07/22/13 – Chris Woods – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Worden, this is the Scott Worden Show.
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Okay, first guest today is Chris Woods from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
That's thebureainvestigates.com.
Thebureainvestigates.com.
This one is exclusive.
Leaked Pakistani report confirms high civilian death toll in CIA drone strikes.
Welcome back to the show, Chris.
How are you doing?
I'm very good, Scott, and thanks for having me back on.
Much appreciated.
And your journalism, as always.
And so, first of all, I guess, tell us about this report.
You say you have it from three, you have three separate copies from three separate Pakistani military sources.
Is that correct?
I'm not going to say who my sources were, as you'll understand, Scott.
But what I can say is that this is an absolutely authentic internal Pakistan government document that reveals in quite a lot of detail who has been killed by the CIA in drone strikes between 2006 and 2009.
And the numbers are really quite strong of around 750 people listed as killed in a sequence of about 75 drone strikes.
One in five of those, at least one in five of those, are identified as civilians, clearly stated to be civilians.
Ninety four of those civilians are said to be children.
This absolutely flies in the face of CIA claims that it has killed hardly any civilians in Pakistan.
And of course, this is the first major document to emerge from either government in its entirety, which starts to give a really now quite comprehensive idea of who was being killed in Pakistan and who wasn't.
So a very important document, I think, and we're pleased at the Bureau to have managed to get it out there.
We've published the document in full and you can find that on the Bureau's website as well.
So you can go and have a look for yourself, look at this and make your own decisions about the importance of this document.
All right.
So now, first of all, when you say 06 or 09, that's through 09 or through the beginning of the Obama term in power?
It runs till November 2009.
The document, my very clear understanding that this document continues to be maintained right until the present day.
So this is, first of all, it's important for me to say how this document gets put together.
This is not based on media reports.
This is completely separate from media reporting of drone strikes.
This is Pakistan's private political monitoring of the drone strikes by political agents, by employees, by informants in the field, in the villages.
And all of that information is fed upwards.
This document was never intended for publication.
And in fact, the version of the document I've got, which, as you say, runs till the end of 2009, was being put together at a period where Pakistan and the U.S. were secretly collaborating on most of these drone strikes.
So Pakistan was secretly recording high numbers of civilian deaths at a time when it was also colluding with the U.S. on the drone strikes.
And both countries at the time were saying nothing about those civilian deaths, nothing at all.
Right.
Okay.
Now, I know there's been a lot of controversy about the numbers of civilian casualties and total casualties, for that matter, in the secret war in Pakistan in the Obama years.
Although I guess most of that is controversy over later data, correct?
Yeah.
I mean, this is historical.
I mean, it covers the first year of Obama in office.
But much of the data does just start to disappear in 2009.
Now, partly that's because these are working investigations.
Quite often, as you'll see if you look at the document, it says for particular strikes in 2009, still awaiting results or still awaiting information.
But some are much more troubling.
Drone strikes where we know that civilians were killed in 2009 and even where we know that the Pakistan federal tribal government had information to that effect.
We're not seeing that reflected in this document.
And that's very odd indeed.
Literally, civilian deaths disappear once Obama comes to power from this document.
And it's really not clear at the moment as to why that happened.
But it's certainly an odd one.
I'm sorry, you're saying it's the percentage of innocents per strike has gone up since Obama?
No, I'm saying that when once Obama comes to power, the Pakistan government stops, pretty much stops recording civilian deaths, even though the bureau and others have continued to record those civilian deaths.
And in fact, on one occasion, the first drone strikes of Obama's presidency, both drone strikes killed civilians.
We know this not only from reports from the media and investigations by people like ourselves, but also from leaks within the administration.
It's been widely reported that a significant number of civilians died in the first two Obama strikes.
Now, we have seen, because it's been published publicly by Civic, which is now known as Center for Civilians in Armed Conflict, we've seen paperwork from the tribal authorities for one of those strikes showing that they knew at least five civilians had died.
And yet in this data set that we've been able to obtain, those civilian deaths are gone.
They're not mentioned.
So they simply stopped being recorded during the period of the Obama administration for which we have the data.
And that's very unusual.
And I have no explanation at the moment as to why that's taken place.
Well, I mean, it's kind of curious why they would have kept such careful track in the first place.
Unless they were worried about, you know, if there's too many, then that could lead to political trouble at home.
Obviously, I mean, to me, it's less obvious why they would want to keep the records and why they wouldn't.
If it's all covert action, why, you know, generate more and more documents for Chris Woods to get his hands on, especially when you know that you're escalating the war.
I think the view of those I've spoken with in Pakistan about this, I've spoken to a number of former officials who worked in the tribal areas, who've talked me through the processes of how such documents would be put together.
And, you know, these are often described as areas which are ungoverned, which have no rule of law.
That's never been the case.
There's still functioning tribal administrations there and a tribal system that dates back a very long way, back to the time when the British were occupying what is now Pakistan as part of the British Empire at that time.
And this is bureaucracy.
You know, when people get killed in a village, there is a system in place that says, hey, these people got killed and actually this is their status and this is how they got killed.
And by the way, quite a lot of them were civilians.
And there was no prejudice in gathering that information because it was never meant to be published.
This was meant to be just for the private understanding of the tribal administration.
And I think that's why this document is so important.
Because, you know, the U.S. government has attacked the media organizations like the Bureau over many years, saying that we exaggerate and falsify claims of civilian deaths in Pakistan.
Well, here we have the Pakistan government secretly monitoring civilian deaths and pretty much reaching the same conclusions as everybody else.
Lots of civilians were killed, particularly in the early days of the drone strikes.
And I think it's very interesting.
Earlier this year, as you know, Scott, there's this U.N. investigation going on into drone strikes at the moment.
And the Pakistan government gave the head of that U.N. investigation its own estimates back in March, where it said that it believed that between 400 and 600 civilians had died in the CIA bombings in Pakistan.
Now, that number is pretty close to estimates of organizations not only like the Bureau, but also the New America Foundation.
And it's my hunch that that estimate is based on their own internal work, some of which we've been able to put into the light today with the release of this document.
Well, you know, I've got to say that, you know, I'm an individualist.
It's not like, you know, I'm trying to diminish it necessarily.
But I am sort of surprised that the numbers aren't much higher.
Well, I mean, the numbers are what the numbers are, I suppose.
I mean, one in five of all of those killed clearly defined as civilian.
Some would say it's a very high number.
Indeed, others would say that that is low, that, you know, that for warfare, you know, one might expect civilian casualties to be even higher.
The Bureau has always said we are, you know, we will be led by our findings and we continue to put out our research and our findings without fear or favor.
And when that shows historically high civilian deaths, we'll say that.
And, you know, more recently, we've been reporting that civilian, reported civilian deaths in Pakistan have all but disappeared.
That doesn't go down well with some either.
But that's what we find in the field and we're led by our findings.
We're not here to spin it one way or the other.
We're here to say this is what we found.
And I think, you know, let's put this in context at the very, you know, the CIA says it has never killed more than 60 civilians in nine years of bombing in Pakistan.
This document, which is missing a whole chunk of strikes anyway, shows that between a three year in a three year period alone, Pakistan secretly recorded around 150 or more civilian deaths.
So, you know, the CIA's claims here, this assumption of a small number of civilian casualties just isn't borne out by any of the evidence coming through now, not by people like ourselves and certainly not by what's emerging from the Pakistan government.
Well, and even where there's been disputes like with the New America Foundation and other groups doing their own lower estimates, it's still much higher than what the government has said.
Yeah.
And actually, that's quite interesting.
New America Foundation, they took quite a beating last year.
They came under a lot of criticism for their data work.
And I have to say, they've gone off and really reassessed their own data.
And I spoke with Peter Bergen recently in Chicago, who told me that he is now of the firm belief that, you know, civilian deaths do appear to be at the bare minimum around this 400 number.
So I think there's much more consensus now that we're looking at that.
You know, that minimum number of around 400 is probably where civilian deaths lie.
That's a big difference from the 60 deaths the CIA claims.
And I think, you know, the great missing piece of the jigsaw here now, we're starting to get a clear idea of what Pakistan thinks about who was killed.
We know what the media think.
We know what research organizations like the Bureau think about this.
What we're still missing is what the CIA thinks.
It really is about time they published their own estimates of who they killed.
And to begin to explain why when everybody else identifies people killed as civilians, they say that they are militants.
Now, I mean, you're talking more than 100 children alone among the dead here.
And yet the CIA says it's never killed more than 60 civilians.
The math just doesn't add up.
And it really is time for the CIA to deal with this pretense of secrecy.
There is no secrecy.
When President Obama stands up and makes a speech at the National Defense University on national TV about the drone strikes, this is not a secret war.
And I think we all need to cut that pretense, really, and try and understand this huge gulf between the U.S. position on civilian deaths and the claims of 50, 60 deaths and the views of everybody else, which says, no, we're talking hundreds of deaths here, hundreds.
And you need to account for that difference.
Well, you know, it was a year ago that the New York Times published this piece that was based on authorized leaks from Obama's two dozen or maybe three dozen closest friends and highest intelligence and military officials explaining to the New York Times, this is our drone program.
This is our Terror Tuesday.
How we kill and who's in the chain of command and who gives the thumbs up or down on all these things.
And they explained how if they kill somebody, then that somebody was a militant.
And if somebody is holding a gun, then that person is a militant.
And if somebody's doing jumping jacks, well, geez, we've all seen al-Qaeda training on the monkey bars on CNN 10,000 times.
So that must be the kind of exercise that terrorists do.
So we can bomb them, too.
And then only if somebody who's never sent is sent to go and investigate and prove that they're wrong, only then would they posthumously pardon anyone or find them not guilty of being a militant.
So there's your discrepancy right there.
The fact that they got blown up is what makes them guilty.
Yeah, you would think that would be the discrepancy, Scott.
But I've actually run the numbers on this.
I've broken down the death by the gender and the age of where we know it of those killed.
And even when you take out all military aged male civilians from the tally, you're still left with probably three times more deaths than the CIA is claiming.
Because, you know, let's face it, lots and lots of women and kids got killed in these drone strikes, particularly in the early days.
And somewhere along the line, the CIA appears, based on the public evidence and based on this new evidence in the Pakistan government, appears to be, you know, women and kids are killed in a strike and they decide they are not civilians.
Now, I don't understand on which definition of war or the laws of war you get to discount women and kids killed in combat as civilians.
But that seems to be what they're doing based on what we know.
And this is why it really is high time they put their own record out there so we can try and reconcile these completely contradictory positions now.
I mean, there's one strike alone here where they talk about 18 dead.
This is in the Pakistan paper.
You know, and it's almost, you know, clinical the way that it says it.
You know, it's 18 civilians, you know, five men, five women, five children, eight men, all civilian killed.
You know, that's the internal Pakistan government assessment of that strike.
Now, you know, ten of those civilians are women and children.
Are we really saying the CIA never counted them as civilian?
I mean, that would be a bizarre world.
Well, maybe the discrepancy is that some of this killing is being done by the Joint Special Operations Command and private contractors.
I've never particularly bought the view that JSOC carries out drone strikes in Pakistan.
I know that Jeremy has a strong view on this, and he's done some work on this.
You know, in all my work in this area, and also I did work quite heavily in Pakistan at the end of last year, I'm not really sure that JSOC is carrying out targeted killings in the air using drones in Pakistan.
I think it's a purely CIA operation.
We know that JSOC operate drones in Somalia and Yemen, and everybody is agreed on that.
I don't know if Obama's, you know, semi-declassified that information, but, you know, I think the discrepancy is just the way they count their numbers.
I think, you know, if women and kids are in proximity to a so-called high-value target or an alleged high-value target when they try to kill them, I just think they take those numbers out.
And, you know, we've had really terrible attacks where, you know, the one real standout of the secret report is the attack on Bajor, on a school in Bajor in 2006, which killed at a bare minimum 69 children.
This report says it killed 80.
I think that's because it lists 18 and 19-year-olds who were students as children.
You know, we use the UN definition of children, which runs 0 to 70, which I think explains the difference.
You know, between 70 and 80 kids died in that one strike.
Now, that strike was reportedly an attempt to kill Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's number two.
If the U.S. accepted that it had killed children in that strike, it couldn't be claiming it never killed more than 60 civilians in nine years of bombing.
So, what has it done?
It must not be counting those children's deaths.
It must not be counting them.
And I think it's time to start asking those really difficult questions.
How can you not count the deaths of children in drone strikes as civilian deaths?
This makes no sense to me at all.
I wonder if maybe there's two sets of books and they have their, you know, this sort of came out in the Iraq War, right, with the war logs.
Hey, here's a whole separate count of dead Iraqi civilians that nobody had ever heard of before.
Well, I mean, McClatchy, the news agency, called out the CIA just a few months ago with its leaked documents.
You remember, Scott, the story I broke two years ago showing that Brennan was not telling the truth when he said the CIA had stopped killing civilians in Pakistan.
And an investigation I did for the Bureau back then, where we gave them the names of 50 civilians they killed and said, well, you might want to have a think about that.
But during that period where Brennan explicitly says the CIA got no information of any civilian killed, the leaked McClatchy documents show a civilian killed in that period.
Actually, it was far more than that.
But even the CIA conceded it had killed one civilian in that time period.
And yet there he goes three months later on camera, John Brennan, when he was then, you know, President Obama's chief counterterrorism advisor, saying we've not killed a civilian in almost a year.
Now, either the CIA has misled him on that information, they withheld from him that death, or John Brennan misled the American public about that death.
It's one or other.
Well, at one point, he even claimed that they had never killed any civilians at all in the entire drone war.
I'm not aware of that claim by Brennan.
I mean, I know that he's claimed that really from around May 2010, they stopped killing civilians.
I'll have to find the link for you.
Yeah, that would be interesting.
I'd love to see that.
I mean, the bizarrest thing about this is, of course, round about autumn 2010, they do predominantly stop killing women and children.
Clearly, the political pressure was growing.
You know, the tensions with Pakistan were becoming extreme, and they risked losing permission for the campaign.
They lost it anyway in the end.
And we start to see this steep decline in civilian drone deaths.
And that's not by their reports or Pakistan's reports.
These are self-identified civilian deaths from the communities out there.
And those deaths have pretty much stopped.
You know, they're not coming in anymore.
So bizarrely, Brennan was, you know, in a complicated way, he was kind of making a point.
They had changed the emphasis and they had tried to stop killing civilians.
But to say that they killed no civilians was just not true.
There is no perfect weapon of war.
Weapons kill civilians in war.
And it's a question of how many, you know, it's a sliding scale.
And the more accurate and more precise the weapon and the better the intelligence and so on and so on, the less civilians you're going to kill.
But nobody has developed a perfect weapon, which, of course, the CIA seemed to be claiming for a while that it had.
Yeah.
Well, you're right here, too.
The New York Times, they only paraphrase the part where he says for more than a year.
And the direct quote just has the no civilian casualties.
But you're right.
And I think that that was probably.
I'm probably thinking of reports that mischaracterize his original statement.
It's still an outlandish and ridiculous one anyway.
Yeah.
And of course, that statement went uncontested.
It wasn't just Brennan making that in June 2010.
For six months beforehand, loads of anonymous U.S. intelligence officials were making the same claims to a gullible U.S. media, which was lapping it up.
And, you know, for six months, the media just went along with reporting that drones had stopped killing civilians.
Every piece of information coming in from Pakistan was saying the opposite.
But, you know, he was going to challenge them at that point.
I think that has changed now.
I think that the media in the U.S. have got better at engaging on this question of civilian deaths.
But there's still a long way to go, I think.
And, you know, we are still seen at the bureau as being way out there on this question of civilian deaths.
Actually, we're in the center on this question.
It's the U.S. media, which is pretty much out there right now in terms of claiming almost no civilian deaths.
Yeah.
Well, they'll catch up to you at some point after it doesn't matter anymore.
Well, and, you know, it's important to bring up here, too, to try to make it a little bit more human and real.
There was that report, Life Under Drones, and there was a great one in the Washington Post, of all places, about life in the Gaza Strip with Israeli drones, weaponized and non-weaponized drones in the air all day long.
And what it's really like to do that to someone or to have that done to you, I guess, to live in a world where there are remote control planes that may or may not kill you buzzing in the sky all day.
And you want to talk about terrorism, that's terrorism.
And if I know, you know, from the media I've consumed, it seems like public opinion in Pakistan is something above 95 percent opposed to the American drone war in their country.
And we've already had an almost attack at Times Square, a failed attack at Times Square, that was directly revenge for American drone strikes in Pakistan.
And we very well could face further attacks based on this policy.
And it just seems like it's so far away, people can't imagine what it's really like to live, to be in such an unfair fight, right, to have a remote control plane bomb you, where if you could shoot it down, there's not even a pilot in there, you know?
I mean, to be fair, Scott, I mean, the day that war starts being fair is a day to celebrate.
Wars are never fair.
Every side will reach for the advantage it has over it.
Agreed, of course, although this is like cartoonishly, ridiculously unfair, I think.
Yeah, I mean, there's a book by a Pakistani diplomat called Ahmed, which has just come out, which makes this exact point.
It's called The Drone and the Thistle, and it's a very interesting read.
One of the things Ahmed says is far too much is made of the technological superiority of the drone, and far too little about the technological inferiority of the cultures it's used against.
And actually, let's, you know, Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, these are three of the poorest nations on Earth.
There's a reason I think that drones are particularly successful in those environments.
It's because they can't do anything about them.
You're absolutely right.
You know, as I say, wars are not meant to be fair.
And I'm sure that is the U.S. view that, hey, you know, we'll take every advantage that we've got.
And if people aren't going to kick off against these drone strikes and we get away with making these outlandish claims about them, then we'll do it.
You know, that's our business.
Right.
Well, and that's why I have to resort to the utilitarian argument, too, about the blowback.
You know, this is something that happened when they're talking about Yemen.
David Gregory, of all people, asked Leon Panetta, hey, you know, we keep hearing these people say, well, geez, I never heard of al-Qaeda, but I'm joining it now that you bombed my family in a drone strike over there in Yemen.
Are you sure that this is the best way to handle it?
And Panetta basically sputtered that, you know, these are the tools we have, and so these are the tools we'll use.
And basically conceding that, yes, it's counterproductive, but I don't have any better ideas.
Do you?
Actually, there was a very interesting killing a few weeks back, almost immediately after the new government came into Pakistan with Nawaz Sharif as prime minister.
So the U.S. killed a guy called Wali ur-Rahman in Pakistan.
There have been very few strikes this year, but he was a number two in an organization that the U.S. has long targeted.
But crucially, he was involved in the suicide bombing of the CIA base at Khost back in 2009.
Now, why did they kill Wali ur-Rahman?
Well, one clear reason for that is probably revenge.
The guy had a multimillion dollar price on his head.
Why did the U.S. kill him at that particular point?
Well, this is a really big question mark.
The new Pakistan government had just put out peace feelers to the Pakistan Taliban.
And with Rahman's death, that process just ended immediately.
The next consequence of that was that the Pakistan Taliban had set up a special unit to target foreigners in retaliation for U.S.
-drained strikes.
Now, the Pakistan Taliban is a terrorist organization, and it's caused countless thousands of terrorist deaths, deaths by terrorism in Pakistan.
But the U.S. has generally left the TTP, the Pakistan Taliban, alone.
Why?
Because it's not fighting the war across the border in Afghanistan, and why pick a fight with them?
The last time the U.S. picked a fight with them, which was when it killed the TTP's previous leader, that led to that suicide bombing across the border.
So we get this ludicrous tit-for-tat killing situation between the CIA and this terrorist organization.
So who sat down at the CIA a few weeks ago and made the strategic judgment about whether it was the right time or not to kill this individual?
Who actually stepped back and said, you know, if we kill this guy, we may actually make life more miserable for thousands of Pakistanis here.
We may make peace less likely.
You know, all sorts of consequences.
I don't think anyone takes those strategic decisions.
Right.
Just tactical ones.
Do we have a clear shot?
Go ahead, then.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We're all out of time.
We've got to leave it there, but thank you so much for coming back on the show, Chris.
I really appreciate it.
A real pleasure, Scott.
Take care.
From the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, TheBureauInvestigates.com.
Exclusive leaked Pakistani report confirms high civilian death toll in CIA drone strikes.
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