10/15/15 – Cora Currier – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show, and I got a big one at The Intercept, brand new out today, theintercept.com, the drone papers.
The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military's assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
The documents provided by a whistleblower offer an unprecedented glimpse into Obama's drone wars.
And one of the stories, at least here, I haven't had time to dig through it all yet, is by Cora Currier, our old friend from ProPublica, and now here she is at The Intercept.
Her piece is called The Kill Chain.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Cora?
Hi, Scott.
Thanks so much for having me.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
Good piece of work here.
Thank you.
Your job is basically parsing through the PowerPoints, huh, and figuring out exactly what's the chain of command on the intelligence and on the permission to wage the actual strikes.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
We actually had, I actually do have a second story in there.
There's one called Firing Blind, which is about the intelligence that goes into the strikes.
Oh, I see.
Yes, yes.
There it is.
Yeah.
But we've got, yeah, basically we had a, they both, both stories come from the same PowerPoint, which was a internal Pentagon study of operations in Yemen and Somalia between 2011, 2013.
And it's a pretty critical assessment internally of the resources and, you know, just some of the inherent limitations of the drone campaign in, in, in these countries.
Okay.
Well, give us some examples of those where they're, where you're saying this is sort of like a little bit of a, a self-criticism exercise inside the Pentagon going back over what they've been doing.
So what are the flaws that they point out?
Well, it's a self-criticism exercise in which they hope to, will end up with getting them more resources.
So the first thing that they point to is they say, we don't have enough equipment, we don't have enough drones, we're flying, we're having to fly manned planes.
One of the revelations was that there's a huge number of sorties by manned planes over Yemen, which I think is not something people appreciate when we talk about the drone program generally.
So they were saying, give us more drones, give us better drones because the cap, capacities that they had at that point to use high definition video, to collect cell phone communications via drone, like flying over targets and sucking up their communications.
They were saying that those weren't adequate and that they weren't, they didn't have the capabilities that they needed to build a full intelligence picture on the ground in Yemen or Somalia.
And of course that's disturbing because they were still killing hundreds of people over the course, during those years while they were admitting that they didn't have a lot of confidence in the intelligence that they were, and the amount of intelligence and the type of intelligence that they were, that they were able to get.
And well, and of course that's kind of self-serving, but it sounds like, you know, there's at least, you know, truth in their admissions, even though of course, as you're saying, they're spending it for better budget, better equipment, et cetera, like that.
But still important lessons in there.
Another of the interesting takeaways that they, and sort of disturbing takeaways from the study, is that they said that, a sort of blunt admission that there are very few captures.
Captures are basically non-existent.
And that the, there's this military doctrine called fine, fix, finish, which means you're looking for a target, you identify them, and then you finish them, right?
Which means kill or capture them.
And because there's virtually no capture happening in Yemen, very rarely in Somalia, that means that you're just killing people.
And when you're just killing people, you don't get any intelligence from them.
Now, of course, we saw the very, very dark side of what happens when you capture and interrogate people during the Bush years, but these documents, they're also a really frank assessment of some of the ramifications when you have no interrogation and no captures and you're just killing people and not generating any new intelligence on the ground.
And that was one of the main things in this brief, was the Pentagon advocating for more captures either by U.S. advanced special operations forces or by partners.
And of course, again, partner governments brings up a whole host of issues about human rights concerns and abuses.
Well, now, they had said before that, I guess, in the New York Times' Terror Tuesday piece from a few years back there, that, well, part of the decision making about whether to kill them with a drone or not was whether it was feasible for them to be captured.
And it seemed like they were trying to play down how easy it might be to actually arrest somebody in Yemen when, really, there was reason to think that, sure, you could.
And of course, we're talking about back before the whole war broke out and all of that there, that at least under the Saleh government, there were a lot of these that probably could have been arrests, but that at least was, I believe, what they had said before was part of the requirement that had to be fulfilled was that we really don't have the ability to ask the partner government to try to arrest them or to give us permission to send in people to grab them ourselves.
But I wondered, it always kind of seems suspicious that maybe that was just lip service and what they really meant was they just drone strike as many as they can because they don't really want to capture them and then be stuck with the question of what to do with them.
Yeah, it's definitely because, as I said, we have the horrific example of detention during the Bush years.
Certainly, Obama, I think, genuinely did not want to keep bringing people into Guantanamo, keep holding people in prisons elsewhere, and it did present this very thorny question for them, and I think it became easier just to kill.
And clearly, in Yemen, for a while you had Saleh, you had Hadi, who the U.S. felt they could work with.
Somalia now, I think, is kind of an interesting example because the government there is still not the strongest, but there is a semblance of a government and there's the African Union forces there, and there's more and more reporting on U.S. special operations working in Somalia, and they've talked publicly, special operations commanders, about using Somalia as this example where they're going to work alongside local forces.
So the military is clearly pushing for this, what they call, small footprint approach to war, but they also want to complement it with drones.
They basically want all the options, and what these papers show is that when you're just doing drone strikes, you're missing a huge part of the picture, but the options that they want also, in terms of a larger U.S. presence, are super thorny.
Yeah.
Well, and it means that, again, their intelligence ends up being just cell phone data or some vague kind of intercept and an interpretation, and very thin reads to hang death sentences on, but then they go ahead anyway.
Right.
One of the revelations in the documents is that the U.S. was relying on SIGINT, or signals intelligence, as you just said, intelligence from phones and other electronic communications, for more than half of their target development in Yemen and Somalia, but the documents also say very bluntly that this is an inferior form of intelligence, that it's not as timely, and that they need more human intelligence.
Yeah.
You know, when the Saudis bombed the wedding with, of course, American help in Yemen just a couple of weeks ago, I tweeted that out, and a veteran who follows me on Twitter responded, hey, same as it ever was, I remember one time we killed this guy and his wife right after their wedding, I think he said outside of Ramadi, and the poor bastard just had borrowed the wrong uncle's truck and cell phone, and, you know, I'll never forget the look on her face as we blew her away, you know, kind of thing.
You know, that's pretty shoddy intelligence, you know, which cell phone is coming from which truck, but, you know, I guess if you're talking about the CIA and the military in another country, I guess if you're talking about American cops, that might be good enough too, if they had the drones coming soon, but, yeah, anyway, can you stay with me for one more segment here, Cora?
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay, great.
All right, y'all, theintercept.com, huge scoop, multi-part series going on here thing, the drone papers, theintercept.com, we'll be right back with Cora Currier in just a sec.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton, it's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Wrapping up for the day, talking with Cora Currier from The Intercept, theintercept.com, they have a huge new multi-part special series based on a whole bunch of top secret documents, the drone papers.
All about the drone wars in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
And obviously I've had a chance to read, I read one of yours, one of the two that you wrote here, Cora, and none of the others, but I wonder about what all might be in there.
Like for example, I don't suppose that they have any very stunning admissions about why they killed Anwar al-Awlaki's son by any chance, do they?
No, actually one of the fascinating omissions, very telling omissions, about these documents is that there's almost no discussion of civilian casualties.
They talk about the need to avoid civilian casualties as kind of a limiting factor on drone strikes.
They definitely mention that the rules of engagement have to recall for low civilian casualties.
But at least as far as the Yemen and Somalia documents go, there's very little discussion of civilian casualties.
And this is actually the time period when Abdul Rahman was killed, so it's interesting and there was another very well documented strike in the fall of 2012 that killed a number of civilians, including a pregnant woman.
And none of that's in these documents.
This is again the internal military's positioning this campaign as being all about high value targets, all about senior operational people.
It actually gives the numbers of people that were on the kill list at a given time in June of 2012.
There were 16 targets authorized in Yemen and in Somalia there were four.
And during that year, 2012, I mean of course there could have been turnover on that list, but during that full year, 2012, there were dozens of strikes killing dozens of people, ostensibly all in pursuit of those same four people, of those 20 people.
There's another thing I wonder if whether it's in there is, I mean you say that they kind of mention that, yeah, it could be problematic, you know, something kind of thing.
But I wonder to what degree they explore that at all, because I'm reminded of the Meet the Press episode where David Gregory asked Leon Panetta, I was kind of surprised he asked him this on Meet the Press actually, but he said, you know, we're hearing a lot of reports coming out of Yemen saying that people are joining up al-Qaeda because we're bombing them with these drones.
And that's, you know, helping their recruitment.
So you know, I wonder, do you have a good way to count whether we're making more enemies than we're actually killing here?
And Panetta basically conceded and said, yeah, it's true.
But these are the tools we have, and so these are the tools we're going to continue to use.
What are you going to do?
Have me not use drones to kill these guys, Dave Gregory?
And Dave Gregory's like, jeez, I don't know, I guess you got to just keep doing it anyway.
And then that was it.
It seems like, you know, close enough for government work, right?
Sounds like their logic.
But I wonder whether they address that in these documents that, you know, we actually have a lot more targets than we did before.
And we wonder whether maybe it's the Hellfire missiles that are multiplying these guys.
That doesn't come up in the Pentagon study on Yemen and Somalia.
Again, they're like, you know, they talk a lot about the technical problems that they have, the resource issues that they have.
And they're sort of explaining why their operations aren't as fast as in Afghanistan.
And that's one of the sort of striking things about the study is that it's constantly kind of comparing operations in Somalia and Yemen to Afghanistan.
And you're like, well, okay, but we have, you know, a full-on war in Afghanistan.
We have thousands and thousands of troops.
And is that really what you're calling for in a place like Yemen?
And that was something that we heard from some of the military sources that we talked to on this.
We talked to General Michael Flynn, who was very influential in counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.
And he has been very critical of drone strikes, calling it kind of a, you know, saying you get one guy, then there's all this blowback, and what does it even matter that we got that one guy?
But the implicit alternative that he's offering is a hugely ramped up military presence in all of Afghanistan, and clearly that in Yemen or Somalia is not what we need either.
So you know, there's sort of a subtext of that, but it's not explicitly addressed.
We do have papers in this series.
There's a fantastic story by my colleague Ryan Devereaux called Manhunting in the Hindu Kush.
And that gets into quite some detail on Afghan campaigns and how some of these issues played out there.
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
So now, what did you learn that's new and important about the chain of command for, you know, from Obama, his top advisors on the ordering of the strikes, and what kind of actual responsibility he's taken himself?
Yeah, so there's an interesting slide in here that shows the chain of command for authorizing a strike, and they describe it as a two-step process.
They say that the first step is authorization, so they're sort of developing a target.
It passes up through the ranks of the military to the Secretary of Defense, then it passes to a council of advisors known as the National Security Principals Committee.
And actually, what we know from the other reporting is that it's actually the principals are all basically sort of cabinet heads, all the top White House advisors.
And then beneath them, they're deputies, they're second-in-commands.
And it was those committees that would do a lot of the agonizing over these targets and sort of debating them and seeing which were legal.
And then they would present during the time covered by the study, it was John Brennan who was super influential on these decisions.
He would bring the targets to the White House, to the president for the final authorization.
And then the second step, they call in the sort of jargon of the slide, is authorizing to actioning.
And that's actually giving the go-ahead for an actual strike.
And according to these documents, the president does not sign off on individual strikes.
Those require the military chain of command, the input from the ambassador and the CIA station chief in the country where the strike is going to take place, and supposedly the host nation.
So, you know, the government of Yemen or Somalia, as the case may be.
Well, so I don't know.
I mean, is there anything that's really, that's different than what we knew before about that?
Or it's just detail?
Or is there something surprising in there about the chain of command in any way?
Anything really notable about it?
I mean, the details is, it's just remarkable that this, you know, there's been all of this kind of off the record descriptions of this process.
There's been, I mean, when I was researching this article, I read just about every book that's come out about the drone war in the past couple of years, all the insider accounts.
And there's volumes and volumes of off the record officials talking about this process and who's in the room when.
And it's just unbelievable that this stuff is classified, like what the, that the sort of bureaucratic process for who makes these decisions needs to be kept like some, some major secret.
So it's just kind of stark to see it on paper in front of you.
And this issue of, you know, sort of who's making the call on actual individual strikes, I think is relevant in, in terms of, you know, sort of how commonplace they are and how seriously the White House takes them.
You know, we've heard that since 2013, since this study came out, the White House sort of tightened control over individual strikes even, and wanted the Pentagon to get permission for individual strikes.
And then now, so can you tell us a little bit about, you mentioned Ryan Devereaux's piece here, manhunting in the Hindu Kush.
That looks like a lot of fun.
And then, but what's this one, the life and death of Objective Peckham?
So this is another fascinating profile that's in the series.
Both the Ryans, Ryan Gallagher and Ryan Devereaux have done these amazing profiles.
And the Objective Peckham is the code name given in these documents for a Egyptian naturalized British citizen named Bilal ElBarjawi, who was killed in February 2012 by the U.S. soon after the U.K. stripped his citizenship from him.
So this has been a huge case in England over, you know, sort of the legality of stripping this guy's citizenship.
And this story, in addition to the documents that we had, which spell out in minute to minute the strike in which he was killed, Ryan also obtained a letter, a deposition basically that he gave to his lawyers in London, arguing whether or not he should, you know, arguing the stripping of his citizenship.
And so this is a huge amount of new material on a really controversial case involving not just the U.S. government, but also the U.K. and raising a lot of issues about the U.K.'s complicity in the U.S. program.
All right, Shell, well, that is Cora Currier.
She is at The Intercept, theintercept.com, the brand new multi-part thingamajig that just came out, the drone papers.
Thanks very much for your time.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks so much.
Hey, Al, Scott Horton here.
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