Saudi Drone Base Blackout

Yesterday it was widely reported that the United States has been operating "secret" drone base in Saudi Arabia since 2011. Not only that, but some American news organisations had known about the base for more than a year and chose not to disclose its existence because of a blackout agreement made with the government.

Here's a snippet from the Washington Post's report:

The Washington Post had refrained from disclosing the location at the request of the administration, which cited concern that exposing the facility would undermine operations against an al-Qaeda affiliate regarded as the network’s most potent threat to the United States, as well as potentially damage counterterrorism collaboration with Saudi Arabia.

The Post learned Tuesday night that another news organization was planning to reveal the location of the base, effectively ending an informal arrangement among several news organizations that had been aware of the location for more than a year.

But the logic here doesn't stack up. Why? Because on 26 July 2011 a story was published by the London Times titled "Secret drone bases mark latest shift in US attacks on al-Qaeda." This report revealed the existance of a CIA drone base in Saudi Arabia, and even went as far as to speculatively pinpoint its exact location:

The CIA has set up a network of secret drone bases in Arab states in a major escalation of its campaign against al-Qaeda militants in Yemen.

Sources in the Gulf say the agency is now massed along Yemen’s borders, launching daily missions with unmanned Predator aircraft from bases in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Djibouti and the United Arab Emirates. [...]

“Oman, Saudi and the UAE are being used as bases for drones. The operation against al-Qaeda has been stepped up in Yemen and in Somalia,” said a Gulf defence source. [...]

A senior Gulf intelligence source believes the most likely base in Saudi Arabia is at Khamis Mushayt in the southwest. The site has been used by Saudi forces for airstrikes against Houthi rebels in northern Yemen. A possible alternative is Sharurah in the kingdom’s Empty Quarter, close to the Yemeni border but considered less secure.

What this means is that the information the United States government was pressuring American reporters to keep secret was already in the public domain — it had already been "outed," as it were, and it hadn't damaged counter-terrorism operations or the relationship with Saudi Arabia. Anyone with an Internet connection — and yes, that includes members of al-Qaeda — could find out that the CIA had a "secret" drone base in Saudi Arabia simply by doing a quick Google search. (Even though the Times story is behind a paywall, the first few paragraphs, which include the Saudi detail, can still be viewed for free.)

Defending the decision not to publish this information after some criticism, Washington Post reporter Greg Miller posted a tweet today saying: "For the record, WaPo has reported CIA drone base on Arabian peninsula since 2011, w/out disclosing it was in Saudi." I asked him why not disclose the specific country when it had already been published elsewhere, and he responded: "Short answer: US govt concerned more about US press than British, and saying on Arabian peninsula puts readers pretty close."

I think this shows poor judgement. It seems flawed to make a distinction between the British and American press here, especially in the age of the Internet. All news stories published online are distributed instantly to an international audience. By disclosing the existence of an "Arabian peninsula" base while suppressing the exact country in question — even though it is already in the public domain — not only are you serving no substantive purpose but you are doing your readers a disservice.

In national security journalism, difficult decisions often have to be made under incredible pressures. Sometimes, there can be a legitimate need to keep a certain military operation undisclosed if, for example, lives are at stake. But in this case I think the American press got it wrong. Unfortunately, it comes off looking like another example of deference to power that will ultimately taint the reputations of the newspapers involved.

State Secrets Culture and Warrantless Wiretapping

In the days following 11 September 2001, many things changed in the United States. The terrorist attacks that took place on that day quickly prompted tightened security and, crucially, heightened use of surveillance tactics.

It is now well documented how eavesdropping agency the National Security Agency (NSA) was given unprecedented authority to intercept communications flowing to and from the country after 9/11. As the New York Times reported in its 2005 exposé: "The international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible 'dirty numbers' linked to al Qaeda."

This revelation led to a lawsuit (Jewel v. National Security Agency) which alleged the US government was engaged in "the biggest fishing expedition ever devised, scanning millions of ordinary Americans' phone calls and emails for 'suspicious' patterns." The lawsuit was originally dismissed back in 2010 on the grounds that it didn't sufficiently allege "personal injury" was caused by the warrantless snooping. However, this decision was later reversed and now an appeals court is taking another look at the case.

As it has done previously, the US government is asserting its state secrets privilege as part of an attempt to stop the case moving forward. In a motion to dismiss submitted to the appeals court earlier this month, the government said that invoking the privilege was necessary "in order to prevent exceptionally grave damage to national security." It denied the allegation that it had "indiscriminately collected the content of millions of communications sent or received by people inside the United States." But added that it could not prove this before a court because doing so would "risk or require the disclosure of highly classified NSA intelligence sources and methods."

Such claims from the NSA are not new. The agency has a track record of arguing it is entitled to avoid public scrutiny because doing so would pose some sort of grand danger. Back in 1998, for instance, the agency admitted it had spied on Princess Diana and was holding more than a thousand pages of documents in a "Diana file." But the NSA declined to disclose the information held about the Princess because it would reveal — you guessed it — "sources and methods."

The problem with the NSA's position is that it is questionable. The NSA seems to think that disclosing even the slightest detail about what it is doing would aid people who are engaged in plotting against the US. But organised terror groups or oppositional foreign government agents will already presume that every phone call they make and email they send can be intercepted by agencies like the NSA. And besides this, many of the NSA's clandestine methods can be learned by anyone with access to Google because of details made public by whistleblowers. A sworn 2006 declaration by a former engineer for the AT&T telecom firm, for example, stated the NSA was routing AT&T communications through a secret "secure room" where they could be intercepted. This, a former NSA employee said earlier this year in his own sworn declaration, involved the use of a "Semantic Traffic Analyser," which would allow the NSA to mine "addresses, locations, countries, and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases" from within the data flowing through communication networks.

So given that such detailed information is already in the public domain about the NSA's snooping activities, the "sources and methods" justification for secrecy seems at best naive, at worst disingenuous.

The knee-jerk reaction of governments and groups with power is often to resort to secrecy in order to avoid controversy, to protect reputations, and to ultimately avoid accountability. That's why the use of state secrets to protect the NSA's wiretapping program from public scrutiny in a court looks suspect — particularly as the US government has form abusing official secrecy to conceal scandals.

As was revealed by the British politician David Davis during an astonishing speech in the UK parliament in March this year, the very same state secrets privilege currently being put forward to protect the NSA from court was previously used as part of an extraordinary cover-up involving US intelligence agencies (including the NSA).

In the late 1990s, as part of a covert effort called Operation Foxden, the FBI, the NSA and the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were working with three businessmen — one Afghan-American citizen, two British — to introduce telecommunications infrastructure into Afghanistan. They planned to rig it with extra circuits in order to listen live to every landline and mobile phone call across the whole of the country. But there was a turf war between the three US agencies, which led to Operation Foxden being delayed some 20 months. It is believed, had it been introduced earlier, it may have helped gather intelligence about the 9/11 terror plot — possibly preventing it from ever happening.

The businessmen involved in helping set up the Afghan network later had a dispute over money, which in 2002 ended up being taken to a court in New York. A year later, the case was suddenly shut down by a judge who cited the state secrets privilege. It turned out that the two British men involved in the deal — Stuart Bentham and Michael Cecil — were being defrauded by the Afghan-American, Ehsanollah Bayat. But they were not allowed to have their case heard in court because the US government did not want its secrets laid bare — in this case showing that a dispute between the intelligence agencies had delayed a massive spy project that might have helped prevent a catastrophic terrorist attack.

Last year, a Vanity Fair writer found out some details about Operation Foxden and approached the CIA for comment about it. Surprisingly, given the previous iron-fisted attempt to keep the story secret and out of courts, the CIA made no attempt to suppress Vanity Fair's report. Why? According to a US source quoted by David Davis in his speech to the British parliament on the subject: "Ten years have passed since 9/11, and the culpable people have moved on, so it’s no longer embarrassing."

The short remark was as shocking as it was revealing. As Davis noted:

This demonstrates only too clearly that although the aim of the American state secrets privilege is to protect national security, in practice it is often used to eliminate embarrassment — political, bureaucratic, organisational or individual embarrassment at past failures ... It also shows how giving a government agency an absolute right to secrecy encourages bad behaviour. The American agencies could easily have stopped the defrauding of British citizens without the matter going to court, given their enormous leverage in the matter. Instead, they chose to suppress justice.

Could the current attempt to stop the case against the NSA over the domestic surveillance programme be a similar bid to "suppress justice" and protect reputations? It is not a far-fetched possibility. One key figure in the warrantless wiretapping saga has even openly gloated about how he is pleased state secrets privilege is being used to shield him. General Michael Hayden, who was the director of the NSA between 1999 and 2005, said with a smirk a few weeks ago that he was "personally grateful to Obama for using the state secrets argument to stop some of these court proceedings — because I am personally named in some of these courts."

Perhaps most alarming, though, is the bigger picture at play here. When any democratic government repeatedly resorts to secrecy to protect the disclosure of information the public has a right to know, it has lost its way. It is broken, existentially fractured. In my own experience as a journalist, the US has a stronger culture of freedom of information than the UK does, but at the highest echelons of power there remains a definite absence of transparency and accountability. The ongoing surveillance case, and the aggressive bid to suppress it, is only the latest example.

Ex-US Spy Chief On Surveillance, Rendition, and Targeted Killings

Secret black sites, illegal surveillance of American citizens' communications, waterboarding — General Michael Hayden overseen it all, and he doesn't have a single regret.

Between 1999–2005 Hayden was director of US eavesdropping agency the NSA, and between 2006-2009 he was director of US spy agency the CIA. He served under the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.

On Friday, Hayden, who is now retired, gave a speech at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy in the state of Michigan. Over the course of about 60 minutes, he reflected at length on everything from extrajudicial killings of suspected terrorists to extraordinary renditions (or kidnapping) of suspected al-Qaeda members. It was an unapologetic speech that occasionally verged into sociopathic territory. It was also, at times, revelatory.

Here are a few highlights:

Approximately two hours after the first terror attack on New York in September 2001, Hayden used his authority as chief of the NSA to "dial things up" and get more "aggressive" with communications interception. This prompted a colleague at the CIA to tell him, jokingly, that he was "going to jail," and in turn led President George W. Bush to authorise the domestic wiretapping program that permitted the NSA to spy on emails and phone calls of Americans without a warrant.

Hayden is "personally grateful" to President Barack Obama for protecting him from being held to account in a court of law by invoking state secrets privilege.

A 2008 amendment to the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act "legitimated" everything president Bush had authorised the NSA to do regarding the domestic wiretapping of communications and "gave the NSA a great deal more authority to do these kinds of things."

Hayden says there has been "powerful continuity" between the counter-terror tactics used by President Bush and President Obama, including on extraordinary rendition. However, he said one area of discontinuity is that Obama has a preference for killing terror suspects as opposed to capturing them — because it is now considered "so politically dangerous and so legally difficult" to capture.

On 11 September 2001, the day of the Twin Towers attacks, Hayden explained how he stood behind blacked out curtains at an NSA building in Washington and thought to himself, "things are going to be different around here tomorrow. We have entered into an entirely new era."

Within about two hours of the first plane striking the first World Trade Center tower that morning, Hayden said he had used his authority to "dial things up a little bit" at the NSA in order to give the agency "a higher probability we would intercept those kind of messages that would tell us about the next attack." Hayden didn't elaborate exactly on what it means to "dial things up," but I think it's safe to assume it means intercepting a much larger volume of communications. (Hayden said that because he had "dialed things up" then-CIA director George Tenet a few days later joked to him that he was "going to jail" but President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney said it was alright because they would "bail him out.")

In the weeks ahead, President Bush gave Hayden more powers. This led to the domestic wiretapping scandal revealed by the New York Times in 2005, which exposed how the NSA had been granted authority to spy on "the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible 'dirty numbers' linked to al Qaeda."

But that was just the start. And despite the controversy around the domestic wiretapping exposed by the New York Times, as Hayden said in his speech, a 2008 amendment to the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act "not only legitimated almost everything President Bush had told me to do under his article two authorities as commander in chief but in fact gave the NSA a great deal more authority to do these kinds of things."

Aside from the surveillance, Hayden also overseen a variety of other ghoulish new tactics brought in amid the terror fears. There was the kidnapping, or extraordinary rendition, of suspects from one country to the other — often to countries where they were allegedly subject to torture, like Egypt and Libya. There was also the secret black sites — hidden prisons in locations such as Poland and Thailand — where terror suspects were subjected to a variety of so-called 'enhanced interrogation techniques' like waterboarding, which makes a person feel like they are drowning. Not to mention the Guantanamo Bay prison, the indefinate detention of accused terrorists, and the birth of remote-controlled drone strikes as a method of 'targeted killing' or extrajudicial assassination — however you want to term it.

None of this Hayden has any reservations about. In his speech he explained it was all about how America had to "take the fight to the enemy" wherever he (or she) may be. He even recounted a meeting in Germany during the spring of 2007, where he gave a speech to a room of about two dozen people including representatives from every country in the European Union. He spoke about extraordinary rendition and America's tactics in the War on Terror. Not one person present in the room, he said, agreed with any of the justifications he gave for the use of such tactics. But this didn't dissuade him. His essential position could be summarised as, "how could we possibly be wrong?" Perhaps a mindset that can be attributed to American exceptionalism, the belief that the US has a unique mission in the world to spread its ideals.

Hayden was evidently not preoccupied at all with minor irritations like human rights obligations and international law. Rather, he explained how his main concern was in early 2009, when Barack Obama was sworn in to the White House. He was worried that Obama, a Democrat who had voiced strong criticism of George W. Bush's counter-terror policies, might seek to scale back efforts in the War on Terror. Hayden had at this point moved to the CIA, where he was director. But his fears about Obama being a soft touch were quickly alleviated.

Obama continued almost all of Bush's policies, Hayden explained, because he realised "we are at war" with al-Qaeda and its affiliates. In the end, there was a "powerful continuity" between Bush and Obama, Hayden said.

"Targeted killings have continued, in fact if you look at the statistics targeted killings have increased under Obama" ... "renditions, that's the extrajudicial movement of suspected terrorists from place A to place B — our policy is the same under President Obama as it was under President Bush and President Clinton."

He went on: Obama "didn't shut Guantanamo" and he also took the same position as Bush on "indefinite detention and state secrets" ... "I am personally grateful to Obama for using the state secrets argument to stop some of these court proceedings — because I am personally named in some of these courts."

Perhaps most revealing, the one discontinuity between Bush and Obama from a counter-terror perspective, Hayden said, was (and is) the difference between the presidents when it comes to killing or capturing terror suspects. Under Bush many suspected insurgents were captured, incarcerated and interrogated. Under Obama, according to Hayden, just one person has been held outside of Iraq and Afghanistan since January 2009. Obama has been accused of preferring to kill than capture, though this is something he has denied. He said in a recent interview that "our preference has always been to capture when we can because we can gather intelligence" but that it’s sometimes "very difficult to capture them."

According to Hayden, however, the kill rather than capture policy is a political decision.

"We have made it so politically dangerous and so legally difficult that we don't capture anyone anymore. We take another option. We kill them," he said. And in a thinly veiled criticism of Obama's aggressive killing policy, Hayden added: "We're losing the opportunity to interrogate and to learn about our enemy."

listen to ‘Former CIA/NSA chief on Obama's kill/capture policy’ on Audioboo

When you weigh up Hayden's comments, the essence of what he is saying is quite extraordinary. This is a man who openly admits has has no qualms whatsoever about some of the most brutal and contentious tactics that have been used by the United States over the last decade or so. The wiretapping, the renditions that contravene international law, the interrogation techniques widely considered to constitute torture, the extrajudicial killings in countries like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, where there has been no formal declaration of war. And here he is applauding Barack Obama, a president elected on a platform oppositional to many of these tactics, for keeping up a "powerful continuity." In fact, his only criticism of Obama is that he is doing too much killing.

The other thing that struck me about Hayden in this speech was his general demenour. The way he was making quips and smirking about how he was thankful Obama was protecting him from being held to account in American courts over the actions of the agencies he was in charge of. There was an arrogance about his comments, an air of impunity. Hayden came off as a man with an almost sociopathic disdain for the basic rule of law.

His justification for the controversial tactics was simple: al-Qaeda and its affiliates constitute a "new threat to old institutions." Terror groups have no regard for laws like the Geneva Convention and blur the distinction between civilian and combatant. Therefore, and this is the core logic underpinning Hayden's remarks, America's security apparatus has to do the same. It has to evolve (or, rather, regress) and "take the fight to the enemy" using whatever means necessary.

The problem is that there is no conclusive evidence anywhere to suggest that this is a successful method of combating the threat in the first place. Killing people and indefinitely detaining them, implementing secret systems of mass surveillance — these are things that have lowered America's standing in the world. If you flout the rule of law, if you sink to a level of legal nihilism, you immediately lose the moral high-ground. You also make more enemies than friends. As we are seeing with US drone strikes in Yemen, where many civilians have been killed by American missiles, the US may only be inspiring a new generation of Jihadists by spreading fear across entire regions of countries while pursuing small handfuls of men who have been deemed a threat through a process that is itself contentious and conceivably highly flawed. Hayden seems convinced that what he presided over at the NSA and CIA was right, just, and absolutley necessary to protect America. But he has not won the argument and I don't think he ever will.

He told the audience at one point that they, as Americans, in reference to the CIA, were "blessed as a people with the talent and the morality of the folks who are in your chief espionage service." I couldn't help recall at this point the case of a Muslim cleric known as Abu Omar. He was accused of plotting terrorism and snatched by CIA agents from a street in Milan, Italy in broad daylight on 17 February, 2003. Omar was taken to Egypt where he was imprisoned in Tura, 20 miles south of Cairo, and handed over to Egyptian security services. He said he was twice raped, suffered electroshock treatment and lost the hearing in his left ear due to repeated beatings. He was eventually released by the Egyptian government in 2007, after a state security court ruled that his detention was unfounded. There are many cases similar to this. All of them call into question the morality of those involved, and that includes General Michael Hayden and the staff he commanded.