Both the CIA and JSOC stepped up their drone campaigns, which enjoyed vocal support from Saleh’s eventual successor, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Facing domestic protests during the Arab Spring, he left the country in June 2011 after being injured in a bombing. would respect Somalia’s sovereignty.īy 2011, when the study’s time frame began, Yemen’s president Ali Abdullah Saleh was in crisis. Somalia’s minister of national security, Abdirizak Omar Mohamed, told The Intercept that the United States alerted Somalia’s president and foreign minister of strikes “sometimes ahead of time, sometimes during the operation … normally we get advance notice.” He said he was unaware of an instance where Somali officials had objected to a strike, but added that if they did, he assumed the U.S. In practice, the degree of cooperation with the host nation has varied. “One Disagrees = STOP,” the slide notes, with a tiny red stop sign. We have an extensive chain of command, humans along the whole link that monitor the entire process from start to finish on an airstrike.” The country’s government was also supposed to sign off. “And that includes a lot of lawyers and a lot of review at different levels to reach that decision. Mark McCurley, a former drone pilot who worked on operations in Yemen and recently published a book about his experiences. citizen, “it would take a high-level official to approve the strike,” said Lt. For a very important target, such as al Qaeda-linked preacher Anwar al Awlaki, who was a U.S. For the actual strike, the task force needed approval from the Geographic Combatant Command as well as the ambassador and CIA station chief in the country where the target was located. Later in 2013, the White House reportedly tightened control over individual strikes in Yemen.Īt the time of the study, with the president’s approval, JSOC had a 60-day window to hit a target. Under Brennan, the nominations process was reportedly concentrated in the White House, replacing video conferences once run by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and elevating the role of the National Counterterrorism Center in organizing intelligence. There have been various accounts of this drone bureaucracy, and almost all stress the role of Obama’s influential counterterrorism adviser John Brennan (who became director of the CIA in 2013) and of top administration lawyers in deciding who could be killed. However, the slide does appear to be consistent with Obama’s comment in 2012 that “ultimately I’m responsible for the process.” The slide detailing the kill chain indicates that while Obama approved each target, he did not approve each individual strike, although news accounts have previously reported that the president personally “signs off” on strikes outside of Afghanistan or Pakistan.
It was then examined by a circle of top advisers known as the Principals Committee of the National Security Council, and their seconds in command, known collectively as the Deputies Committee. The intelligence package on the person being targeted passed from the JSOC task force tracking him to the command in charge of the region - Centcom for Yemen, and Africom for Somalia - and then to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, followed by the secretary of defense. The May 2013 slide describes a two-part process of approval for an attack: step one, “‘Developing a target’ to ‘Authorization of a target,’” and step two, “‘Authorizing’ to ‘Actioning.’” According to the slide, intelligence personnel from JSOC’s Task Force 48-4, working alongside other intelligence agencies, would build the case for action against an individual, eventually generating a “baseball card” on the target, which was “staffed up to higher echelons - ultimately to the president.” The NSC would not say if the process for approving targets or strikes had changed since the study was produced. “The public has a right to know who’s making these decisions, who decides who is a legitimate target, and on what basis that decision is made,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.īoth the Pentagon and the National Security Council declined to respond to detailed questions about the study and about the drone program more generally. Both the CIA and JSOC conduct drone strikes in Yemen, and very little has been officially disclosed about either the military’s or the spy agency’s operations. The Obama administration has been loath to declassify even the legal rationale for drone strikes - let alone detail the bureaucratic structure revealed in these documents.
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