The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — President Obama announced late Sunday that Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, was killed in a firefight during an operation he ordered inside Pakistan, ending a 10 year manhunt for the world’s most wanted terrorist. American officials were in possession of his body, he said.

The fate of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Al Qaeda number two in command, was unclear.

The death of Mr. Bin Laden is a huge punctuation in the American-led war on terrorism. What remains to be seen is whether the death of the leader of Al Qaeda galvanizes his followers by turning him into a martyr, or whether it serves as a turning of the
gives further impetus to the Obama administration to bring American troops home.

Update: This post was amended to add that the Navy SEAL Team Six, a top military counter-terrorism unit, carried out the operation with the help of the CIA.

The selection of two outsiders — Petraeus has no experience in the realm of pure intelligence work, while Panetta hasn’t had military experience, other than tangentially in his two years as CIA director, since his discharge from the Army in 1966 — to fill the posts may seem an odd choice. The two men’s backgrounds, however, may provide clues as to why each was chosen for the job.

Petraeus’s popularity, spanning both party lines and the civilian-military divide (at least among members of the public who know who he is), is sure to be an asset in the position, as it has been in his capacity as the head of military operations in Afghanistan. More pointedly, Wired’s Spencer Ackerman theorizes that Petraeus’s endorsement of unmanned drone strikes and special operations raids like those undertaken in Afghanistan and Pakistan hews closely to the Obama administration’s preferred methods of using the CIA in counterterror efforts, with drone strikes and shadow operations.

Panetta, meanwhile, got the CIA post to begin with in part because of his success steering President Bill Clinton’s Office of Management and Budget through the fat years of the mid-‘90s. Panetta later became Clinton’s chief of staff. His experience with budgets — he also headed up the House Budget Committee for years prior to leaving the world of elected office for Clintonian pastures — could be a sign that the administration is looking for a numbers man to justify bloated defense spending. Until the administration officially confirms its picks, however, it won’t be forthcoming with explanations for its choices.

The news hasn’t inspired a uniformly optimistic reaction from intelligence or defense insiders. Ackerman reports in Wired that Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the left-leaning National Security Network, contends that Panetta, at least, will be entering a no-win situation once he takes over the Defense Department:

“He’ll never live up to what building wants or has come to expect,” Hurlburt says of Panetta. “Gates tried to prepare them that this is coming, and cushion the building for what’s coming, but that’s not tenable. It’s an unenviable task.”

The response from the right has been similarly lukewarm:

[H]e’s generating cautious, first-blush optimism from defense watchers, even among the administration’s political opponents. “Safe choice,” says James Jay Carafano of the conservative Heritage Foundation, which has accused Gates and Obama of cutting defense too deeply. With both Petraeus and Panetta, “no one is going to question whether they are qualified.” Even Gates’ predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, no fan of Obama, tweeted that Panetta and Petraeus are “outstanding leaders.”

Ackerman does not mention, however, that Rumsfeld’s tweet on Panetta and Petraeus was qualified by a followup:

…5 DCIs 5 US ambs & 7 mil cdrs in Afg over 7 yrs: No matter how capable the individual, musical chairs makes it impossible to find footing

Rumsfeld’s un-self-conscious criticism of the U.S.’s handling of the war in Afghanistan comes despite his role as the U.S. Defense secretary during the initial invasion, as well as the invasion of Iraq.

Responding to the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act request of “records relating to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles – commonly known as ‘drones’ – for the purpose of targeting and killing individuals since September 11, 2001,” which was submitted July 2010, the Department of Defense told Jonathan Manes of the ACLU’s National Security Project that while this department does possess documents estimating the number of civilian casualties that result from operations involving military aircraft, it does not distinguish between weapons platforms.

“The only documents that address estimates of civilian casualties related to drone strikes are individual battle damage assessments evaluating each military aircraft mission, which the ACLU and DoD have agreed are outside the scope of documents to be processed in this litigation,” writes Mark H. Herrington, the DoD’s associate deputy general counsel.

The letter is dated Dec. 30, 2010, but ACLU spokesperson Molly Kaplan said the department held on to the letter for months, “apparently by mistake,” and it did not make it to the ACLU’s desk until last Friday.

Herrington further writes:

“In July 2010, the Department of Defense (DoD) informed the ACLU that all records related to this section of the request are classified and not maintained in a format that allows searching without significant cost. However, in light of ACLU’s insistence that civilian casualty information was of particular interest, DoD agreed to conduct 40 hours of searching for estimates of civilian casualties caused by such strikes, after which the parties would discuss whether additional searches would be undertaken.

DoD’s search confirmed that DoD does not create or maintain documents to compile estimates of civilian casualties related to drone strikes separately from estimates related to other weapons systems.”

Last year the civil liberties organization sued DoD after it would not fill its FOIA request on unmanned drones used to target killings overseas. The ACLU wanted to know when, where and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, as well as the number and rate of civilian casualties. Generally, the ACLU wanted the government to clarify the legal basis for using unmanned drones.

“It is remarkable that the Defense Department does not compile data about the total number of civilian casualties inflicted by unmanned drones – a new and controversial technology,” said Manes in a press statement. “The public must have accurate information about civilian casualties in drone strikes in order to assess the ethical, legal and strategic concerns that these weapons raise.”

According to the ACLU, the CIA, for its part, has entirely refused to respond to a request for information about the drone strikes in Pakistan.

Because the government has not been much help coming forward with this information, independent organizations and other media have attempted to pick up the slack. Last October, the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC) released a report that concluded that innocent civilians in northwest Pakistan were being killed by both U.S. drone strikes and the ground and aerial attacks from the Pakistani military, as well as local militants.

The report found that in 2009, an estimated 2,300 civilians were killed in terror attacks alone and noted that “there is no governmental or military mechanism that systematically and publicly investigates or collects data on civilian casualties.” The group also discovered that the Pakistani government runs several compensation programs and suggested that drone victims be included in one of these programs.

On Thursday, CIVIC released a statement calling on the DoD and the CIA to “count and compensate civilians harmed by U.S. drones,” in light of the ACLU’s reveal.

“The US has a duty to know where it has caused civilian harm, including whether it was caused by close air support or unmanned aerial vehicles,” said Sarah Holewinski, CIVIC’s executive director, in the statement. “Let’s say civilian casualties skyrocket. Why the spike? How can the problem be fixed? Without good data, the US is operating with blinders on. After ten years at war, the US should know better.”

The New America Foundation is another organization that has attempted to quantify the civilian casualties of U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan, compiling data and information since 2004 from sources such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press and the BBC and English-language newspapers and media in Pakistan, such as The Daily Times, Dawn, The Express Tribune and Geo TV.

Thus far, NAF has found that the 233 reported drone strikes in northwest Pakistan — including 20 in 2011 – have killed between 1,411 and 2,247 people, of whom about 1,134 to 1,810 have been described as militants. According to the organization: “The true non-militant fatality rate since 2004 according to our analysis is approximately 21 percent. In 2010, it was more like six percent.”

NAF has also created a map with estimated locations of each drone strike.

Illegal immigrants are held at a detention facility in Phoenix, Ariz. (Mary F. Calvert/ZUMApress.com)

Until last week, local officials in Arlington, Va., Santa Clara, Calif., San Francisco and Washington, D.C., thought they’d have no trouble opting out of the Secure Communities program, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement initiative that runs fingerprints collected by local police through federal immigration databases. After all, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and an assistant attorney general had both written letters confirming that an opt-out was possible, and the ICE website even lists steps for communities to opt out.

[Immigration1] But in the past week, these local officials’ plans have been thrown into turmoil, as a senior ICE official told The Washington Post that opting out of the program was impossible and Napolitano confirmed on Wednesday, “We don’t consider Secure Communities an opt-in, opt-out program.”

Now, however, local officials say they plan to go ahead with the opt-out process. Arlington County Board member J. Walter Tejada, a Democrat, told TWI the county still intends to contact state and ICE officials to begin removing itself from the program.

“I’m aware there is some internal turmoil with ICE, but for us nothing has changed,” Tejada said. “We’re moving forward.”

Local politicians and activists say Napolitiano’s statements have not deterred them from pushing back against Secure Communities, arguing that ICE cannot impose the program without their consent. In many cases, however, it already has: ICE signs a memorandum of understanding with state officials to agree to the program, and local communities are often only notified they are participating after it has already taken place. If guidelines for opting out turn out to be meaningless, critics of the program say, then ICE has misled the public.

“If ICE for some reason decides not to follow through, I think we’re looking at possible massive deception,” said Sarahi Uribe, lead organizer of the Uncover The Truth Campaign, a coalition that opposes Secure Communities. “We’re going to continue to push for transparency and accountability.”

The path of fingerprints from local police stations to ICE has been obscured in public statements from the agency. Secure Communities is often explained as a fingerprint-sharing program between local law enforcement and federal immigration officials, which hints at a straight transfer of biometric information. But as The Washington Post reported, the program actually depends on an agreement between the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security, meaning local jurisdictions have little control over where information they provide to one agency ends up. When fingerprints are submitted to the FBI to check for criminal records, they can be sent along to ICE without additional consent from local law enforcement agencies, an ICE official confirms.

This means opting out, at least in the sense local jurisdictions understood it, is impossible. All local police send fingerprints to states, which send it to the FBI for criminal background checks. The only way to withhold information from ICE under such a system would be to eliminate these checks entirely — something no jurisdiction has indicated it would be willing to do.

Local communities can only opt out of receiving information about why specific individuals needed to be detained; they cannot opt out of sending the fingerprints that could lead to their detention.

“That’s not really opting out because you’re still going to send a lot of people to ICE without due process,” said Angela Chan, an attorney with the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco. “‘Opt out’ means something much more: It means the information is never sent to ICE in the first place.”

Previous statements by government officials seem to back up that definition. Last month, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), chairwoman of a House subcommittee on immigration, sent a letter to the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security requesting clear instructions for the opt-out process, which she defined as “how local law enforcement agencies may opt out of Secure Communities by having the fingerprints they collect and submit to the [state identification bureaus] checked against criminal, but not immigration, databases.”

In his Sept. 8 response, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich quoted her definition of opting out, then listed instructions for how a local jurisdiction could remove itself from the “Secure Communities deployment plan.”

Napolitano also responded without correcting Lofgren’s definition of what “opt out” would mean. A month later, as communities began to vote to opt out, the message seems to have changed. Immigrant rights groups and local officials are baffled — and angry — after beginning an opt-out process Napolitano now claims does not exist.

“We definitely were led to believe that we could opt out,” said D.C. City Council member Jim Graham, who led the charge for the District to opt out of the program. “Our chief of police had been negotiating a memorandum of understanding with the FBI.”

In San Francisco County, officials say they plan to move forward with removing the county from the program. Sheriff Michael Hennessey has already notified officials his county would like to opt out of the program and plans to meet with ICE staff and the California attorney general’s office after the Nov. 2 elections. Still, he said, the constant confusion over the program is frustrating.

“Obfuscation and misdirection seem to be ICE’s preferred method of communication, because that is all we have been getting so far,” Hennessey said.

Although ICE has said it prioritizes criminal illegal immigrants for deportation — and does deport more criminal than non-criminal illegal immigrants — some critics express concern about those caught up in the system by Secure Communities. Anyone who is arrested has his fingerprints taken, even if he is not ultimately charged with a crime. Even victims of crimes such as domestic abuse can be fingerprinted, and critics of the program argue they might not come forward if they fear they could be deported by reporting their abusers. According to ICE data released in August, one-quarter of the illegal immigrants deported through Secure Communities had no criminal records.

Opting out is also an issue of cost, critics claim. Secure Communities nets a larger number of illegal immigrants than routine law enforcement, particularly in communities that instruct officers not to ask about immigration status. This means higher costs when ICE asks police to hold people for immigration violations, Chan said.

ICE officials say they routinely ask local police to hold suspected illegal immigrants and that Secure Communities does not change that process.

Still, immigrant rights advocates argue the program must be voluntary because it was not created by federal law. Since local law enforcement agencies are not given additional funding for the program, requiring them to participate amounts to an unfunded federal mandate, Chan said.

“Unless it is federally mandated by Congress, then it seems they have to make sure there is a real mechanism for opting out,” said said Margaret Huang, executive director of the Rights Working Group, who lobbied for Arlington to opt out of the program. “If ICE has created a program that cannot respond to jurisdictions that want to be removed, they need to fix the program so they can.”

Assistant United States Attorney John Durham is close to completing a preliminary review of whether there is evidence that CIA agents violated the law when they used brutal methods to interrogate terror detainees, Attorney General Eric Holder said in speech Thursday night.

Holder, speaking in a question and answer session after his remarks at the University of the District of Columbia Law School, said Durham is ”close to the end of the time that he needs and will be making some recommendations to me.”  Holder’s comments were his fullest status report to date on the one  of the Justice Department’s most politically sensitive inquiries.

The question Durham’s investigating is ostensibly a narrow one: whether CIA interrogators acted outside of what Holder called the “pretty far-out OLC opinions” that justified torture. But there’s some room of interpretation of those strictures. A recently declassified CIA inspector general’s report from 2004 found that interrogators used mock executions and death threats with power drills and other gruesome techniques on detainees not explicitly outlined in even those “far-out” opinions. But they were operating in the spirit of those opinions, and most definitely with the sanction of policy from the Bush administration. So how will Durham calibrate what’s in and out of sanctioned boundaries?

Perhaps more saliently, what will Holder do in response? Indicting CIA interrogators without indicting the policymakers who put them in positions to break the law doesn’t exactly resemble justice. But neither does declining to indict torturers, especially when the Obama administration is trying to promote a rules-based international order more generally. Adam Serwer has a good post about the domestic politics the already-demonized Holder has to manage:

Of course, if there are prosecutable cases, and Holder chooses to pursue any of them, the GOP will paint the whole effort as a witch hunt against the CIA. That point if view is likely to draw more attention than the opposite one from the left, which is that the investigation didn’t go far enough in that it did not include those administration officials who authorized torture to begin with.

Through the collection of  ”detailed medical information” from detainee interrogations that physicians and mental-health experts used to shape subsequent interrogation regimens, Physicians for Human Rights charges that medical personnel involved in the torture violated their professional ethics and long-standing legal restrictions on human experimentation. Those violations “could rise to the level of war crimes and crimes against humanity,” the group writes in its report. It calls for an “immediate criminal investigation” into its charges, as well as a host of oversight mechanisms to determine that no such biological experimentation continues.

Just months after 9/11, the CIA hired two psychologists with experience in a training program to help U.S. servicemembers survive enemy torture, known as SERE, to help design an interrogation program for hard-to-crack al-Qaeda detainees. Those psychologists, Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, set to work on a detainee in CIA custody, Abu Zubaydah, and under their guidance in the summer of 2002, Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. Their work contributed to the establishment of several other interrogation methods not permitted under decades-long understandings of the Geneva Conventions, like keeping a detainee’s body so painfully contorted as to prevent him from falling asleep.

Jim Risen of The New York Times has the CIA’s rebuttal:

“The report is just wrong,” said Paul Gimigliano, an agency spokesman. “The C.I.A. did not, as part of its past detention program, conduct human subject research on any detainee or group of detainees. The entire detention effort has been the subject of multiple, comprehensive reviews within our government, including by the Department of Justice.”

The National Religious Campaign Against Torture emailed reporters a statement on the report: ”These revelations are profoundly disturbing and raise for us the question of what more remains hidden.  The spiritual health of our nation will continue to suffer until the full truth opens a path to the justice and healing that our nation so desperately needs.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights calls on the Obama administration to certify that its new interrogation team, known as the HIG, does not engage in any similar human experimentation:

CCR also demands that the new intra-agency interrogation unit that was disclosed in February 2010 explain the nature of the “scientific research” it is conducting to improve the questioning of suspects. The current government may attempt to take advantage of ambiguity in Appendix M of the Army Field Manual, added by the Bush administration and left in place by the Obama administration, to justify the ongoing use of some “enhanced” interrogation techniques such as sleep deprivation in the new interrogation guidelines. Any ongoing unlawful human experimentation to “perfect” such techniques must immediately cease.

For more, see Jeff Kaye, who first disclosed the existence of Appendix M.

Update: Check out this video about the report:

“I have concerns about Clapper as a choice,” committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, told The Cable in an interview, saying that the widely expected nomination of Clapper, who now is under secretary of defense for intelligence, would give the military too much control of the intelligence community. “The best thing for intelligence is to have a civilian in charge. The elbows are less sharp.”

In a bit of irony that surely warms hearts at Langley, Feinstein’s choice for the nation’s top intelligence post is — wait for it — Leon Panetta, the CIA director whose nomination Feinstein initially fought hard to scuttle. I suppose you could be cute and suggest that Feinstein secretly just wants the bureaucratic meatgrinder that is the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to finally grind Panetta’s flesh and bones. But most likely she’s just been impressed by his job as CIA director.

And so has Kit Bond (R-Mo.), the committee’s GOP vice chairman. Rogin further reports that there’s no daylight between the committee leaders on who they want for Blair’s job. Panetta is “the only one who has the clout to make it work,” Bond told Rogin, “I have reservations about [Clapper] in that job.”

Does Clapper’s (possible, prospective, never official) candidacy survive public opposition from the leadership of the Senate committee that will have to approve him?

What might this mean in practice? Mazzetti:

General Petraeus’s September order is focused on intelligence gathering — by American troops, foreign businesspeople, academics or others — to identify militants and provide “persistent situational awareness,” while forging ties to local indigenous groups.

Petraeus’ spokesman declined comment. But if that’s faithfully reported, it sounds a lot like uniformed personnel could assume civilian cover for intelligence purposes. And that carries the non-trivial risk of unaffiliated businesspeople or academics or journalists or tourists in the Middle East or South Asia being presumed to be spies — and, hence, targets — by local security forces or extremists. Foreign allied governments in the region might also not like the U.S. sponsoring “local indigenous groups” that might destabilize their countries or threaten their rule.

Many of the murmurings I’ve heard from intelligence veterans have concerned the untenability of the DNI position, an intended fix to the old CIA-centric intelligence leadership that’s created an odd hybrid of management over 16 agencies without correlative budgetary authority and a perhaps naive distance from active intelligence operations. If people on TV are upset that a series of failed-but-attempted domestic terrorist attacks have happened on “Blair’s watch,” as I’ve heard more than one cable pundit say over the past 18 hours, they’re misunderstanding the DNI. S/he’s not supposed to prevent those attempts from happening. S/he’s supposed to organize, structure and resource the intelligence community so relevant agencies can prevent those attempts from happening. That’s why the Senate intelligence committee report that found a disorganized National Counterterrorism Center — something the DNI is responsible for — was damaging. What the DNI should also be doing is focusing the intelligence community around answering why these domestic terror attempts are happening, particularly using American citizens as operatives.

If that operational distance sounds untenable, that might be because five years of unhappy experience since the 9/11 Commission sought greater intelligence consolidation is prompting a re-think in intelligence circles. When I asked a veteran career intelligence officer with experience in various intel agencies what he made of Blair’s departure, the response I got back started with “Good!” Like several intelligence officers who serve out in the dangerous parts of the world, the prospect of an increasingly top-heavy bureaucracy distanced from field concerns is an unpleasant one.

“Blair’s biggest move was to try to grab turf from CIA over station chiefs, instead of doing serious work like developing a plan to better integrate [intelligence community] bureaucracies, where joint-minded personnel and promotion policies could create positive change. But that’s hard work and not sexy,” the intelligence officer emailed. “The current system creates bureaucrats whose focus is building their empire — more bodies, more money — all in the name of national security. His position was created to fix the intelligence bureaucratic failures, but growing bureaucracies to fix bureaucracies is a losing bet.”

In fairness to Blair, you can find an effort at “joint-minded personnel and promotion policies” — or, at the least, a commitment to the idea of them — in his August 2009 National Intelligence Strategy (PDF).

But don’t expect either the Obama administration or Congress to have any appetite for root-and-branch restructuring of the DNI position. That would be a major structural reform five years after the last major structural reform, and the national agenda is already too clogged to tolerate such a thing. Instead, expect the confirmation hearings of whoever ultimately replaces Blair to be a colloquy on what statutory changes are necessary to make the Office of the Director of National Intelligence a more coherent structure.

Whether that’s ultimately a laudable goal is up for debate. In 2007, a former senior intelligence analyst, Robert Hutchings, testified to Congress that the creation of the DNI itself reflected what he called a “Coordination Myth” about intelligence. That myth, he said, was

that it is somehow possible to “coordinate” the work of hundreds of thousands of people across dozens of agencies operating in nearly every country of the world. Anyone who has worked in complex organizations knows, or should know, that it is possible to coordinate only a few select activities and that there are always tradeoffs, because every time you coordinate some activities you are simultaneously weakening coordination among others. To cite just one example, the creation of the National Counterterrorism Center may have enhanced interagency coordination among terrorist operators, which is a good thing, but it has surely weakened coordination between them and the country and regional experts. The net result is that the Intelligence Community is probably stronger in tactical counter- terrorist coordination but is surely weaker in strategic counterterrorism. While we are looking for the next car bomb, we may be missing the next generation of terrorist threats.

Anyone observing the current debates over drone strikes, increased radicalization and their relationship surely recognizes the current relevance of Hutchings’ fear. When I asked him what he thought about the next DNI, he quipped, “Please quash those burgeoning rumors that I will be tapped.”

The full statement is after the jump.

The Intelligence Community (IC) fully supported the Senate Intelligence Committee’s review of IC information and procedures prior to the attempted bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

Immediately following the attempted attack, Director Blair initiated reviews to identify IC-wide shortcomings and potential solutions. The findings of these reviews identified many of the same systemic problems noted in today’s SSCI report.

As a result of the ODNI’s internal review and the President’s January 7 directive, the IC has undertaken certain corrective actions to address these shortcomings. Specifically:

The DNI clarified roles and responsibilities among the IC’s counterterrorism functions, ensuring that any stream of threat reporting receives follow-through to its conclusion;
The establishment of a dedicated analytic element at NCTC to thoroughly and exhaustively pursue terrorist threat threads, including identifying appropriate follow-up actions by other intelligence and law enforcement organizations, and increasing the number of personnel resources dedicated to enhancing the records of information on individuals contained in the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment or TIDE;
Renewed efforts to integrate disparate data and information systems to make data more discoverable/accessible by analysts IC-wide; and
Investments in education and training, which will provide counterterrorism analysts with a career-long curriculum to facilitate integration, collaboration, and tradecraft improvements.

In light of the recent Times Square bombing attempt, Director Blair noted that, “The Intelligence Community is aggressively focused on potential threats, especially new tactics by radicalized individuals. At the same time, institutional and technological barriers remain that prevent seamless sharing of information. We can and must outthink, outwork, and defeat our enemies. The Intelligence Community is absolutely committed to that goal.”