan brothers” to avenge the loss.

Lamenting American missteps in the war on terror, Abd Al-Wahhab Muhammad Qaid says his brother had been in Afghanistan for 15 years, as a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, but that he, “like all of us shunned Al Qaeda.” That is, until his mistreatment at Bagram Air Base. “He was tortured very aggressively and humiliated. Naturally, for each action there’s a reaction,” he sighs.

Now the chairman of the national security committee in the General National Congress, Libya’s parliament, Qaid hopes America will rethink how it combats Muslim extremists and base its actions on reason not emotions; on investigation and not supposition.

Sitting in the grand lobby of Tripoli’s Rixos hotel for a rare interview with an American journalist, Qaid disclosed for the first time that, when he was jailed by the then-dictator Muammar Gaddafi, Americans seeking to understand his brother’s psychology visited him in prison to explore whether his brother could be coaxed to break with Al Qaeda.

The American visits were made before his brother became second in command of Al Qaeda, suggesting the CIA had spotted quickly that he was a rising terrorist star. He told them that it might be possible to persuade his brother to leave Al Qaeda and return to Libya, if Gaddafi would guarantee no torture and no jail time.

The 45-year-old Qaid is an imposing man and favors traditional Libyan dress. When I met him he was wearing a black galabeya and white prayer cap. He is the third senior member of the now defunct Libyan Islamic Fighting Group I have interviewed in recent months. There are similarities between him and his former comrades-in-arms Abdelhakim Belhadj and Sami Mostefa al-Saadi. All three are highly thoughtful and they all exhibit a calm dignity I’ve seen in other long-serving political prisoners.

And surprisingly none of them appear to bear any ill will to the West or Americans. All of them have tempered their beliefs and describe themselves as Islamist modernizers.

Belhadj and Saadi were among the 15 Libyan Islamists opposed to Gaddafi that the Americans and British delivered to Libya’s spy chief, Musa Kusa. The Americans tortured several of them before rendering them illegally to Libya, where they were tortured again. When Gaddafi’s intelligence boss interrogated al-Saadi he bragged: “Before 9/11, you went to countries where we couldn’t reach you. But now, after 9/11, I can just pick up the phone and call MI6 or the CIA.”

The renditions constitute one of the darkest chapters in the war on terror and they highlight a point Qaid is eager to convey: the failure of the West to distinguish between different Islamists and to view them all as being Al Qaeda. [Continue reading…]

Dr. Loch K. Johnson writes: The United States faces a world of constantly shifting circumstances, as underscored by the Arab Spring uprisings. To shield the nation in a global setting where uncertainty and hostilities are commonplace, officials in Washington have crafted a range of responses to international events that includes diplomacy and the use of armed force. The most hidden and least understood of these responses is covert action — a tightly held operational secret in the U.S. government. This secrecy has yielded several myths that have misled the American people about a controversial, and sometimes lethal, approach to foreign policy.

MYTH #1: The meaning of covert action is clearly delineated.

With the Intelligence Authorization Act of 1991, the government did craft a formal statutory definition of covert action as “an activity or activities of the United States government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United State Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly.” Put simply, covert action attempts to influence world events through the secret use of propaganda, political, economic, and paramilitary activities. The concept of “secret influence” is spongy, though, and can blur the distinction between activities carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or by the military. Take the training of foreign covert forces by U.S. Special Operations Forces. The SOF consists of soldiers out of uniform, acting on an unacknowledged basis — precisely the kind of operation engaged in by the CIA. By calling such activities “traditional military operations,” the Pentagon is able to sidestep the legal procedures for reporting covert actions to Congress.

MYTH #2: Covert action offers a quiet approach to America’s foreign relations.

An appealing aspect of covert action is the promise that it may allow the United States to address vexing problems overseas in a quiet manner. Indeed, one of the euphemisms for covert action is “the quiet option.” Yet consider such CIA operations as the failed attempt in 1961 to overthrow the Castro regime with an invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs; or the use of mines to blow up shipping in Nicaraguan harbors during the Reagan administration. Nothing quiet about these “secret” activities. Today drones can fly silently, but there is nothing quiet about the explosions of Hellfire missiles as they strike targets on the ground. [Continue reading…]

Mark Perry writes: Lost amidst all the fuss over whether Obama nominee Chuck Hagel is – or isn’t – acceptable to the Israeli lobby (or whatever), is the crucial, but strangely low-profile, debate over the president’s nomination of controversial counterterrorism chief John Brennan to head up the CIA.

The 25-year agency veteran, who first tied himself to Obama when the then-Illinois Senator was launching his long-shot campaign for the Oval Office, makes Hagel look positively liberal. This early support for an Illinois back bencher paid off for Brennan, for when Obama took office he immediately turned to the CIA veteran for his expertise on the war on terrorism.

While Brennan’s official title during Obama’s first term was US Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, he was known to critics and supporters alike as “Mr Drone” – the official behind the administration’s more than 350 separate drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia that have killed more than 3400 people, including an estimated 891 civilians.

“No politically appointed official in US history has played such a prominent role in killing so many people outside of a war zone as John Brennan,” Foreign Policy‘s Micah Zenka writes, adding that Brennan is the “most lethal bureaucrat” in Washington.

That may well be, but while Brennan hasn’t exactly been given “a pass” by either Democrats or Republicans (and has been dubbed the administration’s “assassination czar” by American progresssives), his most predictable critics have been less than outspoken in opposing his nomination.

One of the reasons may well be that Brennan believes the CIA should be “demilitarised” (which has gained him the support of the agency’s powerful senior analysts), and its drone war turned over to the Pentagon – which is where it belongs.

Although doing so probably won’t end the programme (should it actually happen), senior military officers are known to be sceptical of its utility, and intelligence veterans support Brennan’s position on transforming the post-Patraeus CIA back into what it was intended to be – an agency that gathers intelligence instead of running push-button wars. [Continue reading…]

Ted Gup writes: In the last week, the American public has been reminded of the Central Intelligence Agency’s contradictory attitude toward secrecy. In a critique of “Zero Dark Thirty,” published last Thursday in The Washington Post, a former deputy director of the C.I.A., Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., defended the use of waterboarding and said that operatives used small plastic bottles, not buckets as depicted in the film, to carry out this interrogation method on three notable terrorists. On Sunday, The New York Times reported on the Justice Department’s case against a former C.I.A. officer, John C. Kiriakou, a critic of waterboarding who faces 30 months in prison for sharing the name of a covert operative with a reporter, who never used the name in print.

The contrast points to the real threat to secrecy, which comes not from the likes of Mr. Kiriakou but from the agency itself. The C.I.A. invokes secrecy to serve its interests but abandons it to burnish its image and discredit critics.

Over the years, I have interviewed many active and retired C.I.A. personnel who were not authorized to speak with me; they included heads of the agency’s clandestine service, analysts and well over 100 case officers, including station chiefs. Five former directors of central intelligence have spoken to me, mostly “on background.” Not one of these interviewees, to my knowledge, was taken to the woodshed, though our discussions invariably touched on classified territory.

Somewhere along the way, the agency that clung to “neither confirm nor deny” had morphed into one that selectively enforces its edicts on secrecy, using different standards depending on rank, message, internal politics and whim. [Continue reading…]

It looks like the CIA’s decade-long shift from being an intelligence agency to becoming an assassination agency is soon to become irreversible as President Obama’s chief assassin takes over.

The New York Times reports: President Obama will announce on Monday that John O. Brennan, his counterterrorism adviser and a career Central Intelligence Agency officer, is his choice to head the agency, two months after David H. Petraeus stepped down after admitting an extramarital affair, a spokesman for the National Security Council said.

Mr. Brennan’s nomination will be announced at 1 p.m. along with that of Chuck Hagel, the former maverick Republican senator from Nebraska, whom the president has chosen for secretary of defense, said the spokesman, Thomas Vietor.

In Mr. Obama’s first term, Mr. Brennan, 57, has played a central role in the oversight of Mr. Obama’s use of targeted killing of suspected terrorists using drones in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. He has become one of the president’s most trusted advisers, and administration officials had said that the C.I.A. job was his for the asking.

The Washington Post reports: The rapid collapse of a U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya exposed the vulnerabilities of State Department facilities overseas. But the CIA’s ability to fend off a second attack that same night provided a glimpse of a key element in the agency’s defensive arsenal: a secret security force created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Two of the Americans killed in Benghazi were members of the CIA’s Global Response Staff, an innocuously named organization that has recruited hundreds of former U.S. Special Forces operatives to serve as armed guards for the agency’s spies.

The GRS, as it is known, is designed to stay in the shadows, training teams to work undercover and provide an unobtrusive layer of security for CIA officers in high-risk outposts.

But a series of deadly scrapes over the past four years has illuminated the GRS’s expanding role, as well as its emerging status as one of the CIA’s most dangerous assignments.

Of the 14 CIA employees killed since 2009, five worked for the GRS, all as contractors. They include two killed at Benghazi, as well as three others who were within the blast radius on Dec. 31, 2009, when a Jordanian double agent detonated a suicide bomb at a CIA compound in Khost, Afghanistan.

GRS contractors have also been involved in shootouts in which only foreign nationals were killed, including one that triggered a diplomatic crisis. While working for the CIA, Raymond Davis was jailed for weeks in Pakistan last year after killing two men in what he said was an armed robbery attempt in Lahore.

The increasingly conspicuous role of the GRS is part of a broader expansion of the CIA’s paramilitary capabilities over the past 10 years. Beyond hiring former U.S. military commandos, the agency has collaborated with U.S. Special Operations teams on missions including the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and has killed thousands of Islamist militants and civilians with its fleet of armed drones. [Continue reading…]

In late 2010, after the CIA had kept Osama bin Laden’s home under surveillance for several months, the agency was under increasing pressure to come up with conclusive proof that the Abbottabad house was indeed the location of the al Qaeda leader. CIA director Leon Panetta was running out of patience. Peter Bergen writes:

Over the next several months, Panetta became increasingly annoyed — some CIA officials even say “pissed” — about what he perceived as a lack of creativity among the bin Laden hunters.

They were directed to come up with 25 ways of getting inside the compound and encouraged to not be afraid of making some of them “kind of creative.” They came back with 38 proposals including one that sounds more comical than creative: set up loudspeakers outside the house from which could be broadcast the self-declared “voice of Allah” (speaking in Arabic I assume) saying to the inhabitants of the house, “You are commanded to come onto the street!”

One of the plans they decided to put into operation was to set up a phony vaccination program in the area in the hope that they could use this as a pretext for collecting blood samples from the house’s residents, thereby finding markers of bin Laden’s DNA in that of his children.

Matthieu Aikins describes what happened when this plan was put into operation:

[O]n April 21, 2011, a gray jeep pulled into town and parked in front of a property dealer’s shack a short distance from the Big House [where bin Laden and his family lived]. It was an official vehicle, with the logo of the provincial health department painted on the door, and from the passenger side stepped a doctor, here on business from the province’s capital, Peshawar. In his collared shirt and pressed trousers, the doctor stood out among the wheat fields and dirt paths of this semi-rural suburb: a handsome, imposing man with a thick head of black hair, his filled-out frame a point of pride in a country where stunted growth can be a mark of the lower classes. Leaving his driver behind, the doctor set off along a narrow gravel-strewn path, beside fields thick with grass and dusky cauliflower leaves, his gaze focused intently on the house ahead.

Waiting for him outside the compound’s forest-green metal gate were two nurses, Bakhto and Amna, their shawls drawn across their foreheads. All day, as part of a hepatitis B vaccination team that the doctor had assembled, the nurses had been canvassing the area, knocking on doors and looking for women ages 15 to 45 to cajole into taking the needle. First a drop of blood would be drawn from the patient and blotted on a rapid-test strip, which would show, within minutes, whether the patient had been infected with hepatitis. If the patient was negative, the nurses were instructed to administer the vaccination.

Normally a jovial man, the doctor seemed tense at the gate. Amna wondered why he was so interested in this house in particular, the only one whose vaccination he had bothered to personally supervise. She watched as he rapped sharply on the metal door. They waited. Again he knocked, but there seemed to be no one home. Amna shrugged. Did it really matter if they missed this one house? Undeterred, the doctor strode across the street to a low brick compound and roused a neighbor, whose son, as luck would have it, did the occasional odd job for the Big House. The man had the cell number of one of the Khan brothers [Arshad and Tariq, who owned the house]. The doctor dialed it and handed his phone to one of the nurses, but when the brother answered and said the family was away on a trip, the doctor took the phone back from her.

“Hello?” he said. “This is Dr. Shakil Afridi.” The doctor urgently explained the need for the hepatitis test. It was crucial that it happen soon. The vaccine, he said, would be very good for them.

Bergen says Afridi was unsuccessful in collecting DNA samples. No one has described the effect of Afridi’s unsolicited call on the bin Laden household.

We already know that the al Qaeda leader had spared no effort in maintaining a high level of security and it’s reasonable to assume that the doctor’s presence must have aroused considerable suspicion inside the compound.

Afridi’s CIA handlers must have been briefed on the doctor’s over-zealous effort to collect blood samples and thus surely feared their quarry would flee.

Bergen’s account of discussions in Washington at that time paints a picture of somber deliberation. He quotes Panetta saying:

“[W]e’re probably at the point where we have got the best intelligence we can get. It’s now time to make a decision not about whether or not we should do something about it, but what we do about it. We’ve come this far. There’s no turning back. We have enough information such that the American people would want us to act.”

It doesn’t sound like he imagined the next word on bin Laden might be that he had fled — which probably means he didn’t know that Afridi had come close to blowing the whole CIA operation.

Since Afridi’s arrest and subsequent imprisonment (he has been jailed for 33 years convicted of crimes unrelated to his work with the CIA), Washington has portrayed the doctor as a hero, but it’s hard not to wonder whether both the CIA and the White House are content to see him remain behind bars. Afridi may have come dangerously close to turning Abbottabad into Obama’s Tora Bora.