The Drone Secrecy Farce
By Scott Horton
Following Attorney General Eric Holder’s speech at Northwestern, publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times responded with renewed demands for the release of the Department of Justice memorandum (or “OLC Memo”), written by Martin Lederman and David Barron, that provides the legal framework for targeted killings. The Obama Administration came to power promising to end secret Justice Department memos like the ones that approved torture and warrantless surveillance. It also published most of the controversial Bush-era memos, which makes it look particularly disingenuous when withholding its own controversial legal opinions.
Why is it doing so? When pressed, government figures cite the same reason, always off-the-record: drone operations on and over Yemeni territory depend to some degree on the approval of Yemen’s dictator, who has insisted that they be kept secret. Indeed, according to an understanding the United States has reached with Yemen, the latter’s government will generally claim internally that U.S. drone strikes were carried out by Yemen’s own air force.
This past week, however, Reuters and the Associated Press reported on a series of strikes in Yemen that killed at least thirty persons allegedly linked to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The stories included both claims from Yemeni officials of air-force involvement and acknowledgements from other Yemeni officials that the attack was really conducted by the United States, as “the Yemeni military does not have the capacity to carry out nighttime air strikes and had no orders to do so.” The charade has gotten so tiresome that Sanaa isn’t even bothering to keep it up.
Former State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said on Al Jazeera on Friday that the Obama Administration’s cover has long been blown on the “secret” arrangement with Yemen. A classified WikiLeaks cable from the American Embassy in Sanaa spelled out the situation in some detail. In the communication, the American ambassador, Stephen Seche, reported on a conversation he had with Yemeni deputy prime minister Rashad al-Alimi, in which the two rehearsed the false statements they would make in an effort to camouflage U.S. operations:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2012/03/hbc-90008485
I'm sure the response will be, so what? Who cares who, what, where or by whatever means the President orders the CIA to take out "Al Qaeda," as long as Americans are kept in the dark about what their government does, all is well.
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