02/24/11 – Marcy Wheeler – The Scott Horton Show

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Welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio and our next guest is Marcy Wheeler, Empty Wheel, from firedoglake.com and the Huffington Post and the Guardian online and all over the place.
Welcome back to the show.
Marcy, how are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
This story of this guy Raymond Davis in Pakistan, apparently an American CIA agent who's been arrested on charges of murder of two men is causing the whole other side of the world to go crazy right now over there.
I saw footage of what I thought must be a scene from Egypt or something, but no, it was a massive protest in Pakistan about this specific case of this specific apparent CIA agent who's been arrested.
So it seems like, you know, it's an interesting thing to me, I guess, how with all that America has been doing in Pakistan over all this time, it seems like they have really seized on this particular case kind of as an example of what they've had to put up with and a chance for them to finally fight back if only, you know, in this case through murder charges.
But so anyway, before I keep going on, why don't you give us the background, basically, you know, the story here, and then we can talk about the further developments and his outing in the New York Times and all that.
Okay, so Raymond Davis, who was dressed as a civilian in a rented car in a neighborhood in Lahore where Westerners don't go, followed or approached by two men on motorcycles, allegedly armed, and he shot them both and actually chased one of them down to shoot him used five bullets on one of the guys.
So went to a great effort to actually shoot them and then actually took a picture of the people he had shot.
At the same time, a big SUV comes to rescue him and in the process going the wrong way up a one way road ends up killing a cyclist.
So far, you've got three people dead.
He doesn't get rescued by the SUV, he tries to run away on foot, gets arrested by the Lahore police.
So that's how he gets captured.
They find him with all sorts of things that immediately led the Pakistanis to believe he was a spy.
He had the camera, which I mentioned already.
He had a phone that reportedly had a bunch of phone numbers or phone calls to the tribal areas of Pakistan.
He had a GPS device.
He had an infrared headlamp.
He had a bunch of equipment, which was unusual, particularly for a Westerner in a neighborhood of Lahore where Westerners don't go.
And since then, pretty much everyone in Pakistan has assumed, and I sort of suspect that members of the ISI have leaked, that he was a spook of some sort.
That was back January 27th, he was arrested.
At first, the State Department was kind of like, well, yeah, we think he's a consular employee.
There was a lot of hedging in the first couple of days.
Since then, the State Department has been much more assertive in saying that he has diplomatic immunity and describing him as a technical or administrative staffer at the consulate.
And now there's a big fight between the, between Pakistan and the United States on whether this guy has diplomatic immunity or not.
The most recent news on this has come out because on Sunday, the Guardian, the Pakistani news all along has been saying this guy has ties to the CIA.
He's got ties to Blackwater.
But nobody in the United States had done more than, there was actually a Colorado outlet that had said that a phone number they got from his wife was a CIA phone number, but they removed that.
They hid that they had originally reported that.
And since then, all of the Western presses kind of remained silent that he is some kind of spook until Sunday when the Guardian published it.
And then on Monday, the New York Times and everybody else published it and revealed at the same time that our government has asked them to sit on that information for the last almost month and that they did so.
And then since that time, since Monday, there's been a lot more reporting in the West with more details about precisely who he is.
And it seems that he is a contractor allegedly through the CIA.
But one of the really important parts of this story is that going back to last year, Jeremy Scahill was reporting on joint efforts by the CIA and by the military special operations forces and contractors, including Blackwater, to do the kind of targeting on drone strikes and a bunch of other spying in Pakistan.
And of course, when Scahill reported this, the government said, oh, no, no, that's wrong.
And he's been validated over and over and over again.
So one of the issues is who does he work for?
Is it Blackwater?
Is he working just for a cover of Blackwater?
And secondly, is this a special operations operation as much as it is a CIA operation, which would make it illegal because we're not at war against Pakistan.
We shouldn't be doing military operations there.
All right.
Well, so there's a lot to go over there.
A minor point, maybe.
But is it still believed this guy's story that these two men that he killed were trying to rob him?
Or if he's a spook, perhaps they were spooks on his tail?
Or is that still in dispute?
Or do you know?
In Pakistan, there have been a number of reports that these guys have ties to the ISI, although it sounds more like they I mean, they are guys.
They are guys with a background of kind of petty robbery.
They had some stolen phones on them.
So it was made to look like it was going to be a robbery of his phone.
But, you know, if you kill two guys who are robbers, what do you do?
You call 911, I guess.
911 and you don't take pictures of them.
Right.
So Davis's Davis's behavior seems to indicate he didn't think they were they were there to rob him either.
And then I mean, and also they also there are kind of tactical discussions about what happened.
And they were actually in front of his car at one point.
If you want to rob somebody, you don't you don't take a motorcycle in front of your car because it makes it easy for them to mow you down.
So the robbery story doesn't seem to make any sense.
All right.
Well, I guess I'll try to save my legal type questions for after the break.
But I guess can you get back to what's known about what he was up to?
I read something I think you linked to this, too, that the drone strikes kind of stopped after this guy got busted.
Perhaps he was playing a major role in the targeting of the logistics or something like that in the drone strikes in Waziristan.
Yeah, there are two stories for why the drone strikes stopped.
One is just that the the relations between the CIA and the ISI in Pakistan are so terrible right now that the CIA stopped just to try not to further inflame things.
Although this week there have been at least three drone strikes, so they're back on.
The other the other reasoning, and I I sort of think it's more logical, is the one that you mentioned, which is that if he had been if if the people whose phone numbers he had in the tribal areas were people he was using to help target, you could understand why it might be harder for the CIA to continue their program having just lost a key cog in that in that system.
All right.
And now maybe if we could get back to where I started, which was the reaction of the people of Pakistan, they really turned out, I don't know, tens of thousands of people at least in a giant protest against the idea of letting this guy come home.
Right.
Because they they I mean, you know, it's it's obvious to everyone there that this is this guy is a spy.
It's been obvious for for three weeks and they've been protesting for three weeks.
And I you know, I think that, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if their protests were were encouraged.
This is in Lahore.
So it's it's it's not the strong area of the Zardari government.
So there's some politics going on here as well.
But it just this is this is an example of American arrogance in an area that's not particularly friendly to Americans.
And the notion that the United States, I mean, I think one of the biggest problems the United States has done is they've been really pushy about saying this guy has immunity rather than in similar situations in other countries.
They kind of play lay low a little longer so as not to inflame emotions.
And in this case, I mean, this is Pakistan nuclear arms, a government that's highly unpopular.
And yet our response to this is inflaming people locally as much as anything else.
An important point.
All right.
Hold it right there, everybody.
It's empty wheel.
Marcy Wheeler from FireDogLake.com.
We'll be right back.
Antiwar Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Empty Wheel, Marcy Wheeler from FireDogLake.com.
And Marcy, when we went out to break, you were talking about the clumsiness of the Obama administration's response here, sort of like vetoing a West Bank resolution in the Security Council right in the middle of the entire Middle East going up in a riot.
Seems like a pretty clumsy decision making on the Obama administration's part.
I wonder what you think is behind it.
Are they just in a hurry to try to get this guy out of here before the truth about what he was really doing there came out, before it would be then now too late, as it seems to be?
Yeah, I sort of, I mean, I think that that may be part of it.
One of the news that's coming out in the last day or so is talking about there being this whole influx of these contractors into Pakistan since last September.
And I think one of the points I've made about the way the Obama administration asked newspapers to keep this quiet, they weren't hiding Davis' identity from the people that we normally would want to protect it from.
You know, the ISI already knew he was a spook.
The people in Pakistan were already operating on the assumption he was a spook.
Presumably the Taliban and al-Qaeda already knew he was a spook and were already trying to figure out who was on his cell phone.
So all the people we would normally protect his identity from, they already knew.
The people who didn't know were the American people.
And so it seems to me part of what the Obama administration has tried to do and failed, and in some ways made it worse, was to try and hide all of this from us.
Try and hide the fact that we've got Blackwater guys once again going crazy, shooting people, and causing big diplomatic problems.
It's just like Nisour Square in Iraq, but in an even more volatile region.
I suspect that Obama didn't want us or the Pakistanis to know about these hundreds of other contractors in Pakistan.
I think that's part of what's going on here.
The other thing is that if he is tried and found guilty, he'll be hanged.
But that's true of accused spies in other countries, and to some degree they've increased the focus on him in Pakistan, which seems counterproductive.
Well, and that's the thing, right?
A spy behind enemy lines, the rules of war are you can put them up against the wall and kill them.
Yet we're not at war with Pakistan.
They're our friends.
We're helping them and really mandating that they fight a civil war against people up in the northwestern regions for us.
And so it all becomes very murky.
It seems like when you throw into the mix the question of whether this guy had official diplomatic cover from the State Department, or whether he was a knock, or whether he was actually maybe former CIA and working as a contractor for Blackwater, how the law is supposed to apply here, or if it can be applied.
It's a very messy situation.
And there are, I mean, there's a very interesting diplomatic debate going on because the, you know, on Monday, after it became public in the United States that Davis was a spy, the State Department had a briefing with somebody who, you know, might or might not be Harold Koh to talk about, to try and argue that Davis has diplomatic immunity.
And it was before a lot of the reporters had done a lot of research on the story.
And so they didn't get at some of the questions, such as there was a list that we submitted to Pakistan on January 25th, so two days before this guy was arrested, of the people we considered those who have immunity, those attached to the embassy, and he wasn't on it.
It was only afterwards that we put him back on the list.
And then there's the question of whether he has the immunity you would get from being attached to the embassy, or the immunity you'd get from being attached to the consulate, which is weaker, and which doesn't trump things like murder.
And after it became clear that we're charging him with murder, all of a sudden we said he's attached to the embassy and made the claim for the stronger kind of diplomatic immunity.
And, you know, again, this is another, the reporting on this is fascinating, because it's all over the map.
And, you know, I'm sure both sides, both the United States and Pakistan are engaging in a whole bunch of disinformation.
But it seems like there's good reasons to believe that our claim that he's got diplomatic immunity is dicey at best.
And yet we're going to, I mean, I don't blame him.
You know, he's our guy.
I'm not surprised that our government is fighting to get him back.
It's just not clear that they're telling the entire truth of the matter.
Yeah, well, it seems like, at least from what I can tell so far, it seems like the choice is whether he was a knock, you know, a completely deniable CIA agent, you know, who's not under the cover of the State Department, or whether he was a contractor working for Blackwater, XE, or Z, or whatever they call it, or another contractor like that in the country, right?
That's really the question.
Yeah, I mean, the government, the U.S. has gotten pretty close to arguing that he's got official cover, but that doesn't hold.
That doesn't hold up.
I mean, he clearly had some loose ties to the consulate, but it also seems like he had only been, you know, he's been in and out of Pakistan.
He spent a lot of time in Peshawar.
He was on a mission, in this case, directly to Lahore.
The details don't hold up the notion that this guy was sitting there in Lahore over a long period of time working with a technical person, you know?
So, but, you know, we're gonna hear these claims and counterclaims, I think, to try and obscure the issue.
And to me, for us, for Americans, the big issue is, are we conducting military operations in Pakistan, even though there is, even though Congress has not approved war in Pakistan?
Because that's one of the issues here.
And the other one is, um, are we still using blackwater in these sensitive, in these sensitive issues, after blackwater has gotten us into trouble time and time and time and time again?
And, and, you know, there are reasons to have buys in other countries, particularly in countries that are unstable and nuclear armed.
But do we really want to be having loosely controlled contractors doing that work?
And that seems to be what went on here.
Well, and that brings me to one of these pieces.
I'm not sure if it's your latest, but somewhere here, Empty Wheel, you have at Firedog Lake, a piece called Thousands of Spooky Americans Doing Who Knows What in Pakistan.
Now, talk to me about the indications you have here of thousands of who knows who JSOC or CIA or contractors or whoever these people are waging this secret war inside Pakistan.
Just the number, that's just, Pakistan has said one of their problems with this is that they've been asked to, there's, there's been this kind of simmering debate about whether Pakistanis get visas to the United States and vice versa.
And since September, Pakistan has allowed a bunch of Americans into Pakistan, has given them visas without vetting them.
And they, the numbers appear to be, I mean, there have been hundreds in the last couple months, but the numbers appear to be in the thousands since September.
And if that's the case, I mean, if we're asking them to not vet people that we're requesting visas for, how many of those people are contractors that we're kind of, you know, pretending aren't, you know, how many of those people are really involved in some kind of intelligence operation?
And I think that's, that's Pakistan's big concern at this point is that they don't know what all these people they've let into their country are doing.
Yeah.
Well, killing people.
All right.
Well, uh, some of them anyway.
Uh, thanks very much.
Uh, I really appreciate your time and your efforts there on this story.
Very good stuff.
Thanks.
Take care.
Everybody.
That's Marcy Wheeler.
Empty wheel.
That's empty wheel dot fire dog lake.com.
Zanta war radio.
We'll be right back.