10/29/12 – Leah Bolger – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
So I'm Scott Horton.
This is the show.
Thanks for listening.
Our next guest is the president of Veterans for Peace, Leah Bolger.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I am doing great.
Glad to be here, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
I'm very happy to have y'all's support on the show here.
I'm quite proud of it.
If I had the money, I'd pay you to let me pretend to be sponsored by you, but I'm glad I don't have to.
Well, we're glad to be a part of your show, and you've been doing great work for a long time, and we're happy to be able to support you.
Great.
Well, I sure appreciate that.
And you know what I really appreciate is this thing that you wrote for Alternet, and I think it was published in some other places too, Murder from the Skies, U.S. creating new enemies where there were none.
And this is about your trip to Pakistan.
You went with them to Pakistan, correct?
Yes, I went with the Code Pink delegation.
There were 31 of us, mostly Americans.
There was one Canadian and mostly women, although there were some men as well, and we ranged from age 22 to 83, I believe.
Well, I like the way this starts out.
You talk about, well, geez, what it's like to just live in Waziristan.
I think that was your original title for it, right?
It was Life in Waziristan.
Tell us about it.
Yeah, it was Life in Waziristan 2012 AB, and the AB stands for after drones, because we met with several men who were leaders of their families from Waziristan area, and they told us how their lives have changed, and they speak of their lives as we do now in the United States, about before 9-11 and after 9-11, and they speak of their lives as before drones and after drones.
And so that was the hook for my subject line.
I think alternate changed my subject, but that's the point is that their lives have been completely changed, and not just from the killing that's happening from the drones, but the presence of the drones has actually changed their way of life and has created a real feeling of ongoing terror, if you will, because it's a form of emotional and psychological warfare to have these drones there 24 hours a day, and the people living on the ground never know when something is going to launch and strike.
So this is a communal society that lives and works and communes together, but now they're afraid to do that.
They're afraid to be in groups of more than two or three for fear of being targeted by these drones.
Children will not go to school anymore, so now they're raising a generation of children who have no education because the children are afraid to leave their homes.
They're afraid to have the normal wedding celebrations, which would normally be something where everybody would come to, and they would be dancing and drumming and singing, and now they're afraid to have these big group gatherings for fear of being targeted.
Funerals, for God's sake.
Funerals are being targeted.
So it's really changed their way of life, and now they've also become suspicious of one another because the CIA provides these chips, GPS chips, that can be planted to indicate where a, quote, militant might be or live, and so when some compound is targeted, then everybody is suspecting someone else of being the one that planted it there because we don't have any troops on the ground to provide the intelligence, so the intelligence that the CIA is getting is coming from paid informants.
It's suspects, and that's another point that I'd really like to make is that the drone program in Pakistan is being run by the CIA.
It's not being run by the DOD or the Department of Defense or the American military.
It's being run in secret by the CIA, and there is no accountability whatsoever.
Right, because the whole thing is secret.
Now, I don't know, there's so much to go over there, but I want to get to the, well, what you said about just children not being able to go to school, whatever.
I grew up in Austin, Texas, which is basically paradise compared to the situation everybody else who ever lived in the history of the world pretty much.
You know, when I went outside to play when I was a little kid, I never had to worry about anybody killing me, but just imagine, seriously, for the audience out there, imagine being, I don't know, seven, and you want to go play with your friends in the neighborhood, and you can't go outside at all because there is a very real risk that that buzzing sound in the sky will blow you up to death, for real, and you have to deal with that every day.
Imagine that.
And that's the USA doing that to these people.
Right.
Right.
You know, when there was the bombing at the movie theater in Colorado, and I remember the pundits saying, oh my gosh, you know, now I'm afraid to let my children go to the movies, and how awful this was.
They were really traumatized by that.
And I thought, my God, can't you see?
Can't you turn it around in your head and realize what we are doing to these people?
Their lives are terror.
They are living in terror every day.
And I don't understand why the basic average American human cannot understand this and cannot put themselves in the shoes of the people we are farming.
Yeah.
Well, of course, the real answer to that is just because of the TV lie by omission.
I mean, if TV will never, ever, ever, ever tell you it's important, but will tell you that all this other crap is important, well then, what are you going to make of that if you're just a regular person in the world?
Dancing with the stars gets all the attention and killing people in Pakistan doesn't.
It must be because dancing with the stars is that much more important than killing people in Pakistan.
Right.
Or else what explains the priorities of the TV people?
That's the kind of way, that's how people reason these things out, you know?
Well, no, that's exactly right.
But, you know, something I learned in Pakistan which surprised me is that the people in Pakistan who are very much against the drone program, but they are fed the same kind of propaganda that Americans are fed, that these drones are very precise and they only kill bad people and that there are very few non-combatant deaths.
And I was really kind of taken aback by this, but what happens is that the Pakistani government does not want their people to know that children and women and non-Taliban people are being killed.
So the reporting that they hear, the Pakistani people hear, is like a little crawl on the bottom of their TV screen that says, you know, drones strike North Afghanistan, eight militants killed.
And it never mentions, you know, the age or the name.
It doesn't verify anything.
It just assumes that if they're dead they're militants, which is exactly what we hear.
And part of that is because it's just very difficult to know who's been killed by these drone strikes.
The area that they're targeting is rural.
There's no cell phone coverage there.
So the only phone coverage is landlines, and the landlines are operated by generators, and the army controls the power to the generators.
So the only information that gets out is very spotty, and it has to be, you know, spot.
People have to go up into these dangerous areas to try to document these deaths, the ages and the names.
Also, their cultural norms require burial within a very short period of time compared to what we're used to here in the United States.
And then another thing we found out, the reason why there's very little documentation of women being killed, is that it is a cultural taboo for the Pashtun society to give out the names of women.
They consider it a breach of privacy, and they don't allow pictures to be taken of women.
So there's no documentary evidence of a woman's life.
There's no birth certificate.
There are no photographs.
There's no high school yearbook.
There's nothing that we would think of as documentation of someone's life here in the United States.
So we saw pictures that this one gentleman had taken, a Pakistani journalist, who risked his life many, many times to go up and try to document these deaths, and he showed us a picture of a man holding just a shard of his wife's dress that she had been wearing that he found in a tree when he came home and found that his whole family had been blown up.
And so he was trying to document her life with this piece of cloth.
And this is heartbreaking and shocking, but something that the United States doesn't address at all, and they just keep insisting that, oh, no, we're only killing bad guys.
But none of these people, you know, when you look at the statistics of how many people have died, and there's a report out that came out just before our trip that's been put out by Stanford and NYU universities talking about the number of people who have actually been killed and the number of people who were, quote, innocent civilians, very high number.
But I would contend that everybody who has been killed by a drone is an innocent civilian.
Number one, they're innocent because until they've been proven guilty of something in the court of law or they're wearing the uniform of their state's military, then they're civilians and they're innocent.
So these people that are just being targeted, these are targeted assassinations, and they're based on nothing more than, you know, the way people are dressing, if they're a male between, you know, the age of 16 and 60, they're considered militant and therefore fair game.
So this is targeted assassination.
It's absolutely illegal.
It violates international law, and I cannot understand why the global population is not more upset about this and is not speaking out and sanctioning the United States, taking us to a criminal court.
Yeah, well, I guess they're just mostly not in any position to do so.
I mean, we're the hyper-power and they're the everybody else.
That's kind of how that works as far as accountability goes, unfortunately.
But I think it's so important the way you talk about, you know, who's a militant.
Yeah, a militant is somebody that we killed, you know.
It doesn't even necessarily mean a fighting-age male with a rifle in his hand, even though, of course, being a fighting-age male with a rifle in your hand doesn't mean that you're guilty of anything at all, much less being a member of the Haqqani network or whatever.
And here they are, speaking of which, fighting the Pakistani Taliban, not al-Qaeda, which doesn't really exist in Pakistan anymore at all anyway.
They're fighting the Pakistani Taliban at the same time the Pakistani government is backing the Afghan Taliban, which is actually America's enemy, you know, assuming, you know, the occupation of Afghanistan.
So the whole thing is completely ridiculous anyway.
They didn't just kill that guy's wife.
They killed that guy's wife for no, even close to irrational reason whatsoever.
It wasn't like, well, you know, we got to kill terrorists and sometimes there's a little bit of collateral damage.
No, they really are just going around making new enemies out of people who aren't necessarily enemies of the United States at all by doing such things.
Absolutely correct.
And, you know, one thing that was impressed upon us by these tribal leaders is that they have a strong culture of revenge and they do not forget.
And these killings, even if we were only getting the bad guys, but we're not, as you know, this is counterproductive.
You know, this is not just ineffective, it's counterproductive.
It's making things worse.
We are creating enemies where there were none and this is going to go on for generations and generations.
Frankly, I'm not sure that we can repair the damage that's been done.
Even if we stop joint attacks today, the people will remember.
So we have created enemies for the indefinite future, as far as I can see.
Yeah, which is, you know, great news for Raytheon investors, but for the rest of us.
Exactly.
You know, I mean, we got and this is the thing, too, where, you know, I do understand.
I'm not trying to just be, you know, patronizing where I do understand that I was raised this way, too.
It's I think it's the government schools more than anything else.
We're raised to believe that Americans are free.
Americans have rights.
Everybody else.
Life is cheap and it's really is OK to kill them.
It really doesn't matter.
And the further away they are and the more saltwater, especially there is between here and there, the more fine it is to go ahead and kill them or hire Gaddafi to torture them or whatever it is.
People just don't care.
So maybe it's worth pointing out again that Faisal Shahzad was a Pakistani American.
I think he was a citizen.
I forget if he had actually gotten his full citizenship yet.
But anyway, he had a wife and a good job and a big house, a professional job with a good salary.
And he owned his own house and all these things.
And he went to Pakistan to visit some family on vacation and he saw the results of a drone strike.
And he joined up not without Qaeda friends of Zawahiri.
How would he have found them?
Right.
He joined up with the Pakistani Taliban.
And they're the ones who taught him how to make a bomb.
Fortunately, not very well.
And he came back to the United States and joined up.
You know, he had just joined up as a soldier on their side of the war.
And he tried to bomb Times Square.
And thank goodness a civilian, not a government employee, stopped him.
And the thing was kind of a dud anyway.
And no one was hurt.
But imagine if that had been a successful truck bombing in Times Square back in 2010 when Faisal Shahzad had tried to set it off.
And he told the judge.
The judge said, how could you do this when there's women and children around?
And he says, you kill people in Pakistan every day.
And you don't care whether there's women and children around.
You don't even look.
You don't care at all.
So I'm just like you, judge.
And the judge sends him to life in prison, of course, which he deserved.
But the point is we're going to have to keep dealing with that here in America where life actually has value.
Let's say we could kill all the bad guys tomorrow.
And everybody, we would eliminate all the horrible people who, you know, are, quote, terrorists.
But, you know, 100 American children would have to die in the process.
Would that be acceptable to the American people?
And absolutely not.
So I don't understand, you know, why it is that we cannot value the ‑‑ we have to.
This is something we're going to have to backtrack and start thinking about.
It's going to take us generations, I think, to start teaching our children that their lives are no more valuable than the lives of an Afghan child or a Pakistani child.
And we're going to have to get away from this jingoistic, you know, we're number one, this American exceptionalism that rules don't apply to us because we're the biggest, we're the best, and might makes right, and all these, you know, these things that we're brought up believing.
We have to start thinking in terms of a global community that we're all of the same value.
And that is going to take a long time to do, if it's possible.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the Declaration of Independence doesn't say the king doesn't have a divine right.
It says we all have a divine right, and his is no more divine than anybody else's.
So how do you like that?
So, you know, that's a good way to spin it.
It's not that Americans are worth as little as an Afghan.
It's that Afghans are just as precious as Americans are.
That's what it is.
You know, come on.
That's not too hard.
It shouldn't be too hard to teach people, you know.
Right.
I mean, hell, that's half the war propaganda, right?
That's why we kill all those Afghans, is to protect all the ones we're not killing, because we love them so much.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
Yeah.
That's right.
And just think of all the poor Afghan, you know, women and young girls who, you know, now they get to have an education and be free like us because of how hard our government works on their behalf.
Yeah.
It seems like if we can take all that cognitive dissonance and straighten it out, you know, in just one direction instead of the other, then we'll be all right, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe that's just me.
All right.
Oh, I wanted to get back to, I guess, hopefully giving you a chance to describe more about what people told you about living with these drones.
I think something I learned in this Washington Post story about the Gaza Strip about a year and a half ago was about the buzzing in the sky.
Wow.
It's always there, and it is an ever-present reminder that we might kill you just for walking down the street.
I mean, there's really not much of a rhyme or reason that you could distinguish from the ground for why some guy hiding in Nevada is killing you, right?
Right.
No, that's exactly right.
And so that was one thing that we were told that adds to this feeling of mental, you know, and psychological warfare of this sound and knowing that they're there 24 hours a day, sometimes up to six drones circling overhead.
Now, we met twice with the acting American ambassador to Pakistan, his name is Richard Hoagland, and we met with him before we went up to Waziristan and after we came back.
And at the end of the second meeting, and he just denied that we were killing innocent people and just really stuck to his guns.
He was very offended that we were telling people that Obama has a kill list, and he just was really preaching the party line.
But I said, well, sir, would you concede that this constant presence of drones overhead buzzing and being there all the time is a form of psychological warfare?
And he said, oh, well, from what he understood, that they were too high to be either seen or heard, which is just false.
But instead of saying, well, you know, I can see your point or I don't, you know, he's been told that you can't see him or hear him, so that's what he chooses to believe.
And that's what Americans will choose to believe, because they don't want to face the reality of what we're doing to these people.
Can you imagine?
You know, when I was in Chicago for the NATO protest, and there were all these helicopters overhead all the time, and I thought, you know, this must be a little bit, a little tiny taste of what it's like to live where there are drones overhead, and people watching you all the time and wondering, you know, what's going to happen.
It was very disconcerting having these helicopters following crowds of people and, you know, and this is much, that's just a tiny, you know, sample of a little bit of what it must be like to have these drones overhead.
So it's just another example of the party line telling people what they want to hear so that they don't have to be responsible for the truth.
Well, every time we talk about this, I think about Chalmers Johnson and his warning that you can either follow the British model or you can follow the Roman model.
The British model is you just give it up.
Eh, you tried taking over the world, it cost too much, and so, you know, you don't even have to say sorry.
Just quit.
And then the Roman model is, no, go ahead and kill yourself.
Go ahead and bring your empire home and live under it and slave yourself until you starve to death.
And that basically seems to be the model that we're following, is we're going to end up having 18,000 different sheriff's departments flying these things around, and it'll be, I don't know, 10 years before they're all armed with, you know, guns and missiles and whatever.
But soon enough, 10, 15 years from now, especially depending on, you know, economic troubles and that kind of thing, just like all of our cops wear camouflage and carry machine guns now, they'll all be flying robots around, killing people from very safe distances for their own, you know, officer safety needs.
And the American people will, you know, they'll reap what they sow, because that's just the way it is.
Again, it's good for the Raytheon investors, it's good for the sheriffs, and it's good for the generals.
And who's going to stop the three of them working together?
Right, you know, and that reminds me of a point that, you know, there's been a caucus in the House of Representatives, a drones caucus now for three years, and mostly the members of the drones caucus are members of states that are on the border, the Southwest, although there are some others in Missouri and Nevada and some other places.
And now the Senate has a drones caucus, too.
It only has two senators in it.
So now, you know, the whole purpose of the drones caucus is to promote the purchase and development of the drones industry.
You know, it provides jobs and makes us safer.
And so, you know, they're not going away any time soon.
You know, Leon Panetta was the one who said that drones are the only game in town.
So despite all these critical reports that we're killing innocent people, that they're counterproductive, these people, they're very short-sighted, and they're thinking of them as tactical successes, that, you know, we kill tactically, we're getting the guys that we're trying to get, they're not looking at the strategic picture of this is making things worse in the long run, that we are creating enemies where there were none, we are fostering hatred, anti-Americanism, and this idea that they're going to strike back.
So it just plays into this vicious circle of we have to pay you back for a bad thing you did to us.
And whether or not the actual culprits are, you know, our attack on Afghanistan, our attack on Iraq after 9-11, was not to get, you know, it was completely nonsensical.
We were not attacking the people who actually killed our folks.
We were just lashing out.
And so, you know, if we can't understand that that was wrong, then how can we, you know, how can we criticize Pakistanis or Afghans or Yemenis who want to kill all Americans?
Right.
Yeah.
Americans, more than anyone else, ought to understand how they feel.
Don't you hate it when somebody kills you?
Don't you want to kill them back real bad?
Right.
That's how they are too.
You know?
Yeah.
Come on.
You know, we did talk, we did even pose this question to one of the, to a man named Kareem Khan, who has 70 members of his family, to this extent his family had been killed by drones.
And we asked him, what would you do if you had a drone?
What would you do with it?
And he said that he would, we said, would you kill civilians with it?
And he said, no, absolutely not.
He thinks of a soldier, any soldier, as a legitimate target, a soldier in Afghanistan, because they are, you know, instruments of war themselves, and they are in a country they shouldn't be in.
But he said, no, he would absolutely not target, you know, the drones to New York City and kill innocent people.
And so even though they had this idea of revenge, he understood it to be that you have to strike back at the person who is responsible, not at, you know, an innocent person.
So I thought that was interesting and kind of an insight.
Well, they have a lot greater respect for the rule of law and individual rights there in Waziristan than we have here in the USA.
That's true.
Absolutely.
Apparently.
Yeah.
That's really too bad.
All right.
Well, listen, I think it's very brave that you even went over there.
I sure as hell ain't going to Pakistan to take a look around.
I mean, you look at this guy, the cricket star, Imran Khan.
Right.
The goons grabbed him this morning on his way to New York.
I guess he's lucky they didn't shoot him in the back of the head.
I don't think it's safe to do things like that, travel around, opposing American foreign policy.
You might end up on the receiving end of it.
Well, you know, and this is happening.
This is, you know, Medicare Peace has been labeled as an extremist organization by the Boston police and Homeland Security because they don't like our position opposing the government.
We are absolutely a nonviolent organization.
We take a pledge of nonviolence and we, you know, we do training on nonviolence.
We are always talking about nonviolence.
You know, we've been labeled an extremist organization.
You know, we have people being taken in with grand jury, FBI grand jury subpoenas and with no cause.
The government is chopping away at our rights, our civil liberties.
It is really very frightening that if you go against the government, you could find yourself in jail without charges and without access to a lawyer.
And all they have to do is label you an enemy combatant and that's, you know, the government can do that now.
It's very frightening.
And, yes, the thing with Imran Khan being taken off a plane on his way to New York is shocking.
It's shocking to us.
But it's really not, you know, in this day and age, it's not surprising anymore.
But I think it's just potential for what's to come.
It's not, and the picture's not good.
Right.
It's not surprising.
But we've got to stay shocked and not let ourselves get used to it.
That's the thing.
Yeah.
All right, everybody.
That is Leah Bolger.
She is a former commander in the U.S. Navy, and she is now the president of the Veterans for Peace at VeteransForPeace.org.
You'll find this great piece, Murder from the Skies, U.S. Creating New Enemies Where There Were None at Alternet.org about her trip to Pakistan with Code Pink.
Thank you so much for your time on the show today.
It was my pleasure, Scott.
Anytime.
Hey, folks.
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