Double Ambien tonight. I keep picturing all those bombed wedding parties I finally understand.
Remember in May when I promised you, we don’t use drone weapons unless there’s "near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured.”? I stand by that. I have never pulled the trigger on a drone or bomb attack where the certainty we were disrupting terrorism was less than 98%.
And nothing makes for more certainty than a finding by a computer. We have a very high tech system for confirming that terrorists are planning an attack — a system that leverages the fact that we’re recording every call on the continent.
We know they’re not going to talk about terrorism directly on the phone, if they use phones at all — they’re not stupid. Terrorists will use codes or slang. We caught them doing it one time — referring to a suicide attack plan as a “wedding” because the jihadis are supposed to join 72 virgins, that whole thing. Brennan and Clapper showed me how “chatter” is manually or automatically translated and then analyzed rigorously by computer for conversations about terror.
Still, after the latest holiday season drone massacre I just had to learn why so many local people say hundreds of civilians are dying in our carefully targeted drone attacks.
First, I learned that the software that finds the terrorists is classified and hard to audit, since the engineer who wrote it moved on long ago. No one had looked inside it since.
Tonight I learned that the only record in the “terrorist code/slang” database is the term “wedding party” — which I had watched Brennan type in when he and Clapper demoed it for me in 2009. It turns out they never found a “terrorist code/slang urban dictionary” they could type in, to fill it up with other terms after the demo.
So it turns out any time the NSA overhears multiple connected people in Yemen, Afghanistan or Pakistan talking about a wedding party, I get an urgent alert that a group of likely militants is planning something that matches 100% of the items in our classified terrorist chatter database. And almost always, I’ve been biting my lip and ordering a drone or ground attack to defend your safety against bad people.
A detail: in the audit I also learned there are technically 2 items in the database, but they are both “wedding party” — Bush had received the same demo in 2003.
Anyway, now we finally know:
• why 42 women, men and children were suddenly massacred at a wedding party in Mukaradeeb, Iraq, with General Kimmitt insisting they were a legitimate target (if a 100% score isn’t legitimate, what is?)
• why a wedding party of 63, including dozens of women and children, was wiped out at Wech Baghtu, Afghanistan
• why 47 Afghan civilians died in the Deh Bala wedding party
• why my Dec 12, 2013 drone strike killed 12 people and injured 14 others at a Yemen wedding party
I investigated and we finally know. In a way, the system works!
What now? Fire Brennan and Clapper? Take responsibility myself? What’s the upside, when no one would ever believe this unless I personally confirmed it anyway?
It’s a systems / computer glitch — a little like the computer that told President Johnson “raise the body count — before you've killed 3 million Vietnamese you will have won the war.” We mustn’t let it weaken my presidency.
What I’m realizing is, this kind of secrecy inherently means no real oversight and no accountability. Officially the drone program doesn’t even exist, and we got a judge to sign off on that before we killed Awlaki and his teenage son -- both US citizens who weren’t charged with anything. So there’s 3-branch, bipartisan consensus: classified crimes aren’t crimes. They can’t be prosecuted; only whistleblowers who reveal them can.
That’s the real reason an Abu Ghraib or a Wedding Party Bug can remain hidden for a decade, if it’s discovered at all.
I still can’t sleep, but I keep on, comforted I have your support.
I knew you’d understand.