All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show here.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Marcy Wheeler, which keeps the great blog, Empty Wheel at EmptyWheel.net.
And, um, of course the big deal yesterday, which I guess I didn't realize till after the show was that the New York times had published this gigantic article all about the death council in the white house, where Barack Obama personally oversees the thumbs up, thumbs down decision on whether to use a robot to kill somebody somewhere in the world.
Um, which is, uh, very instructive.
Now here, uh, Marcy is, uh, pointing me toward this piece.
I didn't even know about, uh, that I had missed entirely.
That was here, uh, at the daily beast on the same subject.
And, uh, of course, whenever we're talking about the drone war, that means we're also talking about expansive, uh, and expansive policy, uh, using them in more and more places around the world, uh, spreading of course, uh, deeper in Africa, uh, that kind of thing.
Uh, welcome back to the show, Marcy.
How are you doing?
I'm doing all right, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I appreciate you joining us on the show today.
When I read the New York times piece, well, you know, Chris Floyd had a great critique of the morality of the times and who these people are who write this stuff, but then I thought, you know, as far as the facts and what's the meat of this and in what order, there's really nobody that I would, uh, rather have, uh, take us through this article and what's important about it, the wheat and the chaff, uh, cause it is what 10,000 words or something, uh, than you.
So you sat down, I assume, and read the New York times article yesterday.
And I wonder, uh, what was your takeaway?
What did you think was the most important part of the story?
Was it the, um, kind of the, where they describe everyone's sitting down and doing the thumbs up, thumbs down process there, although, um, I should correct you that the New York times piece was 600 words.
The daily beast piece was 4,000 words.
So between them, 10,000 words, um, they, they, what they do is they describe the death panel, both of them.
But I argued today that they both describe an outdated version of the death panel.
So what's important in the New York times article is, um, I think the most important thing is a detail about the way that the Obama administration has been counting deaths in, in, uh, drone strikes, which is to say they're arguing that any military male, I'm sorry, military age male in the vicinity of somebody that they consider a target is also a legitimate target.
So they're not counting.
So, you know, there was a, there was a drone strike in Pakistan the other day, uh, that hit a bakery, you know, um, non of mass destruction, I guess.
Um, and killed three people in the bakery.
I don't know whether the baker was one of those people, but they're arguing for example, that because the baker was there selling non to people who may or may not have been Taliban or Al Qaeda or what have you, then the baker himself is a legitimate target.
And when they count up their numbers of civilians killed, they're not going to count the baker as a civilian because he's 30.
So that's the analogy that they use in the piece, right?
In the times piece was, Hey, what are you doing in the back of a pickup truck with a bunch of bad guys?
If you're not one of the bad guys, that's basically the same thing you're talking about.
Yeah, there's, and actually what's, I mean, what's really interesting is because, um, one of the guys, there were two people killed in the Fidel Cusco strike, which was, uh, May, May 6th, so earlier this month.
And, um, one of the guys, basically what happened, Fidel Cusco was, excuse me, visiting a friend who's a farmer and the friend who's a farmer died.
And now that friend's family is all pissed at us because he had nothing to do with AQAP.
Sure he knew Fidel Cusco, but he wasn't, he wasn't AQAP.
And so, you know, now we've made enemies of an entire other extended family in Yemen.
Um, so, so I think that's, um, the New York times piece, uh, makes it crystal clear that John Brennan is lying his pants off when he says there have been no civilian strikes, there have been no civilian deaths.
Um, mind you, it uses John Brennan as a credible source in there, but it proves once and for all that John Brennan was lying when he said there was no civilian strikes.
But it does show this gimmick that the Obama administration is using to try and pretend probably not just for their own purposes, but for, you know, so that they're not having to admit that they're breaking international law.
So it was to pretend that they're not killing civilians, which they in fact are.
Right.
Cause anybody that they kill is a terrorist.
And then they even have this great phrase, right?
About posthumous, uh, not a quid or what they call it, where it could be that they find out later after you're dead, that maybe you weren't really a bad guy, but they never do seem to do that.
Well, and the other thing is, you know, as they're saying, uh, we're just going to assume all military age males are, are outside of members.
They're also accusing journalists who risked their lives to go find out who died, um, of sympathizing with the enemy.
I mean, they're accusing the bureau for independent journalism, for example, they've suggested that they're Al Qaeda sympathizers because they've gone, their lives gone into where they're a stand and said, okay, tell me who died on such and such a date.
And, you know, that sort of ruins their whole little gimmick because then there's an independent store source out there saying, sometimes saying, you know, Al Qaeda was, was wrong when they claimed, you know, 10 civilians died, but also sometimes claiming here are the names of the civilians.
Here's what they do.
And here's what they were doing when the United States claimed they were meeting with Al Qaeda, but we're in fact arguing over land.
Yeah.
It's the weekly standard, um, uh, accounting for, you know, what amounts to helping the enemy, uh, only applied by the state, same thing they're doing with Bradley Manning, right?
It says anything that makes us look bad, weakens our position in the world versus the terrorists.
Therefore you're on the side of the terrorists.
Right, right, exactly.
So that means that anybody who, uh, I guess publishing the Toguba report, was that Donald Rumsfeld that published the Toguba report?
Does that mean that then he's a traitor?
Cause I read that thing and it was pretty brutal.
It is pretty brutal.
Um, but, but I mean, you know, all of that, like the, the, this, the New York times really important point.
The, the, the administration is using a gimmick to claim that they're not killing civilians.
Um, there, take a step back and ask, why did these two pieces come out at once?
Why did 10,000 pages, 10,000 words come out yesterday at once.
And I went back today and looked at the AP piece, which came out about 10 days ago, um, which described John Brennan bringing all of the drone targeting into the white house and his own grubby little paws.
And in there, there's actually a line where he says, you know, even as he's bringing out all into the white house, even as he's bringing it, you know, away from congressional scrutiny away from FOIA, he's at the same time saying, um, I should look up this line because it's priceless.
He's basically saying, oh, I thought it was important to, um, show the American people that were, were deliberating over these drone targets.
You know, he basically said, I'm going to run a PR from, I'm going to, I'm going to start this PR take, uh, and rename signature strikes and, and, and tell everyone about how we used to vet drone strikes before we decided to use signature strikes in Yemen, um, so that everyone feels better about the fact that we're killing bakers and people who opened the gate and who were in the back of a Hilux and in Yemen.
You know, it's interesting is, um, I guess that they think it's good politics.
Maybe it is good politics to have Barack Obama personally choosing on.
It's funny, you know, the way the New York times put it, I forgot their exact phrasing, but it sort of seemed like they said, um, he personally approves, I guess, all of them in Yemen and Somalia and most in Pakistan.
Is that how you read it?
No, he personally approved a third of the strikes, but since the big number up until the last couple of weeks in Yemen have been in Pakistan, um, that means, you know, most of them, what, what he, what the article says, and I would suggest, um, there's contradictory reporting out there, so I'm not sure that we should totally believe the article, but what the article said, um, cause remember that, that New York times article, there were like something like 12 current or former officials on the record.
It was a sanctioned article.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
So I would be very cautious about, I mean, it was great.
Yeah.
As Chris Floyd said, it's all about making a Barack Obama, the wise philosopher King who takes personal responsibility cause he read it in Thomas Aquinas and all this crap.
He's got an election to win.
We'll be right back after this with the empty wheel, Marcy Wheeler, empty wheel.net.
All right, y'all welcome back.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Marcy Wheeler.
She's the empty wheel on the, in the blog world, empty wheel.net.
That's her blog.
And, um, that's where she writes.
And we're talking about, uh, secret kill list proves a test of Obama's principles and will in the New York times, a love letter, a hymn to the violence as Chris Floyd called it.
And then this one is drones.
How Obama learned to kill by Daniel Klaidman.
Uh, this is an excerpt from his book, kill or capture the war on terror and the soul of the Obama presidency.
I didn't know presidencies had souls, but anyway, that has been kind of the question, right?
Is that George Bush got in so much trouble for, you know, kidnapping all these people and having them tortured hither and yon and, and black sites here in Guantanamo Bay there.
And Obama figured out it's a lot easier if you just kill them and then you don't have to worry about brow beating them into a plea deal or anything else.
And then, so he's carried that philosophy on and spread it throughout the world.
Huh?
Yeah.
And that's another, another area where the New York times article is very interesting because it includes kind of subtle details and, um, almost.
Confirmation that that's what the administration does.
Although there's one guy, a Somalian Ahmed war Sami that we captured.
And so I think Obama's going to point to that one guy, uh, for the rest of his administration and say, see, we actually didn't kill one person.
So it's proof we're trying to capture these guys.
Yeah.
Well, they did cooperate with the Kenyans on some extraordinary rendition of Ethiopia back at the start of the American backed, uh, Ethiopian invasion of Christmas, 2006 and early 2007 there.
I don't know if that counts.
Oh, wait, yeah.
Sorry.
Um, yeah.
And so I, you know, I think it's interesting because I think, you know, what's going on and what these articles kind of write around, I think Kleidman is actually better on this front.
The very last four paragraphs of the Kleidman article kind of make it clear that, uh, you know, for years, he's very good at showing how at first Obama's like, no, not going to do signature strikes in Pakistan.
Oh, well, okay.
I'll make this exception for Pakistan.
Um, and then as Kleidman tells it, uh, sometime last year, John Brennan was like, no way we're not going to get involved in a campaign in Yemen.
That's not our war.
And then as AQAP started holding cities and started risking Aden, which is a port, which is a pretty strategically important port, then all of a sudden, all of those firm principles went out the window and Brennan was saying, and Obama was saying, oh, well, we've got to use signature strikes and we've got to roll it out in such a way that we can hit insurgents who are fighting the Yemeni dictatorship rather than the people who, you know, rather than people who might be targeting the United States.
So in other words, it's a big, what we're seeing, Scott, is really a big campaign on the part of John Brennan and the white house, um, to kind of distract us away from the fact that we're going to war against Yemen against people who aren't really a threat to the United States.
Right.
Going to war in Yemen on behalf of the dictatorship of Yemen that Hillary Clinton calls a democracy because they held a Saddam Hussein style one man election a month or two ago.
And Saudi Arabia.
I mean, you know, this is also Saudi Arabia's interest, not just Yemen, but, um, yeah.
And, and, you know, one of the things that I think is really interesting about this is they, they, you know, they're portraying what has happened in the last year is, oh my gosh, Al Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula turned out to be a lot stronger militarily than we thought.
Um, there's no confession.
There's no admission on the part of the administration instead that, oh my gosh, president Salah was two timing us basically with using all of the money we gave him to protect him, you know, to, to, to fight terrorism and instead using it to protect himself and shore up his power.
And now you've got the military in Yemen basically on strike against their own government.
Well, and you know, in the times piece, they make such a big deal of invoking Abdulmutallab and saying that, well, you know, that was really a wake up call.
Imagine if that plane had really exploded everybody.
That kind of thing.
Yeah.
But they don't acknowledge that that was on Christmas, but they just rewind three and four and five weeks.
They could just go back to the history on antiwar.com and read about how America was pretending to be Yemen and was bombing them starting in November.
And so, you know, then they say, oh my God, they dared to retaliate for that.
Maybe we really do have a problem there when it was so obvious they'd started the whole, uh, you know, intervention and blow back all took place within three, four weeks.
Well, the other thing is that, um, they, um, there, there are really subtle places in the New York times article where I've, I've argued that it's somebody, and I suspect it's Brennan, um, actually giving a quote on deep background.
So in other words, it's a direct quote from somebody in administration, but it's not in quotation marks and it's not attributed.
And, and I say that because if that's not true, then the New York times was, was making completely unjustified judgments, you know, saying that the drone is a precision weapon that reflects Obama's values, saying that drones have eviscerated Al Qaeda.
And then, you know, most interestingly, they said that the Al Mujalla strike, which is, um, the worst strike in Yemen, it was a, it was a strike on December 17th, 2009.
Um, that, that killed 40 some women and children.
Um, basically what happened is it killed some people who allegedly were AQAP fighters, but it also killed this Bedouin tribe that was there killed, you know, a good part of the Bedouin tribe.
They, they use cluster bombs.
So it made things worse.
Yeah.
Amnesty international did a whole writeup on this one.
Right.
Um, what's interesting is the New York times article says, well, we hit our target.
We hit our target, but we killed a bunch of other civilians.
Nevermind that they've been lying for three years and saying we didn't kill the civilians, but we killed our target.
What, what I find really interesting about that is in the very day after that strike, ABC had a story that said the target was people planning an imminent attack against the United States.
That was December 17th, 2009.
We had advanced knowledge of the Abdulmutallab strike.
We didn't know the real details, but we had, in addition to wire into a wiretap mentioning it, we, we'd heard discussion that a Nigerian was playing an attack.
We, you know, we had advanced.
So I wonder to this day, whether we struck a Bedouin tribe in Al-Majalah causing, you know, which is really the source of where a lot of our problems in Yemen go thinking we were going to hit Abdulmutallab and instead he was already halfway to the United States.
Yeah.
Well, I think the original strikes has started in November.
So my theory still holds.
Just not on that particular strike.
Yeah.
I'm not disagreeing, but you know, remember now Richard Wolf, who is sort of, uh, you know, kept little MSNBC boy kind of guy for the white house and very close to the chief of staff, that kind of guy.
He went on MSNBC and said, and I'm not saying necessarily he was right on this or whatever, he said that Obama apparently was paranoid that the intelligence agencies had set him up and had let this guy through and a terrible thing had almost happened, which was, you know, for, for the white house and maybe not necessarily the president himself, but for the white house to arrange for this guy, Richard Wolf, to go and say that on MSNBC, I thought was a pretty big deal.
Well, and remember it wouldn't even necessarily have to be our intelligence agency.
You know, we are, we are dependent upon the Saudis intelligence for human intelligence in, in Yemen.
We also know, uh, because WikiLeaks leaked it, um, and Julian Assange is going to be shipped back to Sweden and soon be on his way to the United States.
Uh, for, for teaching us this, but we know that in August or September of that year, Salah was probably going, well, you can do whatever you want in my country, but if you get hit, then it's not my fault.
And then guess what?
We got hit, you know, our partners in that part of the world really aren't trustworthy.
And I wouldn't be at all surprised if I were Obama and I had those concerns.
Well, yeah, I mean, here we have, um, uh, uh, John Glaser at antiwar.com, uh, writing, uh, Yemen continues military offensive in South aided by us troops and bombs and hundreds have been killed in recent weeks with very little information on their identities.
And this is as Jeremy Scahill wrote in the nation too, in America's Yemen policy backfire, something like that.
Uh, it was all about how all of our anti-terrorism effort in Yemen has simply gone to fight the regime's enemies who are legion, right.
Who don't necessarily have to have any, and are actually many different legions who don't necessarily have any ties to each other.
Right.
Okay.
Yeah.
And, and that's the thing.
I mean, the administration is not admitting that, you know, clearly with Salah, he was double dealing up clearly with Salah.
He was taking all this money, using it to enrich his family, using it to develop his own personal guard, doing nothing for the country.
And it would probably go a long way if we had admitted that.
Well, you know, this post piece says in Yemen, U S airstrikes breed anger and sympathy for Al Qaeda.
Wow.
That's really something to have in the Washington post.
Um, you know, ask him about the motivation for September 11th and see what they say.
But, um, then, uh, I'm sure you must've saw or read about, uh, Leon Panetta on Sunday morning on ABC was asked, Hey, is it possible that our policy in Yemen is actually just creating more enemies every time we drop a bomb over there and Panetta kind of flipped out and didn't really answer the question.
He just said, look, there are bad guys.
We have these tools.
We have to use them.
And he didn't really address, but I guess he was implying that.
Yeah.
And we recognize that we create more enemies every time we do it, but we just can't stop once you're in a hole, you got to grab a shovel and keep digging.
That's what Hillary Clinton says.
That's the policy.
Yeah.
And actually there's a great quote from Dennis Blair in the, in the New York times piece, um, and I'm going to misquote him because I don't have it right in front of me, but you know, he basically says the problem with the administration is they don't have a strategy.
They have the drone strikes and they are saying literally, this is the only game in town, so get on board.
And so we don't, you know, we don't know how we're using the drone strikes.
We're just using them because we haven't taken a step back and said, how are we going to keep the country safe and how are we frankly going to, you know, eliminate these, these failed states largely failed because of cold, you know, this is Yemen is still recovering from cold war politics, much less neoliberalism, much less the oil curse, much less everything else.
So how do you solve a problem like Yemen?
Because there are lots of people in Yemen who really do deserve peace and some kind of stability in their lives.
And we're not doing anything for them.
We're making it worse.
Yeah, definitely.
Well, and you know, it's just like an Andrew Bacevich's recent piece at Tom dispatch and antiwar.com where he's talking about, you know, the tool you use helps determine the policy in a lot of ways.
And when it's really easy to use the special forces all the time and keep it all secret, even from the Congress and everybody else, when it's really easy to fly remote control planes around killing people, why you could spread a war all the way across the world, man, you could fight every militia in Africa if you wanted to, if it just comes down to remote control planes and special forces teams, you could go to war anywhere and everywhere for ever.
Now, any, any armed group that opposes any state that you pick the side of, we can have an intervention, call it a war on terrorism, and it's way past out of control now.
And it's all secret, no accountability.
And so no way to really even measure all the consequences.
And so much of it is, is made secret.
But certainly there are consequences, and there will be more.
Yeah.
And, and I, you know, again, I think that Dennis Blair quote is really important, because if, if we were basically going to war, we also have F-15s that we're using in Yemen now, we're going to war in Yemen.
And we don't have a strategy, we haven't figured out a way to fix what makes Yemen so dangerous to us, to a small degree, but to the Saudis, clearly to a large degree, and for better or worse, you know, we're, we're dependent on them for, they're our drug dealers, right?
And we, we don't have any solutions to that.
So instead, we're just going to keep launching drone, drone, drone, drone, drone.
Well, and it'll work out, I'm sure, because waging war on the Arabian Peninsula, or actually even from the Arabian Peninsula, has always worked out so well for us in the past.
All right.
Thank you so much.
As always, you're brilliant, Marcy.
Appreciate it.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Take care.
All right, everybody.
That's Marcy Wheeler, EmptyWheel.net.
That's where you find her great blog.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
We're done for today.
See you tomorrow.
