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Kabul, Afghanistan,
4:00 in the morning.
As an American journalist,
I was used to filing stories in the middle of the night.
But there's always something eerie
driving through the deserted streets.
A city of 3 million-
barely a streetlight on.
It was a familiar routine:
Waiting for the crew to light up the night sky
so you could see something in the background.
But could we really see?
Well, Keith, greetings from Kabul, Afghanistan,
where the U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry...
This is a story about the seen
and the unseen...
And about things hidden in plain sight.
It's hard to say when this story began.
I'd been working as a war reporter
for more than a decade
in Yugoslavia, Iraq, and now Afghanistan.
After nearly ten years,
the war here wasn't exactly breaking news.
I think there's, like-
there's, like, eight rakes.
One, two, three...
We haven't been out here.
What's the name of this village out here?
Oh, I have no idea.
They all blend in for me.
Yeah.
What's the focus of your campaign here?
In southern Nangarhar,
we're dealing with the Ashkar-
Ashkael-
uh, Asherkeil tribe.
You know, the wording, uh, I'll get right
probably when we leave next year, but...
This was supposed to be the front line
in the war on terror.
From Kabul out on an exercise with the military
and back to Kabul,
the Afghan Press Corps was locked in a bubble.
We were told that the battle for hearts and minds
was being won
as soldiers dug wells
or drank tea with tribal elders.
But I knew I was missing the story.
There was another war,
hinted at in press conferences
and detailed in each morning's press release.
December 14th, Zabul Province,
a night raid.
Four Taliban killed,
three detained for questioning.
No civilians injured.
No one at NATO would give us anything more
than the lists of nighttime raids.
No one even seemed to know who was doing the raids.
And I wasn't going to find out if I stayed in Kabul.
POLICE HEADQUARTERS JALALABAD, AFGHANISTAN
This is the third raid in my district.
13 or 14 people have been killed in all.
They were innocent people.
So what you're saying
is that the Americans will come into a district
where you're the police commander,
and they won't inform you that they're gonna carry out
this kind of action in your district.
I've asked the American soldiers that come to my district.
But even the main NATO base here says
they don't know anything about the raids.
The troops came from another base.
So there's the two-
the two men in the guesthouse were the first people killed.
And then...
The farmer from here.
- Yeah. - And then another farmer.
Two. Two of his sons.
Two.
- Mm-hmm. - Two of his sons.
So there's, I think- so seven.
Or two-
- Two, two---four. One farmer---five.
Two these--- seven.
Two...
The Americans will say anything.
The Americans will say anything, everyone knows that.
If the Americans do this again,
we are ready to shed our blood fighting them.
We would rather die than sit by and do nothing.
The list of raids from NATO press releases
read like a map of a hidden war.
The military divided the roads in Afghanistan by color.
Green was safe.
Red was dangerous.
And black?
Don't even try it.
Most of the raids were happening
far beyond the green zone
in what the military called "denied areas"...
Places where journalists never show up
to ask questions.
NATO, the U.S. Embassy,
and my own better judgment
all advised against traveling there.
But I'd read about a raid in Gardez,
half a day's drive in Paktia Province.
I pushed as far as I could into the gray area
on the fraying edge of NATO's control,
past rusting Russian tanks
and bombed-out NATO supply convoys.
Two other journalists had been kidnapped on this road,
and after weeks
in the military's armored vehicles,
our Toyota felt thin-skinned and fragile.
I knew I had to be back in Kabul before sunset,
when the Taliban took control of the roads.
But I had no idea how far
my visit to Gardez would lead me.
GARDEZ PAKTIA PROVINCE
This is my son, and this is my son,
and this is my daughter-in-law,
and this is my granddaughter.
They killed them all on a single day.
Two of the women they killed were pregnant.
One was 5 months, the other was 4 months pregnant.
A child had been born in our home
and we had organized a party to celebrate.
We invited many guests and had music.
During the party, people were dancing
our traditional dance, the attan.
The American forces came between 3:30 and 4:00 am.
Daoud went to see what was happening.
He thought the Taliban had come.
They were already on the roof.
They shot Daoud as soon as he stepped outside.
All the children were shouting,
"Daoud is shot! Daoud is shot!"
We brought Daoud in here.
The women grabbed Zaher.
They told him not to go or he would be killed.
But they opened fire.
They killed three women, along with Zaher.
My wife, my sister, and my niece.
Look at these patched bullet holes.
Was Mr. Daoud killed immediately,
or did he live for a while after he was shot?
Daoud and my sister-in-law were alive until 7:00 am.
They didn't let us take them to the hospital.
The Americans used knives to dig the bullets out of their bodies.
They pulled out the bullets from their body.
You saw the U.S. Forces
take the bullets out of the body?
Ja.
They tied our hands and blindfolded us.
Two people grabbed us.
They pushed us one by one into the aircraft.
They flew us to another province.
To Paktika.
So he had just seen his wife killed by the American forces,
and then he himself was taken prisoner by the Americans.
What was going through his head when they took him?
My senses weren't working at all. I couldn't cry.
I was numb and didn't feel a thing.
I didn't eat for three days and nights.
My hands and clothes were caked with blood.
They didn't give us water to wash the blood away.
The interrogators had beards and didn't wear American uniforms.
They had big muscles. Sometimes they acted nice.
And sometimes they would shake us.
By the time I got home,
all our dead had already been buried.
Only my father and my brother were left at home. I didn't want to live anymore.
I wanted to wear a suicide jacket
and blow myself up among the Americans.
But my brother and my father wouldn't let me.
I wanted Jihad against the Americans.
MOHAMMED DAOUD 1:00 AM - FEBRUARY 12, 2010
MOHAMMED DAOUD 2:00 PM - FEBRUARY 12, 2010
The family had no idea
what led the Americans to their home.
MOHAMMED DAOUD POLICE COMMANDER, GARDEZ
They had long fought against the Taliban,
and Daoud was a police commander
who'd been through dozens of U.S. training programs.
This is my son, the Police Commander.
Was he Taliban?
They said they had information that 50 Taliban were here.
But they were all my relatives, and they worked for the government.
They killed my innocent sons, daughter, and daughter-in-law.
They had committed no sin and had no enemies.
As we prepared to leave,
Daoud's granddaughter spoke to us,
but only later would I know the meaning of her words.
Daoud's family told me it was time to go.
The sun sets early in the mountains,
and the night belongs to the Taliban.
The gunfire continued,
and it was now obvious how dangerous,
maybe even reckless the trip had been.
Mm-hmm.
NATO wasted no time issuing a report.
They claimed that the women killed in Gardez
were the victims of a Taliban honor killing,
bound and gagged
by their own murderous families.
You saw the U.S. Forces
take the bullets out of the body?
I believed the family,
but that wasn't enough
for me or anyone else.
[Speaking indistinctly]
Who were these men that stormed into Daoud's home?
And why would they go to such horrifying lengths
to cover up their actions?
Tamana. Who did the Americans kill?
They killed my grandfather...
...and Gulalai.
And they killed Agha Abdulnoor.
All right.
Ready? Yeah.
One, two, three.
Good morning.
The subcommittee will come to order.
The subject is national security.
HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE WASHINGTON, DC
If my esteemed friend,
the gentleman from Michigan,
wishes to continue with this hearing,
I think that's fine.
He is the chairman.
But next year,
when this committee is under new management,
we won't be looking at the calendar
of last year or two years ago.
Thank you.
Far from discussing the distant past,
I'd like to share with this committee
part of my investigation into deadly U.S. night raids...
Sensenbrenner walked out,
but no one else even bothered to show up...
Just Chairman Conyers and his staffers.
In closing, Mr. Ohairman, I told these families
that I'd bring their cases before the U.S. Congress
and ask that they be investigated
and that those responsible be held accountable.
On behalf of those families...
It didn't surprise me
that Washington wasn't interested in Gardez.
As an investigative reporter,
you rarely have people's attention.
More often than not, you work alone,
and the stories you labor over fall on deaf ears.
But sometimes a story strikes a nerve,
and you're thrown into the public arena.
It happened to me once before.
During its time in Iraq,
Blackwater has regularly engaged in firefights
and other deadly incidents...
It was 2007,
and I was reporting on Blackwater,
a shadowy mercenary company,
and suddenly it was front-page news.
A frequent contributor to The Nation magazine,
his new book is called Blackwater.
Jeremy Scahill, who authored the book Blackwater...
Who's come to us from London...
Joining me now is Jeremy Scahill.
I quickly discovered
that the world of talk show television
is less a meeting place for ideas
and more like a boxing ring.
That is hooey.
$700 million
for a colonial fortress in Pakistan.
The whole thing feels like a game.
But every time you step into the ring,
there's a chance your story can have an impact.
Journalists have done nothing
to hold the White House accountable now,
Chuck, or under Bush.
Let me get to the story-
- Why are you still alive?
Are you paranoid?
No, I'm serious. I'm serious.
I mean, it's an amazing book that you've written,
and I'm curious that- "Oh, that guy had a"-
"Remember that guy we did Maher with?"
"Oh, he's dead." "What happened?"
"He had an accident." I mean...
And here are the-
Residents are being picked up, abducted...
Congress wasn't going to investigate
the raid in Gardez.
And my Freedom of Information requests
were bounced all over the military,
ending up in an unnamed agency awaiting review.
I reached out to everyone I could in Washington-
the CIA, State Department,
former military officials-
but no one would speak openly about Gardez...
Until I met with General Hugh Shelton,
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs on 9/11.
GEN. HUGH SHELTON CHAIRMAN, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF
One incident that I looked into in Afghanistan,
where an Afghan police commander
and two pregnant women were killed-
but the question I wanted to ask you is,
in that kind of case- let's say that's true-
how would something like that be handled
or investigated or reviewed?
If they go flying in
and meet any kind of resistance at all-
I mean, shots are fired-
then I'm sorry if they got killed,
but they're in the wrong place at the wrong time,
and I don't think it ought to be investigated.
I think you write it off
as one of those damn acts of war.
But one of the victims was a senior police commander
who had been trained by the U.S.
And two of them were pregnant women.
Now, just 'cause he's a police chief-
he could've been a terrorist as well.
You know, he could've been working both sides,
so that piece of it, although it sounds bad-
but two pregnant women?
The fact that they were pregnant is very, very unfortunate,
but it's also unfortunate that they were women.
But on the other hand,
I've been shot at by women myself,
so that doesn't-
And I mean shot at.
That doesn't excuse 'em.
They die just like men do if they shoot at us, so...
Congress wasn't interested.
I was being stonewalled by the military.
And General Shelton told me
there should be no investigation.
KAIA AIRPORT KABUL, AFGHANISTAN
And back in Afghanistan,
the reporter who first broke the Gardez story
had been publicly attacked by NATO.
JEROME STARKEY TIMES OF LONDON
Yeah, we went to print on a Saturday.
By Saturday afternoon,
I was getting information
from other journalists in Kabul who are my friends
that NATO was briefing against me.
NATO was trying to discredit me,
trying to say that the story was inaccurate,
and effectively trying to kill it dead.
To my knowledge, that was the only time
that they've named a journalist
and sort of singled out a journalist so specifically
in a denial.
NATO accused Starkey of lying.
It could have been enough to end a journalist's career.
But information about Gardez kept leaking out.
A secret UN investigation confirmed
many of the details the family had told us,
and an Afghan police inquiry was under way.
MOHAMMED DAOUD
I didn't realize what the family was showing me.
It was just a grainy cell phone video
from the morning after the attack...
[indistinct conversation]
Until the voices began.
When I get to here...
Two Americans,
their hands visible for a moment
filming the corpses
while they piece together their version
of that night's killings.
NATO phoned me up, and they said,
"Jerome, we're just calling to let you know
"we're about to put out a press release.
We are changing our version of events."
They admitted that they were responsible
for killing the three women
and that the men they said were Taliban
were not, in fact, Taliban.
They admitted they'd got it wrong.
Again, they were hoping it was gonna go away.
Well, it wasn't.
Like yourselves, we set off very early one morning
from Kabul through Logar to Gardez...
When up rolls a huge convoy
of countless Afghan officers and soldiers.
And among them is a man
wearing a uniform that I recognize
as sort of U.S. Marines,
but it says U.S. Navy on his lapel.
But I didn't know who he was.
They off-loaded a sheep,
and three Afghan soldiers knelt on this sheep
in exactly the same place
where these soldiers had been when they started the raid.
They were offering to sacrifice the sheep.
The soldiers tried to stop Starkey's photographer,
Jeremy Kelly,
but the family insisted.
Otherwise, there'd be no evidence
that this extraordinary event occurred,
no proof of who the killers were.
Like so much about this war,
they would have remained unseen.
He said that, "My soldiers were responsible
for the deaths of these members of your family,"
and for that, he apologized.
I would not trade my sons for the entire kingdom of the United States.
America unleashes the Special Forces on us.
And the Special Forces beat and kill poor, innocent people.
These Special Forces with the beards did cruel, criminal things.
They all have beards.
We call them the American Taliban.
BROOKLYN, NY
I returned home
and tried to put the story of Gardez behind me.
But coming home is never easy.
I didn't want to admit it,
but life back home was dull
after being in a war zone.
Ordinary life was just that.
I tried to forget about Gardez
but couldn't.
We pulled everyone out, okay?
Now, at that point,
I'm watching what's going on here.
I see it all go down. Now...
The video was chilling,
but I couldn't see their faces.
All I had were images of their hands
and the sound of their voices.
Okay, the blood trail. This is it.
This is the last room.
This is where the engagement was.
He comes in here. There's-
There's a woman crying in the doorway.
None of these clues were supposed to exist-
the cell phone video,
the photos of the admiral and his sheep.
The killers were meant to disappear without a trace.
The family had called them "American Taliban."
But who were they,
these American soldiers with beards?
As a reporter, you learn that every story
has conflicting points of view.
You try to understand all of them
without letting your own get in the way.
But there was something about this story
and the way it was covered up.
The photo of the admiral had seemed to answer
our questions about the raid.
But the longer I looked at it,
the less sense it made.
I could read the name and rank,
but who was this man delivering the sheep?
Vice Admiral William McRaven
wasn't from NATO Headquarters in Kabul,
and he wasn't from the Eastern Regional Command
that owned that battle space.
I'd never seen the R01 insignia on his shoulder.
And it was hard to find mention of him in the press,
much less a photograph.
But I found an old DoD press briefing from 2008
that mentioned McRaven's nomination
to lead an obscure unit within the military
called JSOC,
the Joint Special Operations Command.
After more than a decade as a war reporter,
I thought I knew most of the players involved,
but I'd never heard of JSOC.
There was little official record,
but JSOC was formed in 1980
after the failed hostage rescue mission in Iran.
It was designed
as the most covert unit in the military
and the only one that reports directly to the White House.
So why would the President's elite force
be kicking down the doors on a family in Gardez?
I knew Gardez wasn't an isolated incident
and went back to NATO's daily press releases
with their lists of killed and captured.
I expected the list to be long,
but I had no idea how long.
Every week, the tempo of raids increased.
In the last three months,
there had been 1, 700 night raids in Afghanistan.
It was a staggering figure
and meant that stories like the one in Gardez
were unfolding nearly 20 times each night.
An endless list of raids
but not a single name.
I could see that Gardez was part of a bigger story-
much bigger.
But the very thought of it was overwhelming.
With 1, 700 raids,
who would compile the list of the dead?
The surge of night raids
was clearly changing the war in Afghanistan.
It didn't take long for JSOC's actions to ricochet.
Matthew Hoh has become the first U.S. official
to resign in protest over the Afghan war.
Hoh is a former marine who spent five months
working for the State Department in Afghanistan
and is, by all accounts, well-respected.
CPT. MATTHEW HOH FORMER STATE DEPT. OFFICIAL
A lot of times, yeah,
the right guys would get targeted,
and the right guys would get killed.
And then plenty of other times,
the wrong people would get killed,
sometimes innocent families.
And then that sets you back so far.
You know, nothing like going into a village
in the middle of the night, knocking a door down,
and, like, killing a woman or a child
to just undo everything that infantry battalion command
had been trying to do for, like, the last nine, ten months.
You were in a position
where you were trying to vet lists
to make sure that the wrong people
weren't being killed by these task forces.
Were there 500 people on this list, 1,000?
No, I can't- I can't tell you.
- Oh, you can't? - Yeah.
You can't tell me because...
I can't tell you 'cause I can't tell you that stuff.
- You can't talk about it? - Yeah.
I saw the list. I saw how big they are.
Yeah, everything else, yeah.
I mean, that's- I can't tell you.
I was just...
The Joint Special Operations Command
had never numbered more than a few thousand.
But under William McRaven,
Afghanistan had become JSOC's war.
How had such a small covert unit
taken over the largest conventional war
on the planet?
Andrew Exum had experienced the change firsthand
when he served as part
of McRaven's high value targeting campaign,
not in Afghanistan
but in Iraq.
He led a company of rangers in 2003
as part of JSOC's Iraq task force.
CPT. ANDREW EXUM 75TH RANGER REGIMENT
I watched the way things began to change.
You know, kind of the iron rule was,
you don't go anywhere unless you've got, you know,
a company of Army Rangers in reserve.
In 2003, nobody was in reserve.
I mean, people were hitting targets every single night
in a very dispersed way
and just-bam, bam, bam.
I mean, you remember the deck of cards.
We kind of had this poster of all these guys,
and we went out looking for them every night.
So we would, you know, kick down a door
and pull somebody out of their home
in the middle of the night,
and the next morning, you know,
people would be rioting in the streets.
I'm in!
Clear!
Come out!
On your fuckin' face.
On your face.
Yeah, I remember one night going out.
You know, we found out later
that we were on two-weeks-old intelligence.
Two Iraqis started shooting at us.
We killed them.
And, you know, we kind of realized later
that these guys were just out guarding the-
you know, the neighborhood generator.
Now, I didn't lose any sleep over it,
'cause these guys were shooting at me,
but, you know, you start thinking about it
from a strategic perspective- that's a loss.
You start out with a target list,
and maybe you got 50 guys on it;
maybe you got 200 guys on it.
But you can work your way through those 50 or 200 guys,
and then suddenly,
at the end of that target list,
you've now got a new target list
of, you know, 3,000 people on it.
And how did this grow?
What Exum told me about Iraq was a revelation.
I thought JSOC's rise had happened later
in Afghanistan.
I'd worked in Baghdad for years
and had written countless stories there,
many from the front lines of the war.
It was there that I first started reporting
for The Nation magazine.
But I'd never heard of JSOC.
The budget for the Joint Special Operations Command,
you can't get it through a FOIA request.
We've tried that.
I'd missed the most important story.
In Iraq, the U.S. had fundamentally changed
the way it fought war.
The real story, JSOC,
was hidden in the shadows,
out of sight.
What was hidden in the shadows right now?
...That I propose
represent a new direction from the last eight years.
What was I missing today?
We are embracing more oversight of our actions,
and we're narrowing our use of the state secrets privilege.
I discovered that, over the past decade,
a series of secret presidential orders
had given JSOC unprecedented authority.
The battlefield was expanded,
and JSOC could now hit at will
in countries beyond Iraq and Afghanistan.
I began to research strikes against al-Qaeda
outside the declared battlefields.
I looked for patterns among the lists.
And then I found one.
In December 2009,
five strikes with over 150 casualties
in a country without a declared war.
[Man singing in native language]
ADEN, YEMEN
Aden.
Yemen's ancient port city
was nothing like Kabul.
In Afghanistan, life was defined by the war.
Everything revolved around it.
But in Yemen, there was no war,
at least not officially.
The strikes seemed to have come out of the blue,
and most Yemenis were going about life as usual.
It was difficult to know where to start.
The Yemeni government claimed responsibility for the strikes,
saying they'd killed dozens of al-Qaeda operatives.
But it was unclear who the targets really were
or who was even responsible.
I arranged to meet the most powerful man
in southern Yemen,
Sheikh Saleh Bin Fareed.
SHEIKH SALEH BIN FAREED LEADER, AL-AULAQ TRIBE
When was the first time that you heard about
someone being al-Qaeda in that area?
How did you first hear of the strikes
that had happened on December 17th?
What was the news saying?
AL MAJALAH ABYAN PROVINCE
People saw the smoke and felt the earth shake.
They had never seen anything like it.
Iran to the area. I found scattered bodies
and injured women and children.
46 people were killed, including 5 pregnant women.
If they kill innocent children and call them al Qaeda,
then we are all al Qaeda.
If children are terrorists, then we are all terrorists.
At 6 am they were sleeping and I was making bread.
When the missiles exploded, I lost consciousness.
I didn't know what happened to my children, my daughter, my husband.
They all died.
Only I survived, along with this old man and my daughter.
Missiles attacked me.
And my brother Ibrahim.
And my mother.
Their hands were cut.
The echoes of Gardez were everywhere...
So many of the details repeating themselves.
But there was one important difference.
In Gardez, the American soldiers
went to obscene lengths to cover up the killings.
Here in al-Majalah,
despite the official denial,
they'd left their fingerprints strewn across the desert.
Why would they deny something so obvious
when anyone who visited the bomb site
would see the truth?
But maybe that was the point.
There was no declared war in Yemen.
Out here, in the middle of the desert,
no one was looking.
And the one local reporter investigating the bombing
had disappeared.
The decision to arrest me was made the day I exposed the cover-up
of the murder of women and children in Abyan.
The day I exposed those who sent cruise missiles to bedouin camps.
ABDULELAH HAIDER SHAYE YEMENI JOURNALIST
Abdulelah Haider Shaye had traveled to al-Majalah
immediately after the strike,
and his reporting sparked national outrage.
Soon after, his house was raided
by Yemen's American-trained counterterrorism forces.
Abdulelah was thrown in prison.
Posters demanding his return
were hung around the capital.
ABDULRAH MAN BARMAN ABDULELAH'S LAWYER
I met Abdulelah's lawyer at a teahouse
because his office was under attack.
They fired over 120 shells into my office.
And now we can't reach it
because the Republican Guard are deployed in the area.
In court, I noticed that one of Abdulelah's teeth had been pulled.
And another had been broken.
And he had scars on his chest.
My understanding was that President Ali Abdullah Saleh
was going to pardon Abdulelah Haider.
The president agreed to release him.
But that same day, the president got a call from Obama
expressing concern about Abdulelah's release.
I'd heard the story many times in Yemen-
President Obama personally intervening
to keep a respected Yemeni journalist in prison.
It sounded farfetched to me.
But then I found this
on the White House's own website,
a readout from a phone call
between Obama and the Yemeni president.
They badly misspelled Abdulelah's name,
but Obama's point was clear.
He wanted him kept in jail.
Al-Majalah was the first reported strike
inside Yemen in seven years.
It was clearly a U.S. Cruise missile
that struck the Bedouin camp.
Since there was no declared war in Yemen,
I knew the strike was either JSOC or the CIA.
And then I found this photo.
The U.S. would have never released it,
but Yemen's president posted it on his personal website-
a presidential meeting with an important American guest,
the head of the Joint Special Operations Command,
Admiral William McRaven.
Joining us now is Jeremy Scahill,
national security correspondent for The Nation magazine.
His latest article is all about
the U.S. relationship with Yemen.
Jeremy, thank you for joining us.
Thank you.
Back in New York,
I started writing stories about JSOC,
their rise to lead force in Afghanistan,
their covert strikes in Yemen,
and it felt as though
I had crossed an invisible tripwire.
The reality is that
U.S. counterterrorism obsession with Yemen
trumped concern for human rights.
- That's not true. - And it's-
Well, it is true. - It's not true.
Yup, back there.
Does the Pentagon have any comment
on a report in The Nation today?
And my question is-
- Yeah, I guess- I-I-
- The question is-
you keep denying covert operations.
Isn't this yet more evidence of one?
Okay.
Despite whatever conspiratorial theories
that, you know, magazines or broadcast outlets
may want to cook up,
there's nothing to it.
So, Jeremy, let me ask you,
have we been going into all of these countries
over the past decade with drone attacks,
dropping bombs in countries where we haven't declared war?
The lack of response from the major media
and the CIA and all the rest of it
suggests they're dismissing what you've done.
I receive a call, unprompted,
from a Captain James Kirby,
who is the spokesperson for Admiral Mike Mullen.
Calls me on my cell phone.
Wouldn't tell me how he got my cell phone number.
Wouldn't tell me who told him about the story.
This is hours from publication.
And told me that
if we published this story in The Nation
that I would be "on thin ice."
That was a direct quote.
And I said, "Well, I want to know
"how you heard about this story,
and I want to know how you got my number."
And he said, "Let's just say that I heard about it."
I wasn't sleeping well,
and insomnia fueled my anxiety.
My computer had been hacked
and part of my hard drive copied.
It was difficult not to feel a creeping sense of paranoia.
And then I got another strange phone call.
I had no idea why he called me
or how he got my number.
I thought it might be a setup.
Every story I worked on
seemed to trace back to JSOC.
And now, out of the blue,
someone from the inside was reaching out to me.
I had met operators before
in my research on Blackwater
but no one as close to the heart
of JSOC's covert operations.
He sent me photos of his DoD badges.
But I still couldn't help wondering,
was I investigating JSOC,
or were they investigating me?
Explain what JSOC is.
[Distorted voice]
What has JSOC been doing in Yemen?
Targeted killings inside the borders of Yemen?
Were there ways that JSOC was being used
that you found objectionable?
Torture?
So you're saying JSOC is able to hit harder
under President Obama
than they were under President Bush?
On my last day in Sana'a,
a file had been left for me at my hotel...
A leaked investigation into the strike of al-Majalah.
It included a list of the dead.
In Iraq, they had a deck of cards,
a list of 55 names.
But the cards were not enough.
New lists were needed.
Longer lists.
At the end of each list,
another and another,
an endless list of names.
In al-Majalah, the list numbered 46.
14 of the names were women.
21 were children.
Who were they trying to kill?
A week after al-Majalah, there was another strike.
And this time, the Yemeni government
issued a press release naming the intended targets,
but none of them had been killed.
For the first time, I had names on the kill list
of people who were still alive.
Two of them were publicly known leaders:
Shihiri and Waheshi.
But the last name gave me a chill:
Anwar al-Awlaki.
I knew the name,
but I couldn't believe I was seeing it here
on this list.
Awlaki was an American citizen.
The Christmas Day bombing attempt
has everybody on alert tonight.
Investigators connecting the dots,
and a key focus in the investigation
is a radical Islamic cleric.
That man is Anwar al-Awlaki,
an exiled American who was...
Just as I was investigating the expanding war in Yemen,
it seemed Awlaki's name was everywhere.
The War on Terror suddenly had a new face.
Radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki
may now be as grave a threat
as Osama bin Laden himself.
Awlaki, Holder says,
is a clear and present danger.
He's an extremely dangerous man.
Does the U.S. have a preference
in terms of al-Awlaki:
Dead, captured, or prosecuted?
Well, we certainly want to neutralize him,
and we will do whatever we can in order to do that.
An American was on the kill list.
It felt to me like we'd walked off a cliff.
Awlaki had been sentenced to death
without even being charged with a crime.
Awlaki's father filed a lawsuit
with the help of the Center for Constitutional Rights
and the ACLU.
He demanded that the government provide
whatever evidence they had against his son.
But the government refused.
They had ordered the assassination
of a U.S. citizen
but said the evidence itself was too dangerous
to be made public.
What kind of protections does this American have
against being assassinated by his own government?
Yeah, it almost sounds kind of funny
in an ironic way when you say that.
You know, you have the right not to be assassinated.
A bill was introduced in Congress
to ban the extrajudicial assassination of Americans,
but only six congressmen signed on.
And the people who should have known what was happening,
the members of the intelligence committees,
couldn't tell me anything.
When there is a lethal operation
and a high-value person is killed,
the president, of course, acknowledged that we killed-
- He can't- - Huh?
SEN. RON WYDEN SENATE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE
Has there been any legal review
of the potential for lethal operations
against American citizens?
- Not to our knowledge. - Is that classified?
It's important for the American people to know
when the President can kill an American citizen
and when they can't.
And yet it is almost as if there are two laws in America,
and the American people
would be extraordinarily surprised
if they could see the difference
between what they believe a law says
and how it has actually been interpreted in secret.
You're not permitted
to disclose that difference publicly.
That's correct.
I wasn't surprised when Washington
ignored the killings in Gardez.
But this was an American citizen.
The country was now targeting one of its own.
Even John Walker Lindh,
who'd taken up arms with the Taliban,
was given a trial.
What had Awlaki done?
And why was the U.S. willing to cross such a dangerous line
to have him killed?
I read everything I could about Awlaki.
It was obvious that he was an immensely popular preacher
with a large following
among young English-speaking Muslims
around the world.
On his blog, he openly praised
some of the attacks against the U.S.
But this in itself was clearly not a crime.
I spoke with former CIA and military officials.
PHIL GIRALDI CAREER CIA CASE OFFICER
They argued that Awlaki's speeches
were inspiring domestic terrorists.
EMILE NAKHLEH CIA POLITICAL ISLAM DMSION
There were a lot of words
COL. PATRICK LANG DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY from both Awlaki and the U.S. Government
but no concrete piece of evidence
LT. COL. ANTHONY SHAFFER CIA - LEADERSHIP TARGETING CELL that he was an operational figure
LT. COL. ANTHONY SHAFFER CIA - LEADERSHIP TARGETING CELL in any attacks.
I remembered seeing him on TV nearly a decade earlier,
just after 9/11.
ANWAR AL AWLAKI FALLS CHURCH, VA - 2001
And it was difficult to reconcile
the image of a new bin Laden
with Awlaki's earlier sermons condemning terrorism.
The fact that the U.S. has administered
the death and homicide of civilians in Iraq
does not justify the killing of one U.S. Civilian
in New York City or Washington, D.C.
For a short time, Awlaki seemed like the go-to imam
for journalists trying to understand
the experience of American Muslims
in the wake of the attacks.
He was even profiled by the Washington Post
for a piece about Ramadan.
After September 11th...
All of the feelings of the American Muslims
were similar to everybody else in America:
Feelings of sympathy
for the families of the victims
and a sense of...
That whoever did this needed to be brought to justice.
A decade after this video was filmed,
Awlaki had become Public Enemy Number One,
his name at the very top of the kill list.
It felt like the War on Terror was turning on itself.
I was now investigating
the planned assassination of a U.S. Citizen-
a watershed event.
SANA'A, YEMEN
For the first time,
I had the name of someone on the kill list
who had not yet been killed.
Anwar al-Awlaki was now a wanted man
hiding somewhere in the mountains of Yemen.
I knew I wouldn't be able
to speak with Awlaki directly...
But through a series of intermediaries,
I managed to set up a meeting with his father.
I expected him to be reluctant to speak about his son,
but he seemed happy to reminisce
about an earlier time.
Anwar was an all-American boy.
This is in Disneyland, you know,
in 1984, I think.
This is in San Diego when he was already an imam
with a big beard, you know.
At that time, he was asking Muslims to participate
in the democratic process in America.
In fact, during the presidential campaign of George Bush,
he thought the conservative Republicans
will be better than the liberal Democrats,
and he encouraged the Muslims there
to elect George Bush.
Didn't he even, at one point,
attend a luncheon at the Pentagon?
Yes.
You see, he liked America,
and he wanted to stay and really-his life in America,
but things came differently.
Can you explain to me why your son went into hiding?
After the incident of al-Majalah
and Anwar was all over the news,
the drones started to fly over Shabwah.
So, you know, Anwar was really concerned.
And so we took his family with us,
and he left to the mountains.
Hmm?
Myself, at this age in my life,
I really cannot ever replace,
you know, the role of my son
as he was doing for his family.
From my reading of the history of your son,
from his writing,
it seemed as though there was a transformation
that happened politically for him
from 9/11 to the invasion of Iraq.
Something started to change in his tone.
Yes.
Anwar became popular before September 11th
because his sermons and his tapes,
you know, were very popular
all over the English-speaking world.
And then the invasion came in 2003,
and they invaded Iraq and destroyed Iraq,
so Anwar really started
to be more vocal in his speeches
against what the Americans were doing
against Muslims all over the world.
There's no doubt that your son praised
some of the attacks against the U.S.
And for many Americans, it was enough to say,
"Anwar al-Awlaki is a terrorist."
But also, I want decent American lawyer
to tell me that it is right
for the United States government
to kill an American citizen
on the basis that he said something
against the United States or against American soldiers.
I mean, I-I don't understand.
I don't understand 100% the American Constitution,
but I don't believe American law will allow
the killing of an American citizen
because he said something against the United States.
Anwar's father may have been calling for justice
under American law,
but American drones were already flying overhead.
The fact that they were trying to kill an American citizen
was shocking enough.
But there was another reason Awlaki's story haunted me.
We are against evil,
and America as a whole
has turned into a nation of evil.
How can your conscience allow you to...
Awlaki seemed to have embraced the very identity
he once opposed:
The military jacket, the black flag,
the unequivocal call for armed jihad.
I specifically invite the youth
to either fight in the West
or join their brothers in the fronts of jihad.
The all-American boy was gone
and so was the moderate imam.
But why?
Awlaki was deeply affected by the War on Terror
both abroad and at home.
The day after September 11th,
a woman stumbled into his mosque in Virginia
after being beaten with a baseball bat.
More than 1,200 Muslims were detained
across the country.
You have Muslims who are locked up in jail
and are left to rot in there.
There are no charges brought against them.
What have you done for them?
Awlaki resigned from the mosque soon after
and left the country.
But the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq followed.
And, well, this is a new kind of-
a new kind of evil.
And this-this-this-this- this crusade...
Is gonna take a while.
Awlaki began to see the expanding wars
as part of a global attack against Islam,
and his sermons reflected a growing anger.
We are watching one Muslim nation fall after another,
and we're watching, sitting back,
doing nothing.
After 9/11,
Awlaki was put under surveillance,
detained at airports,
and repeatedly interrogated by the FBI.
When he returned to Yemen,
local officials arrested him on orders from Washington.
He was locked up for a year and a half
without charge
and spent 17 months in solitary confinement.
When he was finally released,
Awlaki was a changed man.
And after JSOC tried to kill him,
his transformation was complete.
Eventually came to the conclusion
that jihad against America is binding upon myself...
This is not a war of choice.
Just as it is binding on every other able Muslim.
This is a war of necessity.
They seemed like mirror images of one another,
strangely distorted,
America's wars
and Awlaki's words.
This will not be quick...
War against Islam and Muslim...
Nor easy.
Like a self-fulfilling prophecy,
the United States had helped create the very man
it was now trying to kill.
America was my home.
Those who attacked America on 9/11
are plotting to do so again.
Awlaki's journey,
from a voice of moderation to one of retribution,
cut to the heart of the larger story
I was investigating.
[Indistinct conversations]
Anybody...
Anybody belongs to al-Qaeda...
I'd seen the same pattern repeatedly.
America was trying to kill its way to victory.
Now got a new target list...
But the War on Terror was producing new enemies
wherever it spread.
How did this grow?
How does a war like that ever end?
Good evening.
Tonight, I can report to the American people
and to the world
that the United States has conducted an operation
that killed Osama bin Laden,
the leader of al-Qaeda.
Again, for those just joining us,
Osama bin Laden is dead,
and one confirmation we're getting
indicates that this is a special operations raid.
And I think an organization
we're gonna hear a lot about in the coming days
is JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command.
So much for secrecy.
So much for cover-ups.
The forces I'd been trying to unmask since Gardez
were suddenly national heroes.
The operation was called Neptune Spear.
To capture or kill bin Laden.
It felt like the world had turned upside down.
JSOC, long shrouded in secrecy,
was becoming a household name.
But what did it really mean?
The White House circulated a photo
from the night of the raid,
perhaps as a picture of transparency.
Everyone was in the room:
Secretary of State,
Secretary of Defense,
Vice President,
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs,
the President himself.
But it was the seating arrangement
that interested me.
The man at the head of the table
wasn't the commander in chief.
It was McRaven's assistant at JSOC,
General Webb.
McRaven himself was running the operation from Afghanistan.
USA! USA! USA! USA!
I wasn't mourning bin Laden's death,
but I wasn't celebrating either.
After ten years, I understood that people wanted closure.
But it didn't feel like V-E Day to me.
Didn't feel like victory at all.
The leader of al-Qaeda is dead,
but a new one has taken his place.
Your mission will be to ensure he meets the same end.
Hearing JSOC mentioned on television
was jolting enough,
but when I saw the admiral in front of the cameras,
it felt like I'd walked through the looking glass.
I am deeply honored that the President has nominated me
to serve as the next SOCOM commander.
And if confirmed...
William McRaven was now the toast of Washington.
Admiral McRaven,
by leading the mission that killed Osama bin Laden,
you and your men won an enduring place
in American military history.
Like all of my colleagues,
I salute you and your colleagues'
and the SEALs' extraordinary operations.
Thank you for your service. Thank you, sir.
When the congratulations subsided,
the senators turned to the real purpose of the hearings.
Are you prepared and capable to expand your operations
at a moment's notice worldwide?
As we look out from Iraq, Afghanistan,
and, frankly, across the globe,
as we look at hot spots in Yemen
where you have al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
or Somalia where you have East African al-Qaeda
and al-Shabaab,
now, these are clearly areas of concern...
People in the streets may have hoped
the War on Terror was finally over.
But in Washington,
in the corridors of power,
a new chapter had just begun.
Right now, it's kinetic. Hard kill.
If it's not hard kill, doesn't get played.
MALCOLM NANCE NAVAL INTELLIGENCE
Soon after the bin Laden strike,
I met Malcolm Nance,
a legend in the world of covert ops
who'd trained countless Navy SEALs
and other JSOC operators.
I'm a firm believer in targeted assassination.
If they are too strong for your ability
to negate their capacity in the battlefield,
then you're just gonna have to put a hellfire in.
If they're- if they are dangerous
on a strategic scale
like Anwar al-Awlaki from Yemen-
definitely has a missile in his future.
No longer cloaked in secrecy,
special ops seemed to be enjoying
their moment in the sun.
You know, we went in, we did the drone strike,
and-or hellfire strike,
and we blasted the individual car
of a known guy who was known to be in that vehicle.
And we flew in, and we snatched his body-
we confirmed it- got the intelligence, went away.
That's the way we should be doing it.
The first time we met,
he'd called me out of the blue.
This time, it was me who called.
JSOC may no longer have been a secret,
but that didn't mean we knew the truth.
But, in theory, Congress is supposed to have oversight
of these operations.
Bin Laden's death had given the War on Terror new life.
After 9/11, there were seven people on the kill list.
In Iraq, 55 on the deck of cards.
By Afghanistan, there were thousands.
But now the list itself was changing.
Signature strikes,
TADS,
crowd killing-
a target list was no longer needed
to justify a strike like al-Majalah.
All boys over the age of 15,
all men under the age of 70
were now fair game in targeted areas.
Like a flywheel,
the global War on Terror was spinning out of control.
When I began this story,
the U.S. was at war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The bombing in al-Majalah brought me to Yemen.
But the list of countries
where U.S. Special Forces were operating had grown,
just as the kill list had.
Algeria, Indonesia,
Thailand, Panama, Jordan-
the world was now a battlefield.
It was hard to know where to go next.
In Pakistan, the U.S. was launching weekly drone strikes.
In Mali, they were hunting al-Qaeda.
In Latin America, targeting drug cartels.
I decided to go to Somalia,
where an escalated kill/capture program
was under way.
Just as McRaven had testified,
the war was erupting in East Africa.
Drone strikes were increasing.
There were suicide bombings in Kampala and Mogadishu.
And JSOC was on the ground,
snatching bodies and flying them back to ships
in the Arabian Sea.
ADEN ADDE AIRPORT MOGADISHU, SOMALIA
Almost as soon as I arrived,
I sensed that things weren't going to go well.
Mogadishu was seeing its worst fighting in years,
and there were no foreign journalists left in the city.
My local contact, Bashir Osman,
was worried about my safety.
Okay?
It's okay.
All right.
It was a strange feeling,
traveling with a dozen armed men
in a decoy car.
I still had my reporter's notebook,
but what could I learn in conditions like these?
Before arriving in Somalia, I had read reports
that the U.S. was outsourcing the kill lists
to local warlords.
Among the most powerful in Mogadishu
was Yusuf Mohamed Siad,
known by everyone as Indha Adde,
"White Eyes."
GEN. INDHA ADDE US-BACKED SOMALI ARMY
In an earlier life, Indha Adde had been America's enemy,
offering protection to people on the U.S. kill list.
But the warlord had since changed sides.
He was now on the U.S. payroll
and assumed the title of general.
So he's saying that the fiercest fighting
that they're doing right now is happening right here.
Okay.
The men fired across the rooftops,
but it didn't make sense to me what we were doing here...
Or what the Americans were doing here in Somalia,
arming this warlord-turned-general
for what seemed like a senseless war.
We got to move.
So these were Shabaab fighters you buried here?
Yes, two, uh-huh.
If we capture foreign fighters alive, we bury them.
We kill them when we catch them.
If you capture a foreigner alive,
you execute them on the battlefield?
Yes.
So that other foreigners expect no mercy.
[Indistinct conversations]
How did the Americans find men like Indha Adde?
And to what end?
After a decade of covert war,
Somalia was in ruins.
Half the country was ruled
by the local al-Qaeda affiliate,
the other half by men like the general,
wandering the streets with an endless kill list
and a band of men.
[Indistinct conversations]
Every time we stopped,
people looked at us nervously,
and I was told that my very presence
was endangering them.
Bashir would insist we leave moments after we arrived.
Okay, we go.
I wanted to see beneath the surface of the war
to understand what it meant to ordinary Somalis.
[Indistinct conversations]
But I was passed from warlord to warlord
and soon realized the only people
I'd be able to meet were men with guns.
MOHAMMED QANYARE US-BACKED WARLORD
For years, Mohamed Qanyare
was Washington's man in Mogadishu.
His methods were extreme,
but Washington insisted Qanyare's services
were vital to their kill campaign.
Who were the people
that the Americans wanted your help tracking?
You don't want to talk about that.
Did they offer to fund any operations?
You don't want to comment on that.
But you're targeting people for the Americans.
And when these American operations
kill innocent people, what's the impact?
They're all being taken to Madina Hospital?
For over a decade,
JSOC and the CIA had free rein in Somalia.
All their tactics were on display-
drone strikes, night raids, mercenaries.
As the War on Terror entered a second decade,
Somalia seemed like a laboratory of the future,
and the future looked bleak.
KENYA-SOMALIA BORDER
I was ready to leave Somalia
and decided to call my editor.
But the news from home what not what I expected.
Anwar al-Awlaki was dead,
killed in a drone strike
authorized by the President himself.
Another name struck from the list.
I wanted to go home,
to be done with it all.
But I couldn't.
SANA'A, YEMEN
I got another call,
and this one left me stunned.
Two weeks after al-Awlaki's death,
the U.S. had launched another strike in Yemen.
Another American had been killed.
But this time, it was a teenage boy.
They had killed Anwar al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son,
Abdulrahman.
I returned to Sana'a,
but I wasn't sure why.
Was it to file another story?
To investigate another crime?
Or was it to apologize?
Abdulrahman left without telling us.
He said in a small note
that he's going to look for his father.
He left from the kitchen window,
and he took a bus to the governorate of Shabwah.
Then when his father was killed,
his grandmother told him,
"There is no use for you to stay anymore."
And he said, "Yes, I will come back in two days."
On the morning of October 15th,
we got a telephone call,
and they told us he was blown up to pieces
by the drone.
And they saw only the back of his hair.
You know, his relative, his cousin,
he knew his hair from the back,
and he recognize it, and he knew
that Abdulrahman really was dead.
But they could not recognize his face or anything else.
I always teased with him
about his, you know, big-
his hair, you know, that he should cut it,
because I thought that he should do that.
The drone had not just killed the boy,
it vanished him.
I asked to see photos of Abdulrahman
and suddenly realized why I was here.
It wasn't to investigate another death.
I wanted to see him when he was still alive.
[Indistinct conversations]
Abdulrahman's grandmother was in mourning
but sat down with me for a moment to talk.
What did Abdulrahman do?
Who ordered the killing of Abdulrahman?
He was sitting, having dinner with his friends.
How come he was killed?
What did he do?
You know, Abdulrahman was...
He was a very, very gentle boy,
and he never hurt anybody.
I tried to make sense of Abdulrahman's death.
His father's could at least be explained.
But a teenager with a Facebook page
and a group of adolescent friends,
why would his name have been put on the list?
What could he possibly have done?
The Americans said
Abdulrahman was collateral damage,
but they offered no explanation for the strike.
And unlike Gardez, they made no apology.
It seemed an impossible coincidence.
They killed the father
and then the son.
But maybe it was as simple as that.
Like a tale from Greek mythology,
Abdulrahman was killed not for what he'd done
but for who he might one day become...
A twisted logic,
a logic without end.
Nasser had lost his firstborn son
and his first grandson.
But what did we lose when the drone struck
Abdulrahman and his teenage friends?
When I first visited Gardez,
I had no idea where the story would lead me.
I didn't know just how much the world had changed...
Or how much the journey would change me.
But I realize now the story has no end.
Somehow, in front of our eyes,
undeclared wars have been launched
in countries across the globe,
foreigners and citizens alike assassinated
by presidential decree...
The War on Terror transformed
into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
How does a war like this ever end?
And what happens to us
when we finally see what's hidden in plain sight?
END
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