The administration's counterterrorism policies are leading to media censorship, refutation of basic rights and to more terrorism. The man responsible for these consequences should not become head of the CIA.

Today the Washington Post's homepage tries to sell this item as news:

The piece says:

President Obama’s plan to install his counterterrorism adviser as director of the CIA has opened the administration to new scrutiny over the targeted-killing policies it has fought to keep hidden from the public, as well as the existence of a previously secret drone base in Saudi Arabia.

… a 2011 attack that killed al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki, was carried out in part by CIA drones flown from a secret base in Saudi Arabia.

The Washington Post had refrained from disclosing the location at the request of the administration, which cited concern that exposing the facility would undermine operations against an al-Qaeda affiliate regarded as the network’s most potent threat to the United States, as well as potentially damage counterterrorism collaboration with Saudi Arabia.

The Post learned Tuesday night that another news organization was
planning to reveal the location of the base, effectively ending an
informal arrangement among several news organizations that had been
aware of the location for more than a year.

Moon of Alabama, unlike the self censoring Washington Post and other media, reveled that such a base is in Saudi Arabia in June 2011. Referring to a NYT piece we wrote:

Then this:

The Central Intelligence Agency is building a secret air
base in the Middle East to serve as a launching pad for strikes in Yemen
using armed drones, an American official said Tuesday.

The only plausible place for a base to strike in Yemen is Saudi Arabia. Sharurah would be a likely candidate.

Next to Yemen itself Saudi Arabia is the only country within reasonable flying distance to cover Yemen with drones. The Predator drones the U.S. uses have a combat radius of some 500+ miles. Flown from Sharurah, which already had a decent airport as is needed for the logistics, they can cover all of Yemen. If we could come to that conclusion others can certainly too. The censoring of that fact in U.S. media may hide it from the U.S. public but those who might think of attacking such a base will know where it is.

It is interesting to note that the most recent satellite pictures available via Google Map/Earth and Bing of Sharurah, Saudia-Arabia, are still from 2009, while those in other areas, for example nearby Seijun, Yemen, have been updated in 2010 and 2011 (twice). Are updates of sat pictures of Sharurah also censored?

In July 2011 a London Times piece confirmed our claim of a Saudi base:

The CIA has set up a network of secret drone bases in Arab states in a major intensification of its campaign against al-Qaeda militants in Yemen.

Sources in the Gulf say that the agency is now massed along Yemen’s borders, launching daily missions with unmanned Predator aircraft from bases in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Djibouti and the United Arab Emirates.

In September 2011 a Fox news report also confirmed our take that the base is in Saudi Arabia. But shortly after it came out that first report in U.S. media was censored and rewritten. Searching the web for "Obama Administration Building New Drone Bases in Horn of Africa, Saudi points to the original report on Fox news but also to copies of it on other sides. But the original report on Foxnews.com (though not its URL which still includes "Saudi") has since been changed as can be seen when comparing it to the first version still available, for example, at Foxnews.mobi.

The original headline "Obama Administration Building New Drone Bases in Horn of Africa, Saudi" has been changed to "Obama Administration Building New Drone Bases in Horn of Africa, Arabian Peninsula" and while the original version included this:

In addition to Seychelles and Ethiopia, the senior U.S. military official said the United States got permission to fly armed drones from Djibouti, and confirmed the construction of a new airstrip in Saudi Arabia.

"Operations in Saudi are (the) only new expansion to this plan. The rest has been working for over a year when we long ago realized danger from AQAP," the official said, describing the process as a "long-term deliberate effort where we used what we could (until) we got the locations we wanted."

The censored version reads:

As part of the expanded program, the senior U.S. military official said the United States got permission to fly armed drones from Djibouti, and confirmed the construction of a new airstrip in the Arabian Peninsula.

The official said that was the "only new expansion to this plan.

"The rest has been working for over a year when we long ago realized danger from AQAP," the official said, describing the process as a "long-term deliberate effort where we used what we could (until) we got the locations we wanted."

While Fox news confirmed our take on the location of the base, its report was later censored to hide the fact that it is in Saudi Arabia. Thus is the Orwellian censorship power of the U.S. government.

But that power goes even further. Lets return to the WaPo piece at the top. Referring to that lousy legal opinion that tries to justify killing people without due process WaPo writes:

The white paper, which was first reported by NBC News, concludes that the United States can lawfully kill one of its own citizens overseas if it determines that the person is a “senior, operational leader” of al-Qaeda or one of its affiliates and poses an imminent threat.
…
Within hours after Awlaki’s death in September 2011, White House officials described the U.S.-born cleric as “chief of external operations” for al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen, a designation they had not used publicly before the strike.

So it was only after some government lawyer opined that the president can kill Americans who are “senior, operational leader” of al-Qaeda and after Awlaki was killed that he was designated as such. Note that there is zero proof in the public that Awlaki was anything but an outspoken cleric who used his first amendment rights. And if Awlaki was not seen as “senior, operational leader” before September 2011 what was the justification for the failed attempt to kill him on May 5 2011?

It seems that the now emphasized “senior, operational leader” criteria in that White Paper is just obfuscation. Glenn Greenwald points out that there is no real limitation in what that "memo" defines:

The purported limitations on this power set forth in this memo, aside from being incredibly vague, can be easily discarded once the central theory of presidential power is embraced.

and

[Law professor Kevin John] Heller points out what I noted above: once you accept the memo's reasoning […] then there is no way coherent way to limit this power to places where capture is infeasible or to persons posing an "imminent" threat. The legal framework adopted by the memo means the president can kill anyone he claims is a member of al-Qaida regardless of where they are found or what they are doing.

So here is what we have. Censored or self-censoring media complying to administration requests to hide its operations, sheer limitless legal opinions not even fit for a kangaroo court that allow the president to do whatever he wants, new U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia even as the original reason (see 1990) for Bin Laden's jihad against the U.S. was the very existence of such U.S. military presence in that country.

Meanwhile the policies behind all this are, predictably, only creating more terrorists. As we asserted when writing about that base in Saudi Arabia:

There may be some troublesome folks living in Yemen but they do not seem to be many and are obviously incompetent and amateurish. Attacking those few while making sure that innocents will be killed will not create a more peaceful world. It will certainly incite more terrorism.

Eighteen month later Yemen scholar Gregory Johnson confirmed that prediction:

Testimonies from Qaeda fighters and interviews I and local journalists have conducted across Yemen attest to the centrality of civilian casualties in explaining Al Qaeda’s rapid growth there. The United States is killing women, children and members of key tribes. “Each time they kill a tribesman, they create more fighters for Al Qaeda,” one Yemeni explained to me over tea in Sana, the capital, last month. Another told CNN, after a failed strike, “I would not be surprised if a hundred tribesmen joined Al Qaeda as a result of the latest drone mistake.”

The drone campaign in Yemen, the growing "al-Qaeda" base there, the media censoring and those false law opinions are the outgrowth of simple minded policies of John Brennan, the president’s chief counterterrorism adviser. That man is now supposed to become chief of the CIA. I agree with Gregory Johnson that Brennan is indeed the wrong man for that position.