Rand Paul would have supported drone use in hunt for marathon bomber

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Tuesday that he would have supported police using drones in last week's hunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombing.

"If there is a killer on the loose in a neighborhood, I’m not against drones being used to search them," Paul told Fox Business Network.

Last month, Paul conducted a nearly 13-hour filibuster on the Senate floor after the Obama Administration said in a letter that it was theoretically possible for President Obama to authorize a lethal drone strike on an American citizen under "extraordinary circumstances." The administration subsequently clarified that they did not believe the president had the authority to "use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat."

Paul said that the question of an "imminent threat" was the pivotal one when considering drone policy.

“Here’s the distinction — I have never argued against any technology being used against having an imminent threat an act of crime going on," Paul said. "If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and $50 in cash, I don’t care if a Drone kills him or a policeman kills him, but it’s different if they want to come fly over your hot tub, or your yard just because they want to do surveillance on everyone, and they want to watch your activities."

The Kentucky senator also broke with a number of prominent Republican allies, saying he disagreed with calls to treat Tsarnaev, who was captured hiding in a boat Friday night, as an enemy combatant. Some senators, including South Carolina's Lindsey Graham (R), have argued the government would be able to glean more from the 19-year-old's interrogation if he was denied ordinary due process.

"I think we can still preserve the Bill of Rights," Paul said. "I see no reason why our Constitution isn’t strong enough to convict this young man, with a jury trial, with the Bill of Rights. We do it to horrible people all the time — rapists and murders — they get lawyers; they get trials with juries, and we seem to do a pretty good job of justice, so I think we can do it through our court system.”

The White House on Tuesday said that Tsarnaev would undergo a standard criminal trial.

"We will prosecute this terrorist through a civilian system of justice," said White House press secretary Jay Carney. "Under U.S. law, United States citizens cannot be tried in military commissions. It is important to remember since 9/11, we have used the federal court system to convict and incarcerate hundreds of terrorists."

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National Security Brief: Former Top Obama Military Aide Questions Benefits Of Drone Program

The former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said on Thursday that the costs of the Obama administration’s counter-terror drone program may be outweighing its benefits.

“We’re seeing that blowback,” said retired General James Cartwright at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “If you’re trying to kill your way to a solution, no matter how precise you are, you’re going to upset people even if they’re not targeted.”

The CIA will reportedly be moving its armed drone program under the auspices of the Defense Department and because of that, according to the New York Times, Cartwright is also worried about “blurring the line” between soldiers and spies if DOD is running armed drones “outside a declared area of hostility.”

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that the new U.S. drone base in Niger is starting to take shape. “We welcome the drones,” Niger’s President Issoufou Mahamadou said. “Our countries are like the blind leading the blind,” he said. “We rely on countries like France and the United States. We need cooperation to ensure our security.”

In other news:

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei suggested in a lengthy speech on Thursday that he is open to nuclear talks with the United States, if not optimistic about their outcome.

The Washington Post reports: The U.N. secretary general said Thursday that he will launch an investigation into whether chemical weapons were used in Syria, seeking to address accusations that, if proven, could alter the trajectory of the two-year-old civil war in the country.

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Sen. Wyden: Debate Over Drone Secrecy Just Beginning

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR)

Speaking at a panel at George Washington Law School this morning, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) indicated that his struggle with the Obama administration for more transparency on national security matters is just beginning.

Wyden was the opening speaker at a Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington event on drones, in which he laid out his position on the secrecy surrounding the Obama administration’s counterterrorism targeted killing program.

Wyden made clear during his talk that he believed that there are “certainly legitimate reasons” for the government to keep some matters secret, including the details of covert operations. Sources and methods — or the precise ways that intelligence is collected — are in a very different basket than keeping the law secret, Wyden explained. “Secret operations are different than secret laws,” Wyden said. What Wyden is firmly opposed to is secret interpretations of public laws by the Executive Branch without the conclusions being disclosed:

WYDEN: [W]e aren’t going to take a backseat to anybody — not anybody — on the question of protecting genuinely sensitive sources and operations. But I am also not going to take a backseat to anybody in the effort to try to make sure our public laws stay public. And that’s what this is, in effect, discussion is all about.

At the forefront of Wyden’s concerns is a set of classified memos from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel laying out the justifications for when force can be used against American citizens overseas. An unclassified white paper summarizing those memos leaked to the press last month, stirring up the current debate.

Wyden indicated that he had spent the last two years asking the administration for access to the DOJ memos on targeting Americans abroad. As part of its deal to have John Brennan confirmed as CIA Director, the White House has turned over those memos to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, but has not declassified them as of yet. These memos, Wyden believes, as the official interpretation of the Executive Branch on how it reads current laws need to be made public. At present, there is no one place within the law that Americans can go to see what the standard is with regard to targeting Americans, Wyden said.

“I don’t buy that,” Wyden said when asked about whether the memos reveal too much in the way of operational details to be declassified. “That’s what we have redaction for.” Wyden was the only member of the Democratic Caucus to join Rand Paul’s nearly thirteen-hour long filibuster of John Brennan last week, though he disagreed with Paul on the forthrightness of the administration.

House Democrats earlier this week wrote to the White House also demanding the declassification of the DOJ memos, as well as answers related to the broader use of drones in warfare.

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Libya needs international assistance, not drone attacks

Two years to the day after the anti-Gadhafi uprisings began in Benghazi, the populace has again taken to the streets. This time they are protesting the new authorities failures to bring economic development and its prerequisite, security. Over the last two years, wide swathes of Libyan territory have been transformed into a non-governed space has indirectly facilitated the Islamist takeover in Mali and the attack by Al-Qaeda affiliates on Algeria’s In Amenas gas facility. If Libya is the fabled ‘gateway to Africa’, then the gate has been left wide open.

In today's Libya, heavy artillery and extremist militants flow across the country's porous borders with ease. Since the killing of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens, Libya's extreme east is currently being monitored by American drones in search of jihadist training camps.

Barack Obama wisely pledged in his recent State of the Union address to help Libyans “provide for their own security” including cooperation on counterterrorism. However, should the promised “direct action against those terrorists who pose the gravest threat to Americans” turn out to be code for conducting drone attacks on Libyan soil, then the president is on the verge of a catastrophic blunder which would irrevocably jeopardize vital American economic and strategic interests.

Libya urgently needs international assistance in building its institutions, especially the basic machinery of government and security. The Libyans have a friendly government, infinite money to spend on infrastructure projects, and they are actively soliciting Western assistance. Clearly, nation building – which the Libyans are even able and willing to fund themselves - would be far more effective than drone strikes at eliminating terrorist safe havens. It would be more cost effective as well.
 The drone infrastructure

Currently, U.S. surveillance drones focus on the Islamist hot spots in Eastern Libya (Derna, Benghazi, and the Green Mountains) due to the obsession with finding the perpetrators of the attack on the American mission which killed the Ambassador. Plans for a forthcoming U.S. unarmed drone base in Niger will make it operationally feasible to employ drones against militant extremists in Libya's southwestern region of Fezzan. This area is beginning to rival Yemen as one of the globe's premier ungoverned spaces and a site of heavy arms trafficking. If the use of drones in Libya should gradually switch from unarmed surveillance to armed attacks it would anger the heretofore friendly Libyan populace and likely incite revenge attacks against the West. In the wake of such attacks, Libyans would likely close ranks with the extremists in their midst and refuse Western capacity building assistance, which they otherwise support.
Life in a dangerous neighborhood

Instability in the Sahel can only undermine Libyan efforts to secure its borders. In retrospect, the attack against the In Amenas facility appears to be part of a broader strategy by al-Qaeda and its affiliates against energy facilities and Western interests in North Africa. Al-Qaeda affiliates are now involved in an undeclared war with Bamako, Algiers, and Tripoli for control of the Sahel.

The French campaign has dispersed the most hardcore jihadist elements from their previous redoubts in Mali, but they are presently finding safe havens among the Sahara's other ungoverned spaces -- awaiting the appropriate moment to make their next move. February 8th's guerilla-style suicide attack in Gao is a possible indication of the tactics that appear to be spreading. Attacks like those at In Amenas or Gao lacked extensive preparation or a unified command and hence, even with good intelligence -- they are impossible to forecast or preempt. So long as Libya's southwestern border is an ungoverned space, it will be impossible to win a counterinsurgency campaign in the vast empty space of the Sahara. The logic of drone strikes to disturb terrorists in this area holds a certain appeal for an administration that has decimated al-Qaeda leadership in the Af-Pak region, yet it is the wrong policy choice. In the Sahel, fighting fire with fire is not the right strategy.

Only a stable and secure Libya will prevent the indefinite spread of this contagion and a likely series of attacks against North Africa's oil installations and drone counterattacks against terrorist training camps.
Finishing what we started in Libya

A succession of various threats in Benghazi over the past month have made it quite clear that foreign diplomats, NGOs, and investors will remain at risk in Libya so long as the authorities are unable to govern outside of the capital. There is a palpable fear that the General National Congress' February 6 decision approving the direct election of members of the constitutional assembly on a regional basis will lead towards federalism and the disintegration of the Libyan state. These worries are coming to a head as mass anti-government demonstrations are planned in Eastern Libya for Friday, February 15 -- the second anniversary of the Libyan revolution.

If Libyans and Westerners want to see a free, open, and democratic Libya capable of being part of the community of nations and a vital engine for growth in the global economy, they cannot let Libya drift towards lawlessness and separatism. Libya’s international partners, especially the U.S., Britain, and France need to complete their commitments to support Libya in establishing the rule of law, transitional justice, and security. To this end, the major Western and Arab powers unveiled a security plan in Paris on February 12 calling for European experts to train Libyan security forces and rebuild the military. Crucially, this effort has the backing of the EU, UN, Arab League, African Union and the government of Libya.
Time to deliver on training

Until now foreign training of the Libyan army, police, and border guards has been small in scale. Most training has largely been conducted outside of Libya, in Jordan and Turkey. The U.S. for its part has discussed possible training of around 400 military special forces, but has not yet committed to firm details about the program. These positive cooperation measures are incomplete steps upon which we must rapidly build.

The new Libyan security plan announced on February 12 moves the location of training inside Libya, calling for a two-year EU border security training program using civilian trainers starting in June 2013. This plan should aid in dismantling the dysfunctional, militia-dominated Supreme Security Committee and Libya Shield Force.
However, military, police, and border security training should only form part of a broad capacity building and vocational training package urgently needed to promote a stable and secure environment. This is the best way to get needed job skills to former fighters.
Libya should be a top-tier U.S. foreign policy priority

A broad multilateral effort to prevent Libya from becoming a failed state can only succeed with the U.S. as a key and proactive partner. Ignoring or attacking Libya with drones would be a truly counterproductive policy that would worsen the devastating effects of instability in North Africa and the Sahel perpetuating the downward spiral of violence, the loss of foreign investment, and the proliferation of weapons through ungoverned spaces. Instead of drone strikes, Secretary of State John Kerry should go to Libya as part of his first Middle Eastern trip. While there, he should unveil a vast training scheme to help build a new Libyan army and provide it with on the job training in border security. America must follow through on its commitments in order to cultivate a valuable regional partner in Libya and prevent the Sahel region from becoming the next Afghanistan.
Pack is a researcher of Middle Eastern History at Cambridge University and editor of The 2011 Libyan Uprisings and the Struggle for the Post Qadhafi Future (Palgrave Macmillan Forthcoming June 2013)
Benotman is a senior analyst at the Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremism think tank in London. He was previously a senior leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG).
Cook is Director of Research of Libya-Analysis.com.

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Sen. Paul threatens hold on Brennan over armed drone strikes

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Wednesday threatened to hold John Brennan's nomination for CIA director unless he receives more answers on the administration’s drone program.

“I have asked Mr. Brennan if he believed that the President has the power to authorize lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, and my question remains unanswered," Paul said in a statement. "I will not allow a vote on this nomination until Mr. Brennan openly responds to the questions and concerns my colleagues and I share.

"These issues must be discussed openly so that the American people can understand what constraints exist on the government’s power to use lethal force against its citizens," Paul continued. "Before confirming Mr. Brennan as the head of the CIA, it must be apparent that he understands and will honor the protections provided to every American by the Constitution."

Brennan, Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, faced a contentious confirmation hearing last week, as lawmakers pressed him on the legality of using armed drone strikes against suspected terrorists, in particular American citizens.

The increased congressional scrutiny followed the leak of a Justice Department (DOJ) memo laying out the circumstances in which the administration would authorize a deadly drone strike on a U.S. citizen.

Lawmakers, though, have demanded that the DOJ share its actual legal memos justifying the targeting of Americans abroad.

The administration attempted to defuse congressional anger by providing a private briefing to lawmakers before Brennan’s hearing. Brennan also testified that the administration only authorizes lethal force as a “last resort to save lives.”

But the briefing and Brennan’s testimony did little to satisfy lawmakers. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) have said they will hold more hearings on the issue.

Feinstein last week also suggested creating a federal court to oversee and approve drone strikes, but Republicans quickly rebuffed the proposal.

“I think it is a terrible idea,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told The Hill.

Over the weekend Graham also said he would put a hold on Brennan's nomination as well as former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), Obama’s nominee for Defense secretary, until the administration provides more details about its response to the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

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France Sends Troops To Mali As U.S. Mulls Drone Strikes

A 2012 map showing rebel-held territory in Mali

France has responded to a request for help from Mali by sending military forces to aid in the Malian government’s push back on an offensive launched by rebel forces in the north of the country.

The initial forces on the ground are there to take part in a United Nations-authorized mission to boost training of the Malian Army, ahead of an international force due to be deployed in the fall of this year. Several other European countries have also pledged to send trainers to Mali, but France surprised many with the swiftness of its action. President Francois Hollande laid out the thinking behind France’s decision in a speech on Friday:

“France, like its African partners, cannot accept this. I have decided that France will respond, alongside our African partners, to the request from the Malian authorities.

“We will do it strictly within the framework of the United Nations Security Council resolution. We will be ready to stop the terrorists’ offensive if it continues.”

France — which has a history of intervening in the region, such as in Cote d’Ivoire in 2011 — had previously indicated publicly that it would wait for a further clarification of U.N. resolutions before taking action. While these forces are not necessarily mandated to engage in combat with the coalition of rebels and Islamists in control of Northern Mali, French diplomats are now arguing behind closed doors that previously passed U.N. resolutions give them the authority to do so, should France choose. Given the ease in which the rebels, whose make-up include groups thought to be affiliated with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), took a key town on Thursday, Hollande may make that call relatively soon.

France’s speedy response may help make U.S. decision-makers coming to a conclusion regarding the region far easier. After the Sept. 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, reports floated the possibility that the U.S. was considering launching drone strikes against AQIM. Those strikes never came to fruition, but remain a distinct possibility, as J. Peter Pham, director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, sees U.S. counter-terrorism officials being increasingly open to air strikes. “Drone strikes or airstrikes will not restore Mali’s territorial integrity or defeat the Islamists, but they may be the least bad option,” said Mr. Pham, a senior strategy adviser to the U.S. military’s Africa Command.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius has confirmed that France has already used its air force to halt the southern advance of rebels in Mali.

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