04/30/15 – Andrew Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, Al Scott here.
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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show, and our first guest today is Andrew Coburn.
He's the Washington editor of Harper's Magazine, and he's the author of the book, Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy, and the new one, Kill Chain, The Rise of the High Tech Assassins.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
Good to be with you.
Good, good.
Good to have you back on the show, and let me page down on my list of tabs here.
I've got your Tom Dispatch article here, Andrew Coburn, How Assassinations Sold Drugs and Promoted Terrorism.
That one is at tomdispatch.com, and it's running under Tom's name at antiwar.com as well.
You know what?
This is as good a place to start as any, I guess, here.
Well, no.
Actually, I'd rather start with Chapter 1.
Let's talk about Chapter 1 of your book, Kill Chain.
These idiots blowing up a couple of trucks full of men, women, and children in Afghanistan, and the decision-making process there.
Was that much of a unique case beyond the body count, or is that pretty much how the drone war is waged, is basically boys playing with remote-control planes and killing people?
I'd say it was, in a way, a pretty ...
If you learn about that incident, read that chapter, you pretty got it.
You got it down on how the drone war operates.
I mean, very briefly, for anyone who hasn't read it, there was a drone high over Afghanistan middle of the night, and they're watching out for there's an American unit on the ground going into a village to kill someone, and they're sort of watching out, and they see actually three vehicles, two SUVs and a sort of pickup truck, proceeding along a mountain road, which were, in fact, full of poor people on their way to Kabul, hoping to look for work with their families, women, and children, and so the drones, they're sitting back in Nevada, and they see two of the vehicles flashing their headlights at a third, and they say, oh, that's suspicious.
It could be Taliban.
Then a bit later, as dawn's coming up, they see that they're heading toward where the American patrol is, so they say, oh, it's Taliban reinforcements coming to get the Americans.
Then they see the vehicles have stopped by a river bank, and as far as they came out, people seem to be getting out.
They can't, because the little secret of drone warfare is they don't see that well.
They see sort of blobs on the ground, and they think they're praying, and they say, oh, that's what Taliban do.
Actually, a hundred, a billion Muslims do it, too, but still, they say this is what Taliban do, so then they basically, everything else they see convinces them further that this is an enemy, and eventually, they don't actually fire the missiles themselves.
That's what the two special forces helicopters do, but they kill 23 men and children and wound several women, and it's really, you know, once you see how the whole thing worked with the more people talking to each other across the world and convincing each other, there's a very bizarre conversation where someone says, who's watching the same video somewhere else says, oh, I think I saw a child, and they say, oh, well, child, what are we talking, toddler or adolescent, and someone else says, well, an adolescent can be as old as 13, and they say, well, 13, that's a military-age male.
That could be a threat if he's got a weapon, so what, in fact, this was a toddler, six years old, suddenly gets translated into a 13-year-old kid who couldn't fire a gun, so he's slated for execution, too.
It's really, it's the way the whole thing works, I think.
And then, so, I guess what was exceptional about that one, it was so many innocent civilians died and right at a very precarious time when Stanley McChrystal was trying to implement the ridiculous coin strategy there and really lower down the civilian casualties and all that, so it was investigated, and the story was told that thoroughly.
That's basically what's unique about the situation, but as far as the process, yeah, this is how we do it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's, I mean, these, maybe these drone, I mean, the, if you look at the book, I mean, I have the transcripts of what the drone pilots were saying to each other, the drone crew, and it's pretty, you know, it's disgusting.
They're really keen, they're really looking to kill someone, they're really looking forward to it.
Maybe they're not, I hope they're not all like that, but they were certainly so in this case.
And actually, the general who investigated it was pretty shocked himself, I gotta say.
Right, yeah, you have some quotes from him about what he thought of their professionalism when it came to waging that war.
And now, so, but a big part underlying this whole story, too, is the illusion of precision here.
I mean, boy, are we talking space age fancy stuff, right?
And yet, it's, it really is just an illusion of precision, a way of basically loosening the rules, making it easier to kill innocent people instead of harder.
Well, that's right.
I mean, they have this whole now sort of, I don't know what you'd call it, sort of air sorts, almost an academic discipline of assassination.
You know, how they pick the people, you know, you can precisely locate, you know, the evil terrorist.
They used, and what they actually mean by that is they've, they follow their cell phones.
I mean, that's the big, that's been the major intelligence device of the war on, so-called war on terror, which is following people's, you know, being able to locate, you know, your cell phone and follow it, so they, wherever it goes.
And that all sounds great.
And they love it.
And they proudly boast about it, except I have a chapter in the book where I explain how they followed a cell phone, a bad cell phone, that belonged to a Taliban commander, and they tracked him, you know, all around the country.
And eventually, when the, they spotted the phone driving down a lowly mountain road with a, you know, in a big convoy, they, they killed it, came in and bombed it and, and, and killed the guy, except it was the wrong phone.
They got the numbers mixed up, and they killed a perfectly innocent guy who was actually out campaigning for parliament.
And he was in the papers every day, and he knew everyone.
So if they bothered to look at a newspaper instead of their fancy high-tech intelligence device, they might have figured they were following the wrong person.
Right.
Yeah, it's, it reminds me of that book, Technopoly, by Neil Postman, about, where he talks about how, you know, knowledge in, in all times, but especially now, knowledge is defined by the technology that you use to gain it.
So- Oh, yeah.
Very interesting.
Yeah.
You know, when you're watching a radio show or reading something, that kind of thing, there's a, there's a difference there.
But when it comes to all this high-tech stuff, like you're saying, you could read a newspaper, which is, you know, 14th century or 15th century tech or whatever, right, and know more and have better quality of information.
That's in fact what it says in chapter one there, was they had one special forces guy who'd been there for a few years in Afghanistan say that you got to have somebody who has some experience with the place.
He's got to have, you know, instead, you got 17-year-old kids who are doing all the deciding, who have no context, no, no real understanding or, or, you know, much less wisdom of, you know, about the situation.
They have only data points.
Exactly so.
And I, you know, that's really, if there's just an underlying theme to the whole book, that's it.
That the more and more we or they, you know, are fighting wars, you know, through, through a video screen and they, they think there's the illusion because you can sort of see things up close, you know, or seem to be up close, even though you're 12,000 miles away, you're like, you're really in touch.
You really know what's going on.
But of course you don't, you know, I have a story in the book about a, there was a battle in Afghanistan a few years ago where there was some American troops who were in, were sort of basically trapped on top of a mountain.
And there was a guy on the ground who understood what was happening and he had good communications and he'd been there for a while and he knew what to do, but there was a drone overhead.
So they, the headquarters of this unit would, who were 1000 miles away, not in, in, in the, somewhere in the Persian Gulf.
They said, no, no, no, we're in touch week, we can see what's going on because we're watching the drone picture and we can, you know, we'll run the battle, which they did with disastrous consequences and a lot of people got killed.
Yep.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry.
Music and the heartbreaks interrupted us here, but we can pick it up on the other side right there on the other side of this break.
It's Andrew Coburn, author of the new book, kill chain, the rise of the high tech assassins.
Find them at tomdispatch.com and harpers.org too.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show.
Scott Horton show.
Scott Horton.org for all the old ones.
Lots and lots of old ones.
All right.
Talking with Andrew Coburn, author of Kill Chain, the rise of the high tech assassins.
And so we're talking about the substitution of data for knowledge.
And you were in the middle of telling an anecdote about a specific battle where they had a real experienced special forces guy on the ground and he was and his, you know, knowledge based decision making was overruled by the guys with all the bells and whistles back at the office.
And it's been like this.
And this is, I think, chapter two of your book is about Vietnam, too, is it's really been like this, maybe in waves, not not steadily the whole time.
I'm not sure.
But since Robert McNamara and all the whiz kids in their mainframes and all the all the very sophisticated geometric patterns that they had figured out, they were going to win them the war in Vietnam.
Huh?
Well, that's right.
You know, I mean, there's two reasons for that.
One is, you know, they love the whole, you know, predisposition towards high tech and so-called high technology that that all.
That really makes people a lot of money.
I mean, in that Vietnam chapter, I point out that this was all of a great benefit to to the IBM Corporation.
And what it basically consisted of was they had the idea was they had sensors littering.
They littered the jungle of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which was supplying the, you know, the North Vietnamese forces and Viet Cong fighting in the South.
They littered the whole jungle with sensors that could hear people or sense movement or even smell their urine.
And these these would radio back the signals back to a giant IBM computer in in Thailand actually was the largest computer in the world at that time, which would then sort out the signals and say, oh, that's, you know, that's a North Vietnamese supply convoy.
And they're located here and would, you know, automatically send bombers to go and bomb them.
But it was a complete bust.
It didn't work at all, cost billions and billions and billions of dollars.
And, you know, 1972, half the North Vietnamese army sort of drove right past it and no one noticed because the Vietnamese figured out what was going on.
So but it did make a lot of money for a lot of contractors, which I think is really the basic impulse for all for all this.
And the second impulse is, you know, they really.
They want to cut, you know, cut out the human element.
I mean, the human element can like mutiny or decide this.
The war's a stupid idea, like, you know, like in Vietnam or, you know, generally cause the higher ups trouble.
So they like, you know, they really want to substitute robots as much as possible.
You know, I was thinking what Tom Englehart wrote, an introduction to probably a base of HSA or something one time where he just kind of rehearsed how easy Iraq was supposed to be and how, oh, yeah, we're going to have 56 bases forever and then we'll threaten Iran from there and this and that and it'll all be great.
And then.
But you know what?
Who minds failing?
Like you say, they can only fail up anyway.
More guns, more javelin missiles and more dividend checks for Lockheed stockholders and more shiny ribbons for all the military officers in their shiny Pentagon and all that.
Mm hmm.
So, yeah.
And hey, look, an ISIS to fight, you know, boy, we sure screwed up that last war bad.
Now we got a whole new one.
Exactly.
So, I mean, the, you know, the criminal blunders of all this is just amazing, but it makes no difference.
I mean, I, you know, throughout the book, throughout Kill Chain, I have examples, you know, where there's been a report saying this weapon doesn't work, you know, or they tested something like the original drone.
And they said the Predator drone, they said, well, this thing is it's basically legally blind.
I mean, it can't.
It fits the legal definition of blindness in drivers.
It made no difference.
They plowed ahead with it.
The later on, there's a thing they're still very proud of called Gorgon Stare, which can supposedly from a drone even put it mounted on a drone and it can watch a city or a large town anyway and see everything that's going on anywhere in that town down to a resolution of six inches.
And there was a unit tested it.
I got the test report.
They said this thing doesn't work at all.
I mean, it's completely useless and, you know, exactly so.
But it didn't make any difference.
They sent it off to Afghanistan.
They sort of hid it in Afghanistan, spent billions more dollars on it.
And keep making, still today, you'll find them making statements saying what a wonderful war winner it is, though we obviously lost the war.
Yeah.
You know, I've always for a very long time, I feared that, you know, if you want a vision of the future, it's the Gorgon Stare over every city in this country in the name of whatever, you know, I wouldn't worry.
I wouldn't worry too much about that.
Yeah, I know.
You're really putting my fears at ease here with this.
Oh, good news.
It's a government program.
It's not effective whatsoever.
Exactly fair.
Yeah.
It's not all bad news, my book.
Yeah.
All right.
So now, before the terror war, but after the Soviet Union and the Cold War, they had a stand in for a little while.
It was the drug kingpins of South America.
And in your article here at Tom Dispatch, you talk about the obsession with the decapitation strikes and assassination and and getting the very top bad guys and how, in fact, hey, you know, I guess as we could predict, maybe they're exactly failed methods from the drug wars of the 1990s were implemented in Afghanistan and Iraq is why they failed so badly.
Well, that's right.
But in the in the article and in the book, I explain, you know, that the how the drug war exercise was really, you know, really set the pattern because they had the DEA came up with this.
And it was a great way to expand their presence, their budget and so forth that they called the kingpin strategy where we're going to go after the kingpins, the the evil monsters who control them, you know, the big drug cartels that we used to hear about, which they did.
And actually, that bit worked quite well.
They you know, they did get this a lot of the big, you know, big cartel leaders and they killed them all, you know, jailed them for life.
And that's all fine, except that supplies of drugs, in this case, cocaine in this country went up.
If, you know, it's going to be a drug war, you might be reducing the drug supplies, right?
And they instead of which it had completely the opposite effect.
Every time they arrested or killed a cartel leader, the price of cocaine in this country went down and there was more around because for a very simple and obvious reason, you know, what cartels do is restrict, restrict supply and keep the price up.
So if you just, you know, if you dismantle the cartel, if you knock off the leader, then you get two would be leaders competing and they compete, you know, for market share.
So naturally, they supply more, bring in more stuff and, you know, therefore the price goes down.
It's exactly what happened.
Yeah.
And of course, then there's that much more violence because you have you've basically you haven't gotten rid of the kingpins.
You've just made a bunch of smaller kingpins who all now are at war with each other for who gets to be the next big kingpin.
Exactly.
I mean, just, you know, if you want to the guy who get all this out is kind of the hero in my book.
He said, you know what they should have done is said, OK, we'll have one cartel.
We'll support having just one cartel that we'll sort of work with.
And if they, you know, that guy will keep the price up and, you know, we won't arrest him and restrict supply and we'll all be better off or at least law enforcement would be better off.
Or you could just legalize it and let cocaine businessmen do their business.
It's not like the demand is ever going to go away.
And certainly not among the people in New York and D.C. who hold all the power in this country.
They probably do two thirds of all the coke in the whole land.
Well, I think.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I think that's right.
All right.
So and now we saw the same thing with the Iraq war where they would get the baddest of the IED makers and they would assassinate him and then he'd be replaced by, you know, a couple of wild guys who would do, you know, a much more severe job of putting that many more IEDs everywhere that they now have to prove themselves rather than take their time and pick their targets.
They're now, you know, killing more innocent civilians and et cetera, et cetera, just making everything worse, not better.
Exactly.
It's inevitable.
I mean, I don't know.
I mean, it's being you can see it's inevitable because this is what's happened.
I mean, what you're talking about, they actually did a study in Iraq in 2007 when they killed 200, you know, IED cell network leaders.
And actually, they looked at 200 cases where they'd done that.
And then they looked to see what happened then.
And they found that, you know, life got worse, you know, attacks on Americans went up by 40 percent immediately.
Yeah.
In fact, it's probably an article of yours that I was thinking of when I said all that.
Yeah.
It's in there.
It's in there.
There's a lot about it in the book.
Oh, well, see, I'm not that far into the book yet.
I'm only I got I got a few chapters of the book and a Tom Dispatch article knocked out.
I'm sorry.
It's been sitting on my pile here.
But I'm going to now that I've got you on, we're going to, you know, follow up in the next week and and then I will have finished reading it.
But it's, of course, great so far.
And I like the part about the folder gap.
You know, there's the missile gap in the mineshaft gap and the folder gap.
Oh, no.
They're coming for us across the folder gap.
And you have a great bit in here about how they tried to automate all of that.
And yeah.
And yeah.
Yeah.
That is working.
Yeah.
All right.
So hopefully we'll work this out for some time next week and finish up this great interview.
Thank you, Andrew.
Appreciate it.
Anytime.
Always a pleasure.
Thank you.
All right.
So that's a great Andrew Coburn.
The book is Kill Chain.
The rise of the high tech assassins.
And we'll be right back.
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