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Guantanamo and Hellfire By
Derek Henry Flood
The day following a
long-awaited military commission tribunal for a
defiant Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other
9/11-era al-Qaeda men finally got underway in a
courtroom in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on Saturday May
5, an armed drone operated by the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) hovered over a remote
area of southern Yemen's Shabwa governorate where
it honed in on a vehicle carrying Fahd al-Quso.
Quso has been described as a top al-Qaeda
leader in Yemen, being head of its "external
operations". It should be made clear that while
Quso was far from the most important leader among
Yemen's jihadis who are alleged to be led by Nasir
al-Wuhayshi, Osama bin Laden's former secretary in
Afghanistan, he was a
very symbolic figure as a
longtime al-Qaeda veteran.
Quso was once
known as the man who bungled his assignment on
October 12, 2000, when a small, explosives-laden
sea craft chugged toward the USS Cole in
the harbor of Aden. Quso was meant to film the
attack for a proto-propaganda film to have been
disseminated by al-Qaeda.
The attack went
off as planned, killing 17 American sailors and
injuring 39 more in the process, plus the two
suicide attackers.
Quso missed or skipped
his cue to film the massive explosion, but this
failure did little to harm his standing in an
evolving al-Qaeda.
Quso would come to
outlive much more visible men like al-Qaeda leader
Osama bin Laden and American-born al-Qaeda member
Anwar al-Awlaki - though only by so many months
under the deadly gaze of President Barack Obama's
weaponized, unmanned air force patrolling Yemen's
skies unfettered.
In the immediate
aftermath of Quso's demise, a story broke
regarding a foiled bomb plot in April similar to
the plot that failed in 2009. The plan to blow up
a US airliner is reported to have involved a bomb
without any metallic parts and a more advanced
version of the "underwear bomb" that failed to go
off on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit in
December 2009.
The story, first reported
by the Associated Press (AP), may have been
leaked, according to Republican New York
congressman Peter King. While giving no specifics
on the two incidents, King stated in a television
interview that the Quso assassination and the
April bomb plot were directly linked.
Few
details have emerged, but it is being reported
that it was a joint US-Saudi intelligence action,
including a double agent posing as a willing
suicide attacker, that led to information about
Quso's whereabouts in Shabwa.
The
infiltrator is described as being now well outside
of Yemen. This circumstance may be why the White
House asked AP to sit on the story for what was
possibly up to a week. This may have allowed time
for the informant to be extracted from Yemen or
the region entirely and to get the explosive
device in question to American soil for close
examination.
The events in Guantanamo and
Yemen represent differing paradigms in the "war on
terror".
The first primary wave of
suspects in this amorphous war included those
captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan and in
village raids conducted by the US military that
were at least partly based on faulty intelligence.
These men and teenagers were transferred to the
then makeshift prison facility at Guantanamo. [1]
The second primary wave was made up of
high-level al-Qaeda players hiding out in an array
of Pakistani cities in 2002 and 2003. These
included the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
his nephew Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali (aka Ammar
al-Baluchi), Walid bin Attash (aka Tawfiq bin
Attash - alternatively Tewfiq; "Khallad"), [2]
Ramzi Binalshibh and Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi.
These five detainees in the latter set are
widely believed to have been directly involved in
the planning, financing and logistics of 9/11,
with Walid bin Attash firmly crossing over into
the USS Cole attack in 2000 that he
coordinated on with Quso.
The alleged 9/11
conspirators were paraded into a facility
auspiciously named the Guantanamo Legal
Expeditionary Complex that was reportedly
completed at a cost of $12 million to the US
taxpayer.
Not only is Obama hamstrung from
closing down the infamous detention center during
his first term as he touted during his election
campaign, but as congress enacted legislation in
2010 to block the use of federal funds to transfer
these prisoners to the American mainland -
according to James G Connell III, defense lawyer
for Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali - Americans are married to
the tropical prison for the foreseeable future.
As these suspects have been in American
custody for nine or more years at the time of this
writing, the George W Bush-era legal and ethical
conundrum of Guantanamo Bay will not be
dissipating anytime soon at the present pace of
developments.
The current paradigm
concerning those involved in 9/11, the
Cole, or al-Qaeda generally is the
escalating tactic of simply killing those
perceived to be enemies of the United States and
their fellow travelers, this in the literal sense.
Fahd al-Quso was a recipient of this form
of justice and he will certainly not be the last
man to incur a Hellfire missile substituting for a
courtroom.
Quso served time in the
revolving door that is the Yemeni justice system.
He was detained and interrogated in the aftermath
to the Cole bombing. He was imprisoned
until 2003 when he escaped under curious
circumstances. He was recaptured by Yemeni
authorities who later sentenced him to up to 10
years incarceration in a September 2004 ruling.
He was released under the auspices of the
central government attempting make peace with
militants in 2007. After being let go, Quso wasted
little time in immersing himself once again in
militant activity. Subsequently, Quso rose through
the hierarchy of what would become al-Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). He was certainly not
AQAP's most senior leader, but maintained a high
degree of credibility within the organization due
to his early involvement and having survived until
the May 6 strike.
Though Obama had pledged
to American voters during the 2008 election cycle
to de-escalate some of his country's most
disastrous overseas boots-on-the-ground
engagements, he has not only ramped up the global
drone war but vastly expanded its scope.
Far from the Afghanistan-Pakistan and Iraq
war theaters, Obama has been busy obliterating
militants in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean
regions. Executive kill orders have replaced the
notion of capturing a suspect and "bringing them
to justice". Suspects are simply liquidated
without trial in far afield locales where
governance is either weak, as in the case of
Yemen, or non-existent, as in the case of Somalia.
The Pentagon's Special Operations Command
(SOCOM) became infatuated with the personalities
and doings of AQAP even as American soldiers were
actively engaging insurgent movements in
Afghanistan and Iraq.
Yemen is viewed as
an incubator of transnational terror plots with
AQAP being thought of as al-Qaeda central's most
potent franchise.
AQAP remains a shadowy
outfit whose inner workings are far from clear.
The group has withstood a number of drone
assassinations and has been able to take and hold
territory by making the most of Yemen's political
turmoil in the distant capital, Sana'a.
AQAP has been steadily fighting Yemeni
government forces for several years while
simultaneously orchestrating attacks far beyond
Yemen's southern reaches that it inhabits. AQAP
takes its inspiration from the 1990s-era Bin Laden
meme that infidels must be expelled from the
sacred lands of the Arabian Peninsula at any cost.
AQAP epitomizes the classic Bin Laden manifesto in
targeting both the "near enemy" and the "far
enemy" in its acts.
Given that the United
States or other external forces are not occupying
military or cultural powers in Yemen analogous to
International Security Assistance Force troops in
Afghanistan or Russian federal forces in the
Republic of Chechnya from the point of view of the
jihadis, AQAP may employ the concept of
takfir against their Yemeni and Saudi
enemies.
Takfir is the concept of
excommunication in Islamic jurisprudence that is
theoretically meant to be limited to use by
esteemed religious scholars and invoked only in
rare or extreme circumstances. These ad hoc
takfiri practitioners belonging to al-Qaeda
and its offshoots believe they are fit to deem
their nominal Muslim enemies apostates, thereby
legitimating them as targets of their jihad. AQAP
can use takfiri thought to justify its
actions against fellow Muslims in power in Sana'a
and Riyadh who cooperate with non-Muslim state
powers (ie the United States). In this realm of
thought, few are safe from their religio-political
violence.
The man with
bang Enter Ibrahim al-Asiri, the man
thought to be AQAP's explosive device innovator.
In August 2009, Ibrahim constructed a
small yet powerful suicide bomb rig to be used by
his brother Abdullah to carry out an assassination
against Saudi deputy interior minister Prince
Mohammed bin Nayef. Abdullah al-Asiri had
approached Nayef using a ruse that he wanted to be
rehabilitated from a life of militancy.
Nayef, in an act of naivete, allowed
Ibrahim's young brother to pass by his security
cordon unmolested. It was only by a twist of fate
that the prince survived the incident, walking
away with solely minor injuries. Ibrahim al-Asiri
would not emerge from obscurity, however, until
the Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab airliner bomb plot
in December 2009.
It seems highly unlikely
that the strategy of extrajudicial killings in
Yemen will serve long-term American strategic
interests in the region. Deciding these matters by
physically capturing and trying these suspects is
deemed a non-starter by the Obama administration,
judging by its increased use of drones as
instruments of foreign policy over the past two
years.
The fact that Quso was charged
though never tried and convicted in an American
court of law appears to be as irrelevant as the US
citizenship held by Awlaki and Samir Khan, the
editor of AQAP's English-language magazine Inspire
who were killed in a similar attack in September
2011.
Ibrahim al-Asiri, a former Saudi
chemistry student of whom relatively little is
actually known, has repeatedly been dubbed a
"mastermind".
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