10/19/12 – Omar Shakir – The Scott Horton Show

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Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest on the show today is Omar Shakir.
He is currently pursuing his JD at Stanford University School of Law.
He's a 2007-2008 Fulbright Scholar in Syria, and he's co-author of the Stanford NYU Living Under Drones Report.
Welcome to the show, Omar.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
It's a very important bunch of work that you put together here.
Just the day before yesterday, we spoke with Noreen Shah from Columbia University about their work going back and doing a recount of the civilian deaths.
There are a few different sources, of course, doing body counts like that.
The New America Foundation, the Long War Journal, the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, and now Columbia University.
They've got an even higher number of civilian deaths, I believe, in your article.
You're working off of the numbers from the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, which they were doing the best work up until Columbia did theirs, anyway, as far as going back and following up and trying to keep track of as much as they possibly could about civilian deaths there.
That's really the starting point for your study here, Living Under Drones, at livingunderdrones.org.
Again, a product of Stanford and NYU.
Why don't you start there with what's your understanding about the numbers here, maybe the methodology, how close we are to an accurate portrayal of the number of civilian deaths there in Pakistan?
Absolutely.
No, and I think the work that Columbia did is incredibly important.
I think one of the initial questions that was at the base of this project was, we keep hearing in the U.S. press that there are so few numbers of civilians who have been killed in strikes.
Really, it's one of the toughest things to verify, given the limited access to information to the federally administered tribal areas, of course.
It's not possible for foreigners or even non-residents of FETA to travel to that region.
I think part of the reason why there's such low estimates that you see not only from U.S. government sources, but also from places like the Long War Journal and the New America Foundation, it's partially a problem of terminology.
Too often, we see media sources use the term militant.
Without defining what that term means, without challenging the sources of information, too often there's a reliance on anonymous government officials, without any sort of verification mechanisms.
In many cases, more significantly, just because somebody is a quote-unquote militant does not give necessarily a legal justification for a targeted assassination under international law.
There's a much higher threshold for committing strikes like that.
I think part of the problem is sloppy terminology of what exactly constitutes a militant.
I think most significantly, the May 2012 New York Times article that talked about how the Obama administration has counted military-age men as militants, absent information post their death that they were civilians, as militants.
I think that's part of the problem, and I think another real issue that we have here is kind of the logic.
Wait a minute.
Slow down just a second.
I don't want to break your train of thought too badly, because I want you to say the next thing you were going to say, too.
Just how important is that?
I just hate for it to go by so quickly.
Yeah, militant means whoever they kill, and then they don't even try to find out whether they were right or not.
That's how they count who they killed, the U.S. government over there in Pakistan.
Absolutely.
No, you're absolutely right, Scott, and I think it's worth pausing and really reflecting on what that means, because here in the United States, the only kind of discussion of that article after it came out is, hey, how were there leaks?
How was this information leaked?
We didn't have a conversation about, is this the kind of policy that we should be pursuing overseas where we consider, I mean, we completely.
And you know, the thing of it, too, is that sounds like an outrageous kind of accusation that, you know, some peacenik would make that like, oh, yeah, sure, I bet a militant just means whoever you just killed when like, no, a militant means someone that we killed for being a militant.
But no, really, the hyperbole is correct.
That is how the U.S. government and the article you're referring to, everyone go back and read this.
It's the famous kill list article in The New York Times.
The article clearly, and it's described in paragraph two.
This article is based on interviews with Barack Obama's 14 closest friends.
It's clearly an authorized top down leaked story.
It's not some, you know, whistleblower on the fourth rank down who told the truth.
Absolutely.
And I think if you kind of scratch a little bit below that and you look at some of the U.S. policies that we document in the report, for example, signature strikes, which most people aren't familiar with.
Too often our consideration of targeted assassination, we think purely about, you know, having people on a kill list, which is certainly a part of what the U.S. government does.
But we're also issuing what's called signature strikes, where we basically target communities based on profiles of behavior and we target them for killing.
And what is this profile that's used as the basis for strikes?
We don't know.
A lot of information hasn't been made public, but what we can piece together from, you know, the different accounts we've heard from direct victims is it appears to be things like large congregations of people, particularly men.
It appears to be men that, you know, have weapons.
It appears to be men that, you know, don kind of the kind of tribal clothing that has been associated with the Taliban, but which many tribesmen who live there also, you know, wear in their day-to-day lives.
So I think when you look at signature strikes and when you look at some of the other types of strikes that we research in our report, I think it really raises troubling questions about how we're distinguishing between civilians and between, you know, actors that, you know, could be killed under international law.
And I think there's a lot of really problematic questions there.
Well, you know, here's the part of the show where I got to focus on the American people and their responsibility for this, and I think a huge part of it is just a failure of imagination.
It's like George Carlin actually used Pakistan in an example one time.
6,000 people were killed in an explosion today.
And you say, where?
Where?
And they say, in Pakistan.
And you say, ah, screw Pakistan.
That's too far away to be any fun.
That's too far away to imagine that it's real people over there.
And so when Americans hear a story like a doctor went around working for the CIA, collecting DNA, trying to prove if there were bin Laden children in a household or not.
And what he ended up doing was chilling the people of that part of Pakistan's willingness to accept polio vaccinations.
This disease that's almost been wiped off the face of the earth.
The vaccination efforts there have now been set back, which means little bitty helpless children who never helped Osama do anything are getting polio.
But the American people, they just can't be bothered with that.
That's such a minor detail that a Pakistani kid would get polio now when, hey, we had an Osama to kill.
So shut up.
Forget about it.
And it's the same thing with these drone strikes.
Even just in the executive summary where you say, you know, parents are keeping their kids home from school.
They're afraid to go to anyone's funeral.
They're afraid if somebody does get bombed to try to help the wounded, screaming, dying people because that's the American terrorist policy.
Like Eric Rudolph, the abortion clinic bomber, Barack Obama does the double tap and he kills the first responders in a second strike.
And these are real people living under these drones way over there in Pakistan.
Absolutely.
And I think this was one of the most surprising things to us.
When we started this research project, we expected to hear, which we heard, you know, harrowing narratives of strikes and their consequences.
And we certainly heard those.
But what really came across to us much stronger was the daily terror felt by civilian communities because drones, you know, our imagination is these drones are these high technology, you know, weapon systems that fly overhead, target and leave.
But the reality is they hover over communities.
Because you have four or five drones which, you know, produce this noise that's kind of been seared in the minds of those that live under drones.
They fly overhead.
They're omnipresent in many parts of North Waziristan.
And it really affects daily lives in communities in ways that's hard for us to imagine.
But you mentioned some of the consequences.
And I think it even affects people every day.
I mean, people told us they're afraid to, you know, have family over for dinner.
They're afraid to hold, you know, tribal jirgas, which are the community dispute resolution.
They're kind of the court system and the political dispute kind of system wrapped into one.
But, you know, we document in the report a strike that killed 40 tribal elders, at least 40 tribal elders in March of 2011.
And that's really affected the way the community deals with everyday issues, economic and social and political.
So I think those are the kind of effects that we really wanted the American people to be aware about, because it's not the sort of thing that had really been a part of our calculus of drone strikes, is the daily, everyday terror it affects on civilian life.
And it's funny, too, because, well, not really funny.
It's a little bit ironical, I guess, that right now, this last couple of weeks is when it's the big, you know, cause for all the liberal warmongers is the poor little girl that got shot by the Pakistani Taliban for trying to promote literacy among young girls.
And but nobody wants to talk about your study.
And why is it that the people of the Swat Valley are keeping their kids home from school?
It's not fear of the Taliban.
It's fear of a bunch of American Army specialists sitting in a trailer in Nevada, hiding behind the entire diameter of the planet for their shield, assassinating them with their Nintendo.
Right.
I mean, I think it's important to distinguish a little bit, because I think the Swat Valley is an area where we haven't had, you know, we haven't had as many drone strikes.
But I think there have been a variety of different approaches that Pakistan, the United States has taken throughout Pakistan.
So Swat Valley is one area where Pakistan is engaged in and, you know, kind of military offensives that have caused significant human rights abuses in North Waziristan.
We see U.S. drones that fly overhead in North and South Waziristan and in other parts of Pakistan.
We've seen different approaches taken.
So absolutely, I think I'm sorry for inflating all those into one little area.
No, no, no.
Of course not.
So I think it's important just to clarify that.
But I think it's also important to note that, you know, education is is really has been the focus this past week, as it rightfully should, given how how high the illiteracy rates are in parts of Pakistan.
And certainly, you know, there are there have been effects of armed non-state actors on education.
But to deny the way that drones have struck schools, I mean, this is well documented again, not just by, as you said earlier, kind of, you know, anti-war activists, but this has been documented by prominent media sources.
And we talk about it in our report.
And that has really caused many families in parts of the federally administered tribal areas to, you know, and again, many were embarrassed to tell us that they just couldn't feel secure sending their children to school, knowing that, you know, they're congregating their large groups of people and that schools have been struck by drones in the past.
So I think it's important to recognize that we when it comes to education, our drone strikes have certainly not helped.
All right.
Now, I wonder if you guys were able to tell in in doing this work or if or do you know whether the Columbia or or Bureau of Investigative Journalism guys have been able to find out just how many of these guys are Arabs?
Because I don't want to imply that anybody who's an Arab who's got stranded and left behind in Afghanistan a long time ago or something is necessarily a guilty friend of Zawahiri.
But at least that'd be an indication that maybe they're actually trying to kill the last few friends of Zawahiri in Pakistan.
Or are they really just fighting the Pakistani bombing the Pakistani Taliban?
And what's the point of that?
No, it's a really good question.
I think I mean, that's, again, to go not to go back to the point we started with earlier, but we really don't know in a lot of cases what's happening.
But we were able to piece together enough to, I think, strongly challenge the dominant narrative.
I mean, one thing we heard over and over from the people we talked to is, hey, listen, there aren't foreigners in our communities anymore.
You know, there are some, you know, here and there.
But it's not the kind of, you know, full scale occupation of foreigners that's been talked about in the press.
But we really just don't know.
And the problem with, you know, commit, you know, having drones strike based on very questionable intelligence.
And I think part of our report really looks at the intelligence that's used to authorize strikes.
And we're using the same intelligence in many cases, or worse, that we're used to arrest and throw people in Guantanamo Bay.
And over 80 percent of those in Guantanamo Bay were never charged with any crime.
So if we're using the same information that was used to detain folks who we weren't able to eventually charge to kill them, is that the sort of policy we want to be undertaking?
Even if we disregard the civilian consequences or questions of legality, do we want to be, you know, putting forward a policy that relies on such intelligence?
I think from an efficacy perspective, you know, there's serious questions that should be considered.
Yep.
Well, and you guys asked the question, too, in this thing about whether this actually enhances American security at all.
I guess that's part of the question, whether they're actually killing any friends of Zawahiri.
And, of course, you'd have to add to that, if Zawahiri is hiding in a basement or a third floor somewhere in Pakistan and he has six friends around him or whatever, aren't they stranded on the far side of the world?
And what makes them a threat to America at all?
I mean, the reason that September 11th was the September 11th is because those guys had German passports and all of that kind of thing.
Right.
But it's not like Pakistan is direct access to North America or something like that.
But what is obvious is not only from all the news articles or even the New York Times.
They won't tell you why, but they admit that everybody in Pakistan pretty much hates America's guts now.
And we see direct blowback like Faisal Shahzad, who was an American.
I forget if he was an American citizen or not, but he'd been living here a long time, had a professional level salary job, a house and a wife and a successful American dream type life.
He went on vacation to Pakistan, where his family's from, to visit some people.
I don't know if he saw a drone strike firsthand or exactly what aftermath or what.
But he said that he saw the results of America's drone war over there.
And so he decided to join up as a soldier on their side.
And he didn't join up with Zawahiri or some Egyptians or Saudis.
He joined up with the Pakistani Taliban, the locals that we've been fighting, who never had a grudge against the U.S. before.
Absolutely.
And I think there are several reasons why we should question the kind of mainstream accounting of drones as this very targeted, precise instrument that's been effective.
I think one of which, as we mentioned earlier, is the intelligence.
The second point is that even according to White House studies, the vast majority of those killed at best among those that are not civilians are low-level insurgents, right?
I mean, the kinds of foot soldiers that I think don't really pose the kind of eminent threat that's required under international law to justify a strike.
I think the other point that's worth mentioning is really whether a decapacitation strategy works with groups like al-Qaeda or the Taliban, who in many cases have been described as groups and are not as centrally organized as they're sometimes depicted.
And then what we've seen also in Pakistan is the drone program may have only shifted the location of armed non-state actors.
So we've seen, you know, bin Laden wasn't found in the tribal areas.
He was found in Abbottabad.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was found in Rawalpindi, which is, you know, near Islamabad.
Abu Zubaydah was found in Faisalabad.
Mullah Omar is widely reported to be in Karachi.
So the fact that drones are targeting this very specific area and subjecting a civilian community to kind of their everyday omnipresence, in many cases, the kind of leaders that we claim to be targeting are not even located there.
So it's only shifted their operations.
And finally, the point that you raised, which is, you know, are drone strikes, you know, fomenting anti-American sentiment and aiding recruitment to the very actors that we claim to be targeting?
I think we capture from many of our interviews the kind of feelings that many felt.
In many cases, they felt many people liked America or they, you know, had neutral or ambivalent feelings before the advent of the war in Afghanistan and the beginning of the drone campaign in Pakistan.
But in many cases, people's opinions have shifted and they don't understand why they've been targeted by U.S. drone strikes.
And they've told us that they really want this to stop.
And if it does stop, their kind of resentment towards the United States, you know, would end as well.
And I'm sorry for appealing to American selfishness so much, but it just seems like that's if we have any hope at all, that's it.
And I would just encourage people to imagine it's pretty easy to imagine in it that if instead of being a complete and total failure of a bomb, what if Faisal Shahzad had set off a World Trade Center 93 sized bomb in Times Square, he could have killed whatever X number of hundreds of thousands of people, which would have been the start of a whole new era where everything changed again.
Our police state would be cranked up whatever percent more, you know, maybe they'd go with the Cheney plan and blame Iran somehow or whatever the hell.
It would be a whole new era in history again with a giant attack in downtown New York again like that.
And that's what very easily could have been back in 2010.
Right.
Absolutely.
And I think, I mean, I think it's important for us to think through all these issues, Scott.
And I think that's why our report really tried to consider drones in several different ways.
And I think we start with this in many and much the way this conversation has gone.
We start with this question of are civilians being killed?
Beyond killing, what's the effect on civilian communities every day?
But even if we want to disregard those effects and think through our own interest, you know, well, A, what's the legality of this program?
Because we do, you know, and even our political leaders have constantly said that we find it incredibly important that we adhere to binding domestic international law.
And finally, you know, what are the effects?
One purely on our security, but I think more importantly, what are the implications on the rule of law?
I mean, and I think in many cases the U.S., our drone program has really raised questions about the way we think about going to war in a new age with new technology and the way we account for decisions to go to war.
And I think the real concern now is if we have these high technology weapons that we can send out without any threat of losing American life, and if we don't have to go through the normal approval processes in Congress and the normal kind of public debate about war, does it make the resort to war easier?
And what are the implications of giving the executive such unchecked power?
And I think this is a conversation.
The answer there is simply, I know it's kind of a rhetorical question, but yes.
And what does it lead to?
Exactly this.
CIA seeks White House backing for more drones.
Petraeus pushes to invade Africa with robots.
It's on.
Once you can do it with drones, and you think how easy it was to do the Kosovo war from six miles away or whatever with cruise missiles and that kind of thing, where the American people could hardly be bothered.
They didn't even know it was going on.
Just think, when it's all robots, right?
I mean, Pakistan's at least next door to Afghanistan, where there's a war the American people have heard of.
But you could have a drone war in Somalia and Mali and Uganda and wherever you want in Africa forever, and the American people would never even hear about it, much less care.
Absolutely.
And there's the geopolitical effects.
I mean, 76 countries now have acquired the technology of unmanned aerial vehicles, of course.
Including Hezbollah, right?
Including Hezbollah, exactly.
Including Iran, including Russia, including China, I mean, including many other countries.
And so it's a question we should really think about, because, you know, while there's only some countries that have armed drones, I mean, think about the airplane, right?
I mean, think about how long it took the airplane to go from unarmed to armed.
And think about that same type of conversion and the kind of proliferation implications that took place with airplanes or with nuclear weapons, and think about that in the context of drones.
And I think that's a question we should all think about.
I mean, it might seem nice for us here in the United States, if we really think drones are successful, to say, hey, we're using it, but have we thought about the way it's going to change the way in which the world operates in 5, 10, 15, 20 years?
And as you, I think, Scott, very correctly note, the technology is developing rapidly.
And there's already talk of autonomous drones or swarms of drones that we soon could have the capability to dispatch on different areas.
And so to think about those implications of, you know, providing, taking the human element, I mean, there is still some human element that's involved in drone strikes in Pakistan, because there's somebody making that decision in Nevada or in, you know, wherever they are in the United States.
But, you know, we could be leading to a point at which we have autonomous drones that are programmed to make those sort of life and death decisions.
And what are those implications, especially when we have policies that target first responders, that target funerals, that are targeting based on patterns of behavior, signature strikes, that have struck schools?
Again, these are all things that are documented very thoroughly in our report, and really raise questions about when you even remove that last human element, where are we headed?
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, you look at the model for all those excess tanks.
What do we do with them?
Well, give them, we'll have the Pentagon be the conduit to give a tank to every sheriff's department in America, just to get rid of tanks.
That's just the economics of democracy in America.
You know?
Yeah.
That's what a good lobbyist does, is he gets some tank salt.
Same thing with drones.
It'll be, there'll be all different incentives, uncounted incentives, for every sheriff's department to have as many drones as they possibly can.
We'll all be living like Gazans.
Absolutely.
And I think, Scott, you're right.
I mean, that's one thing we don't talk about in our report, but it's not really been discussed enough, is that law enforcement here in the United States, and it's been used also by the UK, have begun using drones domestically, and there's much talk about the commercialization potential.
Again, these are not armed drones we're talking about yet.
We're talking about still, in most cases, surveillance drones, but again, the technological leap is not significant, and if we're moving towards that direction, especially given something that I know you've covered in your show before, about the way law enforcement here in the United States is increasingly becoming militarized, what are the implications of this new type of technology being used here in the United States, potentially against, and we've already seen it used, armed drones against American civilians overseas, what's going to happen when we start giving law enforcement this technology, which has already started?
We've already crossed that line, so I think these are important questions.
Again, even if somebody isn't moved by accounts of the civilian consequences of drone strikes in Pakistan, I think it's incumbent upon all of us to think of these strategic questions, to think of these questions about the rule of law and about the resort to war, and then finally to think about, hey, could this technology be used here in the United States?
Given that we live and we're engaged in a conflict which has been described to us as without borders, that means it doesn't include our borders, and that means that some of the same things could be taking place here in the United States.
Yep.
It's like Chalmers Johnson, you say you either give up your empire or you live under it, and I guess we already chose the latter.
Sure do miss him.
Listen, we've got to go.
Thank you so much for your time.
This is such great work.
I beg everyone to go and look at Living Under Drones.
It's at livingunderdrones.org.
It's a project of Stanford and the NYU Clinic, and its co-author is Omar Shakir from Stanford University's School of Law, 2007-8, Fulbright Scholar in Syria.
Thanks very much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott, and thank you, everybody, for listening.
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