Yemen Feature: CIA Seeks Authority to Expand Drone Programme (Miller)

The CIA is seeking authority to expand its covert drone campaign in Yemen by launching strikes against terrorism suspects even when it does not know the identities of those who could be killed, U.S. officials said.

Securing permission to use these “signature strikes” would allow the agency to hit targets based solely on intelligence indicating patterns of suspicious behavior, such as imagery showing militants gathering at known al-Qaeda compounds or unloading explosives.

The practice has been a core element of the CIA’s drone program in Pakistan for several years. CIA Director David H. Petraeus has requested permission to use the tactic against the al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, which has emerged as the most pressing terrorism threat to the United States, officials said.

If approved, the change would probably accelerate a campaign of U.S. airstrikes in Yemen that is already on a record pace, with at least eight attacks in the past four months.

Click to read more ...

Turkey Live Coverage (14 March): A Growing Role Over Syria

1845 GMT: Turkey is getting ready to sue Iran for its relatively high natural gas price. Energy and Natural Resources Minister Taner Yıldız said: "The road to arbitration is being paved on March 16, and we will not wait for too long after that to file our complaint."

Turkey currently buys a cubic meter of Azerbaijani gas for $330 and pays Russia $400 for the same amount. However, Iran sells its gas to Turkey for $505 for each cubic meter. 

Turkey is reportedly going to take the issue to the International Chamber of Commerce in Switzerland, which awarded Turkey $800 million in compensation in 2009 in a previous dispute with Iran.

1730 GMT: Retired Gen. Ergin Saygun, who has been receiving medical support since he was first arrested as a Sledgehammer suspect in 2011, was arrested by a Turkish court today. 

The case of Sledgehammer suspects, a clique inside the military, are being accused of carrying out anti-government plans to overthrow the AKP government. Crashing jets, bombing mosques during a busy hour of the day are just some of the accusations. 

1645 GMT: State-run Anatolia news agency reported that at least 765 Syrian refugees, mostly women and children, have crossed into Turkey since Tuesday night. It is reported that Turkey currently hosts nearly 14,000 Syrian refugees in its Hatay district.

Click to read more ...

Yemen Feature: Why is President Obama Insisting on Imprisonment of an Honest Journalist?

Abduelah Haider Shaye (Photo: Iona Craig)On February 2, 2011, President Obama called Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The two discussed counterterrorism cooperation and the battle against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. At the end of the call, according to a White House read-out, Obama “expressed concern” over the release of a man named Abdulelah Haider Shaye, whom Obama said “had been sentenced to five years in prison for his association with AQAP". It turned out that Shaye had not yet been released at the time of the call, but Saleh did have a pardon for him prepared and was ready to sign it.

It would not have been unusual for the White House to express concern about Yemen’s allowing AQAP suspects to go free. Suspicious prison breaks of Islamist militants in Yemen had been a regular occurrence over the past decade, and Saleh has been known to exploit the threat of terrorism to leverage counterterrorism dollars from the United States.

But this case was different. Abdulelah Haider Shaye is not an Islamist militant or an Al Qaeda operative. He is a journalist.

Click to read more ...

Iraq Feature: The Costs of a War (Duss/Juul)

The ceremony in Iraq marking the end of the US intervention

---

Total Costs

Total deaths: Between 110,663 and 119,380

Coalition deaths: 4,803
U.S. deaths: 4,484
U.S. wounded: 32,200
U.S. deaths as a percentage of coalition deaths: 93.37 percent
Iraqi Security Force, or ISF, deaths: At least 10,125
Total coalition and ISF deaths: At least 14,926
Iraqi civilian deaths: Between 103,674 and 113,265
Non-Iraqi contractor deaths: At least 463
Internally displaced persons: 1.24 million
Refugees: More than 1.6 million

Click to read more ...

Afghanistan Feature: Meet America's Man in Kandahar (Aikins)

Though Raziq has risen in large part through his own skills and ambition, he is also, to a considerable degree, a creation of  the American military intervention in Afghanistan. (Prior to 2001, he had worked in a shop in Pakistan.) As part of a countrywide initiative, his men have been trained by two controversial private military firms, DynCorp and Xe, formerly known as Blackwater, at a U.S.-funded center in Spin Boldak, where they are also provided with weapons, vehicles, and communications equipment. Their salaries are subsequently paid through the Law and Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan, a UN-administered international fund, to which the U.S. is the largest contributor. Raziq himself has enjoyed visits in Spin Boldak from such senior U.S. officials as Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and Generals Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus.

In public, American officials had until recently been careful to downplay Raziq’s alleged abuses. When I met with the State Department’s Moeling at his Kandahar City office in January, he told me, “I think there is certainly a mythology about Abdul Raziq, where there’s a degree of assumption on some of those things. But I have never seen evidence of private prisons or of extrajudicial killings directly attributable to him.”

Click to read more ...

Afghanistan Feature: Obama to Announce Plans for Troop Withdrawal --- But How Many and How Fast? (Landler/Cooper)

President Obama plans to announce his decision on the scale and pace of troop withdrawals from Afghanistan in a speech on Wednesday evening, an administration official said Monday.

As he closes in on a decision, another official said, Mr. Obama is considering options that range from a Pentagon-backed proposal to pull out only 5,000 troops this year to an aggressive plan to withdraw within 12 months all 30,000 troops the United States deployed to Afghanistan as part of the surge in December 2009.

Under another option, a third official said, Mr. Obama would announce a final date for the withdrawal of all the surge forces sometime in 2012, but leave the timetable for incremental reductions up to commanders in the field — much as he did in drawing down troops after the surge in Iraq.

Click to read more ...

US Analysis: What General Petraeus' Move to CIA Means for Pro-Democracy Movements

Expect Petraeus to use his new position to build bridges with pro-democracy movements, and expect the US to back more opposition movements soon. Because if there is one thing that the Arab Spring has taught us, it's that the only certainty right now is that the people have all the power. Petraeus understands this, he's built his career on the concept, and I predict that this is exactly what Obama is counting on him to do as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Click to read more ...

Afghanistan Feature: Pakistan to Karzai "Pick Us, Not the US" (Rosenberg)

Hamid Karzai and Yusuf Reza GilaniPakistan is lobbying Afghanistan's president against building a long-term strategic partnership with the U.S., urging him instead to look to Pakistan --- and its Chinese ally --- for help in striking a peace deal with the Taliban and rebuilding the economy, Afghan officials say.

The pitch was made at an April 16 meeting in Kabul by Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, who bluntly told Afghan President Hamid Karzai that the Americans had failed them both, according to Afghans familiar with the meeting. Mr. Karzai should forget about allowing a long-term U.S. military presence in his country, Mr. Gilani said, according to the Afghans. Pakistan's bid to cut the U.S. out of Afghanistan's future is the clearest sign to date that, as the nearly 10-year war's endgame begins, tensions between Washington and Islamabad threaten to scuttle America's prospects of ending the conflict on its own terms.

Click to read more ...

Afghanistan Feature: The US Military, Politics, and "Indications of Progress", Part 358 (Chandrasekaran)

Writing in The Washington Post, Rajiv Chandrasekaran offers the latest article proclaiming progress in the US military campaign in southern Afghanistan.

To be fair, this is more than the common cheerleading piece for American commanders. Chandresekaran cautions that there might be a violent summer in the south and, even more interesting, refers in the middle of the story to "deterioration of security in eastern Afghanistan" and the belief of some US military and diplomats that "the transformation [to Afghan security forces is] unsustainable".

All of this raises the question as to whether the US military are carrying out a high-wire PR balancing act --- we're winning, but to keep on winning, we have to stay far beyond President Obama's proposed withdrawal beginning in July.

Click to read more ...

Sock-Puppet Alert: US Military's Plan to Manipulate Facebook and Twitter (Fielding/Cobain)

The US military;is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.

A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an "online persona management service" that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.

Click to read more ...