Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the “disposition matrix”.
According to the Washington Post, the matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshalled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations.
US officials told the paper the database was designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the “disposition” of suspects beyond the reach of American drones.
“Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al Qaeda continues to metastasise, some officials said no clear end is in sight,” the WP said.
“Meanwhile, a significant milestone looms: The number of militants and civilians killed in the drone campaign over the past 10 years will soon exceed 3,000 by certain estimates, surpassing the number of people al Qaeda killed in the September 11 attacks.”
The paper said officials acknowledged that the development of the matrix was part of a series of moves, in Washington and overseas, to embed counterterrorism tools into US policy for the long haul.
CIA Director David H Petraeus was pushing for an expansion of the agency’s fleet of armed drones, US officials said.
The developments were described by current and former officials from the White House and the Pentagon, as well as intelligence and counterterrorism agencies. Though the US operates multiple drone programmes, strikes against al Qaeda are carried out under secret lethal programmes involving the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).
The matrix was developed by the NCTC, under former director Michael Leiter, to augment those organisations’ separate but overlapping kill lists, officials said. They declined to disclose the identities of suspects on the matrix.
The officials described the matrix as a database in development, although its status was unclear. Some told WP it had not been implemented because it was too cumbersome, while others called it a “blueprint that could help the United States adapt to al Qaeda’s morphing structure” and its efforts to exploit turmoil across North Africa and the Middle East.
A year after Defence Secretary Leon E Panetta declared the core of al Qaeda near strategic defeat, officials see an array of emerging threats beyond Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia the three countries where almost all US drone strikes have occurred.
The creation of the matrix and the institutionalisation of kill or capture lists reflected a shift that was as psychological as it was strategic, the paper said.
“Obama approves the criteria for lists and signs off on drone strikes outside Pakistan, where decisions on when to fire are made by the director of the CIA,” WP said.
“For an administration that is the first to embrace targeted killing on a wide scale, officials seem confident that they have devised an approach that is so bureaucratically, legally and morally sound that future administrations will follow suit.” As Obama nears the end of his term, officials said the kill list in Pakistan had slipped to fewer than 10 al Qaeda targets, down from as many as two dozen. The agency now aims many of its Predator strikes at the Haqqani network, which has been blamed for attacks on US forces in Afghanistan.
