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Pakistan Can’t Confirm Taliban Leader Is Dead, Criticizes U.S. Drone Strike

Pakistan Can’t Confirm Taliban Leader Is Dead, Criticizes U.S. Drone Strike

By Asad Hashim and Syed Raza Hassan

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Pakistan’s interior minister said on Tuesday he could not confirm that Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour had been killed in a U.S. drone strike, and described Washington’s justification for the attack as “against international law”.

U.S. President Barack Obama said on Monday that Mansour had been killed in the drone strike, and the Pentagon said separately that Mansour was plotting attacks that posed “specific, imminent threats” to U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

On Tuesday, Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan told reporters that the body recovered on Pakistani soil, near the Afghan border, was charred beyond recognition, adding that DNA samples would be tested against a relative who had come forward to claim the body.

“The government of Pakistan cannot announce this without a scientific and legal basis,” Khan told a news briefing.

He did not identify the relative or say whether he or she claimed to be related to the Taliban leader or someone else.

Two U.S. officials told Reuters that U.S. intelligence and military agencies used multiple streams of intelligence, including human intelligence and electronic surveillance to locate and identify the car carrying Mansour.

That enabled multiple drones operated by the Joint Special Operations Command to incinerate the car when it reached an empty stretch of road in a remote area where there was little danger of causing civilian casualties.

“There were multiple forms of intelligence attributed to tracking him down,” a U.S. official said.

Khan rejected the U.S. argument that it could launch attacks across borders in order to protect its interests.

“For the U.S. government to say that whoever is a threat to them will be targeted wherever they are, that is against international law,” he said. “And if every country in the world adopts this rule, it will be the law of the jungle.”

Pakistan and the United States have been uneasy allies in the war against the Taliban and other Islamist militants in the region.

Critics in Afghanistan and the United States accuse Pakistan of allowing the Afghan Taliban’s leadership to take shelter on its territory, something that Islamabad has denied.

The militant movement has made territorial gains and carried out a series of deadly attacks across Afghanistan since NATO forces officially wound down their combat mission at the end of 2014, undermining the Western-backed government in Kabul.

Recent events echo those in 2011, when U.S. special forces raided a building in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad that killed longtime al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, infuriating and severely embarrassing Islamabad.

 

CROSS-BORDER STRIKE?

Khan said the car was destroyed on Pakistani territory but was fired “from another country”, presumably Afghanistan, where more than 10,000 U.S. and coalition troops remain.

Khan added that Pakistani authorities were also investigating a passport bearing the name of Wali Muhammad, which was found near the burned out shell of the car believed to have been the target of the drone attack.

He confirmed the passport in question had been used to travel from Pakistani airports multiple times, and that it held valid visas for Iran, Dubai and Bahrain.

If the travel document proves to have been used by Mansour himself, it would raise fresh questions about how the Taliban leader was able to move freely in and out of Pakistan and whether he had help from the country’s security apparatus.

Khan on Tuesday disputed that elements of Pakistan’s security apparatus supported the Taliban leadership.

“If (Mansour) was availing Pakistani intelligence agency support and help, would he be traveling like this?,” he asked, referring to reports that the target was alone with a single driver.

The circumstances surrounding the killing remain murky, including how the U.S. verified it was Mansour who was killed in the attack and how any documents could be recovered from the fiery scene.

“You could not see a spot of paint … that’s how bad it was hit,” Khan said. “How was a passport lying just a few yards away? So first we have to establish that, whether he was actually using it.”

The Taliban have not issued any official statements on Mansour since Saturday’s drone strike.

However, Taliban officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have said Mansour is dead and a council is meeting to choose a successor, the second such leadership shura in a year after the death of the movement’s founder, Mullah Mohammad Omar, was confirmed in 2015.

 

MYSTERIOUS PASSPORT

Authorities in Quetta, the Baluchistan capital, showed a copy of the recovered passport, which has a photo bearing a strong likeness to the officially released Taliban picture of Mansour, to a Reuters reporter.

They also noted that it bore an exit stamp from Iran’s land border with Pakistan dated May 21, the day of the drone strike.

Pakistani immigration records show that the Wali Muhammad passport was used at least 18 times since 2006 to travel internationally, two senior officials in the Federal Investigation Agency, which manages borders, told Reuters.

One of the officials in the southwestern province of Baluchistan said the passport was used mostly over the land border with Iran and from the airport in the southern city of Karachi, with the last exit from Karachi en route to Dubai on March 31, 2015.

The second official reviewed computerized records of the passport and said there were “18 travel events” from Karachi airport starting in 2007, with the last arrival at Karachi on April 2, 2015.

A spokesman for the Iranian foreign ministry was quoted on state media denying that such an individual had crossed the border from Iran to Pakistan at the time in question.

Authorities in the United Arab Emirates did not respond to questions on whether Mansour might have entered Dubai using an assumed name or whether there was any record of a Wali Muhammad visiting.

 

(Additional reporting by Gul Yousufzai in QUETTA, Idrees Ali and Mark Hosenball in Washington.; Writing by Kay Johnson; Editing by Mike Collett-White and Alan Crosby)

 

 

 

 

 

Obama’s ‘Kill List’ Is Here To Stay

Obama’s ‘Kill List’ Is Here To Stay

Drone warfare, once a topic of widespread pubic debate in America, has been placed on the mental backburners of most of the US public. A Pew poll in 2015 found that “Fifty-eight percent of respondents expressed approval of U.S. drone strikes, while only 35 percent disapproved. This included nearly three-fourths of Republicans, slightly more than half of Democrats, and 56 percent of independents.” Perhaps the slow burnout of the public debate around this issue marks a tacit approval.

With the presidential election in full swing and the field narrowed to the final three candidates, it’s worth asking a question that the public isn’t, currently: What will happen to President Obama’s so-called “Kill List,” and to America’s drone warfare policy more generally, once he leaves office?

The short answer is: Well, nothing.

The Intercept, which has reported on Obama’s Kill List extensively, describes Obama’s Kill List thusly:

“U.S. intelligence personnel collect information on potential targets… drawn from government watchlists and the work of intelligence, military, and law enforcement agencies… when someone was destined for the kill list, intelligence analysts created a portrait of a suspect and the threat that person posed, pulling it together ‘in a condensed format known as a ‘baseball card.’ That information was then bundled with operational information and packaged in a ‘target information folder’ to be ‘staffed up to higher echelons’ for action. On average, it took 58 days for the president to sign off on a target… At that point, U.S. forces had 60 days to carry out the strike.”

The program has little-to-no transparency in its decision making apparatus, and has even been called an extra-judicial assassination program, given the lack of due process provided to the targets, who in the past have included U.S. citizens.

There are many controversial aspects of American drone policy, but two in particular stand out: first, “signature strikes,” which according to U.S. authorities, target “groups of men who bear certain signatures, or defining characteristics associated with terrorist activity, but whose identities aren’t known.” The New York Times reported that some in the Obama administration joke that when the CIA sees “three guys doing jumping jacks,” they think it is a terrorist training camp.

When the CIA allegedly carried out its first targeted drone killing in February 2002, in Afghanistan, it killed three men near a former mujahedeen base called Zhawar Kili. In the aftermath of the strike, however, authorities appeared not to know who they had killed. A Pentagon spokeswoman stated, “We’re convinced that it was an appropriate target,” but added, “[w]e do not know yet exactly who it was.”

A 2009 study by the Brookings Institute estimates that, along with the 2,000-plus militants killed by drones in Pakistan, perhaps more than 470 non-militants have been killed. More recently, in March of 2016, drones and other warplanes bombed an al-Shabab training camp in Somalia and killed about 150 alleged militants who were gathered at a graduation ceremony. Yet U.S. officials privately acknowledged that they didn’t know the identities of those they killed.

Sense a trend?

It’s made all the more troubling by the administration’s policy of classifying those killed in drone strikes as militants unless there is evidence posthumously produced which proves their innocence. One can only imagine the difficulties of doing so, and how this dramatically decreases the publicly-admitted number of civilian deaths, true or not.

Despite all this, there has been little outcry from the remaining presidential candidates on the matter.

In an April 2016 town hall, Chris Hayes questioned Bernie Sanders about the practice:

“HAYES:  The current authorization which you cite in what Miguel just quoted which is the authorization to use military force after 9/11. That has led to the kill list. This President — literally, there is a kill list. There is a list of people that the U.S. government wants to kill, and it goes about doing it. Would you keep the kill list as President of the United States?

SANDERS:  Look. Terrorism is a very serious issue. There are people out there who want to kill Americans, who want to attack this country, and I think we have a lot of right to defend ourselves. I think as Miguel said, though, it has to be done in a constitutional, legal way.

HAYES:  Do you think what’s being done now is constitutional and legal?

SANDERS:  In general I do, yes.”

The other Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, was involved in these sorts of strikes herself and saw them ramp up during her time as secretary of state. In her book Hard Choices, notes that drone strikes are “one of the most effective and controversial elements of the Obama Administration’s strategy against al Qaeda and like-minded terrorists.” She has also pinned herself to Obama this election cycle, painting her candidacy as a continuation of many of his policies, signaling little incentive for her to change our approach to drone strikes now.

Finally, there’s Republican nominee Donald Trump, who has expressed a desire to expand the military and kill innocent people in order to combat terrorism. As Glenn Greenwald notes, these views are not necessarily extreme relative to current U.S. foreign policy under President Obama: The Intercept reported that nearly 90 percent of people killed in drone strikes in Afghanistan over a five-month period “were not the intended targets”.

In 2014 Pew released a global poll that found that majorities in 39 countries disapproved of American drone attacks. The only three countries that showed more than half of respondents supporting the tactic were Israel, Kenya and the U.S.

Nowhere did any level support match the level of opposition found in countries such as Venezuela and Jordan, where disapproval topped 90 percent. Some of the places polled where the majority disapproved of strikes included our allies such as South Korea, Japan, the UK, and France.

Given the negative view of drone attacks aboard, the large number of innocents killed, and the secretive nature of the program driving them, it’s surprising that candidates come under so little scrutiny for supporting the practice — and, perhaps, that they ever supported it in the first place.

Photo: A fully armed MQ-9 Reaper taxis down an Afghanistan runway Nov. 4. The Reaper has flown 49 combat sorties since it first began operating in Afghanistan Sept. 25. It completed its first combat strike Oct. 27, when it fired a Hellfire missile over Deh Rawod, Afghanistan. U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Brian Ferguson

Widow Of U.S. Hostage Lashes Out At Obama Policy Toward Captives

Widow Of U.S. Hostage Lashes Out At Obama Policy Toward Captives

By Hannah Allam, McClatchy Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — The wife of an American hostage who was killed in a U.S. counterterrorism operation in Pakistan blames his al-Qaida captors for the death, but she also lashed out Thursday at what she called “inconsistent and disappointing” assistance from the Obama administration during an ordeal of more than three years.

The criticism from the wife of 73-year-old development expert Warren Weinstein, who along with Italian hostage Giovanni Lo Porto was killed in a U.S. strike on an al-Qaida compound in January, adds to a chorus of protests from families who claim the U.S. government could have done more in its efforts to bring captive Americans home before they were killed in captivity.

The families say the U.S. government is long overdue a central coordinator for hostage recovery so that opportunities don’t fall through the cracks of a diffuse interagency process.

“We hope that my husband’s death and the others who have faced similar tragedies in recent months will finally prompt the U.S. government to take its responsibilities seriously and establish a coordinated and consistent approach to supporting hostages and their families,” Weinstein’s wife, Elaine, said in a statement.

An internal review is underway to update the Obama administration’s hostage policies, though the most controversial piece — the longtime U.S. refusal to pay ransoms — is not under consideration for change, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters.

Several families of hostages have criticized the administration’s handling of the cases.

The mother of American journalist James Foley, the first U.S. hostage beheaded by the Islamic State group, has been among the most vocal of the relatives calling for better communication with families and a more streamlined approach to interagency cooperation.

The family of Austin Tice, a freelance journalist and contributor to McClatchy who was seized in Syria in 2012, also has spoken out with demands for three main changes: communicating more closely with victims’ families, approaching each case individually, and seizing opportunities for a quick, safe return. One major criticism of the Tices is that there’s no one person overseeing the return of hostages, something the family has said “we crucially need to change.”

Some relatives of hostages also seek to overturn the longstanding U.S. ban on paying ransoms or making similar concessions to hostage takers, but U.S. officials have said that the policy will remain in place because it’s effective as a deterrent to targeting Americans. Critics of the ban disagree, noting that the Islamic State group freed several European hostages after receiving ransom payments while American and British hostages, whose governments refuse to negotiate, were killed.

Harf, the State Department spokeswoman, said that not all the feedback from the families has been negative, though she didn’t dispute the many calls for a revamped hostage policy.

“These families have gone through the worst thing they will ever have to go through, and I think you hear a lot of different statements from them. We’ve heard people talk about how supportive the U.S. government has been,” Harf said at the State Department briefing. “But we know this is an incredibly challenging issue. That’s why we’re doing a review of how we deal with all of these issues.”

(Anita Kumar in Washington and McClatchy special correspondent Tom Hussain in Islamabad contributed to this report.)

(c)2015 McClatchy Washington Bureau, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: ©afp.com / Mandel Ngan

Correction: Obama Is Not A Liberal

Correction: Obama Is Not A Liberal

WASHINGTON — Let me count the ways that President Barack Obama is not a liberal.

Obama ran as a liberal Democrat in the 2008 presidential primary, edging out centrist Hillary Clinton from the left. The liberal campaign pose became a convenient fiction he deployed while running to succeed a “war president.” Friends and foes are still caught up in that political fiction.

So let’s be clear: Obama has not governed as a liberal, not for a single day, not even when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. In Oslo, he gave a speech defending military action, hinting that he did not deserve or even want the honor. It was as if he didn’t want the world to see him anymore as a peace-loving liberal once he became commander-in-chief. He has eschewed liberalism in many ways since.

For starters, the national surveillance state — a beast created on his watch — springs to mind. It represents a huge loss of privacy and civil liberties for Americans, but Obama has not paid a price for it. Edward Snowden lives in exile for exposing the extent of government snooping at home. Abroad, leaders are furious that the National Security Agency spied on them, too.

For true liberals, such as Roane Carey, managing editor of The Nation, the revelations were a blow to their core beliefs. “That was one [terrible surprise] I didn’t see coming,” Carey said.

Second, the presidential embrace of Predator drones — in absolute secrecy — became Obama’s “signature” weapon in the global war on terrorism, which he extended. A single drone attack is an act of war out of the blue that may result in taking out a terrorist or two. But it’s not so clean and clinical. The damage we also inflict on civilians — say, causing the deaths of innocent village elders — is an uncounted cost of war. The spiral of anti-American anger could catch up with us, if it hasn’t already.

Then there’s the island jail of Guantánamo Bay, an albatross and human rights stain with dozens of detainees. Obama vowed to close it as a candidate. Now comes the president’s penultimate year in office, and he hasn’t spent the political capital needed to close Guantánamo, perhaps judging it a hopeless fight. But early on, the president had Democratic majorities in Congress.

On behalf of my tribe, the press, I note that the Obama administration’s record of refusing Freedom of Information Act requests is surprisingly high. Press organizations such as The Poynter Institute say interviews and access to public agency documents and employees are too hard to get. This crystallizes the complaining from reporters who say the secrecy they run into is undemocratic — small d. There was an unwritten way in which democracy should work day to day, with a presumption of transparency. Contrary to its claims, the Obama administration’s rigid stance toward the press violates the old ways and days. David Sanger of The New York Times is a critic of the “control-freak” administration’s high walls.

Obama issues next to no pardons compared with other presidents, so when he pardoned 22 nonviolent drug offenders, it made news. But thousands are incarcerated with harsh sentences for nonviolent crimes. Why so little mercy? On the other side of paradise, precious few moneyed Wall Streeters who helped drive the financial crisis ever went behind bars.

Sadly, the post-9/11 “homeland security” behemoth assembled by George W. Bush settled into stone when Obama took office. Author James Risen, an investigative reporter for TheNew York Times, writes, “Obama performed a neat political trick: He took the national security state that had grown to such enormous size under Bush and made it his own.” Facing arrest recently, Risen was pressed by authorities to reveal his source on an intelligence story but refused.

Finally, deep regret fills the space of something Obama didn’t do, which is to convene a great national conversation about race 150 years after Abraham Lincoln won the Civil War. Said a Washington editor with a keen sense of history: “Obama had the chance, and he declined to take it, opting instead to follow the path of war and violence against an enemy largely of America’s creation.”

Obama came riding in on a liberal white horse. But there’s no liberal in the White House.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit Creators.com.

AFP Photo/Jim Watson