02/10/14 – Ryan Devereaux – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and despite all the stuff exploding in the world, really the biggest story is last today, and that is the launch of The Intercept, which is the first part of the First Look Media Project of the zillionaire Pierre Omidyar, and the one that I care about, the one put together by Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and Laura Poitras.
And on the line is Ryan Devereaux.
He's one of the journalists on the very short list to start out with The Intercept.
And he contributed to their first piece, the NSA's secret role in the U.S. assassination program.
It's at firstlook.org slash theintercept.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thank you for having me on.
Very happy to have you here, and very happy to see this project moving forward.
I'm sort of vicariously shaking in the boots of all the mainstream media people.
I read a hilarious hit piece on Glenn Greenwald today at the Daily Beast where he even has parentheses at the end of his accusation saying, actually, this isn't really right, and then moving on.
And anyway, I'm just having a great time seeing this.
The anticipation is as good as the journalism.
It's a lot of fun.
Thank you very much.
We appreciate that.
Thank you.
Yeah, yeah.
Good deal.
All right.
So, oh, and I have to add here how great it is that Marcy Wheeler is a part of this.
And I would have been amazed and disappointed if they had not brought her on board.
But that's how to make sure that all of your paragraphs are completely factually correct, is to have her look at them.
If you ask me, she's sort of the ultimate check on what especially these government documents really say, as you well know, of course.
Marcy's unreal.
She's a machine.
She can just crank out these articles every day.
They're so detail-packed.
It's a real honor and privilege to be working with her.
Yeah.
She put aside her modesty, which she is very modest, but she put aside for just a moment the other day to list, here's some of the stuff that I got right, that was later proved right, about the NSA.
These are not, you know, this isn't just, you know, great journalism she's done.
These are all the things where she's saying, you know, I bet we're going to later find out X, and then that's exactly what comes out later.
And the list is 20 long, and it's all the highest caliber stuff, of course.
This is incredible stuff.
So anyway, congratulations.
May you, you know, live long outside of the walls of Guantanamo Bay Prison and prosper in your journalism.
Great.
So now, let's talk about this piece.
It's the NSA's secret role in the U.S. assassination program.
Tell us first about your sourcing for this piece.
Well, so the story is really based on three sources, three separate sources.
Of course, there are the documents that former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked last year that Glenn has been reporting on for the last six, seven months or so.
So there's a number of documents there that contribute to the report that we published today.
And then there's a new source, a former analyst with the National Security Agency and a former drone operator with the military's elite Joint Special Operations Command who came forward to describe some of the programs that he was involved in and spoke under conditions of anonymity with us, sort of described the way in which the NSA works alongside Joint Special Operations Command and the Central Intelligence Agency to sort of track people for drone strikes and night raids around the world in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia.
And then our third source sort of backing up the other two is a young man named Brandon Bryant.
He's a former Air Force drone sensor operator.
He was in the Air Force for six years beginning in 2005, flew missions over Afghanistan, Iraq, and eventually Yemen, worked alongside conventional forces and then eventually worked alongside JSOC in Yemen in the hunt for Anwar al-Awlaki who got out shortly before the Central Intelligence Agency took over the hunt for al-Awlaki and killed him in September of 2011.
Bryant has sort of come forward as an outspoken critic of the United States' targeted killing policy.
So together, sort of put those three sources together, documents, certain documents, this NSA, JSOC guy, and Brandon sort of comments, sort of a picture of what the NSA's role in targeting killing around the world looks like.
So I'm really glad that I asked you that because I thought I had your three sources, but you've clarified, I believe, that other than the documents, your second source that you talked about there, the unnamed JSOC operator, that he himself was a former NSA, so he's both.
So he was giving you both sides of the picture, is that correct?
Exactly.
Yeah, really unique source.
You can sort of speak to both sides of this sort of equation.
Whereas with Brandon, I spent a good amount of time talking to Brandon, and he was very interesting because these programs are so compartmentalized, and Brandon, as the Air Force, what he called the stick monkey, basically the sensor operator is the guy who runs the cameras for a drone.
So he sort of shines the laser, if you will, on the target, and then someone else takes the shot.
But Brandon, again, we don't really have any idea who was providing the intelligence to his crew when he was working in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen, but this other source that we had had a very unique experience on the intelligence side of things as well as the Joint Special Operations Command.
It's really the most convenient sort of military command out there.
All right, so now the bottom line of the story really here is that there's a high demand for dead bodies at the hands of drone operators, so they've got to come up with lists of people to kill, and the way that they come up with the list is what?
Well, so what our story talks about is the way in which the National Security Agency has developed this technology for analyzing metadata and tracking cell phones, which basically allows them, with a device that's on the bottom of a drone, to track a person's cell phone within 30 feet of their actual location.
And what our source revealed, our NSA JSOC source revealed that was so disturbing about this technology is that he says that strikes are often taken when the sources of intelligence are only based on NSA electronic surveillance, so there isn't a human intelligence source confirming that the person on the receiving end of the drone strike is the person they're intending to target.
What he basically told us is that this technology confirms that you're shooting at the cell phone or the SIM card that you want.
You don't know who is holding that cell phone or SIM card, and he said in some cases you might know that you've got the target, but he participated in operations where the target was known to have been killed, but not the people surrounding it.
So our source's concerns are really that there's an over-reliance on this technology, and in the absence of human intelligence, the CIA and JSOC are launching missiles at people, sometimes without really knowing who they're firing at.
They're firing at pieces of technology, which is obviously a concerning development, and something that people who follow targeted killing operations in places like Pakistan and Yemen have sort of believed was going on for a long time, but we've never had the confirmation, the level of detail that the source and the civilian documents provided us.
Well, now, so it seems like this is one of those things where kind of anybody could know better if they were interested in trying to know better, because, you know, as everyone knows, human minds love to see patterns even where they're not really patterns, and we can come up with all kinds of explanations that seem to fit, that seem to make sense, and that's an okay way to find the truth.
Sometimes if you're willing to change your mind and admit that maybe you're wrong or something, but people can convince themselves of all kinds of things, and it sounds like basically what we have here is sort of an automated conspiracy theory program where the computer spits out, like, oh, yeah, you know, when you have a pattern of cell phones that talk to each other like these cell phones do, that usually means people that you should shoot missiles at, and then you have people who are deferring to the brilliance of the machine and its choosing, at least to a degree, and so then the technology kind of makes it all clean, but nobody really, I think you talk about in the article here that after they kill people, then they go back at least some of the time, and the New York Times talked about this back a couple years ago, and they do a posthumous review to see if maybe you were innocent.
Yeah.
Not that that's going to do you much good at that point.
It's incredibly backwards, and, you know, what was really interesting that our source told us was sort of familiar.
If you look at some of these other whistleblower cases, Chuck Manning, when he tried to raise concerns about the problems that he identified in the program, he was just sort of shut down, and was basically told that, you know, SIGINT, signals intelligence, never lies, and that JTOC wouldn't be spending, you know, millions of dollars to kill these people if they didn't know exactly who they were going after, but in his experience, as he described it to us, you know, he regularly saw situations in which there's no idea who was on the receiving end of the strike, just that the technology that they had been tracking was there.
Do you know, does anyone know the percentage, or at least what the government claims the percentages are of signature strikes, so-called signature strikes, where, well, he's a fighting-age male with a rifle, seems like, and he has a cell phone, and so, yeah, he must be the guy we're looking for, compared to ones where at least they claim they really do know who they're shooting, and that they have a reason to do so?
No, this would be a great thing to know, it would be a very helpful thing to know, and it would be a real step towards transparency if we had some sort of breakdown of the intelligence that fed into different strikes, but that just hasn't been the case with this administration when it comes to its targeting and killing policies.
A few months back, the White House, these two reports came out, these big human rights reports, one from the Human Rights Watch on strikes in Yemen, and another one on strikes in Pakistan by Amnesty International, these very detailed strikes that came at the same time that the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counterterrorism was giving his preliminary findings in an investigation he was doing on civilian casualties from drone strikes.
All of these things, a few months ago, and this is sort of talked about in a piece that we wrote, this is how Brandon came to address the United Nations, there was this confluence of activities surrounding targeting and killing.
There was a report, there was the United Nations preliminary findings, and at the time, the White House was under a lot of pressure to respond to these reports, and these allegations of civilian casualties had been really mounting for years, and what the White House said was that they maintain a list, a number, they have a number of civilian casualties that have resulted from U.S. drone strikes abroad, and that number is significantly lower than anything that has been publicly reported.
All right, I'm sorry, you've got to hold it right there.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Ryan Devereaux from The Intercept.
FirstLook.org slash The Intercept, the NSA's secret role in the U.S. assassination program.
This is the new piece, the first one.
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All right, all right.
Goddang commercial interrupted.
I'm talking with Ryan Devereaux.
He's a contributor to the first piece by Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept.
Brand new venture.
Firstlook.org slash The Intercept.
And the headline is the NSA's secret role in the U.S. assassination program.
And when the commercial interrupted, Ryan, you were explaining that the administration claims that the number of civilians killed in the drone wars is lower than tabulated by, I guess, the Bureau for Investigative Journalism or Human Rights Watch or even the New America Foundation.
Is that correct?
Exactly.
They say that the number is significantly lower than anything that's publicly available.
But they won't disclose what that number is, because that would create a risk to national security.
What's fascinating, though, is that at the time that they were saying that last year, it was sort of the same time that it looked like we might strike Syria over the chemical weapons attack.
And at that time, the administration was relying heavily on the same sort of human rights organizations that it was discrediting to build a case for intervention in Syria.
But then when it comes to being asked about civilian casualties as a result of the drone program, suddenly those same organizations became less than credible.
So to your sort of point about or your question as to whether or not we have any information that breaks down the different types of strikes that the United States is involved in, we just, the transparency on the part of this administration has been sorely lacking.
Right.
Well, you know, I think part of this really is sort of, and you guys talk about this in the piece, right, is this overconfidence in the mechanism here, basically.
And then since there's no built-in review process, there's no real reason to look back most of the time unless they get in trouble over a real bad one, like hitting a wedding or something like that, you know, real bad meaning one that gets a lot of publicity.
Yeah, yeah.
They just, but they have a lot of confidence in the brilliance of this thing.
And I remember, I believe this is the very same sort of story of Gareth Porter's work in Truthout that he won the Gellhorn Prize for about the Delta Force raids and the Navy SEAL raids in Afghanistan at the height of the surge under McChrystal and under David Petraeus there, that they're using the same kind of data.
And then there was even a whole lot of hype during the Iraq war, and Gareth Porter wrote about the same kind of thing in Iraq.
But there was a lot of hype about Bob Woodward saying, oh, their secret weapon, their secret weapon, and their secret weapon was this network science about your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate means there's a mark on your head.
And where that's ridiculous to everybody else, to them, it's, wow, look at what we discovered, that if you just do the math right, you can blame all kinds of people for things.
And that's the business there, man.
And so they just go with it, even though to someone on the outside, it starts looking really wacky.
Like you guys are just caught up in make-believe in a way.
And in fact, the numbers, I mean, that's what Gareth showed, is that the numbers of dead civilians in Afghanistan show that, that just like your local sheriff's department, they got the wrong house.
Well, you know what's fascinating?
I always think it's really interesting about this sort of issue, is that the president has acknowledged in his big counterterrorism speech last May, this sort of temptation that is inherent in this kind of technology, especially for a president.
But this seems like a very detached, clean way to do things, and obviously preferable to a ground invasion.
Of course, that's a sort of false dilemma that we could only have drone strikes or ground invasions.
But he seems, his administration seems to, at least in their public statements, acknowledge the temptation that exists with this technology, and yet they seem to have a really difficult time resisting it.
Or at least they have.
I should note that drone strikes did drop last year in Pakistan considerably, but they went up in Yemen.
So this program, it continues to go, it continues to roll on, and it will continue to roll on after this administration.
And that's something that people should be deeply concerned about, because there are precedents being set and precedents that have been set in the last several years with respect to these types of operations that could really open the door, as if they haven't already, for some absolutely egregious abuse of power.
Yeah, well, I'll let you, if you would, please go into detail about shenanigans and Gilgamesh, but let's just say they seem to fit with this other news story that I saw today about this police chief from the Midwest somewhere, Dayton, Ohio, told the Washington Post, yeah, I want, he's saying airplanes, but it could be drones or blimps or whatever, but ultimately implementing the Gorgon Stare, which is what they have been trying to implement, and they have different names for it, whatever, but total surveillance awareness over Afghanistan, that they want to bring these technologies here, and they'll always be able to point to a missing child or some other horrible thing as the justification for it, but we keep developing these kind of technologies, and we keep bringing them home, and that could be really problematic, especially the way they talk about it here.
Right, yeah, I mean, there's a whole industry for developing this sort of technology, there's a whole sort of world that's built around this sort of stuff that is all about creating, designing, selling, promoting this sort of technology, but the programs that you were referring to, Gilgamesh and shenanigans, are these geolocation systems that the NSA uses.
Gilgamesh is the NSA geolocation system, and then the CIA has a similar one that's called shenanigans, and basically the way that this works, technology that can be sort of acts as a fake cell phone data receiver, and it sort of stands in the middle, sort of man-in-the-middle attack, as they call it, that sweeps up all sorts of information from people's cell phones, and then this is the means by which a drone is able to hone in on a cell phone or a SIM card within a distance of 30 feet or so.
So it's really powerful technology, and of course what our source said, what he told us, is that in its implementation during their sort of training with Gilgamesh, a point is reinforced to them, and that is that this is not a science, but this is an art.
And that sort of told him that this is quite far from perfect, right?
This isn't the kind of thing these programs aren't always going to get you, the person that you want.
You have to kind of work with them and work around them.
And when we're talking about stuff that has weapons systems that have lethal potential, and we're talking about a standard that the administration has set that they are never going to take shots unless they're as certain as they can possibly be that civilians won't be harmed, then there are all sorts of concerns raised about something that's an art and not a science, particularly if there's not going to be human intelligence involved in confirming that you are actually pointing a missile at the person that you want to point it at.
One of the other things that I should mention that we found in our reporting was that as of May 2013, President Obama cleared 16 people in Yemen for targeting and five people in Somalia.
And according to our source, before a mission is greenlit, that is, before a missile is fired, there must be two sources of intelligence.
This is a really key point.
Both of those sources of intelligence can be electronic sources, so there doesn't have to be human intelligence.
But know that if that 60 days runs out, if they don't take a strike, then commanders have to go back and basically resubmit the pitch for the target and resubmit their evidence.
Our source of concern, what this sort of tells them, is that it places a pressure on commanders to take shots that might be risky because they could potentially feel that they might not get the shot again.
So it's supposed to be a fail-safe.
Maybe also get the people around him, too.
So it's supposed to be a fail-safe that these death warrants don't last forever.
You only got 60 days.
But what it ends up doing is it ends up encouraging the commanders to take shots that they might not necessarily take.
Maybe they would wait for more information, better confirmation about who this person is or what they're up to.
I was going to say, since this is all about their cell phones, won't they just, and I know they have a lack of translators, but still, I mean, is nobody trying to tap these phones and maybe they could try to verify that way?
They're like, yeah, no, I really heard this guy plotting to defend himself against an American attack somewhere or whatever the accusation is, you know?
Yeah.
Our source indicated that the tracking isn't based on the content of calls, which is really interesting and surprising.
Yeah, I'm just saying, why not?
I mean, if it's their cell phone that's got your interest, go ahead and tap that thing.
I mean, if we're talking, assuming we're talking about, you know, shooting Talibs in Afghanistan or something like that, well, go ahead and make sure that you got the right guy as best you can, no?
Or you don't want to waste a missile.
Yeah, true, missiles are expensive.
Well, maybe that's the problem, is they do want to waste the missile, you know?
Go ahead.
Yeah.
All right, yeah, these perverse incentives all over the place.
That 60-day rush is one of those things where it sounds good at first, but did anyone think it through?
And then you see what ends up being part of the consequences of that.
Yeah, I mean, it can really create a situation where it's a truly perverse incentive.
And then I'm sorry because we're damn near out of time.
We've got about half a minute, but I just want to point out that you guys talk about in the article here, Ryan, about how there are now more drone pilots being graduated than real fighter pilots, regular fighter pilots, and how this is, they compare it to the atom bomb.
This is changing the entire history of warfare for the world.
I just thought if they're pointing that out, it's worth pointing out that people should notice that, that this is a real revolution going on here, right?
Well, I mean, it is fascinating.
I mean, I tend to sometimes worry that there's a little bit too much emphasis on technology.
You know, drones, after all, are a system.
They're a platform.
They're a weapons system.
And what's really most important is the policies and the ways in which they're employed.
Granted, yeah, this stuff has changed the game, but what really matters is the way that policies are implemented and whether there's transparency and accountability.
Right.
All right, everybody.
That is Ryan Devereaux.
He's at The Intercept, firstlook.org, part of the brand-new project and part of the brand-new article with Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill.
He's a contributor to it, the NSA's secret role in the U.S. assassination program.
Congratulations on y'all's first piece.
Talk to you soon.
Thanks again.
Thanks a lot.
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Hey, Al Scott here.
Man, I had a chance to have an essay published in the book Why Peace, edited by Mark Gutman, but I didn't understand what an opportunity it was.
Boy, do I regret I didn't take it.
This compendium of thoughts by the greatest anti-war writers and activists of our generation will be remembered and studied long into the future.
You've got to get Why Peace.
You've got to read Why Peace.
It features articles by Harry Brown, Robert Naiman, Fred Bronfman, Dahlia Wasfy, Richard Cummings, Karen Gutowski, Butler Schaefer, Kathy Kelly, Robert Higgs, Anthony Gregory, and so many more.
Why Peace?
Because war is the health of everything wrong with our society.
Get Why Peace down at the bookshop or Amazon.com.
Just click the book in the right margin at ScottHorton.org.
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