07/27/16 – Anthony Walker – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing Anthony Walker.
He is a veteran of the Afghan war, left the military honorably as a sergeant, and has now become something of an anti-war activist.
He's got an article we're running today on antiwar.com called The Ghosts of Direct Action.
And he has his own blog, which I'll urge you guys to check out.
It's called sciopguy.com.
Welcome to the show, Anthony.
How are you doing?
Yeah, I'm doing pretty good.
Thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you here.
Great article that you wrote.
Plenty to talk about there.
But first of all, are you running some sciop on me?
No, you know, I'm just, you know, a guy with a story and, you know, trying to get the word out there about, you know, things that happened over there.
All right.
So first of all, talk about, you know, your name, rank, and serial number, and the tours of duty you served, where and when.
And what exactly was your role as a psychological operations warrior?
Sure.
So I did four deployments, three in Afghanistan, one in Yemen.
And the thing about psychological operations is that your job changes a lot, depending on where you are sent and who you're supporting and that kind of thing.
So I did a couple embassy duties where I was supporting the U.S. Embassy.
That's what I did in Yemen.
And then I did tactical deployments.
So on tactical deployments, my job was to keep civilians away from the operations we were conducting, to keep civilians safe.
And then the second part of my job as a tactical sciopper was to conduct interrogations, to do what we call battlefield interrogation.
Okay, well, so first one first, then, I guess, separating civilians, that means dropping leaflets from helicopters saying, get out of town because the Marines are coming, that kind of thing?
Well, I mean, I was closer to it.
So we'd actually be out, you know, with a platoon conducting an operation.
And so, for example, what might happen is, you know, we're assaulting a compound, you know, there's explosions, there's stuff going on.
And people, you know, if we're in a somewhat of an urban area, people will actually come out and get involved, you know, and want to know, hey, you know, what's all the noise and are people being heard and this, you know, that kind of thing.
So I'd actually get on my loudspeaker, use an interpreter or use the Pashto that I memorize, you know, I memorized a lot of messages in Pashto, you know, and I would get out there and say, go back into your home, stay away, you know, this is not for you, you know, you'll be safe as long as you're in your home and that kind of thing.
And these are on night raids primarily?
Yeah, it was, you know, when I worked in Afghanistan for about a year, yeah, it was night raids.
I was doing, I was doing all, I was, I was living at night, I was working at night, you know, I'd wake up every day at, you know, one o'clock in the afternoon and my whole job would be nighttime stuff.
And then, so, I mean, I almost hate to ask this, but I guess that's why you're here when, when there's a night raid going on, I guess it's Rangers or, or other, you know, Delta or other special operations guys, I guess you say 2nd Ranger Battalion here, you mentioned in your article, these guys do their night raid, you're out there on a bullhorn saying everybody stay inside, nothing to see here, stay inside, you'll be safe, as you just said, something like that.
Was that really true?
How often did neighbors get involved and how often did, you know, innocent people get caught up in these raids?
I mean, assuming the guilt of the person being raided just for the sake of argument.
Right.
Well, you know, people would get out and get involved in operations a lot, you know, I mean, it just, you know, it really is human nature, you know, you hear something going on in your neighborhood and of course you're going to want to get out there and see what's going on.
And another thing, you know, we might have snipers climbing up on top of the roof of a home that we're not assaulting, but is adjacent to the compound we're assaulting, you know?
So if you got, you know, if you're not even living in the compound we're interested in, but there's someone on your roof with a gun, you know, of course you're gonna, you know, do something about it.
You're going to shoot at him or go outside and say, what the hell are you doing up on my roof?
And that kind of thing.
So, I mean, we were involved with civilians on the battlefield a lot.
And as far as, you know, how it really went down, you know, sometimes I would be able to do my job and I'd be able to get them out of the way.
And a lot of times they would just end up getting shot or getting harmed in some way simply because, you know, when you're a trained killer, you know, you see everybody as a threat, you know?
You don't think, oh, this is just a civilian, you think this is a person that's going to do something, you know, to kill me or hurt me.
So then, I mean, I guess, you know, it's hard to be specific about, you know, how it happens in general, but you're saying, I think it sounds like you're implying there people get shot when they come outside, even if they don't have an AK necessarily, they're not necessarily coming to join the fight on their neighbor's behalf, but just to see what's going on.
But to a ranger in the middle of a raid, hey, any Afghan coming in my peripheral vision is getting shot.
Forget it.
That kind of thing.
Yeah, I mean, that happens a lot, but I will have to say that it depends on who you're working with.
You know, it's, I don't like making broad generalizations because certain platoons were just the absolute epitome of surgical special operations force, you know, they would not harm anybody that didn't, you know, deserve it or that wasn't a bad guy.
They would get in there, you know, they would take prisoners.
They would only shoot if they had to.
And they would stay away from civilians and they would keep civilians safe.
But then, you know, I would work with another platoon and it would be, you know, a whole different story.
And, you know, someone might peek their head out of their compound to see what's going on and they're getting shot at.
Yeah.
And now, so when it comes to these night raids, do you have, I don't know if you ever had the firsthand information, but did you have a very good impression of how often they actually found the guy they were looking for and or killed the guy that they were looking for and or, you know, whether it made sense to be looking for the guy that they were after or whether, you know, because we hear these stories that basically whoever rats on the guy over the hill first wins, you know, and if you don't inform on your neighbor first, you know, like in the old Soviet Union, if you don't inform on your old neighbor first, they might inform on you first.
So that's who ends up getting raided is just average schmucks who were accused by other schmucks.
Well, in terms of who's getting raided, in my experience, and I think this goes for most of the operations that are conducted in Afghanistan, the decision to go after somebody is usually based on signals intelligence.
So it's based on an analysis of their call patterns and who they're talking to and who they're connected to via cell phones.
You know, human intelligence is really unreliable and, you know, we, I think out of over 100 raids, maybe one of them was based on human intelligence.
All the rest were based on signals intelligence.
And did the signals intelligence seem that much more accurate to you as far as, you know, the connections here?
Because we're all just six degrees from Kevin Bacon or whatever, right?
You know, it was accurate, but in my opinion, having, you know, gone in with the intelligence guys and sit there and see how they do what they do.
I just thought that it was, it seemed rather easy to get caught up in that dragnet of what would place you on a list of saying, this is a bad guy.
You know, so you might be in contact with somebody, you might be talking to somebody on the phone as an Afghan, and you don't really have any intention.
You're not trying to facilitate IEDs or really anything at all.
It just might be a friend or a family member, but that person would, you know, become, oh, well, maybe this is somebody we should go after, you know?
So I just thought it was really easy to kind of get caught up in that, you know, to be on that list of potential bad guys.
Well, and then you even have people who are in contact with this guy who's not necessarily part of the Taliban.
And now they're under suspicion, too, based on a maybe in the first place with this guy.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
I was just going to say, you know, the cultural aspect is really important, too, because, you know, if somebody in Afghanistan and Pashtun areas, if somebody comes and knocks on your door and says, hey, I need a place to stay, it's a deeply held, you know, value, cultural value that that person gets to stay, you know, that they would have a place to stay, you know, something to eat and that kind of thing.
So it's just a different culture.
And I know for a fact that we were raiding homes of people that were just distant family members or connected to the targeted individual in some way that were just fulfilling their cultural duty and were not intending to necessarily facilitate an insurgency.
Yeah, and then they they get caught up in prison and or shot, too.
Yeah, I mean, in the real, you know, the real danger is getting shot in a raid because when it comes to getting in prison, the the standards for that are really high.
And I mean, we would let guys go after a couple of weeks all the time.
I mean, it's really hard to keep someone in prison.
All right, well, so now let's talk a little bit more about that and your role in interrogation, I think I gather that your time in the embassy you're referring to there was when you were in Yemen and we talk about that later, but in interrogation, that was when you were in Afghanistan.
Yeah, interrogation was when I was in Afghanistan and when I was supporting JSOC direct action missions.
Mm hmm.
And then, well, so maybe you can, you know, clear something up, because what we've heard, of course, what's obviously a fact is they rewrote the Army Field Manual right after they changed the law to say that everybody back to the Army Field Manual with the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005.
They rewrote it.
And in Appendix M, they left in all kinds of temperature manipulation and sleep deprivation.
And I forget stress positions or not.
I think stress positions are still in there.
And and we've also had some some journalism over the time, although much less than we would like, about the Bagram prison, but also the wink, wink, nudge, nudge, elbow, elbow, secret Bagram prison that where less law applies, where maybe the CIA has more reign or maybe where higher value targets are kept and where Appendix M is applied to them.
So I just wonder, you know, if you can tell us anything about that.
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Sure.
So just to give you the layout here, what we're talking about, I'm at a in my experience, I was at a, you know, a task force.
So we're as close as you can be to the battlefield.
And we're actually going out there and getting these guys now.
Once they once they're arrested or detained and determined, OK, this is maybe a high value target or this is someone that is really interesting to coalition forces, then they'd get sent off somewhere else.
And that would be Bagram or whatever goes on up there.
But at my level, the interrogators were.
I'm.
Very restrained, I mean, they were not allowed to do anything that you might see in them in that field manual, they weren't allowed to do any kind of stress positions or anything like that, they were simply had to go in there and try to convince these guys to to divulge information based on their their manipulation skills, you know, how I'm going to, you know, what what kind of carrots and sticks I'm going to use to try to get this guy to talk.
But in my experience, it just seemed like you really they left some of that more reprehensible stuff to a small group of people that were empowered to do it.
And and again, I'm sorry, what years were you over there beginning and when?
This, let's see, it was August one deployment where I where I experienced most of the things we're talking about today was from August 2008 to August 2009.
So, yeah, certainly long after the Toguba report and the the a lot of the memos being repealed in the Supreme Court decisions, you know, Rasul and and Bomediene and all those things started coming down in the Bush years there.
So, well, that's good, at least that they didn't, you know, make you participate in any direct war crimes as far as that goes.
And then but so how did that go?
I mean, well, and this kind of goes back to what you said before.
And I know it's a figure of speech, but it's kind of important about who's a bad guy and who's not.
And and bad guy and Taliban end up being the same thing.
But not all the resistance were Taliban.
Right.
And I just wonder, even when it comes to the guys that you're actually after, how many of even these bad guys are just farmers who are trying to defend their land from foreign occupation?
And how many of them, you know, secretly worked for Mullah Omar all along or whatever it was?
Well, if we got to a targeted individual and found who we're looking for, typically that person was involved in making IEDs, involved in actually killing, you know, American soldiers.
It was just the people around him that would get caught up in, you know, it was just the people around him that would get caught up in the dragnet that tended to be.
Associates, family members, something like that, and they would be roughed up on the objective, you know, during interrogation might get roughed up.
They would get taken for a week or two for interrogation back at our base and then released.
And I point this out in my article, I think, if I remember correctly, they, you know, the being being taken.
Far from your home and held for a couple of weeks for an Afghan is a terrible situation because there's a lot of lawlessness and the family members back home, you know, have their crops destroyed or have their their, you know, things stolen.
A lot can happen.
So even though they were getting held for a couple of weeks and then released again, it brought a lot of damage to the families and to the, you know, to the household.
So that's those are the people that I really feel like, you know, deserve our attention to kind of look at and say, well, we might have gotten one target individual.
What about the four or five or six other guys that got beat up or that actually got shot or got taken away from their homes for a couple of weeks?
Yeah, well, and, you know, I guess the audience should know that and not that, you know, this ever happened before that someone tried to lie to us or anything.
But, you know, before this interview, I never knew you from Adam.
And so I asked for a little verification of of who you are and you sent me the the transcript from the joint services here from the military explaining your your record and all of that very in-depth and also two pictures that are very graphic that we did not publish at Antiwar.com today.
But that I guess I didn't put them in Google images, but I certainly have never seen them before.
And and one of them certainly maybe both are about exactly what you describe in the article of this one.
Is it a ranger who who cut a square piece out of this woman's neck for a trophy?
Yeah.
And that sounds like a lie, but I've seen the picture of where the skin used to be, at least.
And that's why I kept those pictures, because, you know, I knew that I would never be able to get people to believe me if I didn't have something to say.
Look at this stuff really happens, you know, and, you know, I'm glad I'm so glad that I that I can have something that's a testament to the things that I saw.
So, you know, I mean, part of this is it's the longest war in American history.
It's gone on so long.
I think, you know, most Americans probably don't even know that the war in Afghanistan is still going on because there's been a partisan interest in ignoring it for the last eight years on both sides, really, because the liberals don't want to criticize Obama for his surge and his escalation and all what he's doing.
And the conservatives, they don't want to give him credit.
So everybody's just kind of silent.
And the whole story, the whole story has slipped from the American imagination, I think, quite a bit.
But so, you know, I'm really glad to see that you've started writing and I hope you'll submit more of your articles to Antiwar.com as well, because you're a pretty decent writer, too, it seems like to me.
And it seems like you have quite a bit to tell people here.
But so as far as the audio version here goes, what do you want to tell people about the war in Afghanistan?
What do you want to tell people?
Bottom line, you have not just my listeners, but their friends and family who just walked into the room.
And this is your one chance to make them understand what you want them to understand about the war in Afghanistan.
Anthony.
I think what's most important to me that people understand is that no matter what you have, no matter what reason you have for going to war, once young boys that know nothing of the world outside of their little bubble, once they get into situations that the army, the military forces them into, they have to make decisions that no young man should ever have to make.
And terrible things happen, horror happens, murders happen, death happens, dislocation happens.
And it's always going to be like that in war is always going to be absurd and horrible and terrible.
And it doesn't matter what we do to try to make it not that way.
It's always going to be like that.
Yeah, I think people and, you know, we were all raised this way, right?
This is probably a big part of how you ended up in the army in the first place is we spend our entire youths watching football games and watching these fancy commercials for Aim High and Be All That You Can Be.
And we're looking for a few good men.
And war is basically like standing around in your dress uniform with a shiny silver sword, you know, strutting around and getting paid a lot of money and and prove that you're a real man, you know, as you make the transition to full adulthood and all of these things.
And but nobody's talking about what's it like to go on a night raid and kill somebody, somebody who, you know, maybe was just coming outside to see what was going on.
Because, I mean, obviously the victims in these cases are the victims.
But, you know, the kids shooting them, they're, in a sense, the victims, too.
We send them over there under the theory that in our democracy, the adults here would only send them off to war to fight for a real good reason, to kill people and risk their lives for a real good reason.
Instead, we got them going out on night raids for 16 years to no end whatsoever.
And now they're shooting the neighbor.
And then we wonder why they shoot themselves in the head when they come home.
And all they can do is remember that time they shot the neighbor, you know.
Right.
It's not fair, really.
We get we get stuck in this TV narrative.
We never have to grapple with what's the real war like.
Right.
So anyway, that's true.
I mean, it's it is what war has always been and it's never going to change.
So I just hope that as a as a country, as a world, we can we can take a look and say, look, it's not worth it.
You know, war is not worth it.
All right.
Well, listen, there's quite a few vets I've come across over the years who've decided that their way of dealing with what they, you know, learn and what they saw, what they experienced over there is to help others by telling the truth about it to them.
There's, you know, all different forms of counter recruitment from showing up at the high schools to writing essays, as you're doing now, to writing books, giving talks, forming groups, whatever you can do.
And when you say, hey, I was there and I was a veteran and I know this stuff that makes your word, you know, 10 times more credible than mine when you say it.
So, you know, it's very important what you're doing, Anthony.
I really appreciate it.
And I hope you do continue.
Yeah.
Thanks so much for for just giving me the chance to, you know, to get my story out there.
Well, you keep writing these articles and send them on.
All right.
Sounds good.
All right.
Thanks very much.
Appreciate it.
All right.
All right.
So that's Anthony Walker.
He did eight years in the U.S.
Army, was a sergeant, psychological operations specialist there, three tours in Afghanistan, one in Yemen.
This piece is at Antiwar.com today, original.antiwar.com, The Ghosts of Direct Action.
It's really a hard hitting piece.
I think you guys maybe could do your part to help make this thing viral for once and check out Anthony's great blog, too.
It's psyopguy.com, psyopguy.com.
All right, y'all, and that's The Scott Horton Show.
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