10/16/12 – Naureen Shah – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Our first guest today is Noreen Shaw.
She is Associate Director of the Counterterrorism and Human Rights Project and Lecturer in Law of the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School.
Welcome back to the show, Noreen.
How are you?
Great.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
So you've put together this very important new report.
I think Glenn Greenwald was linking to it yesterday.
John Glazer at Antiwar.com was linking to it.
Counting drone strike deaths from Columbia Law School's Human Rights Clinic.
Go ahead and give us the lowdown.
Well, we know that so much of the debate on drone strikes in the United States right now is really focusing on who's being killed and what we're hearing and what the government's saying is that who's being killed are the bad guys, the terrorists.
And what we found is that the statistics that we're seeing cited regularly by pundits, cited by even good journalists are flawed statistics.
There are statistics saying that the number of civilians killed is extremely few.
And what we found is that looking at the same media reports that those organizations looked at, the number of civilians being killed is actually higher.
And now you say there are three different organizations that have been doing this tracking.
The Bureau for Investigative Journalism, the New America Foundation, and the Long War Journal.
And now, so how much of a discrepancy is there between these different groups themselves and with your study?
Well, the one thing to remember is that all of these groups are estimating a higher number of civilians killed than the U.S. government is admitting.
So the U.S. government has said it's, you know, for some periods it's in the single digits.
Now, all of these groups are saying that it's more than that.
But some of them are saying that it's more than the other.
So the Bureau of Investigative Journalism finds that most civilians killed, the New America Foundation and Long War Journal counted a lot less.
Now, we looked at the data from 2011, just 2011 in Pakistan, and we found quite a bit more than the organization's found.
So compared to New America Foundation, we counted 2,300 percent more civilian casualties.
And compared to Long War Journal, we counted about 140 percent.
Now, we found the Bureau of Investigative Journalism was closest to our count.
We only counted 5.9 percent more than they did.
And what we're really talking about here is reports of civilians killed.
So we looked at all of the news reports of who's being killed in drone strikes.
We didn't do our own on-the-ground research.
On-the-ground research is just really hard to do in the parts of Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia where these drone strikes are occurring, which is why everybody's looking to these organizations to provide estimates.
Well, then, so what's the big discrepancy in the methodology if everybody's using the same media reports to come up with their numbers?
Well, what you have is journalists who are going in or finding out information and filing an initial report where they say, this is how many people are killed.
And they get information from anonymous government officials, usually Pakistani government officials, who say, yeah, all those guys who were killed are militants.
But, of course, the Pakistani government officials have an incentive to say that who was killed.
If they admit that it was civilians who were killed and everybody knows that the Pakistani government is in some ways cooperating with drone strikes, then it looks really bad for the Pakistani government.
So they'll go ahead and say it's militants killed.
And that's the first story that's filed after a drone strike.
That story will repeat what the Pakistani government official said.
But a subsequent story, a story filed, you know, two weeks later by a Pakistani journalist, they might have the opportunity to go and do an on-the-ground investigation, to look at the bodies, to talk to witnesses.
And that subsequent story might say something different.
It might say, you know, five people were killed, three of them have been identified as civilians.
Now, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has a good practice of going back and updating its figures when those new stories are filed.
But the other organizations, it doesn't look like they do that consistently.
And that's one of the reasons why we see that big difference.
The other thing about the Bureau of Investigative Journalism is that they have people in Pakistan doing some of the on-the-ground research.
We don't know, it doesn't, I actually am pretty sure that the Bureau of the Long War Journal and the New America Foundation don't have people on the ground to do it.
Now, it's funny because there's this discrepancy, a real big discrepancy, as you talk about here in the study about how, in fact, there's not even a definition, never mind a discrepancy between definitions.
There is no definition for anybody even to quibble about, about what's the difference between a militant and a civilian.
And of course, there's the New York Times report from last spring that said, well, a militant is whoever they kill unless they have proof later that it wasn't a militant, in which case they'll acquit the person posthumously, I guess, in their own secret paperwork.
I don't know.
But basically, the way they look at it is, if we killed you, you must have been doing something wrong.
Is that the definition of a militant?
Well, you know, it's really to the U.S. government's advantage for there to be this ambiguity about who a militant is.
That way, the U.S. government can say that extremely few civilians have been killed and most of them are militants, and it's really hard for any of us to dispute it because, first of all, it's really hard to do the on-the-ground investigation, but second of all, we don't even know what they mean when they say militant.
But it's a real problem because people living in Pakistan, people who live in those areas who might just be going outside their house, you know, carrying a gun because people in those areas do carry guns, they don't know if just carrying a gun is going to get them targeted and killed by a drone strike.
That's the real scary thing for people who are living in these areas, that they don't know what's going to get them killed.
They don't know what kind of activity to avoid.
They don't know who to avoid talking to.
And it might seem really cut and dry to us and really cut and dry to the U.S. government that if you're in that area and you're what they call a military age male that you are a militant, but you know, at the same time we're talking about any teenage boy living in this area who's walking around is going to be presumed to be somebody who could be killed by a U.S. drone strike.
So we have to think about what it's like for the people who are living in those areas and if it's really fair to them for us to have this ambiguous definition of who a militant is.
And there's a kind of double injustice that, you know, first they're being killed and these families are losing their breadwinners and second the story that's getting told is that they were justly killed, that these are the bad guys that we're picking off and and going forward that means that if we continue to think that this is a successful tactic that we're killing all the bad guys, we're just going to keep doing it in more and more places around the world.
Yeah, that's the thing about this drone war is, boy, is it war made easy.
You don't even have to lie to people into war.
You just go ahead and do it.
Nobody even cares.
Yeah, go ahead.
And nobody knows what's going on.
We have a, you know, it's a secret war.
But it's a strange kind of secret where we know that it's going on.
The U.S. government will kind of pat itself on the back for some of these drone strikes.
But at the same time when you start to ask questions, the U.S. government will say, no, no, we don't acknowledge that this is actually happening.
It's classified.
We can't tell you national security.
We can't talk about it.
Right.
And especially if you try to ask, well, how do you define?
Is it the fact that somebody who's what, over five feet tall and male and has a rifle in his hand?
Is that the definition of a militant?
Because we don't even really know that.
Right.
We just kind of fill in that gap ourselves and assume, well, that must be what it is.
But of course, you'd be crazy to not have a rifle walking around the border region of Pakistan and Afghanistan, you know what I mean?
No matter who you are, if the place is so riddled with bad guys, then any good guy would also have to be armed.
Right?
That's right.
And really what we're talking about is a population that's caught up in the crossfire between militant groups that are there and the U.S. government drone strikes.
And it's a it's a devastating situation for those people.
And they're, you know, it's not just the drone strikes.
It's also the groups that are there that might retaliate against these communities.
And, you know, we actually detailed this in another report that we released at the end of September with the Center for Resilience and Conflict, that there's communities where the militant groups that we know do exist in those parts of Pakistan are retaliating against those communities because they think that they're basically snitches, that they're providing information to the U.S. government.
So again, you know, the more we do these drone strikes, it sounds precise.
It sounds like a great idea.
We're picking up the bad guys from a plane, but we have to really acknowledge and think carefully about the impact that there's going to be on the local population.
There's always an impact on the local population when you go to war and drones don't change that.
Right.
Yeah, they just change even the possibility of soldiers coming home and telling stories about it, right?
Well, now here's the thing, too, and maybe I'm going way off the story here, but it seems to me like a militant is a civilian, too, and that the whole thing is a bogus distinction.
Their theory here is that any civilian who dares to pick up a rifle defending his homeland from our foreign invasion has sacrificed any legitimate claim on their own life, but I don't agree with that at all.
Well, you know, it comes down to what law permits and what it doesn't permit, and we're talking about the laws of war here.
The laws of war are meant to be used, and they constrain government actions, and they permit government actions, but laws of war it is, you know, true that they're designed for something like World War II, where you've got people in uniforms and you know you can kill the guy in a uniform.
He's a soldier.
Now, when I say you can do it, that's you can do it under the law, but there's also humanitarian reasons maybe to not do it or reasons if you oppose war in the first place, then it doesn't matter if that guy's got a uniform on.
It doesn't matter what these laws of war say.
If you think it's wrong, you think it's wrong, and unfortunately that part of the debate has gotten lost.
This isn't a World War II situation.
We're talking about populations where most of the people aren't wearing military uniforms at all, and so the risk is even higher of mistakenly killing somebody who has nothing to do with the conflict, and we'd also say that there's a role for human rights law here that, you know, it's not just the U.S. government who has obligations to these people.
It's their own government.
The Pakistani government has obligations to protect its citizens, and it's not fulfilling those obligations when it provides information to the U.S.
All right, now, I think it's an important part what you say about whenever there's a strike, I guess this is the same problem our soldiers have, right?
When they get blasted with the IED.
We saw this a lot in Iraq.
Whoever set the IED, they're long gone, and so then the soldiers, they just lash out, not every time or whatever, but oftentimes they just lash out because they're fighting ghosts, and they end up just shooting whoever's nearby when a bomb goes off, like in the Haditha massacre, for example.
And so now here we see, it sounds like what you're describing is the Taliban going through the same kind of thing.
The Americans are killing them with drones.
They're being attacked by ghosts.
They have no one to lash out at or to hit back at, and so they attack the locals, and just like you said, they just sort of imagine that, well, you must have told them that we were here or that we'd be here on Thursday or whatever kind of thing, and spread collateral damage in that very same kind of way.
That's right.
Those are the reports that we're hearing, and unfortunately, it's not without reason that they're doing it.
I mean, we know that the CIA has had programs and special forces have had programs where they do seek information from the local populations, and on the one hand, it's better for them to get that information because at least they're not just firing based on video data.
At least they're trying to get some information from the local population about who's who in the neighborhood, so to speak, but at the same time, that kind of relationship opens up those people to retaliation.
So we know that the CIA and special operations forces, we hear anyway, that they gave tracking devices to local individuals, just families, people who lived in the area, and you know, those people were supposed to use the tracking devices to help direct the drones or help direct U.S. forces, and the reports that that was happening is, are what we're hearing.
And the reports that that was happening is, are what prompted militant groups to retaliate against communities, and you know, horrible things have happened where people have been tortured by the militant groups and you know, in some cases killed by them, you know, because of this fear that they're providing information to the United States.
Yeah, and you know, this goes beyond the purview of your study.
I'm sorry.
It's just a comment that I can't help but make that all this is because it must be done because these people somewhere in that tribal region, border region, is the, you know, secret Ho Chi Minh trail where these guys regroup before they come back and attack our guys fighting a war in Afghanistan, that they've got no business fighting, that they've had no business fighting, that almost a super majority now of Americans agree was, hasn't been worth it this whole time and should be called off.
And so this continues on a daily basis.
We're blowing up Pakistanis because of, you know, what could come across the border and affect our soldiers in a war where they had no business.
Yeah, and I think that the problem with drone strikes and drone technology is that it tends to allay or make the public feel like, well, we're doing, we're doing war, but we're doing it in a clean way.
It's, you know, it contrasts with what's happened in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It seems true, right?
Because we hear about Afghanistan and Iraq and we see the coffins coming home and we hear about things like torture at Abu Ghraib and drone strikes seem like a great alternative to that.
They just seem like a precise, limited thing.
The problem is that they make war so so seemingly costless that the U.S. might go to war in more places.
And one of the things that's been most disturbing to me is, well, yeah, we know that the U.S. is in Pakistan and we're also starting to hear reports about the U.S. being in Yemen and Somalia, but we've never heard President Obama go on TV, do a late night address saying, tonight, you know, people of the United States, I sent our drones to Yemen, we're invading another country and this is why we're doing it and I've had to do this.
He doesn't go on TV to justify us being in war the way that you'd have to do if you were going to war in Iraq, the way we saw even President Bush do it.
He doesn't have to do that because drones are secretive and because drones fly under the radar, so to speak.
And that's the problem that, you know, we're now in a war that's not acknowledged and doesn't have to be justified to the American people.
Right.
And, you know, it gets really crazy, too, where occasionally you see articles where they're going completely off the deep end talking about, well, the drones actually could be a lot better at deciding who to kill than a human who's, you know, much more prone to error than a robot.
I mean, they're really going to outsource the decision making to the robots here as soon as they think they can anyway.
Well, you know, they have the technological capability to do that right now and that's something that's not talked about nearly enough that this technology exists.
It's the U.S. government that's said repeatedly that they're not going to take they're not going to take humans out of the loop.
That's how they term it, meaning they're not going to make make it so that it's not that it's robots essentially making the decision about whether to kill people.
And that's assuring, but, you know, who knows when that will change and is there a law in place that would compel them never to make that change?
I don't think so.
And then the other big concern would be this technology will get in the hands of other countries and other groups.
We don't know what kind of policies they're going to have.
If the U.S. government says, no, you can't use drone technology to do these things that you're doing, those other countries or those other groups will just say, well, who are you to tell me what to do?
You were using, you were the first to use drone strikes and you never set up any limits.
You never set up any rules.
You did them secretly.
Right.
Well, and we already see the world changing right where Hezbollah flew a drone over Israel, what, two weeks ago.
There's a brave new world kicking in.
Well, that's true.
I mean, the fact is that this technology is not all that complex.
Some people who, you know, military experts and military technology experts who know a whole lot more about it than I do say it's not even a good thing in terms of how technologically advanced it is.
But it's cheaper and we're not talking about nuclear weapons that will proliferate but still be difficult to come by.
It's a Lego piece technology.
Once you figure out how to build it, you can build it.
It doesn't require scarce resources necessarily.
And we're just going to see it continue.
So it really is time for the United States to take a leading role in saying this is how people, you know, this is how to use the technology and how not to.
And also to set the example of limiting the use of the technology.
And unfortunately, the U.S. isn't taking that leading role.
All right.
Now take us through some of these numbers because I think it really is important.
You know, like you're saying, people perceive the drone war as such a neat and clean kind of deal.
And it seems like some of these other tracking organizations have, as you say in here, honestly, but unwittingly, have been, you know, giving false numbers about just how devastating the drone war has been in Pakistan.
So I was hoping you could sort of show us, you know, here's what we've been told compared to here's what we see when we go back and revise.
Right.
So we looked specifically at drone strikes in Pakistan during the year 2011.
And we found based on the news reports, so there's news reports filed after most strikes, just based on those news reports, which have their own problems, we found between 72 and 155 civilians were killed according to the reports, with 52 of those civilians identified by name, which we think is a pretty good indicator of them being reliable, that if you're able to find out the person's name, you could find out whether they're a civilian or not.
The New America Foundation, whose information is cited quite a lot, it's a guy named Peter Bergen who writes for CNN and does a lot of stuff with CNN.
So we're really talking about the most popular estimates out there.
They found, when we found 72 to 155 with 52 of those really strong indicators, strongly indicated, they found three to nine.
So that's a huge difference.
Three to nine civilians killed in an entire year.
That's the most common estimate and we're finding between 72 and 155 and at least, you know, probably at least 52.
Well, and you're right that he's the guy, Peter Bergen, he's the guy that interviewed Bin Laden back in 96.
He's the guy whose word the media takes for it.
Right.
And like you said, you know, one of the things that we emphasize throughout this report is that it's not about saying, you know, New America Foundation or Long War Journal, you're doing it wrong.
It's really about saying this information that you provide should not substitute for hard facts.
And the U.S. government owes us those hard facts.
It's the U.S. government that benefits from this confusion and from this misinformation.
So when somebody from the U.S. government says, oh, this is a great policy, it's extremely precise, few civilians are dying, and then we see a report from New America Foundation saying very few civilians are dying, then it's, you know, it's going along with the U.S. government's narrative of what's happening.
And what we're asking for in this report is that the U.S. government give a true accounting for what's happening.
When there are reports out there, like the reports by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, sometimes doing on-the-ground research, finding out that civilians have been killed, the U.S. government doesn't respond officially, and it has responded with innuendo and basically implying that the Bureau of Investigative Journalism is enthralled or the pawns of al-Qaeda.
And that's not the right way to respond.
Respond on the merits.
Respond, you know, and say we did an investigation, U.S. government did its own investigation, found out what really happened, and this is what happened.
Instead, they're just responding by impugning the credibility of journalists who are really doing this work in good faith.
Yeah, well, and of course, it's what Christopher Woods, right, from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, he's been on this show talking about how I guess he was blaming Panetta and saying that Panetta was responsible for more civilian casualties than Petraeus, and when Petraeus took over, then they started, they stopped doing the double taps.
That's what it was.
When Petraeus took over the CIA and Panetta left CIA, went over to become Secretary of Defense, that Petraeus stopped bombing funerals and whatever.
I don't know if that's even necessarily true.
But in any case, the point being, there's somebody who's not a terror sympathizer.
If he's anybody's sympathizer, in fact, he was even accused, I think, in the comments section of spinning for Petraeus.
You know, if he was there telling anybody's story, it was about how, yeah, it used to be bad, but now it's not as bad as before.
Right, and it is a real shame that people like him and other journalists who are doing on-the-ground reporting and leading this leading this charge just towards the truth, not towards a particular version of the truth, but just to find out what's really happening.
It's a shame that the response to them by the U.S. government, they're leaks, you know, it's some nameless CIA person who's responding, and it's just a response that is, oh, you're the pawns of Al-Qaeda.
You don't know, you're unwittingly, you know, playing into the hands of our enemies.
It's a kind of throwback, almost McCarthyism kind of charge that, you know, if you're not with us, you're against us type thing.
And that's not responsible, and I don't think that's really what the Obama administration wants.
I mean, this administration has talked about transparency since day one.
They've talked about making a clean break from the legacy of the Bush administration, and, you know, they've talked about how they want to be a leader in human rights around the world, and, you know, if even if even if you think drone strikes are a good policy, even if you think they're a cleaner policy, you shouldn't be in favor of this kind of secrecy, and this kind of secrecy happening under a democratic administration that talks about openness.
It's just, it's the height of, unfortunately, it's the height of hypocrisy for the Obama administration, and, you know, there's a lot of people in the administration who I'm sure oppose that kind of secrecy, and we hope that they are strengthened and really armed by reports like ours, and they can go and make changes within the administration.
Yeah, and now people got to remember, too, that, you know, as critical as you're being of of the New America Foundation and the Long War Journal and whatever, these other tracking organizations for the work that they've done on this, the administration's previous claim was that they haven't killed a single civilian this entire time because of quote, the exceptional proficiency and precision of the capabilities that we've been able to develop.
In the words of Obama's number one hitman, John Brennan, the counterterrorism advisor, the guy that gives the thumb up or the thumbs down on these assassinations.
Right, and John Brennan has said more recently in May of this year that drone strikes have, and he's kind of walked it back a little bit, and said drone strikes have, you know, in extremely rare cases harmed civilians, killed civilians, and he said in those remarks in D.C. that we think carefully, you know, we think about it.
We mull over it, and we don't want to do it again.
Well, that's good then.
Yeah, you know, that's not nearly enough.
I mean, when people's family members are killed, and all they have, you know, they don't have any visible sign of the U.S. government.
There's nobody coming to their house and apologizing.
There's nobody coming to their house and investigating and saying what happened here.
It's just this nameless, faceless drone buzzing overhead, and that's a really devastating thing.
I mean, what victims of war want, they want compensation.
It's true.
They want a way to maintain their economic livelihood, but they also just want recognition, some dignity, and I think that's one of the most devastating things about drone attacks is that there's no one to help provide that dignity.
There's no one to recognize when injustice has been done.
There's just nothing for those families.
Yeah, well, and like so many of these interviews, it turns back to the media, too.
You know, this whole time that you and I've been talking, CNN has been, they did like a 10-minute special here about Duran Duran.
That was a big deal to my sister in 1984 or something, if I remember right, and that's what CNN is bringing the American people today right now for them to learn at high noon, at least Texas time.
You know, this is what you need to know today.
Apparently, they imply there's nothing else going on.
There's no drone strike, civilian deaths report that you need to hear about or you'd be hearing about.
Well, that's why independent media is so important.
I'm glad you guys are on the air.
Well, thanks.
Me, too.
Thank you so much for doing this work.
I hope you do get some more press.
At least there's the British and that kind of thing.
All right.
Thanks so much.
Thanks so much, Noreen.
Everybody, that's Noreen Shashi is Associate Director of the Counterterrorism and Human Rights Project and Lecturer in Law of the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School.
We'll be right back.
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