Kabul, Afghanistan, four in the morning.
As an American journalist, I was used to filing stories in the middle of the night.
But there's always something eerie, driving through the deserted streets.
A city of three million, barely a streetlight on.
It was a familiar routine. Waiting for the crew to light up the night skies so you could
see something in the background. But what could we really see?
...well, Keith, greetings from kabul, Afghanistan where the U.S. ambassador
Karl eikenberry... this is a story about the seen and the unseen.
And about things hidden in plain sight.
It's hard to say when the story began. I'd been working as a war
reporter for more than a decade in yugoslavia, Iraq and now Afghanistan.
After nearly 10 years, the war here wasn't exactly breaking news.
There's, like, eight rakes.
We haven't been out here. What's the name of this village out here?
I have no idea. They all blend in for me. Yeah.
What's the focus of your campaign here?
In Southern nangarhar, we're dealing with the ashkar... Ashkael... asherkeil tribe.
You know, the wording, I'll get right probably when we leave next year, but
this was supposed to be the front line in the war on terror.
From kabul, out on an exercise with the military and back
to kabul. The Afghan press corp was locked in a bubble.
We were told that the battle for hearts and minds was being won as soldiers dug Wells or
- drank tea with tribal elders. - But I knew I was missing
the story. There was another war,
hinted at in press conferences and detailed in each morning's press release.
December 14th, zabul province. A night raid. Four Taliban killed,
three detained for questioning, no civilians injured. No one at NATO would give us
anything more than the lists of nighttime raids. No one even seemed to know who
was doing the raids. And I wasn't going to find out if I stayed in kabul.
So what you're saying is the Americans will come into a district where you're the police
commander and they won't inform you that they're going to carry out this kind of action
in your district?
So there's the, two men in the guest house were the first
- the farmer from here?
Yeah. And then another farmer. Two, two of his sons.
Two of his sons, so there's, I think, seven.
Two and two, four. One farmer, five. Two is seven.
Eleven.
The list of raids from NATO press releases read like a map of a hidden war.
The military divided the roads in Afghanistan by color.
Green was safe, red was dangerous, and black? Don't even try it.
Most of the raids were happening far beyond the green
zone, in what the military called "denied areas", places where journalists never
show up to ask questions. NATO, the U.S. embassy and my own better judgment all advised
against traveling there, but I'd read about a raid in gardez, half a day's drive
in paktia province. I pushed as far as I could into
the gray area, on the fraying edge of NATO's control, past rusting Russian tanks and
bombed-out NATO supply convoys. Two other journalists had been kidnapped on this road and
after weeks in the military's armored vehicles, our Toyota felt thin-skinned and fragile.
I knew I had to be back in kabul before sunset, when the Taliban took control of the
roads, but I had no idea how far my visit to gardez would lead me.
Was Mr. daoud killed immediately or did he live for a
while after he was shot?
You saw the U.S. forces take the bullets out of the body?
so he had just seen his wife killed by the American forces and then he himself was taken
prisoner by the Americans. What was going through his head when they took him?
The family had no idea what led the Americans to their home.
They had long fought against
the Taliban and daoud was a police commander who'd been through dozens of U.S.
- Training programs.
As we prepared to leave, daoud's granddaughter spoke to us.
But only later would I know the meaning of her words.
Daoud's family told me it s time to go. The sun sets early in the
mountains and the night belongs to the Taliban.
The gunfire continued and t was now obvious how dangerous, maybe even reckless, the trip
had been.
NATO wasted no time issuing a report.
They claimed that the women killed in gardez were victims of a Taliban honor killing,
bound and gagged by their own murderous families. ...You saw the U.S. forces take
- the bullets out of the body?
...I believed the family, but that wasn't enough. For me or anyone else.
Who were these men that stormed into daoud's home? And why would they go to such
- horrifying lengths to cover up their actions?
All right. Ready? One, two, three.
Good morning, the subcommittee will come
to order. The subject is national security.
If my esteemed friend,
the gentleman from Michigan, wishes to continue with this hearing, I think that's fine.
He is the chairman. Next year, when this committee is under new management,
we won't be looking at the calendar of last year or two years ago.
Far from discussing
the distant past, I'd like to share with this committee part of my investigation into deadly
U.S. night raids in that country... Sensenbrenner walked out,
but no one else even bothered to show up. Just chairman conyers and
his staffers... in closing, Mr. chairman, I told these families that I'd
bring their cases before the U.S. congress and ask that they be investigated and that those
responsible be held accountable. On behalf of those families... it didn't surprise me tht
Washington wasn't interested in gardez. As an investigative reporter,
you rarely have people's attention. More often than not, you work
alone and the stories you labor over fall on deaf ears. But sometimes a story strikes a
nerve and you're thrown into the public arena. It happened to me once before.
...during its time in Iraq, Blackwater has regularly engaged in firefights and other deadly
incidents... it was 2007 and I was reporting on Blackwater,
a shadowy mercenary company and suddenly it was front page news.
A frequent contributor to the nation magazine, his new book is called Blackwater.
Jeremy scahill wrote the book... Has come to us
- ...Jeremy scahill. - I quickly discovered
that the world of talk show television is less a meeting place for ideas and more
like a boxing ring. $700 million for a colonial fortress in Pakistan...
That is absolute hooey! ...The whole thing feels like a game.
But every time you step into the ring, there's a chance your story can have an impact.
...journalists have done nothing to hold the white house accountable now, Chuck,
or under bush. Let me get to the story... Why are you still alive?
Are you paranoid? No, I'm serious, I'm serious.
I mean, it's an amazing book that you've written. I'm curious that... that guy
had a... he's dead, what happened? He had an accident.
I mean... Congress wasn't
going to investigate the raid in gardez and my freedom of information requests were
bounced all over the military, ending up in an unnamed agency awaiting review.
I reached out to everyone I could in Washington...
The c.I.A., state department, former military officials, but no one would speak openly
about gardez. Until I met with general Hugh
Shelton, chairman of the joint chiefs on 9/11.
...one incident that I looked into in Afghanistan where an Afghan police commander and two
pregnant women were killed, but the question I wanted to ask you is in that kind of case...
Let's say that's true... how would something like that be handled or investigated
or reviewed? If they go flying in and meet any kind of resistance at all,
i mean, shots are fired, then I'm sorry if they got killed, but they're in the wrong
place at the wrong time, and I don't think it ought to be investigated.
I think you write it off as one of those damn acts of war. But one of the victims was a
senior police commander who had been trained by the U.S. and two of them were
pregnant women. Now, just 'cause he's a police chief, he could have been
a terrorist as well. You know, he could have been working both sides, so,
that piece of it, although it sounds bad, two pregnant women? The fact that they were pregnant
is very, very unfortunate, but it's also unfortunate that they were women, but, on the
other hand, I've been shot at by women myself. So, that doesn't... and I mean
shot at. That doesn't excuse 'em. They die just like men do if
congress wasn't
interested. I was being stonewalled by the military.
And general Shelton told me there should be no investigation.
Back in Afghanistan,
the reporter who first broke the gardez story had been publicly attacked by NATO.
We went to print
on a Saturday. By Saturday afternoon, I was getting information from other
journalists in kabul, who were my friends, that NATO was briefing against me.
NATO was trying to discredit me, trying to say the story was inaccurate and effectively
trying to kill it dead. To my knowledge, that was the only time that they've named a
journalist and sort of singled out a journalist so specifically in a denial.
NATO accused starkey of lying. It could have been enough to
end a journalist's career, but information about gardez kept leaking out.
A secret u.N. Investigation confirmed many of the details the family had told us and an
Afghan police inquiry was under way.
I didn't realize what the family was showing me; It was just a grainy cellphone video
from the morning after the attack. Until the voices began.
Ok, the blood trail, this is it. This is the last room.
- This is where the engagement was. - In comes
- there's a woman crying in the doorway. - My group
was emptying this room and that room there, okay? We pulled everyone out, okay?
Now, at that point, I'm watching what's going on here. I see it all go down,
and now we go behind them. White light. To make sure no one's hiding.
Two Americans, their hands visible for a moment filming the corpses,
while they piece together their version of that night's killings.
Hiding... after everything's said and done still two guys are hiding...
NATO phoned me up. And they said, "Jerome, we're just calling to"
let you know we're about to put out a press release. We are changing our version
"of events." They admitted that they were responsible for killing the
three women and that the men they said were Taliban were not in fact Taliban.
They admitted they got it wrong. Again, they were hoping it was going to go away.
Well, it wasn't. Like yourselves, we set off very early one morning from kabul
through logar to gardez, when up rolls a huge convoy of countless Afghan officers and
soldiers. And among them is a man wearing a uniform that I recognize as
sort of U.S. marines but it says U.S. Navy on his lapel. I, I didn't know who he was.
They off-loaded a sheep and three Afghan soldiers knelt on the sheep in exactly the same
place where these soldiers had been when they started the raid. They were offering to sacrifice
the soldiers tried to stop starkey's photographer,
Jeremy Kelly, but the family insisted. Otherwise there'd be no
evidence that this extraordinary event occurred, no proof of who the killers
were. Like so much about this war, they would've remained unseen.
He said that, " my soldiers were responsible for the deaths of these members
"of your family," and for that, he apologized.
I returned home and tried to put the story of gardez behind me.
But coming home is never easy. I didn't want to admit it, but life back home was dull
- after being in a war zone. - Ordinary life is just that.
I tried to forget about gardez, but couldn't.
The video was chilling, but I couldn't see their faces. All I had were images of their
- hands and the sound of their voices. - O.K.,
the blood trail, this is it. This is the last room, this is where the engagement was.
In comes... there's a woman crying in the doorway...
None of these clues were supposed to exist. The cell phone video,
the photos of the admiral and his sheep. The killers were meant to
disappear without a trace. The family had called them "American Taliban".
But who were they, these American soldiers with beards?
As a reporter you learn that every story has conflicting points of view.
You try to understand all of them without letting your own get in the way.
But there was something about this story and the way it was covered up.
The photo of the admiral had seemed to answer our questions about the raid.
But the longer I looked at it, the less sense it made. I could read the name and rank,
but who was this man delivering the sheep? Vice admiral William mcraven
wasn't from NATO headquarters in kabul, and he wasn't from the eastern regional command
that owned that battle space. I'd never seen the r-0-1 insignia on his shoulder,
and it was hard to find mention of him in the press, much less a photograph.
But I found an old d.O.D. Press briefing from 2008 that mentioned mcraven's nomination
to lead an obscure unit within the military called "j-soc"... the joint special operations
command. After more than a decade as a war reporter, I thought I knew
most of the players involved, but I'd never heard of j-soc. There was little official
record, but j-soc was formed in 1980 after the failed hostage rescue mission in Iran.
It was designed as the most covert unit in the military and the only one that reports
directly to the white house. So why would the president's elite force be kicking down the
doors on a family in gardez? I knew gardez wasn't an isolated incident and went back
to NATO's daily press releases with their lists of killed and captured.
I expected the list to be long, but I had no idea how long. Every week the tempo of raids
increased. In the last three months there had been 1700 night raids
in Afghanistan. It was a staggering figure and meant that stories like the one
in gardez were unfolding nearly 20 times each night. An endless list of raids,
but not a single name. I could see that gardez was part of a bigger story...
Much bigger... but the very thought of it was overwhelming. With 1700 raids, who would
compile the list of the dead?
The surge of night raids was clearly changing the war in Afghanistan.
- It didn't take long for j-soc's actions to ricochet. - Matthew hoh has
become the first U.S. official to resign in protest over the Afghan war.
Hoh is a former marine who spent five months working for the state department in Afghanistan
and is, by all accounts, well-respected.
A lot of times, yeah, the right guys would get targeted
and the right guys would get killed, and then plenty of other times the wrong people would get
killed... sometimes innocent families... and then that sets you back so far, you know.
Nothing like going into a village in the middle of the night, knocking a door down and
like, killing a woman or a child to just undo everything that infantry battalion commander had
- been trying to do for the last nine, 10 months. - You were in a
position where you were trying to vet lists to make sure that the wrong people weren't being
killed by these task forces. Were there 500 people on this list, a thousand?
No, I can't tell you. You can't. Yeah.
You can't tell me because... I can't tell you because I can't tell you that stuff.
You can't talk about it. Yeah. I saw a list, that's all I've been doing, yeah,
i mean, I can't tell you.
The joint special operations command had never numbered more than a few
thousand. But under William mcraven, Afghanistan had become
j-soc's war. How had such a small, covert unit taken over the largest
conventional war on the planet? Andrew exum had experienced the
change firsthand when he served as part of mcraven's high-value targeting campaign...
Not in Afghanistan, but in Iraq. He led a company of rangers in
2003 as part of j-soc's Iraq task force.
I watched the way things began to change, you know, kind of the iron rule was, you
don't go anywhere unless you've got a company of army rangers and reserves.
In 2003, nobody was in reserve. I mean, people were hitting targets every single night in a
very dispersed way, just bam-bam-bam. I mean, you remember the deck
of cards. We kind of had this poster of all these guys and we went out
looking for them every night. So we would, you know, kick down a door and pull somebody out of
their home in the middle of the night, and the next morning, you know, people would be rioting
in the streets.
- On your fuckin' face... - On your face.
I remember one night going out, you know, we found out later that we were on
two-weeks-old intelligence. Two Iraqis started shooting at us, we killed them, and,
you know, we kind of realized later that these guys were just out guarding the neighborhood
generator. Now, I didn't lose any sleep over it 'cause these guys
were shooting at me, but then you start thinking about it from a strategic perspective,
that's a loss. You start out with a target list and maybe you got 50 guys on it,
maybe you got 200 guys on it. But you can work your way through those 50 or 200 guys and
then suddenly, at the end of that target list, you've now got a new target list of 3,000
people on it, and how did this grow?
What exum told me about Iraq was a revelation. I thought j-soc's rise had
happened later, in Afghanistan. I'd worked in Baghdad for years and had written countless
stories there, many from the front lines of the war. It was there that I first
started reporting for the nation magazine, but I'd never heard of j-soc.
...the budget for the joint special operations command... You can't get it through a foia
request, we've tried that... I'd missed the most important story.
In Iraq, the U.S. had fundamentally changed the way it fought war.
The real story, j-soc, was hidden in the shadows, out of sight.
- What was hidden in the shadows right now? - ...That
i propose represent a new direction from the last eight years...
- What was I missing today? - We are
embracing more oversight of our actions and we're narrowing our use of the state secrets
I'd discovered that over the past decade, a series
of secret presidential orders had given j-soc unprecedented authority.
The battlefield was expanded and j-soc could now hit at will in countries beyond Iraq
and Afghanistan.
I began to research strikes against Al-qaeda outside the declared battlefields.
I looked for patterns among the lists. And then I found one.
In December 2009, five strikes with over 150 casualties in a country without a declared war.
...aden... Yemen's ancient port city was nothing like kabul.
In Afghanistan life was defined by the war. Everything revolved around it.
But in Yemen there was no war, at least not officially. The strikes seem to have come
out of the blue and most yemenis were going about life as usual.
It was difficult to know where to start.
The yemeni government claimed responsibility for the strikes, saying they'd killed dozens of
Al-qaeda operatives. But it was unclear who the targets really were, or who was
even responsible. I arranged to meet the most
powerful man in Southern Yemen, sheikh saleh bin fareed.
...when was the first time that you heard about someone being
Al-qaeda in that area?
How did you first hear of the strikes that had happened on
December 17th?
What was the news saying?
The echoes of gardez were everywhere, so many of the details repeating themselves.
But there was one important difference. In gardez, the American
soldiers went to obscene lengths to cover up the killings.
Here, in Al-majalah, despite the official denial, they'd left their fingerprints strewn
across the desert. Why would they deny something so obvious, when anyone who
visited the bomb site would see the truth? But maybe that was the point.
There was no declared war in Yemen. Out here, in the middle of the
desert, no one was looking, and the one local reporter investigating the bombing had
disappeared.
Abdulelah haider
shaye had traveled to Al-majalah immediately after the strike and his reporting
sparked national outrage. Soon after, his house was raided by Yemen's
American-trained counter-terrorism forces. Abdulelah was thrown in prison.
Posters demanding his return were hung around the capital.
I met abdulelah's lawyer at a teahouse because his office
was under attack.
My understanding was that president Ali Abdullah saleh was going to pardon abdulelah
haider.
I'd heard the story many times in Yemen. President Obama personally
intervening to keep a respected yemeni journalist in prison. It sounded far-fetched to me.
But then I found this on the white house's a read-out from a phone call
between Obama and the yemeni president. They badly misspelled
abdulelah's name, but Obama's point was he wanted him kept in jail.
Al-majalah was the first reported strike inside Yemen
in seven years. It was clearly a U.S. cruise missile that struck the bedouin
camp. Since there was no declared war in Yemen, I knew the strike was
either j-soc or the c.I.A. And then I found this photo. The U.S. would've never
released it, but Yemen's president posted it on his personal web site:
A presidential meeting with an important American guest... The head of the joint special
operations command, admiral William mcraven.
Joining us now is Jeremy scahill, national security correspondent for the nation
magazine, whose latest article is all about the U.S. relationship with Yemen.
Jeremy, thank you for joining us. Thank you. ...Back in New York I started
writing stories about j-soc, their rise to lead force in Afghanistan, their covert
strikes in Yemen, and it felt as though I'd crossed an invisible tripwire.
...the reality is that U.S. counter-terrorism obsession with Yemen trumped concern for human
that's not true. Well, it is true, I mean...
- It's not true. Yeah, back there. - Does the Pentagon have
any comment on a report in the nation today? And my question is...
Yeah, I, I... The question is, you keep denying covert operations.
Isn't this yet more evidence of one? O.K... despite whatever
conspiratorial theories that, you know, magazines or broadcast outlets may want to cook up,
so, Jeremy, let me ask you, have we been going into all
of these countries, over the past decade with drone attacks, dropping bombs in countries
where we haven't declared war? The lack of response from the major media and the c.I.A. And
all the rest of it suggests they're dismissing what you've done.
I receive a call, unprompted, from a captain James Kirby, who is the spokesperson for
admiral Mike mullen. Calls me on my cell phone, wouldn't tell me how he got my
cell phone number, wouldn't tell me who told him about the story. This is hours from publication.
And told me that if we published this story in the nation, that I would be, quote, "on thin ice".
That is a direct quote. And I said, "well, I want to know how you heard about this"
story and I want to know how you got my number," and he said, "let's just say that I heard
about it."
...I wasn't sleeping well, and insomnia fueled my anxiety.
My computer had been hacked and part of my hard drive copied.
It was difficult not to feel a creeping sense of paranoia. And then I got another strange
phone call. I had no idea why he called me or how he got my number.
I thought it might be a setup. Every story I worked on seemed to trace back to j-soc, and now
out of the blue, someone from the inside was reaching out to me.
I had met operators before in my research on Blackwater, but
no one as close to the heart of j-soc's covert operations. He sent me photos of his d.O.D.
Badges, but I still couldn't help wondering... Was I investigating j-soc or were
they investigating me?
...explain what j-soc is.:
The joint special operations command handles all of the sensitive
counterterrorism missions as the us government directs. And over time that
was perverted into doing things that are far outside of its mandate.
What has j-soc been doing, and in Yemen? Airstrikes...
Targeted killings. Targeted killings inside the borders of Yemen?
Correct. The world is a battlefield and we are at war.
Therefore the joint special operations command can go wherever they please,
and do whatever it is that they want to do in order to achieve
the national security objectives of whichever administration happens to be in power.
Were there ways that j-soc was being used that you found objectionable?
I did.
There was... a lot of trepidation about... What we were being
asked to do, and where, and for what purpose. A lot of it was of
questionable legality. And most of it was outside of any stated battlefield.
Kinetic operations, whether it's capture or kill, in some cases to detain,
people as directed by the United States government. They launched their own
internalized interrogation program, without the knowledge of the conventional
U.S. military forces, or even the central intelligence agency. Because of the extreme secrecy
surrounding the program, there was a variety of abuses. Torture?
I would say that, yes. The president has made a political and military
calculation to let the joint special operations command run wild.
So you're saying j-soc is able to hit harder under president Obama than they
were under president bush. Harder, faster, quicker, with the full support
of the the white house.
On my last day in sana'a, a file had been left for me at my hotel... a leaked
investigation into the strike at Al-majalah. It included a list of the dead.
In Iraq they had a deck of
cards... a list of 55 names, but the cards were not enough. New lists were needed.
Longer lists. At the end of each list, another and another... an
endless list of names.
In Al-majalah, the list numbered 46. 14 of the names were women.
21 were children. Who were they trying to kill? A week after Al-majalah, there
was another strike, and this time the yemeni government issued a press release naming
the intended targets, but none of them had been killed. For the first time I had names
on the kill list of people who were still alive. Two of them were publicly known
leaders, shihri and wuhayshi, but the last name gave me a chill: Anwar Al-awlaki.
I knew the name, but I couldn't believe I was seeing it here on this list.
- Al-awlaki was an American citizen. - The Christmas
day bombing attempt has everybody on alert tonight. Investigators connecting the
dots, and a key focus in the investigation is a radical islamic cleric.
That man is anwar Al-awlaki, an exiled American who... Scahill: Just as I was
investigating the expanding war in Yemen, it seemed Al-awlaki's name was everywhere.
- The war on terror suddenly had a new face. - Cleric anwar
Al-awlaki may now be as grave a threat as osama bin laden himself.
- Al-awlaki, holder says, is a clear and present danger. - He's an
extremely dangerous man. Does the U.S. have a preference in terms of Al-awlaki
dead, captured, or prosecuted? Well, we certainly want to neutralize him, and we will do
- whatever we can in order to do that. - An American was on
the kill list. It felt to me like we'd walked off a cliff.
Al-awlaki had been sentenced to death without even being charged with a crime.
Al-awlaki's father filed a lawsuit with the help of the center for constitutional
rights and the a.C.L.U. He demanded that the government provide whatever evidence they
they had against his son, but the government refused. They had ordered the
assassination of a U.S. citizen but said the evidence itself was too dangerous to be made
public. What kind of protections does this American have against being
assassinated by his own government? Yeah, it almost sounds kind
of funny in an ironic way when you say that. You know, you have the right
a bill was
introduced in congress to ban the extrajudicial assassination of Americans, but only
six congressmen signed on. And the people who should have known what was happening...
The members of the intelligence committees... couldn't tell me anything.
...when there is a lethal operation and a high-value person is killed, the president
of course acknowledged that we killed... Man: He can't.
he can't confirm that there have been any lethal operations
has there been any
legal review of the potential for lethal operations against American citizens?
Is that classified? It's important for the American people to know when the
president can kill an American citizen and when they can't, and yet it is almost as if there
are two laws in America, and the American people would be extraordinarily surprised if
they could see the difference between what they believe a law says and how it has
- actually been interpreted in secret. - You're not permitted
- to disclose that difference publicly. - That's correct.
I wasn't surprised when Washington ignored the killings in gardez.
But this was an American citizen. The country was now targeting
one of its own. Even John Walker lindh, who'd taken up arms with the Taliban,
was given a trial. What had Al-awlaki done, and why was the U.S. willing to
cross such a dangerous line to have him killed?
I read everything I could about Al-awlaki. It was obvious that he was an
immensely popular preacher with a large following among young English-speaking muslims
around the world. On his blog he openly praised some of the attacks against
the U.S., but this in itself was clearly not a crime. I spoke with former c.I.A. And
military officials. They argued that Al-awlaki's speeches were inspiring
domestic terrorists. There were a lot of words, from both Al-awlaki and the
U.S. government, but no concrete piece of evidence that he was an operational figure
in any attacks. I remembered seeing him on TV nearly a decade earlier,
just after 9/11, and it was difficult to reconcile the image of a new bin laden with
Al-awlaki's earlier sermons condemning terrorism. The fact that the U.S. has
administered the death and homicide of civilians in Iraq does not justify the killing of
- one U.S. civilian in New York City or Washington D.C. - for a short time,
Al-awlaki seemed like the go-to imam for journalists trying to understand the experience of
American muslims in the wake of the attacks. He was even profiled by the
Washington post for a piece about ramadan. After September 11th...
All of the feelings of the American muslims were similar to everybody else in America's...
Feelings of sympathy for the families of the victims and a sense of that whoever did this
a decade after this video was filmed, Al-awlaki had
become public enemy number one, his name at the very top of the kill list.
It felt like the war on terror was turning on itself. I was now investigating the
planned assassination of a U.S. citizen, a watershed event.
For the first time I had the name of someone on the kill list who had not yet been
killed. Anwar Al-awlaki was now a wanted man, hiding somewhere in
the mountains of Yemen. I knew I wouldn't be able
to speak with Al-awlaki directly... But through a series of
intermediaries, I managed to set up a meeting with his father.
I expected him to be reluctant to speak about his son, but he seemed happy to reminisce about
anwar was an all-American boy.
This is in Disneyland, you know, in 1984, I think. This is in San Diego when he was
already an imam with big beard, you know. At that time he was asking
muslims to participate in the Democratic process in America. In fact, during the presidential
campaign of George Bush, he thought the conservative Republicans will be better than
the liberal democrats, and he encouraged the muslims there to elect George Bush.
Didn't he even, at one point, attend a luncheon at the Pentagon?
Yes. You see, he liked America. And he wanted to stay and
really... his life in America. But things came differently. Can you explain to me why
your son went into hiding? After the incident of Al-majalah, anwar was all over
the news. The drones started to fly over shabwah, so, you know, anwar was
really concerned, and so we took his family with us and he left to the mountains.
What?
Myself, with... at this age in my life, I really cannot ever
replace, you know, the role of my son as he was doing for his family.
From my reading of the history of your son, from his writing, it seemed as though
there was a transformation that happened politically for him, from 9/11 to the invasion of
Iraq, something started to change in his tone. Yes.
Anwar became popular before September 11 because his sermons and his tapes, you know, were
very popular all over the English-speaking world. And then the invasion came in
2003 and they invaded Iraq and destroyed Iraq, so anwar really started to be more vocal in his
speeches against what the Americans were doing against muslims all over the world.
There's no doubt that your son praised some of the attacks against the U.S. yes.
And for many Americans, it was enough to say anwar Al-awlaki is a terrorist.
But also I want decent American lawyer to tell me that it is right for the united
states government to kill an American citizen on the basis that he said something against
the United States or against American soldiers. I mean, I don't understand.
I don't understand 100% the American constitution, but I don't believe American law will
allow the killing of an American citizen because he says something against the united
states.
Anwar's father may have been calling for justice under American law, but
American drones were already flying overhead. The fact that they were trying
to kill an American citizen was shocking enough, but there was another reason Al-awlaki's
story haunted me. We are against evil, and America as a whole has turned
into a nation of evil. How can your conscience allow you...
Al-awlaki seemed to have embraced the very identity he once opposed.
The military jacket, the black flag, the unequivocal call for armed jihad.
I specifically invite the youth to either fight in the west or join their brothers in
the all-American boy was gone, and so was the
moderate imam, but why?
Al-awlaki was deeply affected by the war on terror, both abroad and at home.
The day after September 11th, a woman stumbled into his mosque in Virginia after being
beaten with a baseball bat. More than 1200 muslims were detained across the country.
You have muslims who are locked up in jail and are left to rot in there.
There are no charges brought against them. What have you done for them?
Al-awlaki resigned from the mosque soon after and left the country, but the wars
- in Afghanistan and Iraq followed. - And this is
a new kind of evil. And this... This crusade is gonna take a while.
Al-awlaki began to see the expanding wars as part of a global attack against
- islam, and his sermons reflected a growing anger. - We are watching
one Muslim nation fall after another and we're watching, sitting back, doing nothing.
After 9/11, Al-awlaki was put under surveillance, detained
at airports, and repeatedly interrogated by the f.B.I. When he returned to Yemen,
local officials arrested him on orders from Washington. He was locked up for a year and
a half without charge and spent 17 months in solitary confinement.
When he was finally released, Al-awlaki was a changed man, and after j-soc tried to kill
- him, his transformation was complete. - ...Came to the
conclusion that jihad against America is binding upon myself...
- This is not a war of choice... - ...Just as it is
- binding on every other able-bodied Muslim. - This is a war of
with the American invasion of Iraq...
They seem like mirror images of one another, strangely distorted... America's
this will not be quick. Al-awlaki: A war
- ...nor easy. - Like a
self-fulfilling prophecy, the United States had helped create the very man it was now
America was my home.
Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again.
Al-awlaki's journey from a voice of moderation to one of retribution cut to
the heart of the larger story I was investigating. [Overlapping voices of afghani
I'd seen the same pattern
repeatedly... America was trying to kill
now got a new target list.
But the war on terror was producing new enemies wherever it spread.
How did this grow?
How does a war like that ever end?
Good evening. Tonight I can report to the American people and to the world
that the United States has conducted an operation that killed osama bin laden,
again, for those just joining us,
osama bin laden is dead. And one confirmation we're getting indicates that this is a
special operations raid. And I think an organization we're gonna hear a lot about in
the coming days is j-soc, the joint special operations command...
So much for secrecy. So much for cover-ups. The forces I'd been trying to
- unmask since gardez were suddenly national heroes. - The operation was
to capture or kill bin laden.
It felt like the world had turned upside-down. J-soc, long shrouded in
secrecy, was becoming a household name. But what did it really mean?
The white house circulated a photo from the night of the raid, perhaps as a picture of
transparency. Everyone was in the secretary of state, secretary
of defense, vice-president, chairman of the joint chiefs, the president himself, but it
was the seating arrangement that interested me. The man at the head of the
table wasn't the commander-in-chief, it was mcraven's assistant at j-soc,
general webb. Mcraven himself was running the operation from Afghanistan.
- U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! - I wasn't mourning
bin laden's death, but I wasn't celebrating, either. After 10 years, I understood
that people wanted closure, but it didn't feel like v. E. Day to me.
- It didn't feel like victory at all. - The leader
of Al-qaeda is dead, but a new one has taken his place. Your mission will be to ensure
hearing j-soc mentioned on television was
jolting enough, but when I saw the admiral in front of the cameras, it felt like
I'd walked through the looking glass. I am deeply honored that the
president has nominated me to serve as the next socom commander, and if confirmed...
William mcraven was now the toast of Washington. Admiral mcraven, by leading
the mission that killed osama bin laden, you and your men won an enduring place in American
military history. Like all of my colleagues, I salute you and your colleagues
in the seals, extraordinary operations. Thank you for your service.
When the congratulations subsided,
the senators turned to the real purpose of the hearings. Are you prepared and capable
to expand your operations at a moment's notice worldwide? As we look out from Iraq,
Afghanistan and frankly, across the globe, as we look at hot spots in Yemen, where you
have Al-qaeda in the Arabian peninsula or Somalia, where you have east African Al-qaeda and
people on the streets may have hoped the war
on terror was finally over, but in Washington, in the corridors of power,
a new chapter had just begun. Right now, it's kinetic, hard kill.
If it's not hard kill, it doesn't get played. [Camera shutter clicks,
soon after the bin laden strike, I met Malcolm
Nance, a legend in the world of covert ops who'd trained countless Navy seals and other
j-soc operators. I'm a firm believer in targeted assassination.
If they are too strong for your ability to negate their capacity in the battlefield, then you're
just going to have put a hellfire in them. If they're dangerous on a
strategic scale, like anwar Al-awlaki from Yemen, definitely has a missile
in his future. No longer cloaked in secre, special ops seemed to be
enjoying their moment in the sun. You know, we went in, we did
the drone strike, or hellfire strike, we blasted the individual car of a known guy
who was known to be in that vehicle. We flew in, we snatched his
body, we confirmed it, got the intelligence, went away. That's the way we should be
doing it.
The first time we'd met, he'd called me out of the blue.
This time it was me who called. J-soc may no longer have been a
- secret, but that didn't mean we knew the truth.
We're now seeing the effects of covert intervention in countries on multiple continents
without any thought to future repercussions. And it has radically expanded.
At one point it was 40 countries. It is now expanded to over 75.
And there are dozens, if not hundreds, of concurrent operations.
But in theory, congress is supposed to have oversight of these operations.
They don't want to step into the dark and see what goes on
behind the curtain. Joint special operations command became a paramilitary arm
of the administration. And billions upon billions of dollars was poured into jsoc.
What we have essentially done is created one hell of a hammer. And for the rest
of our generation, for the rest of my lifetime, this force will be continually
searching for a nail.
Bin laden's death had given the war on terror
a new life. After 9/11, there were seven people on the kill list.
In Iraq, 55 on the deck of cards. By Afghanistan, there were
thousands. But now the list itself was changing.
Signature strikes, tads, crowd killing. A target list was no longer
needed to justify a strike like Al-majalah. All boys over the age of 15,
all men under the age of 70, were now fair game in targeted areas.
Like a flywheel, the global war on terror was spinning out of control.
When I began this story, the U.S. was at war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The bombing in Al-majalah brought me to Yemen, but the list of countries where U.S.
Special forces were operating had grown, just as the kill list had.
Algeria, Indonesia, Thailand, Panama, Jordan. The world was now
a battlefield. It was hard to know where to go next.
In Pakistan, the U.S. was launching weekly drone strikes. In Mali, they were hunting
Al-qaeda. In Latin America, targeting drug cartels.
I decided to go to Somalia, where an escalated kill/capture program was underway.
Just as mcraven had testified, the war was erupting in
east Africa. Drone strikes were increasing. There were suicide bombings in
kampala and mogadishu and j-soc was on the ground, snatching bodies and flying
them back to ships in the Arabian sea.
Almost as soon as I arrived, I sensed that things weren't going to go well.
Mogadishu was seeing its worst fighting in years and there were no foreign journalists
left in the city. My local contact, bashir osman, was worried about my safety.
O.K.? O.K.
...it was a strange feeling, traveling with a dozen armed men in a decoy car.
I still had my reporter's notebook, but what could I learn in conditions like these?
Before arriving in Somalia, I'd read reports that the U.S.
Was outsourcing the kill list to local warlords.
Among the most powerful in mogadishu was yusuf Mohammed siad, known by everyone as
- indha adde... "White eyes". - [Camera shutter clicks,
in an earlier life, indha adde had been America's enemy,
offering protection to people on the U.S. kill list. But the warlord had since
changed sides. He was now on the U.S. payroll and assumed the title
of general... so he's saying that the fiercest fighting that they're
- doing right now is happening right here?
O.K.
...the men fired across the rooftops, but it didn't make sense to me what we were
doing here. Or what the Americans were doing here, in Somalia,
arming this warlord turned general for what seemed like a senseless war.
We gotta move.
- So these were shabaab fighters you buried here?
If you capture a foreigner alive, you execute them on the battlefield?
How did the Americans find men like
indha adde and to what end? After a decade of covert war, Somalia was in ruins.
Half the country was ruled by the local Al-qaeda affiliate; The other half by men like the
general, wandering the streets with an endless kill list and a band of men.
Every time we stopped, people looked at us nervously
and I was told that my very presence was endangering them. Bashir would insist we leave
moments after we arrived.
I wanted to see beneath the surface of the war, to understand what it meant to
ordinary somalis, but I was passed from warlord to warlord and soon realized the only
- people I'd be able to meet were men with guns. - You know when
you are fighting with enemy, any option is open. No mercy.
For years,
mohamed qanyare was Washington's man in mogadishu. His methods were extreme,
but Washington insisted qanyare's services were vital to their kill campaign.
...who were the people that the Americans wanted your help tracking?
No, I don't want to talk about that. You don't want to talk
about that? I don't. Did they offer to fund
any operations? That one also, no comment. You don't want to comment
on that. No comment. But you were targeting people
for the Americans. Yes, we arrest and interrogate and release
if we don't see nothing. And when these American operations kill innocent people,
what's the impact? America knows war. They are war masters.
They knows better than me. So when they're funding a war, they know how to fund it.
They don't need even to touch to tell them. They know very well.
They are teachers. Great teachers.
A roadside bomb blast hit a minibus full of civilians. Three people died on the spot
and many others were injured as well. They're all being taken to
madina hospital? To madina hospital, yeah.
For over a decade, j-soc and the c.I.A. Had free reign in Somalia... all their
drone strikes, night raids, mercenaries.
As the war on terror entered a second decade, Somalia seemed like a laboratory of the future
and the future looked bleak.
I was ready to leave Somalia and decided to call my editor.
But the news from home was not what I expected. Anwar Al-awlaki was dead,
killed in a drone strike authorized by the president himself.
Another name struck from the list. I wanted to go home, to be done
with it all, but I couldn't.
I got another call and this one left me stunned.
Two weeks after Al-awlaki's death, the U.S. had launched another strike in Yemen.
Another American had been killed. But this time, it was
a teenage boy. They had killed anwar Al-awlaki's 16-year-old son,
abdulrahman. I returned to sana'a, but I wasn't sure why.
Was it to file another story? To investigate another crime? Or was it to apologize?
Abdulrahman left without telling us. He said in a small note that
he's going to look for his father. He left from the kitchen window
and he took a bus to the governorate of shabwah. Then when his father was killed,
his grandmother told him, "there is no use for you to stay anymore."
And he said, "yes, I will come back in two days."
On the morning of October 15th, we got a telephone call and they told us he was blown up to
pieces by the drone. And they saw only the back of his hair, you know,
his relative, his cousin, he knew his hair from the back and he recognized it and he knew
that abdulrahman really was dead. But they could not recognize his
face or anything else. I always teased with him about his, you know, his hair that he
should cut it because I thought that he should do that.
The drone had not just killed the boy, it vanished him.
I asked to see photos of abdulrahman and suddenly realized why I was here.
It wasn't to investigate another death. I wanted to see him when he was
still alive.
Abdulrahman's grandmother was in mourning, but sat down with me for a moment to talk.
What did abdulrahman do? Who ordered the killing
of abdulrahman? He was sitting having dinner with his friends.
- How come he was killed? What did he do? - You know,
abdulrahman was... he was very, very gentle boy and he never hurt anybody.
I tried to make sense of abdulrahman's death. His father's could at least be
explained, but a teenager with a Facebook page and a group of adolescent friends?
Why would his name have been put on the list? What could he possibly
have done?
The Americans said abdulrahman was collateral damage, but they offered no explanation
for the strike. And unlike gardez, they made no apology.
It seemed an impossible coincidence. They killed the father and
then the son.
But maybe it was as simple as that. Like a tale from Greek
mythology. Abdulrahman was killed not for what he'd done, but for who he
might one day become. A twisted logic, a logic without end.
Nasser had lost his firstborn son and his first grandson, but what did we lose when the
drones struck abdulrahman and his teenage friends?
When I first visited gardez, I had no idea where the story would lead me.
I didn't know just how much the world had changed or how much
the journey would change me. But I realize now the story has
no end.
Somehow, in front of our eyes, undeclared wars have been launched in countries across
the globe. Foreigners and citizens alike assassinated by presidential
decree. The war on terror transformed into a self-fulfilling
prophecy. How does a war like this ever end?
And what happens to us when we finally see what's hidden in plain sight?