10/23/13 – Letta Tayler – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
We're on Liberty Express radio, no agenda radio and over my website, Scott Horton dot org.
By the way, I keep all my interview archives there at Scott Horton dot org.
More than 3000 now going back to 2003.
Next is Letta Taylor.
She's a senior researcher on terrorism and counterterrorism at Human Rights Watch with a focus on Yemen.
And her latest report is between a drone and Al-Qaeda.
And she's also got a piece in foreign policy dot com, which is titled The Price of War.
Welcome to the show, Letta.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
Thanks very much for having me on the show.
Well, thanks very much for joining us.
I really appreciate it.
And I really like this article.
I admit I haven't had a chance to read the report, but I'm gonna.
But I did read The Price of War at foreign policy dot com.
And I really do appreciate the way that you take the time to tell the personal stories of these individuals who are being killed.
Because I know just from my own experience is sometimes it's hard to imagine Yemen as anything but a vague shape on a map from far away somewhere rather than a real place where it seems like the earth is flat.
If you're standing there and everything is just like here, only there.
And the people are all as human as can be from their head to their toes.
And it's just, you know, TV doesn't really portray it that way.
They never really give us any information.
And a bird's eye view of the shape of Yemen on a map is hardly, you know, conveys much humanity.
So but your story sure does.
And so I was hoping you could tell the people the story of those that you profile in here, the dead and their survivors, too.
Yes, well, thank you very much.
And I think that's an excellent point because, in fact, President Obama has carried out an estimated 80 targeted killing operations in Yemen since 2009.
Yet he's only publicly acknowledged two of those strikes.
Those are the ones that killed three American citizens.
It's as if the hundreds of Yemenis killed in these attacks simply never existed.
And so one of the things I set out to do, of course, was to determine who was being killed in these strikes, but also who were some of these Yemenis who were being killed.
So not just numbers and lists, but why might they have been targeted or what went terribly wrong.
And while the U.S. says it's doing all it can to protect civilians in these strikes, we did find in our research that the U.S. has killed innocent people in Yemen, dozens of them, if not more.
And we'd like to know.
So, yeah, I'm happy to tell some of these stories.
You may need to cut me off at some point because there are many, but a couple that really jump out at me are two indiscriminate strikes.
And these we call clear violations of the laws of war.
One of them, the earliest strike in Yemen from 2009 on a hamlet called Al-Majula, involved cruise missiles and cluster munitions.
These are indiscriminate weapons.
And they showered hundreds of bomblets on an area.
Well, the U.S. did kill 14 people they said were militants out to get the United States, but they also killed 41 Bedouins.
These were shepherds sleeping in their tents, whose misfortune was that their only crime was they happened to be near the site where these militants were.
And they were all sleeping at the time of the attack.
To this day, the U.S. has not acknowledged that strike.
And the only compensation that's been given for these 41 civilians who were killed, many of them women and children, was for the goats and beehives that they lost in the strike.
Nothing for the actual dead.
So that's one case that really jumps out at me.
Another one is a strike on a hamlet.
Let me follow up on that one real quick.
Yeah.
Do they specifically complain about that and point out that, oh, yeah, we get paid for our bees, but not for our father and our uncle?
Or how does that work?
I mean, do they take it that way?
They have been fighting for almost four years now to get compensation for the strike.
And the Yemeni government actually investigated the strike and determined that, yes, it was a ghastly accident.
And they took the fall for it, although WikiLeaks later revealed that this was definitely a U.S. strike.
And there's a table that WikiLeaks revealed in which U.S. officials, General Petraeus, in fact, speaking with the former president of Yemen, they describe how they're going to cover up the strike and make it sound like the Yemenis did it.
And the former president of Yemen says, yeah, we'll say the bombs are ours, not yours.
But, yeah, so the citizens, the families of those 41 bedouins killed in the strike have been fighting since then for some kind of compensation.
And the government of Yemen did offer them something for the dead loved ones killed, but it was a pitifully small sum.
And the family said, no, we would like more.
And the government would not give them more.
Some of them just are so poor that reluctantly they then agreed to take some compensation for their goats, their sheep and their beehives.
But they're holding out, which gives you an idea of what the possessions are and the wealth of these people is.
But they're holding out for real compensation for their loved ones.
All right.
Well, I just want to know specifically, it's not just it sounds like insult to injury, but, yeah, they sure take it that way, too, just like you'd predict.
So anyway, I'm sorry, because I did interrupt and you were going to go on to the next.
So in another case that we examined, this was in a hamlet in central Yemen, a very tribal area with a lot of remote roads.
A U.S. drone assisted strike, probably by a warplane, killed struck a van on a remote stretch of road and killed all 12 people in 12 of the 14 people inside.
Well, it turned out that the 12 people inside that van were not al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
That's the Yemen based group that is associated with al-Qaeda.
No, in fact, the 12 people were killed who were killed were civilians.
They were subsistence farmers, their wives and children coming home from market.
Their loved ones found them charred in pieces and dusted in flour and sugar that they were bringing home to their families.
The target of that strike was nowhere in sight at that time.
He was not in the vehicle.
He was not on the road.
And so we're calling that an indiscriminate strike.
Clearly, civilians were killed there to this day.
No apology from the U.S. government.
No recognition.
We've also found some strikes that are just clearly counterproductive.
The one that I described in the foreign policy piece is about a strike in southeast Yemen last year that killed three alleged members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
But it also killed two civilians, one of whom happened to be a locally renowned cleric whose thing was to preach against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
That's what he did.
He said, violence in the name of Islam is wrong.
Now, this is precisely the kind of person who the U.S. seeks to align with and to enlist—I mean, not literally enlist, but to join in their campaign to denounce violence by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
The reason this cleric was standing with a group of alleged militants was that the militants were looking for him after he gave a particularly vehement sermon denouncing al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
And relatives were scared that if the cleric met with these three men who were strangers to that community, they came looking for him.
Relatives thought, oh, don't go.
We're worried.
You should tone down your sermons.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is going to get you if you keep doing this.
But, in fact, if that was the intent of the militants, the U.S. got there first.
U.S. drones killed this al-Qaeda cleric and his cousin, a policeman, one of the few policemen in this village, along with the militants.
Now, everyone in that village has seen the photos or perhaps even seen the actual body parts of this cleric and his cousin after the strike, blown to pieces.
The relatives only identified them by the belt on one and by a piece of beard on the other.
And everyone now in that village, when they see these photos, they think of America.
So, laws aside, there's a serious policy question here.
Is the U.S. making more enemies than those that it is killing in these strikes?
And that's why we think it's just absolutely imperative that the U.S. government start disclosing some basic facts.
Who is it killing?
How many of them are really militants?
How many of them are civilians?
What are you going to do about the civilians who you've killed unlawfully?
And might you consider making amends to civilians you killed even in so-called acceptable strikes, lawful strikes, where there is collateral damage at an acceptable level?
Even there, we think the U.S. should be compensating these people.
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing of it.
It's black ops covert action stuff, but it's only covert from the American people.
There's nothing secret about it to the Yemenis, but that's basically their problem, right?
They're hiding behind the fact that, hey, that's all classified.
We're not officially at war with Yemen.
We're just helping them clean up their bad guy problem a little.
Exactly.
There is an accountability vacuum here.
The secrecy has reached the level of the absurd because it's the biggest open secret in the world, in Yemen, that the U.S. is behind these strikes.
It doesn't matter when the Yemeni military gets up and says, we carried out this strike or that strike.
Everybody knows it's a lie.
Why?
Well, for one thing, most of these strikes take place at night, and the Yemeni Air Force cannot fly aircraft at night.
They don't have the capacity or the training to do that.
So it's pretty odd if the Yemeni government is accepting responsibility for strikes that occur at times it cannot fly, and particularly when you analyze the remnants, the ordnance of the weapons used, as we did in many of these cases, and discovered that in some cases they're cruise missiles and cluster munitions, which the Yemeni government doesn't have in its arsenal, and in other cases are Hellfire missiles, which are fired by U.S. drones, and the Yemenis also do not have Hellfires in their arsenal.
Yeah, I mean, we've seen pictures of some of this ordinance with American trademarks still written on the pieces.
Exactly, yeah.
And we've identified exactly what kind of weapons they are, and they don't exist in Yemen unless somebody else is using them.
So we know this is the U.S. We absolutely know it.
And it's been admitted by U.S. officials off the record that they're the ones carrying out these strikes, as well as by Yemeni officials off the record.
But nobody's going public on it.
Obama has only in the most general terms admitted that the U.S. is carrying out these strikes.
And when you add Pakistan into the picture, we're talking hundreds of strikes that have killed thousands of people, and yet the U.S. will not say who it's killing.
It's simply as if these people don't exist.
Well, and even when they're kind of bragging about it, like in that big New York Times piece from, I guess, May of 2012, where two or three dozen of the president's closest friends told his side of the story to the New York Times there, they even said, well, there are no civilians because anyone we kill is guilty by the fact that we kill them, unless the burden is on them to prove themselves innocent after we've killed them.
And if they do, then we'll reclassify their corpse to not guilty.
Something like that.
I mean, they really said that, right?
I'm paraphrasing not too roughly.
Yeah, I don't recall that exact phrase, but here's one of our big concerns is that, and this is one reason we want to know how many people the U.S. has killed and how many it is classifying as legitimate military targets, because we are concerned that the U.S. is using an extremely elastic definition of an individual eligible for targeting under the laws of war, meaning that under the law, a legitimate target has to represent a legitimate threat.
The target has to be an active, actively engaged in the hostilities in question that are to which the U.S. is party.
And so it can't be a driver who's bringing milk to the fighters.
It can't be the cousin who happens to live in the same compound with the fighter and is meeting him for dinner as he's done since they were little kids.
No, I mean, in some cases under the laws of war, which are, you know, it's a very cold calculus.
In some of those cases, you can be a lawful, you can be lawfully killed in a strike if you happen to be in the wrong place in the wrong time.
And they call that acceptable collateral damage.
But the question is, how many of these people who the U.S. is killing are actually being targeted, who are not collateral damage but are being targeted, and the assumption is they are militants, simply because they may have friends or relatives who might be militants.
And I know that sounds peculiar to an American audience, but in Yemen, in contrast to a place like Pakistan or Afghanistan, most members of al-Qaida's branch there, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, are Yemenis, and they're part of very tight-knit communities.
So you might have in a single family someone who's a police officer, someone who is a merchant, and someone who's a member of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.
So the onus is on the U.S., actually, to sort out who's who, because under international law, if you're not sure who someone is, you have to assume they are a civilian.
It's innocent until proven guilty under the laws of war, not the other way around.
I found one of the quotes I was looking for was from the CIA.
A CIA official tells the New York Times, it bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants.
They count the corpses, and they're not really sure who they are.
They just say, look, if we kill them, then that was the guy we were trying to kill, and we would have only been trying to kill him if he was a bad guy, right?
Even if it is just somebody's grandmother.
Exactly, and this is why we're particularly, well, we're not particularly concerned, but we're also concerned about what we call these post-strike assessments, the post-strike review that the U.S. does after these strikes.
They do count the bodies, they try to figure out who they killed, did they get the person they were targeting, and so forth.
But our strong concern is that when the U.S. does post-strike assessments, that anybody who is a male of fighting age is just automatically considered to be a militant and put in the militant category.
So it may not be that the U.S., in fact, when the U.S. says civilian casualties are extremely rare, which is what they do say, it may be because they're putting anybody who's of male fighting age in the militant category regardless of whether they're a fighter or not.
I got stuck on their paywall.
I swear there's something in this piece where they talk about people being posthumously acquitted, basically, or found, not that they'll really investigate it, but that they claim to have the process for recognizing someone as an innocent if somehow they can be shown to be innocent after they're already dead.
So I've got to play devil's advocate a little bit with you here, nationalist's advocate.
I think you said under 100 strikes in the past, what, five and a half years, six years, something like that.
In Yemen, right?
And then dozens of civilian casualties.
So if I could just pretend to be a Republican for a minute, I got to say, so what?
Big deal.
That's not very many innocent people killed under 100, and that's not very many strikes.
In fact, if they did 80 strikes and they only killed dozens of civilians, then they're doing a really, really good job with their counterterrorism scalpel and all of that kind of thing.
And so it is bad for grandmothers and babies and children, but that's their bad luck for being near guys that our government absolutely has to kill to keep us all safe.
What about all of that?
Well, I mean, I think there are elements of that argument that are quite sound.
There's no doubt that al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula is a serious threat to the United States.
They do want to put another would-be underwear bomber on a jet bound for the U.S., and they want it to work this time.
That's what they tried in 2009.
There's no question about that.
There's also no question that drones themselves are very effective weapons, and we as an organization do not take a position against drones.
We don't think drones are illegal weapons.
We'll take a drone over a cluster bomb any day.
Our issue, and as for numbers, if the numbers are small, fantastic.
The problem is we have no idea how many civilians were really killed because there is this information blackout on the part of the government, a secrecy by the Obama administration and, of course, by his predecessor, George W. Bush, that is untenable.
The world has a right to know how many people were killed in these strikes and how many were civilians, and that's why we're calling for investigations both by the Obama administration and by Congress, ideally the Intelligence and Armed Services Committee jointly, to find out just how many people have been killed, because is it the 53 people, is it 53 civilians killed who I found to definitely have been unlawfully killed in two of the six strikes I detail?
Is it hundreds?
Is it somewhere in between?
We don't even know.
And part of the reason we don't know also is what you were just talking about with this post-strike analysis.
Who's being put into what category?
Are they legitimate targets or are they civilians?
So all of these things matter.
The other reason this matters is that to the American public, who may think big deal, this is actually a pretty good ratio, is that there's a multiplier effect here.
For every person killed wrongly in Yemen, hundreds of people then start hating the United States.
This plays right into the hands of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Well, and you know, with what you were saying about the close-knit family structure there, it occurred to me that Faisal Shahzad, who was, in his own words, direct blowback from the drone strike program, not against Al-Qaeda in Pakistan, but against the Pakistani Taliban guys, where he was an American who went back home on vacation kind of thing, but an American citizen with a good job and a house and a wife and everything, and he went back to Pakistan and saw drone strikes, I guess, in his neighborhood, or the aftermath of them anyway, and so he joined up the war on their side.
But I can't think of anyone who did that because they felt bad that the Americans were killing Egyptian friends of Zawahiri in Pakistan, it was for bombing their people in Pakistan, Pakistanis in Pakistan.
And so that's the kind of thing where I wonder how counterproductive it is.
Perhaps it's extremely counterproductive, and in fact, you know, maybe we're making way more enemies this way than we even imagined.
Well, this is the problem.
We don't know for sure how many enemies we're making, but we do know for sure that we are making some and many.
There is fear and there is anger against the U.S. for these strikes, and I think simply coming clean could actually lower the level of animosity considerably.
If the U.S. would just say, look, okay, yeah, we killed 473 people in Yemen, or no, the media report says 473, but actually it's 500 or 400, whatever it may be.
And here's how many we think are civilians, and here's why they died.
And we feel horrible about it, and we're doing our best to make amends, and this is why President Obama announced new policy guidelines to make these strikes safer.
We're working on this all the time.
But the transparency is so critical.
For example, this is not Yemen, this is Pakistan, but the Pakistani government did recently tell a UN, a United Nations investigator, that they believe that the U.S. has killed, it was 400 and something, civilians in drone strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan.
The U.S. refuses to confirm or deny that figure.
This, again, plays into the hands of enemies of the U.S., whether it's people in the Pakistani government who want to discredit the U.S., whether it's groups like al-Qaeda or the Taliban.
Everybody can jump on that silence as an admission of guilt on the part of the U.S.
So really, if the U.S. hasn't killed that many civilians, that's great, and we're going to be very happy to hear that and to know that.
But to know that, we need more information from the government, and that's why we're calling for investigations.
Yeah, well, are you making progress as far as that?
Are you getting much response?
Is Congress going to hold a hearing or anything?
We've had a very—there's been a lot of interest on Capitol Hill and within the Obama administration in hearing more about our report and our findings and also how we came up with the findings.
And I would like to mention that we've cross-checked our information.
We went through multiple sources.
We visited sites when we could.
When we couldn't, we sent trusted people we know who we've worked with for years, and in many cases more than one person independently to sites to clarify what was going on.
So there's been a lot of interest in our findings and our methodology in the administration on Capitol Hill among members of Congress.
Will that lead to an investigation?
We sure hope so, but it's too early to say.
There's a lot of interest in keeping this information secret, I think, because it does give the U.S. broad latitude.
I don't want to suggest by that that the U.S. is killing—we have no notion that the U.S. is killing.
I'm sorry, Loretta.
I've got to go.
It's such great work.
ForeignPolicy.com, HRW.org, y'all.
Thanks again, Loretta.
Loretta Taylor, everybody.
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