Newspaper Article

The wrong man for the C.I.A

NYTimescom Gregory D Johnsen

2012

Overview

  For all of the [Obama] administration's foreign policy successes -- from ending the war in Iraq to killing Osama Bin Laden -- the most enduring policy legacy of the past four years may well turn out to be an approach to counterterrorism that American officials call the \"Yemen model,\" a mixture of drone strikes and Special Forces raids targeting Al-Qaeda leaders. Mr. [John O. Brennan]'s assertion was either shockingly naive or deliberately misleading. Testimonies from Qaeda fighters and interviews I and local journalists have conducted across Yemen attest to the centrality of civilian casualties in explaining Al- Qaeda's rapid growth there. The United States is killing women, children and members of key tribes. \"Each time they kill a tribesman, they create more fighters for Al-Qaeda,\" one Yemeni explained to me over tea in Sana'a, the capital, last month. Another told CNN, after a failed strike, \"I would not be surprised if a hundred tribesmen joined Al-Qaeda as a result of the latest drone mistake.\" The strikes Mr. Brennan asks the president to approve frequently lead to civilian casualties. Indeed, the first strike Mr. Obama ordered on Yemen, in December 2009, destroyed a Bedouin village that was mistaken for a terrorist training camp. American missiles killed more than 50 people, including 35 women and children. Watching that strike live on a grainy feed the military calls Kill TV, Jeh Johnson, the Pentagon's top lawyer, later admitted, \"if I were Catholic, I'd have to go to confession.\"

• Publisher: Yemen Times