All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest on the show today is Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater, The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
You see him regularly on Democracy Now and in print in The Nation magazine.
That's thenation.com.
The latest piece is the CIA's secret sites in Somalia.
Welcome back to the show, Jeremy.
How are you doing?
Good to be with you, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And this is a hell of a piece.
And if I got it right in your email that you sent out, this was you and Rick Rowley went to Somalia to dig up this story.
Is that right?
Yeah, we went from mid-June to the end of June.
We were in Mogadishu unembedded.
We weren't with any government forces, any African Union forces.
We were on our own.
OK, and now is there a separate report that you're doing with Rick?
I don't see his name on the byline here.
Well, Rick and I are working on a video project together.
He's an awesome filmmaker that I've worked with for a long time.
So we're going to be producing a series of video reports in the coming months, not just about Somalia, but about elsewhere, where the US is doing targeted killing operations.
But yeah, Rick is my partner in crime.
But he does our video ad that does a lot of work for Al Jazeera.
I just did a great piece about the drug war down in Mexico, focusing on journalists covering that.
He's been all around the world, Afghanistan, Pakistan, throughout Africa.
So he's a stand-up guy.
So I write articles, and then we're doing the video stuff together.
Right on.
Yeah, he is a great reporter, great Iraq War coverage as well.
And so I'm glad to see you guys are still working together.
This piece that you guys got here, the result of y'all's reporting here is absolutely incredible.
I could have guessed, but no, maybe not.
Should we start maybe with the secret prison?
Yeah, I mean, well, first of all, as I know you know, because you've covered it before, the Obama administration is increasingly targeting Yemen and Somalia, and has long been targeting Pakistan with these drone strikes and with special operations raids, primarily by the Joint Special Operations Command.
And in Somalia, a lot of these attacks have been taking place outside of Mogadishu.
What we found when we went to Mogadishu was that the Shabab, which is an Islamic militant group that claims ties to al-Qaeda, controls a good part of the city.
In fact, the US-backed so-called transitional federal government of Somalia only runs about 30 square miles of territory.
And they only are able to hold that territory because of an African Union force that is primarily funded and armed by the United States that consists mainly of the militaries of Uganda and Burundi.
And they have about 9,000 troops.
And if they were to leave, everyone in Somalia says that the Shabab would take control of the city within minutes, because they're more powerful.
They have far more trained fighters than the so-called Somali government has.
So anyway, we landed on the ground.
And actually, what we were investigating was the 2007 US-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, which is really when the US started to intensely engage in covert operations in the country.
And we had some specific people we were trying to track down.
And we ended up tracking them down.
I'm going to write about that later.
But almost within 48 hours of touching down, we started to catch wind of a new CIA facility at the airport, which we actually saw the day we arrived.
It looks like a small, gated community.
It has about a dozen or so buildings, freshly painted guard towers, hangars for aircraft.
And we had confirmation from senior Somali officials that it was, in fact, a CIA counterterrorism training center.
I also met on my third or fourth day there a very reliable Somali who had been taken to what he described as a basement prison that was right near the Somali president's compound.
And he said it was in the basement of Somalia's National Security Agency.
And to make a long story short, I was able to get several senior officials, including those that work with the CIA on counterterrorism operations in Mogadishu, to lay out for me what happens in that prison and to determine that, in fact, the CIA is paying the salaries of the Somali agents that are working on this program.
And also that US intelligence operatives interrogate prisoners regularly in this basement prison.
So it's technically run by the Somalis, but the US is paying the salaries and the CIA is doing interrogation.
So I leave that to your determination whether you think that's a CIA black site and want to rely on the semantics of the agency or if it actually is a Somali-run facility.
Well, and you say that this is the former prison, the hole, they called it, back in the days of the American-backed communist dictator Barre.
Well, yeah, when Fiat Barre, when he was brought down in 1991 and then the warlord sort of took over and then the US and UN came in and then the Black Hawk Down incident happened, a lot of the apparatus, a lot of the symbols of the former regime's agents of oppression were then eventually taken over by a string of US-backed governments.
And that happens a lot of times when there's coups or overthrows of governments.
They'll just take over that country's security forces or their apparatus for detaining people, interrogating them, torturing them.
We saw it in Iraq.
We've seen it elsewhere around the world.
This particular facility still, according to one of the prisoners that was in there, has the sign of the NSF, which was the intelligence service, the secret police of Fiat Barre's regime.
Well, hell of a way to celebrate Bastille Day today.
It's Jeremy Scahill from The Nation magazine.
We're talking about his new piece, The CIA's Secret Sites in Somalia.
And now, I guess, could you please tell us what you know about that prison?
What the conditions are like for the people there?
And perhaps you can work in the story of this one particular victim of kidnapping here, Ahmed Abdullahi Hassan.
Yes.
The prison, as it was described to me by several former prisoners, is in the basement with no windows.
It's a long corridor lined with small cells.
Although the prisoners are not directly locked in the rooms, they can kind of wander freely in the hallway.
All of the rooms are infested with bed bugs.
The air is completely damp, and there are mosquitoes everywhere.
Prisoners are sitting in corners, scratching themselves, banging their heads against walls, rocking.
Some of the prisoners just wander around aimlessly.
One of the prisoners, for some reason, collects all of the plates and puts them in his room and then returns them out.
They described to me people seemingly going nuts inside of this prison.
They also said that there were children, young boys, that were in the prison, as well as the elderly, and that they never are allowed outside.
They never see the light of day.
Some of them have been in there at a minimum 18 months.
It could be longer, but I heard of people as long as 18 months being held there.
It was also described to me when I was in Mogadishu that some of the prisoners held Western passports and that other prisoners had literally been kidnapped in Kenya and taken to the airport in Nairobi and then flown to Mogadishu.
I tell the story of one prisoner, Ahmad Abdullahi Hassan, who was a Kenyan citizen of Somali descent who was living in the Somali slum of Isli in Nairobi.
And in July of 2009, the Somali anti-terrorism police came to his house, knocked down his door and kidnapped him in the dead of night, brought him to a secret facility, and then the next evening they hooded him, as he put it Guantanamo style, and then they rendered him to Somalia.
They flew him into Mogadishu.
And we only know that he was in that prison because a former prisoner met him in there and then smuggled out his statement of what had happened to him and gave it to his legal team.
Because when he went missing, his family hired lawyers to try to find him.
They filed a habeas petition with the Kenyan government.
The Kenyans said they had no knowledge of his whereabouts.
Well, we've now discovered that he's in this prison.
And when I contacted the U.S. government, I'm actually not allowed to say what official was made available to me for comment on this story, but I can say that it was someone with knowledge of these programs.
This U.S. official told me that Hassan is a very bad man and that the U.S. did not directly render him, but that they provided intelligence to the Kenyans that indicated that he should be, quote, taken off the streets.
The next thing you know, he's rendered to Somalia.
And what I think is significant about this is that what the U.S. alleges and what the Kenyans allege is that Hassan was the right-hand man to Saleh Ali Nabhan, who was a man that the U.S. wanted for questioning in relation to the 2002 attacks in Mombasa, Kenya, and possible link to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
When Hassan was taken to Somalia, two months later, President Obama authorized his first targeted assassination inside of Somalia, killing Ali Nabhan.
So it seems clear that the U.S. extracted information out of this guy in that Somali prison and used it to go and kill a suspect.
All right, okay, we'll be right back with Jeremy Scahill, everybody, right after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, I'm talking with Jeremy Scahill.
His new piece at thenation.com is called The CIA's Secret Sites in Somalia.
Incredible piece, we won't be able to get through all of it today, but where we left off at the break there, you were talking about, I guess not a conclusive case, but a circumstantial case that when they, the confirmation, I guess, that they have indeed nabbed this guy, Hassan, and kept him in the prison there is apparently a guy that he knew got blown away by helicopters in broad daylight, and not long after they supposedly had grabbed him.
Is that what you were saying there?
Right, I mean, the U.S. intelligence had indicated that Hassan was the right-hand man to this rather famous Al-Qaeda figure named Ali Nabhan, and two months after Hassan was taken to this underground prison, Nabhan was killed in a strike authorized by President Obama, and the trail on him had gone cold for a couple of years, so it seems there's pretty strong indication that the two were related, and when I spoke to a U.S. official about it, they wouldn't say yes, that's what happened, but they said that it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be a wrong path to pursue, in terms intellectually.
Right, well, and what about the path that his legal representation is pursuing there?
Yeah, I mean, but one thing is the, you know, his lawyers, I think, now know, because of this report, that he is, in fact, in that prison, and what they're gonna argue, they're gonna file a habeas petition in federal court in the U.S., arguing that the U.S. should produce him, and, you know, bring him forward, because if U.S. personnel have access to him, if they're paying the salaries, they're gonna make an argument that he is effectively a U.S. detainee, even if he's technically in Somali custody.
All right, now, I wanted to get back to, well, you have a great little summary paragraph in here, the background, you already mentioned the American-backed Ethiopian invasion back in the very end of 2006, beginning of 2007, but you point out here that the current puppet government that controls all of, I think you say, 30 square miles in Mogadishu, out of the whole country, the current puppet in there is actually from the Islamic Courts Union, that the war was fought to destroy, and now that the Islamic Courts Union are the puppets, the al-Shabaab warriors who never existed before, but who came to help the Islamic Courts Union beat the Ethiopian army and force them out, have decided that's not good enough and are still fighting, basically.
This is the war we're in that everybody in the media and in the government pretends that all of a sudden there are these al-Shabaab guys who are so Islamic that we have to shoot at them, or whatever, and they never explain how none of this had to happen at all.
Right, I mean, first of all, the Islamic Courts Union was a response to the CIA-backed warlords that were really supported and promoted after 9-11 as the US counterterrorism force inside of Somalia, and so, I mean, I interviewed the main CIA warlord who ran this program, the Somali warlord who the CIA hired to run this program, and he told me how CIA agents, beginning in 2002, would fly into his private airstrip two or three times a week and give him pictures of people that they wanted taken out, and that they would go and find these people, and they were operating a whole rendition program, but as part of that, they were targeting innocent Islamic leaders and imams and kidnapping them, and so, and there was just utter lawlessness, and so what happened is that these 12 groups in various regions organized Islamic courts and said, we're gonna bring order to these communities, and they swiftly defeated the CIA-backed warlords, and then came together as one united government in Mogadishu in 2006, and then the US decided that was unacceptable, and they worked covertly with the Ethiopians to plan an invasion, and then they unleashed this invasion, and the Shabab, and I heard this from people who were very close to al-Qaeda and Shabab people during that period, the Shabab, they were the 13th member of this union, and they were the smallest and least powerful, they were just young militants, basically, and when the Ethiopians invaded, they became the vanguard in fighting them, and the only people that didn't get either co-opted or by the Ethiopians or the US, or just went back to being kind of rank warlords, and the current president, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, was actually taken into US custody by the CIA during the Ethiopian invasion, and essentially was flipped and converted and made into the US guy, but he was one of the main leaders of the very Islamic movement that the US said was a threat to national security and needed to be taken out.
Yep, well, and as the WikiLeaks have made clear, Foreign Policy and Focus had a great piece on this, it wasn't just that the Ethiopians wanted to invade and the Americans were happy to tag along with their C-130 gunships and whatever, they made them do it.
I mean, I interviewed the Somali government officials who were working with the US in exile at the time, and they all said to me, you know, I interviewed probably a dozen of the Somalis that were working with the US, they said that there's no way Ethiopia would have invaded unless the US told them to.
So I mean, it's pretty clear that, you know, General Abizade, the CIA, and the State Department, particularly Jendai Fraser, who was the Undersecretary for Africa, got together and said, let's send in the Ethiopians, and the Ethiopians come in and just start, they're just mass slaughtering people.
And, you know, Ethiopia and Somalia have a lot of beef going way back, so the Ethiopians were happy to come in and kill some Somalis.
Well, so let's make like the empire and pretend none of that ever happened.
What's the future of the war in Somalia?
Because now these guys are tied to Al-Qaeda.
Right, well, first of all, the US strategy in Mogadishu seems to be not working at all.
And what they're doing is they're backing the Ugandans and the Burundians to do indiscriminate shelling of areas where the Shabab has, you know, support or has a stronghold, and they're forcing everyone to flee, whether they're Shabab or just innocent civilians.
And then the US is starting with this covert action stuff that looks very much like what they were doing with the warlords, except now they're doing it with the Somali so-called National Security Agency, although who those guys are is very much in question.
And then you have the targeted killings happening in the rural areas of the country, and they're supporting a government that doesn't have any legitimacy or popularity in the country and is largely staffed by technocrats imported from the United States, Canada, and Europe that are Somali-Americans, Somali-Canadians, some of whom would be taxi drivers in Virginia if they weren't senior advisors to the president of Somalia.
Yeah, well, literally that's true in some cases.
I met people that literally drove taxis in Western countries and now they're senior officials in Somalia.
I mean, it's like a crazy, you know, it's just crazy.
Those are the people running things.
Well, and you say in here too, that you quote a Somali analyst, I think, saying that the CIA runs it all.
The State Department doesn't.
There's no part of the government that talks with the so-called puppet civilian government over there at all.
It's just the CIA and the intelligence, you know, secret police running around, that's about it.
Yeah, I mean, they play a game where they'll have meetings with the, you know, so-called leaders of Somalia, and they, you know, the U.S. very much meddles in the internal politics of the transitional federal government, but it's a totally separate track then of covert action, and that's where all the attention is, the resources.
So essentially what the CIA is doing is trying to build up its own private little counterterrorism force that can do targeted kill and capture operations and operate as a proxy for the U.S. government, because white people can't be running around with guns inside of Somalia, because everybody will notice them.
But, so they're trying to build an indigenous force, but I mean, hello, this is what the U.S. always does.
This is Central America all over again.
Well, and as you mentioned in here, there have been Americans who, Somali-Americans, I guess you're supposed to hyphenate it or whatever, who have left the United States to go and fight, including at least one suicide bomber, right?
More than that.
I have at least three suicide bombers, and then there were another, at least seven Americans who've died fighting alongside Shabab.
And, you know, the Americans that have gone over there are largely from the Minneapolis area where there's a large Somali community.
And so, you know, the U.S. pays a lot of attention to that issue of the suicide bombers and the others, but what we're really seeing here is asymmetric warfare being embraced by both the U.S. and the Shabab.
And the Shabab are doing targeted killings, and the CIA and JSOC are doing targeted killings.
So, you know, everybody's sort of using the same tactics.
It's just that, you know, we, rightly so, condemn attacks against civilians by the Shabab or Al-Qaeda.
But what about when we try to kill one, quote-unquote, bad guy and kill 70 nomads instead?
You know, so terrorism is a relative term, and in Somalia, it's not as clear-cut that only the Shabab are the terrorists there, and that's the reality the U.S. has to deal with on the ground.
That's the perception, is that everyone is engaging with the tactics of terrorism.
It's not just the Shabab.
Right, well, and you know, here's the thing, too.
I was just talking with Fred Bronfman about how in Afghanistan, you kill one, you get 10 more.
That's the Stanley McChrystal's insurgent math, right?
But even still, it seems to me that when you're talking about Al-Qaeda, if that means anything, it means that, you know, associates have been by a couple of degrees of separation or so, and it means a focus on the far enemy, us.
If we have a local group of insurgents anywhere on the Arabian Peninsula that have no interest in trying to sneak into the United States and kill a bunch of civilians here, then that doesn't really count at all, it seems to me.
You might be making 10 more, but you're still making 10 more indigenous fighters in Somalia.
If America just stopped intervening, there's no reason to think that these very radical and murderous al-Shabaab fighters are all going to then start heading here instead of heading out to get a real job.
No, I mean, you know, there are several episodes you can point to where there have been isolated attempts to take down aircraft or, you know, blow up, in the case of the underwear bomber, try to blow up, you know, a U.S. aircraft that U.S. intelligence has linked to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Yemen.
But, you know, you have a far greater chance of being, you know, hit by a car, or if you're a smoker, of dying of cancer in this country than you do of being blown up by an Al-Qaeda terrorist.
And, you know, so what we're doing is we're using a sledgehammer to swat a fly.
And in doing these so-called targeted killing operations, it sounds all precise and clean, but it never turns out that way.
And so, you know, does Shabaab present some sort of a regional threat in East Africa?
Probably they do.
Their own rhetoric indicates that.
But how you respond to that, you can make the threat real or greater.
You can make them more real to people, more credible in your response.
But we never have that discussion in this country of how does our own policy undermine our national security?
These creeping wars that we're in right now, I think are really gonna come back to bring serious blowback to us.
In a way, that's what the U.S. did when they overthrew the Islamic Courts Union.
They took out the only force that had been able to stabilize Mogadishu since Siad Barre's regime fell, and we took them out instantly because, well, they said they were Muslims.
And now we're working with many of those same people.
Scott, the other thing is I met several of the so-called pro-government, pro-U.S. warlords and traveled with them.
They all were members of the Islamic Courts Union.
They have a conflict of interest with Shabaab, not a conflict of ideology.
They're just fighting because they get cool weapons and good uniforms from the U.S., and they're told that the Shabaab are the new bad guys.
But tomorrow they can flip again.
So we're engaged in this dangerous game that we seem to always engage in, where we start backing people and then they come back to haunt us later.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right, well, we'll have to leave it there, but I wanna thank you very much for your great work and tell Rick the same.
And thank you very much for your time on the show today, Jeremy.
My pleasure, thanks, Scott.
Talk to you soon.
Everybody, that's Jeremy Scahill.
The article is called The CIA's Secret Sites in Somalia.
It's in The Nation magazine.
And TheNation.com.
