Brian Williams - Predators

Interestingly enough, these two reports of drone attacks in Somalia led the Iranian Press TV to publish an exaggerated report that fifty-six drone strikes in Somalia had supposedly killed a total of 1,370 people. Although the Press TV reports were uncritically picked up and published as fact by other networks, they were either a flight of fantasy or Iranian propaganda aimed at inciting anti-Americanism. 157Regardless, the strikes in Somalia increased the number of countries where the CIA or JSOC carried out drone operations to seven (the others being Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Libya). It is worth noting that the killer Reaper and Predator drones operating in Somalia have been aided by smaller observation drones, such as Ravens, Scan Eagles, and Fire Scout remote-controlled helicopters, as well as massive Global Hawks. 158In the future unarmed drones may work in conjunction with killer drones to hunt and kill targets.

Following the lull in strikes after the Salala incident, there was an uptake in drone surveillance and strike operations in Yemen in the spring of 2012. These strikes were largely a response to AQAP’s four attempts to blow up jetliners with hidden bombs (including the infamous underwear bomber incident) and successful assassination of almost a hundred Yemenis with a suicide bomb that spring. AQAP had become the most lethal al Qaeda threat following the destruction of most of al Qaeda Central’s membership in the Pakistani drone campaign, and the CIA felt the need to respond.

To compound matters, the chaos in Yemen after President Ali Abdullah Saleh stepped down in February 2011 allowed al Qaeda militants and an allied group known as Ansar al Sharia to seize power in much of Yemen’s coastal Abyan Province. Their ultimate aim was, like that of al Shabab in Somalia, to overthrow the country’s secular government and to establish strict sharia law.

In response to these alarming developments, the Obama administration tasked the CIA and JSOC with ramping up an assassination campaign designed to kill AQAP terrorists and weaken related Ansar al Sharia militants. The Pentagon and Langley decided to turn to drones when Tomahawk cruise missile strikes proved to be too clumsy; on one occasion the cruise missiles had caused the deaths of dozens of bedouin civilians. 159

The U.S. drone attacks had started off slowly in 2009 but reached a crescendo in the spring of 2012. The stepped up pace of the Yemeni drone campaign can be seen in the following statistics: there were four airstrikes in 2009, ten in 2011, and forty-two in 2012. According to the Long War Journal , which monitors the air campaign, 322 militants and eighty-two civilians have been killed as of March 2013. 160The percentage of civilian deaths is higher in the Yemeni strikes than in the Pakistani drone campaign, but still the Yemini campaign has been the subject of less controversy and opposition than the Pakistani operations. This is largely because the new president of Yemen, Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi, has worked closely with the United States to counter the terrorist threat to his country. The Yemeni air force, for example, has also bombed Ansar al Sharia targets in Abyan Province in an attempt to dislodge the militants. 161The Arab media has reported that U.S. trainers are working directly with Yemeni forces to help them retake districts lost to AQAP. 162

The Pentagon and CIA drones used in the Yemeni campaign appear to be based at either Camp Lemonier, Djibouti (home to Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa) or at an undisclosed base in Saudi Arabia. The majority of the drone strikes appear to target Shabwah Province, a known hideout for AQAP, which has the support of local tribes there, and Abyan Province, which was largely taken over by Ansar al Sharia militants in 2011. Yemeni sources have reported that JSOC and CIA drones are directly assisting the Yemeni military operations on the ground in these areas. 163

The drone strikes in Yemen and the more widely publicized strikes in Pakistan show similar trends. For example, in Yemen the drones seem to be targeting vehicles that can be easily tracked and monitored, instead of houses, in order to avoid civilian collateral damage deaths. As in Pakistan, civilians have nonetheless been killed in Yemen, and this has led to protests by angry relatives of the slain civilians. The United States has also expanded its campaign in Yemen from more limited personality strikes to signature strikes, as happened in Pakistan in 2008.

The uncanny precision of the strikes also indicates that the CIA has established a network of spies and informers in Yemen that has been relaying the positions of terrorists to drones, as in Pakistan’s FATA. Some members of Yemen’s parliament have protested the drone strikes, and militants have started brutally killing those who are said to be spies working to help guide the drones; both of these trends were also found in the Pakistani tribal areas.

As occurred in the early days of the drone strikes in Pakistan, the Yemeni government has tried to deflect domestic criticism of the CIA strikes by claiming that their own air force carried them out. According to cables published on Wikileaks, former Yemeni president Saleh told Gen. David Petraeus in 2010, “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” and Deputy Prime Minister Rashad al-Alimi even admitted to lying to the Yemeni parliament about the American role in the drone strikes. 164Those who knew Yemen’s air force capabilities saw through such claims; the outdated Yemeni MiG 23s and 29s were incapable of making precision strikes on moving vehicles, especially at night.

The major differences between the Yemeni and Pakistani campaigns have been the more prominent role of JSOC in Yemen, the more direct role Obama plays in choosing the targets, and the large role that the drones played in supporting the Yemeni army in its ground operations against the militants in the spring of 2012. The drones, for example, were used to blow up AQAP ammunition depots and to hit the militants’ defensive positions.

The most notable drone assassination strike in Yemen was the May 6, 2012, killing of Fahd al Quoso, an al Qaeda operative involved in both the AQAP plot to bomb passenger planes and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. Quoso, who had $5 million bounty on his head, was killed in a personality strike after a Saudi double agent pretending to be an al Qaeda bombing volunteer relayed his coordinates to the CIA. The killing of Quoso as he exited a vehicle was in every way a double-agent reversal of the previous killing of the CIA team in Camp Chapman, Afghanistan, by an al Qaeda triple agent.

In addition to the campaigns in Somalia and Yemen, in February 2012 news of a drone strike on the remote Muslim island of Jolo, in the Philippines, began to surface. The strike killed fifteen militants who belonged to the pro–al Qaeda groups Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah. 165Among those killed were three of the Philippines’s most-wanted terrorists, Zulkifli bin Hir, Gumbahali Jumdail, and Mumanda Ali. These terrorists were involved in the 2002 Bali bombing, which killed or maimed hundreds of Indonesians and foreign tourists (mostly Australians), and in kidnapping to fund terrorism. According to the Washington, D.C.–based Jamestown Foundation, “The airstrike was reported to have been ‘U.S.-led’ and facilitated by an unmanned U.S. drone which tracked down Jumdail by honing in on a sensor that was placed by local villagers pretending to be seeking medical assistance from Jumdail.” 166A previous drone strike in 2006 against a notorious Filipino terrorist named Umar Patek had been claimed by the Philippine government to deflect criticism. 167

The strikes in Somalia, Yemen, and the Philippines demonstrate how drones are increasingly used in areas similar to the FATA where a weak or nonexistent central government is combating lightly armed paramilitaries, terrorists, or insurgents who have only rudimentary air defenses. Although it is all but impossible to carry out “snatch operations” in these hostile tribal lands, the remote-control drones give the U.S. military and CIA unprecedented capability to reach out and kill terrorists or insurgents in areas they would otherwise be unable to access.