03/28/08 – David Case – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas, and introducing our next guest, David Case.
He's a freelance journalist.
He's written for Rolling Stone, Men's Journal, and National Geographic Adventure.
He's formerly the executive editor of TomPain.com.
Oh, wow, turns out I'm a big fan of this guy.
I've never talked to him before.
More of Case's work can be found at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and the new article in Mother Jones is the U.S. military's assassination problem.
Welcome to the show, David.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for having me.
Good to have you here, and a very disturbing article you have here.
I want to ask you, first of all, let's just start off with the sub-headline here.
Software like BugSplat is supposed to keep decapitation attacks precise, so why do we keep blowing up Iraqi wedding parties?
What the hell is BugSplat?
BugSplat was a software program.
They actually realized that they had a bit of a PR problem with that name, but BugSplat was a program that the U.S. military developed to kind of determine when they dropped a bomb what the impact zone would look like, so the image, think of a bug splatting against your windshield, and that was essentially the outline of how a bomb would strike.
So it's like a video game simulation of if we drop this size bomb on this particular target, how do we expect it to react?
Yeah, exactly, and from, you know, it was quite sophisticated.
They call it now CD something, collateral damage minimizer or something to that effect, but the idea is if you change the weight of the bomb, if you use a 500 pound bomb versus a 1,000 pound, if you fire it from a different angle, you're going to get a different impact zone, and the idea is to, you know, get the military objective without killing too many people or destroying too much property.
Well, I guess like the guys at the Pentagon, I'm just fascinated by the high-tech angle here.
There's something else that you bring up in terms of, well, letting the computers do the job, and that is the pattern of life, so that when, I think this means when they're surveilling something that they want to bomb with a predator drone or a stealth bomb or something that they have a computer program which analyzes where people ought to be by the time the bomb gets there, that kind of thing.
Is that right?
Well, that's more actually humans doing the work in that case.
They've tried, you know, this article that I wrote is about the targeted killing program of the United States government.
That's essentially the idea that when we find somebody who's an alleged terrorist, we eliminate them with a hellfire missile or something.
They've been doing this basically since September 11th, and lately they've been making an even greater effort to try to minimize civilian casualties, and one way they do that is sometimes they have an intelligence asset that actually watches people and finds out when they go off to tend to their fields so that they can make sure that they can actually isolate the person that they're trying to target.
Well, in that sense, I appreciate that.
I figure if there has to be a war on terrorism, I want it to be done by cops and intelligence guys as much as possible.
I want the targeting to be of individuals, people who are actually leftovers of the Arab Afghan army who are still friends with Osama bin Laden and do what he says and so forth, and I want them to be taken one at a time without innocent people being killed.
Yeah, that's the objective.
But the problem is, it seems like in reading your article, that once you basically put the battle up in the air and you use targeted killings from the sky, that in the name of targeting individuals in individual circumstances, you actually make it more likely that you kill innocent people.
Well, yeah, it's a difficult process.
Intelligence is very difficult for the U.S. military to get, especially in tribal cultures in Afghanistan or Somalia or Iraq or elsewhere, and the problem is that they need to drop these bombs on people who are well-sheltered by their neighbors, and they need to do it in a way that's not going to cause a lot of collateral damage.
There have been two studies that have looked at the effectiveness of this type of program.
Neither of them were really from the war on terror.
One was done on the 1991 invasion of Iraq, and the other one was done in 2003.
The first one was done by some neocons, essentially, and the second one was done by Human Rights Watch.
And both of them found that despite very sophisticated targeting abilities with laser-guided missiles, the U.S. has a very bad record of getting the people that they wanted.
In Iraq, they were trying to get Saddam and his henchmen, essentially, and they were something like zero for fifty in 2003, even though at one point we thought we got Chemical Ali, the guy who was responsible for the gas in the Kurds, but he turned out not to be there at the time.
Well, and that's actually part of the narrative of your story, is this guy Mark, help me pronounce his last name.
Mark Orlasko.
Mark Orlasko, yeah.
And how this guy went from working in the Pentagon doing the targeting to Human Rights Watch doing the analysis of the aftermath, is that right?
Yeah, actually, Mark is a very interesting guy.
He kept his job at the Pentagon in 2003 because he thought he would be as good as or better than most of his colleagues in getting the targets right.
You know, he's quite a conscientious guy, and he knew the targets set because he'd been looking at Iraq for a long time as a Pentagon analyst.
So during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he was working kind of day and night helping the military choose targets and using the follow-up software to bug splats to try to minimize civilian casualties.
And he thought when he was at the Pentagon that he was doing a pretty good job of it, but when the invasion was complete, he took a job immediately after, just days afterwards, with Human Rights Watch, and they flew him immediately over to Iraq to assess his handiwork.
And he went from site to site and looked at, you know, what exactly happened.
He went, for example, to the site where Chemical Ali, where he was, where they tried to kill him, and he found that they had killed, I believe it was 17 civilians.
They knocked out two houses, and the people that he talked to at the site said that they had never seen Chemical Ali in the neighborhood, just in Basra.
Part of the problem was that back then, and it's still a practice as far as we know to this day, the U.S. military uses the signal that is released by satellite phone to try to target these people, and the signal isn't all that accurate.
It's accurate to 100 meters, so that's about a city block.
So if you use that signal, you might be, you know, an entire city block off, which means that you get 17 civilians instead of Chemical Ali.
And now, you said there was zero for 50.
The opening salvo of the war, the shock and awe campaign, was the attack on Doha Farms, and in fact, I think it was a PBS special where they interviewed the pilots, and this was back still in ra-ra days, when only crazy people were critics, and so they had these in-depth interviews with the pilots, talking about what a great job they'd done, despite the fact that all they had done was kill innocent people.
Yeah, well that's a problem, I mean, in the case, in both Iraq wars, the intelligence was just bad, and the U.S. military is very good.
They make mistakes.
The missiles aren't always perfect, but they've gotten quite good at hitting targets they're trying to hit.
They can hit a building.
They can hit a military establishment, but it's difficult to find people and hit them.
Well, yeah, and there was an example just a couple of weeks ago, where they targeted one of the so-called accused in the Africa Embassy bombings in Somalia, and killed three women and three children instead.
Yeah, well actually, you mentioned the Pulitzer Center earlier.
They funded a trip for me to go to East Africa to write about the Somalia War last year, and while I was there, I tried to investigate a couple of bombings that occurred in the beginning, when Ethiopia invaded Somalia in December 2006, January 2007.
Unfortunately, I couldn't get into Somalia at the time, because the situation was so bad, and there was cholera right across the border, and no one would take me there.
But I did visit the refugee camps on the border, and when I was there, it was very interesting.
In one of the camps, there were about 150,000 Somalis on the border of Kenya and Somalia, and in one of the camps that I went to, identifying myself as an American journalist, a lot of people brought up, oh, you know, your country bombed a wedding party in Somalia in January 2007, and killed 73 people.
And the numbers were basically the same everywhere I went, and I talked to, I had tea with a bunch of Somali elders in a tea house in one of these refugee camps, and they were quite irate about this situation.
So I think that the moral of the story is that we don't really know what's going on, which is, that's what I think is the most worrying thing about this program.
We know that the U.S. government is assassinating people, in certain circumstances they've knocked off people that probably deserve to be knocked off, but in other circumstances they've killed civilians, and there's basically no oversight of the program whatsoever.
Well, I'm really looking forward to going back and reading your work about the war in Somalia.
Just for people who don't know, it was the United States that had Ethiopia invade Somalia back in December 2006, and according to the Washington Post, it was because there were three Al-Qaeda guys, suspected Al-Qaeda guys in Somalia.
That's why there's now this, what the New York Times report says, the humanitarian catastrophe that's now eclipsed the crisis in Darfur, the worst one in the world other than Iraq right now.
Right.
The article that I read from Mother Jones' website was, The War on Terror's Newest Front.
Okay.
That's an interesting article.
When I was researching that, people were telling me that part of the reason why the Islamists kind of took power in Somalia in the summer of 2006 was because of blowback from CIA operations of trying to actually kill or capture those suspected Al-Qaeda operatives.
And you know, when they announced the airstrike from the ship, the Tomahawk cruise missile or whichever it was that killed the six innocent people a few weeks ago, even in the official news reports, I forget if it was AP or Reuters, they said, yeah, the target was this guy who's wanted for questioning by the FBI.
I thought that was a nice little spin.
Well, I thought one of the diplomats that I spoke with when I was in East Africa, we were talking about trying to assess civilian casualties from these attacks, and he said, you know, it's hard to figure out whether they were civilians or not when everybody's vaporized.
Yeah, that's very true.
I guess we're lucky that you didn't get renditioned to Ethiopia.
It's happened to at least one American who had escaped to the northern border there.
Yeah, well, they didn't bother me that way, fortunately.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I'm glad we have you here on the show.
I don't know whatever happened to that guy, if he's still in the Ethiopian dungeon or what.
But I know that Chris Floyd talked about there was at least one American citizen who was renditioned to Ethiopia.
If you're running from Somalia while we're bombing it, you're obviously a guilty Al-Qaeda guy.
So off you go.
Yeah, that's an interesting story that I haven't seen well told yet.
Actually, there were about 80 people.
There were over 100 initially, but then there were 80 people who were rendered from Kenya after the war back to Somalia, and some of them ended up in Ethiopia in pretty hideous prisons.
Some of them, I actually talked to some of the people who were released from Ethiopia while I was there.
But some of the human rights groups have been trying to get a handle on what exactly happened in that situation.
Now, let me ask you this.
These predator drones, do they work in the kind of altitudes in the Hindu Kush mountains where supposedly Osama bin Laden and his buddies are hiding?
Yeah, they've launched a number of attacks using predator drones on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
And I think in recent months, they've become more common.
So yeah, they work in that area, definitely.
And actually, it was interesting.
USA Today had a story earlier this week that said that we've gone from a few dozen predator drones to over 5,000 in operation right now.
Really?
Do you know what percentage of those are in Afghanistan-slash-Pakistan-versus-Iraq right now?
No, I don't.
But a lot of them are actually operated by private contractors.
Oh, interesting.
Now, well, I was just going to say, so when the Air Force recruiting ad says, join the Air Force, we'll let you play video games all day, they were telling the truth, actually.
And yeah.
Well, that is part of this, right?
That you have people sitting at an airbase in Arizona somewhere, bombing people on the other side of the world, and who could care less about that, really?
I mean, that's a lot easier than running up to a guy with a bayonet in terms of carrying it out.
I wouldn't minimize the, you know, if we could get Osama bin Laden, that would probably be nice, right?
And I wouldn't minimize the challenge that the U.S. military faces.
And this is a neat solution in some ways, because yeah, you can operate a drone from Doha or from the special operations base down in Tampa, Florida, and no American soldiers are put in harm's way.
And also, for the sake of the locals, it's not easy to have the U.S. military, you know, storm your village.
There's going to be some, there could very well be some collateral damage there.
So it's not always a bad, you know, if we could have taken Saddam out with the Predator drone instead of invading Iraq, it would have been a lot less damaging.
But on the other hand, there's absolutely no oversight of the program.
And there's obviously no due process for the people who are killed.
We don't know, you know, obviously, if you look at Guantanamo Bay, a lot of the people there we now know weren't actually terrorists.
So if they decide to take you out using a Predator drone instead of sending you to Guantanamo Bay, there's really no way of reversing that.
Well, and you know, there have been strikes inside Pakistan, they usually call a chemical plant exploded today or something like that.
And I guess in your article, you mentioned that there was a near miss of Ayman al-Zawahiri, who just put out a new podcast the other day, in fact, from wherever he's safe in exile.
But they ended up killing a bunch of innocent people in that case, missed him by a couple of hours.
Is that right?
Yeah, they missed him by a couple hours.
They had intelligence, apparently, that he was going to be having dinner with some people in Waziristan, I believe.
And they decided to strike in the middle of the night, presumably because that would be when they would minimize civilian casualties.
But he had left by then and they killed 18 people.
Mainly, I guess, almost all civilians, if not all civilians.
Now, so when you say there's no oversight of this, does that mean that there's not even a law governing how they're supposed to do it, much less, you know, double checking on them?
Well, the Bush administration and laws, it's kind of a oxymoron, but...
Well, has Congress even tried?
I mean, is there...
They, there are laws that govern this.
I tried to get an explanation from the Bush administration as to how they view this.
And I can actually have, I stuck on my wall their response.
David, we have no comment for you on whether the paragraph you cite is accurate or not.
I eventually emailed them a paragraph telling them what I had sort of discerned as their legal judgment on how this was to be carried out under US government rules.
The Bush administration, as far as I can tell, has argued that the war on terror is a global war.
So they are free to strike any enemy combatants, if you will, anywhere in the world.
And because it's a situation of war, they don't need to get the normal clearance that they need to get to do covert operations outside of the battlefield.
Well, interestingly, you bring up the Israeli precedent in your article.
There was an Israeli human rights group that got sick and tired of the Israeli government doing this kind of thing, I guess, in Gaza and the West Bank, and took them to court.
And the court ruled and restricted the ability of the military to carry out these type attacks there.
Yeah, there was a coalition of Israeli human rights groups that brought this case before the Israeli Supreme Court.
They argued that Israel is the only other country that has used this tactic in any sustained fashion.
The human rights groups argued that this was an illegal use of force tantamount to a policeman firing on a suspect instead of arresting them.
The court sort of split the difference.
They ruled that they didn't ban the program.
Instead, they said that international law restricted the use of this program and said that it could only be used in circumstances where the target of the attack was known to be engaged in planning terrorist activities.
At the time, kind of thing?
Yeah, it's not entirely clear.
But essentially, at the time, yeah, the idea, I guess, is that you can't hit somebody who is involved in some sort of terrorist activity five years ago or somebody who is no longer a combatant.
It was an attempt to discern who is a combatant and who wasn't in the Israeli conflict.
The other restrictions, they said that the Israeli government or security forces would have to rule out the possibility of arresting the person.
And they said that after the attack, they would need to do an investigation to determine whether all of the international laws of war were abided by.
They needed to make sure that they minimized civilian casualties and so forth.
Now, the only problem with this is that their lawyers say that there are huge loopholes in the law and the Israeli government will probably just ignore it.
So it was a victory in some ways.
A small step in the right direction.
Yeah, I guess they have the same chief executive type standard over there, right?
Where they just add a signing statement.
Is that how they do it?
I don't know.
But there are significant loopholes in this law.
So they would have the wiggle room to get out of actually having to abide by it.
All right.
So tell me this.
How much competition have you had in writing this article?
Oh, there haven't.
You know what?
I must say that it's something that I think journalists are interested in, but it's a very hard story to tell.
As I mentioned, I really wanted to go to Somalia to investigate the airstrikes that occurred in early 2007.
But not only are these places difficult to get to, but when you get there, the locals are often hostile because there's been an airstrike in the area and there's not much evidence left after a Hellfire missile is fired.
Pretty much you have a hole in the ground and maybe some fire remnants or something to that effect, but ash.
So it's hard to actually report these stories.
And if you call the Pentagon for information, they don't even admit that the program exists.
So reporters need something to report.
And if you get into a story like this, it ends up being very difficult to get any meat.
It's kind of a catch-22 with all these new military technologies, you know, because the easier it makes the war, the easier it makes it to go to war.
And, you know, what was it?
What was the number?
You said 5,000 of these things now, the Predator drones?
That's what USA Today reported, over 5,000.
I mean, how long before one of these things or five of them are just circling over Austin, Texas all day?
Yeah, and the other problem is that, yeah, exactly.
The military technology tends to, you know, start maybe in the hands of the United States.
Soon everybody has it.
And then it's kind of a dicey situation.
I'm really surprised there hasn't been more discussion of this.
Yeah, so, you know, I guess the Doha Farms thing kind of encapsulates it all for me.
They wouldn't have bombed Doha Farms except for the fact that, oh, well, we have all this great intelligence and we have all this great technology, so we're going to do this capitation strike.
Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a target.
And so by having this technology that makes everything so much more accurate and so much more high-tech, it expands the range of targets, in a sense, and gets even more innocent people killed than would have been otherwise.
I mean, not that I'm recommending carpet bombing instead, but...
Yeah, well, the other problem is when you do strikes like this, there have been a number of strikes along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, and that's an area where the public sentiment has never been really in the United States' favor, but it's turning more and more violently against us.
And you have to wonder the extent of the effect of these airstrikes.
In 2006, there was a strike, in late 2006, against a couple of suspected Taliban recruiters, clerics at a mosque.
They killed 80-some-odd people who were exercising in the yard of the mosque, in the Madrasa's yard, actually, at dawn.
So the locals said that they were mainly students who were exercising after their morning prayers.
The intelligence sources that got in touch with the newspapers said that they were Taliban fighters preparing to go to Afghanistan.
We'll never know the truth, in part because the Pakistani government prevented journalists and human rights advocates from visiting the site.
But you have to wonder to what extent having bombs rain down on you from time to time by predator drones is turning people against the United States.
Oh, well, I can't imagine.
You're arguing there's such a thing as blowback?
We all know that doesn't exist.
Right.
Of course not.
Okay, well, you know, there's a headline today on antiwar.com from The Guardian, where the new elected parliamentary leaders are saying Pakistan is no longer a U.S. killing field.
Looks like Musharraf's fall from power there.
I mean, I guess he's still nominally the president.
But looks like this shift of fortunes in Pakistan is going to work against the current policy here, at least sounds like it.
Well, whatever happens, I think Pakistan was, is, and for a long time will be more of a concern than Iraq ever was.
You know, that's a nuclear country, and we know that for certain.
And with a large number of people who are truly opposed to the United States.
So the policy of deporting Musharraf for all these years was flawed from the beginning and probably made the situation worse.
Yeah, well, I mean, and that's that's really the question is if if if Pakistan really is so dangerous, which, you know, people who know a lot about that region, like Eric Margolis and people like that have told me that those nukes are in really safe hands, actually, over there.
But, you know, obviously, there's somewhat of a danger there.
The question is, how do we handle?
Are we pushing Pakistan toward radicalism or away from it?
Are we all these attempts to strike al Qaeda targets and some of them, I guess, must have been successful.
Is it worth it compared to, you know, the blowback that we suffer?
I guess Don Rumsfeld asked this question right now.
Unfortunately, we don't have the metrics to measure whether we're creating more enemies than we're killing.
Yeah, well, you know, I think the classic example of that is Iran.
Back in the 1970s, Iran was a very close American ally, and nobody would have predicted that the Ayatollah Khomeini would have taken power.
The people of Iran, to this day, I've traveled in Iran, the people of Iran are, a lot of them are quite favorable towards the United States, and no one would have, you know, you can see parallels between Iran back in the 70s and Pakistan now.
Do we know what's going to happen five years from now?
No.
And the more we alienate people by bombing, the worse the situation could get.
On the other hand, there's, you know, there are a lot of people there that are of concern to us, so it's not an easy problem to solve.
Well, I guess, you know, if I had to choose, if there has to be any part of the war on terror that continues to exist, I would like it to be very targeted against the actual people responsible for knocking down those towers, maybe, and maybe we could leave the rest of the Muslim world alone for a change.
That would have been nice if we had started that back in 2001, and I think, yeah, we should certainly go back in that direction, perhaps if there's a new president that, well, one of, two of three of them, two or three of the possibilities would hopefully go in that direction.
But I think, yeah, we need to do even more than that now to win back the support of the Muslim world, or at least the credibility of the Muslim world.
I've spent a lot of time traveling in Islamic countries in the last five years, and a lot of people think that the United States is fighting a war against Islam, and even in places like Indonesia that are still fairly friendly with the US.
So there's a lot of work to be done to regain our standing in the world.
Well, what do you recommend for that?
Other than, say, for example, removing aircraft carriers from people's shores and so forth, what is to be done in a positive sense?
Well, that's a good question.
One answer, one obvious answer is foreign assistance for countries like Indonesia that have big problems.
That's not an issue in the Middle East where they have more money than we do now in some ways, but part of it is just becoming a good global citizen again, doing the right thing instead of trying to get away with trying to use force and get away with misbehaving in the world.
But it's a tough problem.
It's easier to keep a reputation than it is to build one.
Right, yeah.
Well, I like the way you put that, too, getting away with stuff.
It always seems to me, and I hate to dumb down a complicated foreign policy argument and so forth, but all these things to me, in essence, you can make an analogy to just young teenagers in the neighborhood.
Is the strongest and fastest and smartest guy, is he the bully or is he the guy that really protects you from the bullies, you know?
Right.
That's what I think a lot of people...
I met an Al-Qaeda supporter last year in Kenya who was saying that.
He said, for years we've looked at the United States as the country that would protect us.
It was there to step in when things went wrong.
But he said, now that's gone and we don't see that anymore.
We see the opposite.
This is a guy I met who's been a moderate Muslim for his entire life.
He was actually in the military in Abu Dhabi, kind of as a foreign fighter in the military.
And post-September 11th, he's become a Wahhabi.
He's become kind of radicalized by the war on terror itself.
Yeah, well, there you go.
I mean, that just goes to show one more anecdote of the reaction playing directly into the hands of the people behind the September 11th attack.
Yeah, that's true.
All right, any important points I forgot to ask you about you'd like to clarify or expand on?
I don't think so, other than suggesting that you go to Mother Jones.
They have a great issue.
The March-April issue is all about the war on terror and torture and targeted killing and things like that.
And also, the website of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
I think it's pulitzer.org.
It's a great website.
They support journalists going abroad to do reporting projects like this.
And they have links to all the stories that the journalists do.
So it's a great site.
Okay, great, everybody.
That's David Case.
The article is The U.S. Military's Assassination Problem in the current Mother Jones.
Thanks again for your time today.
Thank you, Scott.