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 is Gareth Porter.
And yeah, I interview him all the time.
That's only because everything that he writes is so incredibly valuable, and his time on the show out loud explaining these things, too.
Welcome back, Gareth.
How are you?
I'm good.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, everybody, you can find what Gareth writes at ipsnews.net primarily, but also antiwar.com/porter.
This one is at Truthout, and if it's not already, it will be in the archives at antiwar.com.
It's called How McChrystal and Petraeus Built an Indiscriminate, Quote, Killing Machine.
Gareth, how did McChrystal and Petraeus build an indiscriminate, quote, killing machine?
Well, let me first explain the killing machine, in quotes, is from actually a loyal, devoted aide, former aide to General Petraeus, named John Noggle, who is now in charge of a pro-military think tank in Washington, D.C., called the Center for New American Security.
And in an interview for Frontline on TV last January, Noggle was asked about the U.S. night raids in Afghanistan and made the comment that, something to the effect, that the United States has become so good at tracking through electronic means the insurgents, he didn't say in Afghanistan, just tracking insurgents through electronic means, that we have built up what he called an industrial-strength counterterrorism killing machine.
And so that is the quote that I tried to shorten in my title, because what we have here is a phenomenon that the news media has basically christened as a huge success.
It has given the blessing of the news media to this whole business of targeted raids, particularly in Afghanistan, as the one success story about Afghanistan, alongside a lot of other military operations that are basically conceded to have been a failure.
So my article really focuses in on whether this killing machine, this system for targeted kill-and-capture raids, is as well targeted as the news media have made it out to be.
And of course, the answer, as all of your listeners already know, is to the negative.
Well, now, the article really starts with Bob Woodward and his book, The War Within, about, at least in part, the surge in Iraq.
Tell us about that.
Yeah, Woodward was really instrumental in creating the myth surrounding the Special Operations Forces raids, the whole idea of targeted raids as a success, because in the wake of the capture of Saddam Hussein and the killing, then, of the al-Qaeda leader in Iraq in 2006, basically General McChrystal was regarded as almost a saint and a hero by the news media.
And Woodward was at the van of this.
He gave an interview, a television interview, after his book was published in 2008, in which he basically gave McChrystal and the Special Operations Forces raids in Iraq credit for having won the war.
And what he was suggesting was that they had been so effective against al-Qaeda and against the Shia militia in Iraq that essentially they were the key to having vanquished the insurgents on both sides of the war.
And of course, the reality, as everybody knows, is that the reasons that both the Sunni insurgents and the Shia insurgents either laid down their arms or reduced the level of their attacks were political reasons on both sides, not the effectiveness of U.S. raids.
But that was the myth that was created.
And secondly, what Woodward did was to suggest that the means that were used, the intelligence system that was used, the technologies used were so highly secret that he could not even mention their code names, that it was among the most highly kept secrets of the U.S. national security state.
Now, since then, as I point out in my article, we have discovered that in fact the means that were used for the collection of intelligence to target people in Iraq were much more mundane.
They were well-known technologies.
First of all, the unmanned aerial drones were used to keep sort of 24-hour watch over particular locations, particular houses or compounds.
Nothing particularly revolutionary there.
Secondly, they were tracking cell phone traffic.
They were following any cell phone that somehow linked up with the target that they'd already decided to monitor through the unmanned aerial drones.
They would monitor all the cell phone traffic in and out of that location.
So that was the second one.
And the third one was that they could track the location of any cell phone from its signals from the sky.
So they combined those three things to be able to decide who would be on their target list and where they were located.
It was really quite simple.
But the effect of the total reliance on electronic means of surveillance without any mediating influence of human intelligence, that is people who could actually check and see who was being tracked, what they were doing, what the relationship was between those individuals and the location that they decided was their target location, completely dismissing any human intelligence was really quite a sharp, profound break with traditional intelligence gathering.
And the consequence was that they built a system that really didn't care about human intelligence, didn't care about vetting the choice of targets based on knowing anything about the individuals.
And once that system was transferred then to Afghanistan beginning in 2009, the consequences were really quite tragic for Afghans and indeed for the United States as well.
Because what happened was that they then began to target large numbers of civilians.
At first, I think unintentionally, but as time went by, it's clear that they understood what was happening.
They were targeting people who were not really part of the insurgency.
They were not combatants.
But people who had contact with the insurgents, either relatives or friends, or just people who had incidental contact with them, were being put into their system, their intelligence system, because of phone traffic, because of cell phone calls.
And if they had more than one or two calls to these people, then they would likely end up on their target list.
And so what began to happen was that the kill and capture list was populated more and more by innocent civilians.
And so that's really the general thrust of my article.
Well, again, it's called How McChrystal and Petraeus Built an Indiscriminate Killing Machine.
It's at truthout.org.
And this is just one of the most fascinating pieces you've written in a long time.
And I read everything you write all week long, every week.
But this is really something else.
It's such a fascinating subject to me.
Not so much the technique of the network science, but just the obvious fact that it's a bunch of bogus pseudo-scientific, pseudo-mystical nonsense that basically these military men and so-called intelligence officers and whatever have outsourced all their thinking to a computer program, which is not too much unlike themselves, subject only to the quality information that it's getting in the first place.
Garbage in, garbage out.
And so they don't know nothing in the first place.
And as you say in the article, they're not even targeting people.
They're just targeting cell phones.
They don't even know who's holding the cell phone.
They don't know what the connection is between these people other than they know each other or whatever.
But I saw a thing on the Science Channel where they showed that the Kevin Bacon game really was just the inspiration for the beginning of this.
And they realized that actually everyone on earth is connected to Kevin Bacon by six degrees of separation.
Everyone is connected to everyone by six degrees of separation.
It doesn't mean anything.
Well, and one of the things that's happened here, just just to carry this a step further in Afghanistan, you know, people need to understand that that in Afghanistan, particularly in the Pashtun zones of Afghanistan, everybody has friends, relatives in the Taliban, in the insurgency.
And so everybody has names of phone numbers of Taliban insurgents in their cell phones.
And in many cases, as Michael Semple, the former deputy EU representative in Afghanistan told me, people have the local the phone number of the local commander in their cell phone just in case they need some help, just in case they get into trouble.
If some local hooligan under the under the rubric of the Taliban does something bad or, you know, takes them captive or something, they they want to have somebody they know in the Taliban in their cell phone to help them out.
And so as a result of that, you have this ever widening of the net that is thrown out to to include all these civilians.
But then at some point, it clearly occurred to one of these bright, young intelligence people, and perhaps it was to McChrystal himself, that, you know, even if we can't capture the commanders, we could capture the friends or relatives of the commanders and take them in and interrogate them.
And maybe they can tell us something about the people that we want to capture.
As as one of the officers who was interviewed by the the Open Society Foundation's report, quoted what was quoted as saying, if we can't get the guy we're after, then we can get the guy who knows the guy we're after.
So so it became really a conscious part of the strategy for targeting to actually pick up and target these people who they knew were not insurgents, but who they had reason to believe would know some of the insurgents and could possibly give them some intelligence.
And so, you know, what what started out as kind of a result of exactly what you're talking about, this over reliance on electronic technology, then became a conscious strategy as well.
Right.
In other words, the cell phones were leading them to a bunch of innocent people.
So then they had to rationalize what they were doing by saying, Oh, yeah, that's what we want is to round up a bunch of innocent people to ask them if they know anything about any guilty people.
And guilty people means any Afghan who defends this country from the foreign invaders.
That's part of the dynamic that that occurred.
No question about that in my mind.
The other thing that that happened, though, is that against the law?
I mean, I know that's a silly technicality these days and everything, but is that OK?
You know, technically speaking on paper to round up people's wives and children and say, you know, where's your dad?
Absolutely not.
It's it's de facto.
I mean, not de facto.
It's it's clearly a violation of the laws of war, as set out in the Geneva Convention.
You know, you can't just arbitrarily detain people, arrest people because you think they might be able to give you intelligence.
That's that's simply, you know, it's against the laws of war to do that.
And that point was made by the lawyers who actually wrote that that report that I just mentioned by the Open Society Foundation.
So so no question about it.
That's that's not only immoral, but but it's illegal under the laws of war.
So so one of the things that happened was that, yes, they realized that that they were that they had all these people in their sights and that that provided a rationale for continuing the high levels of operations of Special Operations Forces night raids that they had already geared up to carry out.
And of course, they never want to gear down again.
That that never happens, as we've talked about on your show before.
But the other thing is that there's a long tradition by this time by the U.S. military in Afghanistan of of sweeping up civilians who they have no information about.
They have no idea who they are, just sweeping them up and taking them into detention and keeping them for weeks, months on end to interrogate them just to find out what they know.
As the Canadian general who was the head of intelligence for the U.S. NATO command in Kabul said in an interview a few years ago, you know, these people are being detained for a reason.
They have information we want.
So again, violation of the laws of war, yes, but this is what the United States and NATO have been doing from the beginning, basically in Afghanistan.
All right.
Now, when it comes to this computerized cell phone targeting of people, you explain one anecdote, one very illustrative anecdote in your article about if I have it right, Gareth, a guy that Petraeus had killed that turned out died a couple of months later, not in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan, and that Petraeus was confronted about this.
And unlike, you know, most military lies, which are pretty obvious, just insistence on things that aren't true, in the denial that you quote, Petraeus seemed to really believe that, but the computer said that this was the guy to kill, and so we killed him.
Well, I think you're right.
In this case, I do believe that Petraeus was convinced by his Special Operations Forces people that absolutely we got the right person.
You have to believe this.
We've got absolute goods on this guy, that we did kill the right person.
I think Petraeus was had, he gave far too much freedom of action to the Special Operations Forces on his watch in Afghanistan.
He let them do basically what they wanted to do without any real supervision.
And they did what they always do, that the Special Operations Forces units lie to their superiors.
I think they certainly lied to the US NATO command over and over again.
I've written about some of those lies in the past.
So obviously, they lied to Petraeus as well.
And I mean, the bottom line of all that, I mean, he seems to actually believe the big lie of the program that this is useful.
You know, if you go look at my Facebook friends, that'll tell you everything about me, even though actually, all it'll tell you in reality is that I hit approve on everyone, unless they really piss me off and then ID friend them.
Yeah.
So the real point here is that Petraeus, of course, you know, has to believe at some level in the mission that he's responsible for, although I have no doubt that that doubts creep up from time to time.
In order to be able to live with himself in order to be able to sleep at night, like other people who are committing crimes in the name of America, he has to believe certain basic things, so that he can carry on from day to day.
And I think that that's, that's really the essence of the storyline about Petraeus in this case.
And of course, this is a particularly outrageous case, because the guy who they killed, who, who the wonder boys in the intelligence community, they're supporting the night raids, had convinced themselves was the shadow governor of Takhar province, the Taliban shadow governor of Takhar province was in fact, somebody who had left the Taliban in 2001, when the Taliban regime was overthrown, had never gone back in had had gone to Pakistan was was detained, and apparently given quite brutal treatment by the Pakistani ISI over a period of years, was finally released, went back to Kabul and began an entirely new life.
Living openly as a as a human rights activist, he worked at some point for for a period of years with with Michael Semple as a human rights reporter for the EU.
And he was absolutely convinced that this guy was not an underground Taliban insurgent, he couldn't possibly have been psychologically was too burned by his experience with the ISI.
They did get the wrong man.
And the reason they explained to former BBC correspondent Kate Clark, who knew this individual who was who was killed wrongly.
The reason was that they weren't even tracking an individual, they weren't bothering to find out who the individual was, they were tracking a cell phone number.
And then, of course, I'm sure you saw the Washington Post story that said that they're really working on automating the drone strike program altogether, because human, whether JSOC or CIA people, they just can't decide on killing people fast enough.
And we really need to pass off not just the decision making, or at least the preliminary decision making to the droids, but we need to pass off the final kill order to the robots as well.
And just go ahead, I guess we'll fill the whole Earth's skies with killer robots.
Skynet, this is this is an unimaginably evil idea, which it's it's difficult to to believe could be taken seriously.
But obviously it is.
And it is it is an evil system that exists already that's giving birth to that evil idea.
And both both ideas have to be really protested in the in the in the most strenuous manner.
Yeah.
All right.
And by the way, speaking of the Washington Post, I'm sure you weren't surprised when they came out, I think, two days after our last interview, verifying what you said that there's no way that the Pakistanis use the Haqqani Network to deliberately attack the American embassy in Kabul on September 13.
And Mullen clearly isn't telling the truth.
And The Washington Post came out with a bunch of quotes from Obama's men saying, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, he never really meant that.
Well, this is this is interesting.
You're right.
This follow up story in The Post did puncture some of the the claims that that Mullen was putting forward of, you know, highly classified intelligence, blah, blah, blah.
But what what is even more fascinating is that behind that quote, which was from an anonymous official at the Defense Department, is apparently a really quite a major debate going on within the Obama administration, which involves not just people at the Defense Department, but the CIA and the State Department as well.
A lot of people are dissenting from the current U.S. policy, particularly towards Pakistan, specifically in the belief that the drone strikes program in Pakistan no longer makes any sense, that, you know, we don't have the high level of the high profile targets, the the kinds of high level officials of the al Qaeda and affiliated groups that were originally supposed to be the rationale for the program.
And it's become increasingly counterproductive.
And so you've got a coalition now of officials from various parts of the national security state who are saying, listen, we need to revisit this whole question, just as Admiral Dennis Blair argued at Aspen, and then in the New York Times op ed piece later on, that we need to adjust this policy and reach an agreement with Pakistan that honors their grave concerns about the way the drone strike program is alienating the population and causing more problems for the Pakistani government.
So I think there's there's more to this story.
And I'm now working on a follow up story that will begin to plumb that that debate.
Excellent.
Well, we'll keep our eyes on antiwar.com/Porter.
And of course, IPS news.net for all your work.
Thanks very much, Gareth.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for having me again, Scott.
All right, everybody.
This article is by Gareth Porter.
It's at truthout.org.
It's called How McChrystal and Petraeus built an indiscriminate killing machine.
And it should have been, you know, cover story of Time magazine or something if they did news.
This is an absolutely fascinating portrayal of the bogus automated intelligence systems, quote unquote, intelligence systems used to identify civilians to be murdered in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, and I guess elsewhere in the world, too.
You've got to check it out.
How McChrystal and Petraeus built an indiscriminate killing machine.
We'll be right back after this.
