Panetta: Kill 20 Leaders, End the War on Terror
\nBy: emptywheel Saturday July 9, 2011 6:48 am \t<\/p>\n
Leon Panetta kicks off his new job as Secretary of Defense with a trip to Afghanistan. On the plane over there this morning, he told reporters that we just need to kill 10 or 20 leaders of al Qaeda and we will \u201cstrategically defeat\u201d al Qaeda. (h\/t Spencer)<\/p>\n
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared Saturday that the United States is \u201cwithin reach\u201d of \u201cstrategically defeating\u201d Al Qaeda as a terrorist threat, but that doing so would require killing or capturing the group\u2019s 10 to 20 remaining leaders.<\/p>\n
Heading to Afghanistan for the first time since taking office earlier this month, Panetta said that intelligence uncovered in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May showed that 10 years of U.S. operations against Al Qaeda had left it with fewer than two dozen key operatives, most of whom are in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and North Africa.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we can be successful at going after them, I think we can really undermine their ability to do any kind of planning to be able to conduct any kinds of attack on this country,\u201d Panetta told reporters on his way to Afghanistan aboard a U.S. Air Force jet. \u201cThat\u2019s why I think\u201d that defeat of Al Qaeda is \u201cwithin reach,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
To kill or capture those 20 leaders, mind you, we\u2019ve got 100,000 troops in Afghanistan\u2013where none of these key al Qaeda leaders are, according to Panetta\u2013and will have 70,000 there after we withdraw the surge troops. So I\u2019m guessing Panetta isn\u2019t really promising we\u2019ll end the war; we\u2019ll just have tens of thousands of troops in harms way to do \u2026 something.<\/p>\n
Compare Panetta\u2019s characterization of what we\u2019re up against with Charlie Savage\u2019s description of the government\u2019s justification for capturing Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame. As you read this, remember that Warsame was captured on April 19, over a week before the government killed Osama bin Laden and started analyzing the intelligence at OBL\u2019s compound. Though, according to ProPublica, we already knew that OBL nixed a suggestion to make Anwar al-Awlaki the head of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.<\/p>\n
Savage suggests that we nabbed Warsame on his way back to Somalia from a meeting with al-Awlaki.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, new details emerged about Mr. Warsame\u2019s detention on a Navy ship after his capture in April aboard a fishing skiff between Yemen and Somalia, and about internal administration deliberations on legal policy questions that could have implications for the evolving conflict against Al Qaeda and its affiliates.<\/p>\n
A senior counterterrorism official said Wednesday that Mr. Warsame had recently met with Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical cleric now hiding in Yemen.<\/p>\n
The Administration justified capturing Warsame based on an argument not that we\u2019re at war against al-Shabaab as a group, but that a handful of al-Shabaab leaders adhere to al Qaeda\u2019s ideology and \u201ccould\u201d conduct attacks outside of Somalia.<\/p>\n
While Mr. Warsame is accused of being a member of the Shabab, which is focused on a parochial insurgency in Somalia, the administration decided he could be lawfully detained as a wartime prisoner under Congress\u2019s authorization to use military force against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to several officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss security matters.<\/p>\n
But the administration does not consider the United States to be at war with every member of the Shabab, officials said. Rather, the government decided that Mr. Warsame and a handful of other individual Shabab leaders could be made targets or detained because they were integrated with Al Qaeda or its Yemen branch and were said to be looking beyond the internal Somali conflict.<\/p>\n
\u201cCertain elements of Al Shabab, including its senior leaders, adhere to Al Qaeda\u2019s ideology and could conduct attacks outside of Somalia in East Africa, as it did in Uganda in 2010, or even outside the region to further Al Qaeda\u2019s agenda,\u201d said a senior administration official. \u201cFor its leadership and those other Al Qaeda-aligned elements of Al Shabab, our approach is quite clear: They are not beyond the reach of our counterterrorism tools.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now, logic dictates that this handful of leaders of a group that did not exist on 9\/11 (and therefore couldn\u2019t logically be included in the authorization of force against those who planned the attack) includes the Somalian al-Shabaab leaders included in Panetta\u2019s 10-20 targets. ..more<\/a><\/p>\n