emptywheel | emptywheel

Tamerlan Tsarnaev: Not a Step by Step Investigation

By: emptywheel Friday May 24, 2013 2:36 pm

In a piece summarizing investigators’ understanding of Tamerlan Tsarnaev based largely on their investigations in Russia, ABC unironically quotes Dana Rohrabacher — who used to play dress-up mujahadeen when they were fighting Russia in Afghanistan — on intelligence-sharing tensions with Russia.

That communication gap has become a target for a group of American lawmakers who plan to visit Russia next week to investigate the bombing.

“If there was a distrust, or lack of cooperation because of that distrust, between the Russian intelligence and the FBI, then that needs to be fixed and we will be talking about that,” Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs’ Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and Emerging Threats who is leading the Congressional delegation, told ABC News by telephone.

ABC makes no mention of the recent escalation of intelligence tensions, from the failed recruitment in March followed by the refused entry on May 5 of US lawyer Thomas Firestone, the May 14 exposure of Ryan Fogle, who allegedly was attempting to recruit FSB’s expert on Chechen extremists, and the May 17 exposure of someone FSB claimed was CIA’s Station Chief in Moscow.

That is, ABC doesn’t point to the pretty extraordinary ways Russia is trying to drive up tensions even as we’re supposed to be working together to understand the Boston Marathon attack.

Nor does it mention that the FBI “and other law enforcement personnel” killed Russian Ibragim Todashev, just as they were purportedly getting him to sign a confession to involvement, with Tamerlan, in a grisly 2011 triple murder. The now-dead Todashev will not be able to shed any more light on what kind of relationship he had with Tamerlan, nor what relations with Russian nuts of all types they might have had.

There’s a lot it doesn’t mention.

It does, however, in the 25th and 26th paragraph (the last two), admit this:

While the officials described their cooperation with the Russians as “unprecedented,” they grumbled privately that they have been unable to do a methodical step-by-step investigation like they are used to doing in the U.S., or even in other countries where they have long-standing cooperation. American investigators from the FBI have been unable to travel to Dagestan without permission from the Russian authorities.

Still, they insist they have been able to confirm much of what they have been told by Russian government officials from what one official vaguely described as “other channels.”

I do hope these “other channels” are truly independent. Because it seems Russia is not only limiting the degree to which the FBI can investigate Tsarnaev, but inventing new reasons to add to tensions with the US.

What “Not Specifically Targeted” Means for Abdulrahman al-Awlaki

By: emptywheel Friday May 24, 2013 11:15 am

A number of people are discussing the killing of Abdulraham al-Awlaki as if the government has claimed he was accidentally targeted.

That’s not what the government has officially said. In his letter declassifying American drone deaths the other day, Eric Holder said Abdulrahman, Samir Khan, and Jude Kenan Mohammad were “not specifically targeted.” Which is quite different from saying it was an accident.

Administration officials were quick to offer an explanation about one of these deaths, that of Mohammad: he died in a signature strike, officials said anonymously, but a former consultant also suggests he was on the kill list.

American officials said on Wednesday that Mr. Mohammad had been killed with about 12 other insurgents in what the C.I.A. calls a “signature strike,” an attack based on patterns of activity, such as men toting arms in an area controlled by extremist groups. Such strikes have prompted the sharpest divisions inside the Obama administration, with some officials questioning whether killing unidentified fighters is legally justified or worth the local backlash.

[snip]

While Mr. Mohammad was not directly targeted, he had come under increasing scrutiny by American counterterrorism officials, who said he was involved in recruiting militants for Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, as well as making videos on YouTube to incite violence against the United States.

“He had risen to the top of the U.S. deck,” said Seth G. Jones, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation and former adviser to the military’s Special Operations Command. Mr. Jones said that while in Pakistan, Mr. Mohammad had made contact with five young Virginia men who disappeared from their homes around Thanksgiving in 2009 and turned up seeking to join militant groups. Instead they were arrested and remain in Pakistani custody.

But officials have been a lot more squirmy about Abdulrahman’s death.

At a pre-speech briefing yesterday, a senior Administration official was asked about Abdulrahman specifically. Between an unbelievable number of “ums,” he first tried to generalize about all three “not specifically targeted” individuals and then provided two possibilities: presence at “al Qaeda and associated facilities” or civilian accidents (neither of which incorporates the explanations provided the NYT for Mohammad’s death).

I don’t want to get into the details of each of those instances. What I will say generally is that there are times when there are individuals who are present at al Qaeda and associated forces facilities, and in that regard they are subject to the lethal action that we take. There are other instances when there are tragic cases of civilian casualties and people that the United States does not in any way intend to target — because, again, as in any war, there are tragic consequences that come with the decision to use force, including civilian casualties.

The first of those — presence at an al Qaeda “facility” — is closer to what the Administration has said about Abdulrahman’s death in the past, when they have claimed they were targeting Ibrahim al-Banna. Though AQAP reported that he was never at the site.

But here’s what a former Obama official told Jeremy Scahill about Abdulrahman’s killing.

A former senior official in the Obama administration told me that after Abdulrahman’s killing, the president was “surprised and upset and wanted an explanation.” The former official, who worked on the targeted killing program, said that according to intelligence and Special Operations officials, the target of the strike was al-Banna, the AQAP propagandist. “We had no idea the kid was there. We were told al-Banna was alone,” the former official told me. Once it became clear that the teenager had been killed, he added, military and intelligence officials asserted, “It was a mistake, a bad mistake.” However, John Brennan, at the time President Obama’s senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security, “suspected that the kid had been killed intentionally and ordered a review. I don’t know what happened with the review.”

In other words, it sounds like some in the Administration suspect that someone within the targeting chain of command may have invented the Ibrahim al-Banna presence as a way to get at Awlaki’s son. (Note, elsewhere Scahill suggested that the Awlaki family suspects a teacher may have been trying to recruit Abdulrahman to help hunt down his father, which might give those recruiters reason to want to silence him after they did kill Awlaki.)

In a piece on the drone program yesterday, Daniel Klaidman revealed that some people within the Administration were trying to keep mention of Abdulrahman and the two others out of Holder’s letter from the other day.

Officials tell The Daily Beast the original plan was to name only Anwar al-Awlaki, while referring to the other three anonymously. That changed when some officials at the Department of Justice argued that withholding the names would defeat the purpose of Obama’s much-touted call for more openness.

If Abdulrahman was killed deliberately, via some kind of deceit, I can understand why the Administration was reluctant to make its role in his death official. John Brennan’s report about it is presumably out there somewhere (though as a White House report, it would be harder to FOIA than a CIA IG Report).

Clearly, the Administration has made some effort to gain a greater understanding of how Abdulrahman was killed than the hemming and hawing official admitted to yesterday. Which suggests “not specifically targeted” might not even rule out “targeted in deceitful fashion.”

Someone Hacked Our Memory: “Retaliation,” “Deterrence,” “Escalation”

By: emptywheel Friday May 24, 2013 9:19 am

The WSJ has a story developing on earlier WSJ and NYT reporting that someone — believed to be Iran — was using cyberattacks on energy companies in preparation to sabotage operations.

And while the WSJ responsibly includes a short paragraph noting that the US “has previously launched its own cyberattacks” on Iran to sabotage its nuke program, none of the people they interview seem to remember that we struck Iran first and that this should be regarded as retaliation to our own provocation, not vice versa.

In response, U.S. officials warn that Iran is edging closer to provoking U.S. retaliation.

“This is representative of stepped-up cyber activity by the Iranian regime. The more they do this, the more our concerns grow,” a U.S. official said. “What they have done so far has certainly been noticed, and they should be cautious.”

[snip]

Underscoring the Obama administration’s growing concern, the White House held a high-level meeting late last month on how to handle the Iranian cybersecurity threat. No decisions were made at that meeting to take action, however, and officials will reconvene in coming weeks to reassess, a U.S. official said.

“It’s reached a really critical level,” said James Lewis, a cybersecurity specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who frequently advises the White House and Capitol Hill. “We don’t have much we can do in response, short of kinetic warfare.”

The Obama administration sees the energy-company infiltrations as a signal that Iran hasn’t responded to deterrence, a former official said.

In October, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta issued a veiled threat to Iran, which he did not name in his speech, by warning the Saudi Aramco hack represented a dangerous escalation in cyberwarfare. Since then, the Iranian attacks have only ramped up. [my emphasis]

One of the reasons we’re likely left with little to do in response short of “kinetic warfare,” of course, is we’ve already economically sabotaged Iran’s economy with sanctions, gutting the already fewer targets we might hit to strike back. (Also, the countries that have exemptions to trade with Iran for oil likely would frown on any attempt on our part to further devastate Iran’s energy sector.)

You’d think someone would have thought of this entirely predictable state of affairs before advising the most cyber-vulnerable nation on earth to pioneer the use of syberwar to sabotage key infrastructure, huh?

The Reason Holder Recused in UndieBomb 2.0 Probably Relates to Reasons He Thinks It’s So Bad

By: emptywheel Friday May 24, 2013 8:42 am

A lot of people are responding furiously with what should not be news: that Eric Holder approved the warrants in the investigation into Fox report James Rosen’s story.

Attorney General Eric Holder signed off on a controversial search warrant that identified Fox News reporter James Rosen as a “possible co-conspirator” in violations of the Espionage Act and authorized seizure of his private emails, a law enforcement official told NBC News on Thursday.

[snip]

Holder previously said he recused himself from the AP subpoena because he had been questioned as a witness in the underlying investigation into a leak about a foiled bomb plot in Yemen. His role in personally approving the Rosen search warrant had not been previously reported.

DOJ policy requires Attorney General sign-off on such warrants and subpoenas, Holder has no apparent reason to recuse in this case, so we should have all expected he signed off on them.

To be clear, I don’t defend the warrant to get Rosen’s emails; the claims he conspired in a leak are terribly dangerous. So I won’t defend Holder for having approved the warrant in the least.

But people seem to be suggesting that because Holder approved the Rosen warrant, he could have approved the UndieBomb 2.0 subpoena, so must be dodging some issue by recusing.

Consider a few basic details. First, the UndieBomber 2.0 mole reportedly infiltrated AQAP up to a year in advance, which would put him in Yemen, at least, if not AQAP, before Anwar al-Awlaki was killed September 30, 2011. And UndieBomber 2.0 was eventually working with Fahd al-Quso, who had a role — perhaps a more dominant role — in some of the attacks used to justify Awlaki’s killing, including UndieBomb 1.0 and the toner cartridge plot.

As I noted, for some reason DOJ did not implicate Fahd al-Quso in Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s sentencing memo 2 months before the UndieBomb 2.0 “plot” was “thwarted,” even though he clearly had a role in the earlier UndieBomb plot. But to the extent that sentencing memo was about providing a public justification for the Awlaki killing (and it was billed as such when it was rolled out), then it would have gone through review if not have been developed in the Attorney General’s office, as that’s where everything else on transparency on the Awlaki killing went (and probably still goes, up to Wednesday’s letter on the topic).

In other words, to the extent that an operation to get either Ibrahim al-Asiri or Quso would be tied up with the at that point recent killing of Awlaki, the AG’s office would be involved (and all that assumes things went down generally as the government claims it does; the AG’s office could be far far more involved, and therefore exposed by the leak, in a number of other scenarios).

Then there’s the question of the security theater rolled out for the Osama bin Laden anniversary, the “scores” of Air Marshals sent to Europe to prevent a threat that had already been rolled up. While the implementation of such security would be directed primarily out of Department of Homeland Security, the decision to deploy it likely involved discussions of the President’s entire national security team, including Eric Holder.

And all this makes sense. The only way the UndieBomb 2.0 leak could have anywhere near the gravity Eric Holder claims it does (even though the claimed reasons for its seriousness appear totally bogus) is if this kind of high level operation and deception were going on.

Which really ought to raise more questions about why the Administration (or Holder) panicked so much about the leak in the first place.

Obama’s Finger Is On the Trigger Except Where It Matters

By: emptywheel Thursday May 23, 2013 1:22 pm

Update: In his speech, Obama took clear responsibility for killing Awlaki.

And as President, I would have been derelict in my duty had I not authorized the strike that took out Awlaki.

Daniel Klaidman remains the Administration’s go-to guy for stories that report facts that contradict the spin he gives them. Today’s installment explains that Obama insisted on retaining direct say over DOD drone strikes in part to ensure we don’t get embroiled in new wars.

Obama wanted to assume the moral responsibility for what were in effect premeditated government executions. But sources familiar with Obama’s thinking say he also wanted to personally exercise supervision over lethal strikes away from conventional battlefields to avoid getting embroiled in new wars.

But at the same time reports that Obama didn’t exercise direct control over those strikes — in Pakistan and, starting in 2011, in Yemen — that have threatened to embroil us in new wars (and indeed, in the case of our strikes on the Pakistani Taliban, led directly to terrorist attacks on the US as well as the Khost attack).

While Obama had broadly signed off on the CIA’s targeted killing program through a presidential finding for covert action, he did not authorize individual killings except in rare instances.

Effectively, by the time Obama overruled the military in the fight Klaidman portrays in this piece last year, all of the strikes away from battlefields were conducted by the CIA, the strikes Obama apparently took no moral responsibility for.

Klaidman’s report includes another laugher, one which undermines the central Administration claim that today’s speech will represent new drone guidelines.

Lethal force can only be used against targets who represent a “continuing, imminent threat,” and where “capture is not feasible,” Holder said in his letter. It is unclear whether that would signal an end to the controversial practice of “signature strikes,” where groups of suspected terrorists have been targeted even though their identities were not known. (The tactic is believed to have led to significant civilian casualties, while at the same time increasing the number of high level al Qaeda members who were killed.) One senior Obama administration official said the question of signature strikes, sometimes referred to morbidly as “crowd killing,” has yet to be resolved.

I guess my earlier suggestion that the word “ongoing” will be defined so broadly as to allow a great number of problematic drone strikes was correct: it apparently might even include signature strikes.

But ultimately, this is the funniest thing about this perfectly time advertisement that on drones Obama is (yes, Klaidman uses this term) “the decider.” Klaidman’s headline (one he likely didn’t choose) is,

Obama: I Make the Drone Decisions

His closing two sentences are,

Obama won’t be declaring the end of the war anytime soon. And that is why his finger will still be on the trigger.

Yet the day before this obviously sanctioned story, Obama’s Attorney General sent out a letter that shielded the President from all responsibility for the decision to kill an American citizen. Again, maybe Obama will change this trend today by taking responsibility for personally ordering the execution of Anwar al-Awlaki. But it seems as though, even as the Administration boasts of “unprecedented transparency,” they still want to legally protect one of the most important facts about drone killing.

Obama (Almost) Capitulates to ACLU on Drone Killing Standards

By: emptywheel Thursday May 23, 2013 10:00 am

Actually, that headline overstates things. Obama will never capitulate to ACLU, the organization. As I’ve shown, his Administration has gone to absurd lengths to defeat ACLU in Court, even holding up legitimate congressional oversight to do so.

But Eric Holder’s letter to Congress yesterday suggested that the government’s new drone rulebook will almost adhere to the standard the ACLU tried to hold the President to almost 3 years ago. Holder claims,

This week the President approved and relevant congressional committees will be notified and briefed on a document that institutionalizes the Administration’s exacting standards and processes for reviewing and approving operations to capture or use lethal force against terrorist targets outside the United States and areas of active hostilities; these standards are either already in place or are to be transitioned into place.

[snip]

When capture is not feasible, the [new drone] policy provides that lethal force may be used only when a terrorist target poses a continuing, imminent threat to Americans, and when certain other preconditions, including a requirement that no other reasonable alternatives exist to effectively address the threat are satisfied.

That’s very close to the standard Nasser al-Awlaki, the ACLU, and Center for Constitutional Rights sought in August 2010 when they sued to prevent the government from killing Anwar al-Awlaki unless he was such an imminent threat.

Plaintiffs seek a declaration from this Court that the Constitution and international law prohibit the government from conducting targeted killing outside of armed conflict except as a last resort to protect against concrete, specific, and imminent threats of death or serious physical injury; and an injunction prohibiting the targeted killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Aulaqi outside this narrow context.

When I noted the Administration was now embracing the standard it had refused in 2010, ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer responded on Twitter,

Is it? What’s the function of the word “continuing”?

He’s got a point. Continue reading →

In Guilty Plea, Abdulmutallab Named Awlaki as Inspiration, Not as Co-Conspirator

By: emptywheel Wednesday May 22, 2013 10:44 pm

In Eric Holder’s letter on drone killing today, he used Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s UndieBomb attack as the most extensive evidence justifying the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki.

For example, when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — the individual who attempted to blow up an airplane bound for Detroit on Christmas Day 2009 — went to Yemen in 2009, al-Aulaqi arranged an introduction via text message. Abdulmutallab told U.S. officials that he stayed at al-Aulaqi’s house for three days, and then spent two weeks at an AQAP training camp. Al-Aulaqi planned a suicide operation for Abdulmutallab, helped Abdulmutallab draft a statement for a martyrdom video to be shown after the attack, and directed him to take down a U.S. airline. Al-Aulaqi’s last instructions were to blow up the airplane when it was over American soil. [Emphasis original]

That version of what Abdulmutallab said about his attack draws on Abdulmutallab’s confession to the High Value Interrogation Group at Milan Correctional Facility, last presented in a narrative submitted at Abdulmutallab’s sentencing. I commented on some oddities in that narrative here and will likely return to it.

Contrast that with how Abdulmutallab pled guilty to conspiracy to commit terrorism in court in October 2011.

In the name of Allah, the most merciful, if I were to say I the father did not do it, but my son did it and he conspired with the holy spirit to do it, or if I said I did it but the American people are guilty of the sin, and Obama should pay for the crime, the Court wouldn’t accept that from me or anyone else.

In late 2009, in fulfillment of a religious obligation, I decided to participate in jihad against the United States. The Koran obliges every able Muslim to participate in jihad and fight in the way of Allah, those who fight you, and kill them wherever you find them, some parts of the Koran say, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

I had an agreement with at least one person to attack the United States in retaliation for U.S. support of Israel and in retaliation of the killing of innocent and civilian Muslim populations in Palestine, especially in the blockade of Gaza, and in retaliation for the killing of innocent and civilian Muslim populations in Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and beyond, most of them women, children, and noncombatants.

As a result, I traveled to Yemen and eventually to the United States, and I agreed with at least one person to carry an explosive device onto an aircraft and attempt to kill those onboard and wreck the aircraft as an act of jihad against the United States for the U.S. killing of my Muslim brothers and sisters around the world.

I was greatly inspired to participate in jihad by the lectures of the great and rightly guided mujahideen who is alive, Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki, may Allah preserve him and his family and give them victory, Amin, and Allah knows best. [my emphasis]

He pleads to a conspiracy (the first crime he was charged with), but he doesn’t name the person or people with whom he conspired.

Then, immediately after not naming his co-conspirators, he says he was inspired to conduct this act by Anwar al-Awlaki. But even there, he doesn’t attribute Awlaki’s influence to conversations he had with Awlaki in Yemen — even Awlaki acknowledged to having contact with Abdulmutallab, though he maintained he did not order the attack. Rather, Abdulmutallab points to speeches Awlaki published, speeches which, according to other court documents, he listened to as early as 2005.

Thus, at a moment when Abdulmutallab controlled his own speech, when there was no question of coercion (though his current lawyer now challenges his competence at the time), in a speech in which he boasted of Awlaki’s role in inspiring his terror attack, he did not name Awlaki as his co-conspirator.

You could argue, I suppose, that Abdulmutallab did so out of some belief the government or news had lied about Awlaki’s death almost two weeks before (as he makes clear, he refused to believe Awlaki was dead), in an attempt to get him to implicate Awlaki, and that his tribute to Awlaki’s influence but not co-conspiracy was an attempt to push back. The FBI appears to have badgered Abdulmutallab about the likelihood Awlaki would be killed after he got put on a kill list, so it is possible he worried that if he implicated Awlaki he might lead to his death (which had already happened).

Whatever the explanation, these two narratives present two of the three confessions Abdulmutallab gave (the other being the one he gave just after he had been captured, as presented by AUSA Jonathan Tukel at trial, in which Abdulmutallab did not name Awlaki at all). And as the Administration’s newfound transparency rolls out tomorrow, it’s worth keeping in mind that the confession that implicates Awlaki is just one of three Abdulmutallab made, and not even the most recent known one.

“At the Highest Levels of the U.S. Government” … Like the President?

By: emptywheel Wednesday May 22, 2013 8:07 pm

Update: Obama did, in fact, take responsibility for ordering the killing.

And as President, I would have been derelict in my duty had I not authorized the strike that took out Awlaki.

There’s something missing from Eric Holder’s 8 paragraphs justifying the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki.

In spite of the many sanctioned leaks asserting that President Obama “insist[s] on approving every new name on an expanding ‘kill list,’” Holder never explicitly says Obama did so with Awlaki. The Attorney General attributes the decision itself to “high-level U.S. government officials,” “senior officials,” and “senior officials” again.

Here’s how he describes the review process:

The decision to use lethal force is one of the gravest that our government, at every level, can face. The operation to target Anwar al-Aulaqi was thus subjected to an exceptionally rigorous interagency legal review: not only did I and other Department of Justice lawyers conclude after a thorough and searching review that the operation was lawful, but so too did other departments and agencies within the U.S. government.

The decision to target Anwar al-Aulaqi was additionally subjected to extensive policy review at the highest level of the U.S. Government, and senior U.S. officials also briefed the appropriate committees of Congress on the possibility of using lethal force against al-Aulaqi. Indeed, the Administration informed the relevant congressional oversight committees that it had approved the use of lethal force against al-Aulaqi in February 2010 — well over a year before the operation in question — and the legal justification was subsequently explained in detail to those committees, well before action was taken against Aulaqi. This extensive outreach is consistent with the Administration’s strong and continuing commitment to congressional oversight of our counterterrorism operations — oversight which ensures, as the President stated during his State of the Union address, that our actions are “consistent with our laws and systems of checks and balances.”

Sure, the code words meaning “the President” are in there: “at every level,” “at the highest level of the U.S. Government.” It quotes Obama’s State of the Union address at the very end, like a flourish detached from the nasty killing bit.

And the process described here, where “the Administration” informs the intelligence committees of the lethal force operations “it had approved,” is clearly that of a covert op, which requires the President’s to inform Congress of covert ops he has approved.

But unlike DOJ and the congressional committees, he’s not named in the decision process that ended up killing Awlaki. (Though Holder does later say that Obama approved the Disposition Matrix which he describes will soon be briefed to Congress, which of course implies Presidential approval for all the drone deaths to come, but not Awlaki’s.)

This might be a picayune observation if this Administration had not, secretly, made almost unprecedented efforts to keep a short phrase indicating the President (Bush) had authorized the torture program.

In his letter, Holder references Obama’s Archives Speech pledge that “whenever possible, my administration will make all information available to the American people so that they can make informed judgments and hold us accountable” (though in Holder’s letter, the “us” becomes “their Government”). He ends this letter by assuring its recipients “that the President and his national security team are mindful of this Administration’s pledge to public accountability for our counterterrorism efforts.”

But on the specific issue of Anwar al-Awlaki’s killing, this letter allows Obama (along with the CIA and DOD, presumably to avoid helping the ACLU in its FOIA — though it may be too late) to avoid any accountability.

Perhaps tomorrow Obama will stand before a bunch of cameras and admit “I personally ordered an American citizen to be drone killed.” But this letter feels like an effort to help him avoid publicly accepting just that responsibility.

Update: As QuietAmerican reminded me, Obama is quoted in that NYT piece as saying the decision to kill Awlaki was “an easy one.”

600 Days after Assassinating Anwar al-Awlaki, Administration Admits Doing So

By: emptywheel Wednesday May 22, 2013 4:51 pm

In this letter boasting of “unprecedented transparency,” Eric Holder officially tells Congress that since 2009 the government has killed 4 Americans: Anwar al-Awlaki was specifically targeted and killed, and Samir Khan, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, and Jude Mohammed were “not specifically targeted.”

One paragraph of the letter details how Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab told US officials of Awlaki’s involvement in the UndieBomb plot.

Too bad that in two of three confessions, Abdulmutallab said someone besides Awlaki did the things Holder lists here. Too bad that Abdulmutallab’s lawyer now says the solitary confinement associated with the interrogations in which he did implicate Awlaki made him incompetent.

We Have Always Been at War with Eastasia Adherents

By: emptywheel Wednesday May 22, 2013 3:38 pm

Back on September 18, 2001, here’s who we declared war against.

the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons,

On March 13, 2009, here’s how Obama expanded that AUMF to include “associated forces.”

The President has the authority to detain persons that the President determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, and persons who harbored those responsible for those attacks. The President also has the authority to detain persons who were part of, or substantially supported, Taliban or al-Qaida forces or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act, or has directly supported hostilities, in aid of such enemy armed forces. [my emphasis]

Here’s how, on Monday, the White House described the speech Obama will make tomorrow on counterterrorism.

On May 23, the President will give a speech at the National Defense University on the Administration’s counterterrorism policy. In his speech, the President will discuss our broad counter-terrorism policy, including our military, diplomatic, intelligence and legal efforts. He will review the state of the threats we face, particularly as al Qaeda core has weakened but new dangers have emerged; he will discuss the policy and legal framework under which we take action against terrorist threats, including the use of drones; he will review our detention policy and efforts to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay; and he will frame the future of our efforts against Al Qaeda, its affiliates and adherents. [my emphasis]

Now, in point of fact, this war against “adherents” is not new. Denis McDonough invoked it in a speech on March 6, 2011.

Preventing radicalization that leads to violence here in America is part of our larger strategy to decisively defeat al Qaeda. Overseas, because of the new focus and resources that the President has devoted to this fight, the al Qaeda leadership in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan is hunkered down and it’s harder than ever for them to plot and launch attacks against our country. Because we’re helping other countries build their capacity to defend themselves, we’re making it harder for al Qaeda’s adherents to operate around the world.

Here at home, we’ve strengthened our defenses, with improvements to intelligence and aviation screening and enhanced security at our borders, ports and airports. As we’ve seen in recent attempted attacks, al Qaeda and its adherents are constantly trying to exploit any vulnerability in our open society. But it’s also clear that our dedicated intelligence, law enforcement and homeland security personnel have disrupted many more plots and saved many American lives.

[snip]

For all these reasons—our stronger defenses at home; our progress against al Qaeda overseas; the rejection of al Qaeda by so many Muslims around the world; and the powerful image of Muslims thriving in America—al Qaeda and its adherents have increasingly turned to another troubling tactic: attempting to recruit and radicalize people to terrorism here in the United States.

[snip]

But with al Qaeda and its adherents constantly evolving and refining their tactics, our understanding of the threat has to evolve as well.

Obama invoked adherents, sort of, shortly thereafter.

Bin Laden and his murderous vision won some adherents.

And John Brennan invoked adherents in speeches on June 29, 2011, September 16, 2011, April 30, 2012, and October 26, 2012.

So the Administration has been at war against al Qaeda adherents (and affiliates, another new category) for some time.

But if I’m not mistaken, tomorrow will mark the most detailed discussion in which the President describes this war that no one declared against adherents. And given that Congress has shown newfound interest in the scope of the AUMF that includes neither adherents nor associated forces, it will be interesting to see how the President describes this expanded war.