12/04/14 – Chris Woods – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Next up is our old friend Chris Woods, formerly with the Bureau for Investigative Journalism.
This one's at Foreign Policy.
Pentagon in denial about civilian casualties of U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Chris?
I'm good, Scott.
Thanks for having me back on.
Very happy to have you here.
And I'm sorry, I meant to have a tab pulled up and Googled.
What's the name of your new book coming out?
It's called Sudden Justice, America's Secret Drain Wars, and that's coming out in the spring in the U.S.
Quite a bit of work gone into that, but looking forward to that finally being out.
Yeah, me too.
I forgot in what circumstance I accidentally found that on Google the other day, saw that that was coming out soon.
Sudden Justice, very good.
Okay, so, and now for people familiar, you already know, for people not familiar, Chris has done all this groundbreaking work on the drone war, especially of the Obama years, but of the Bush years too.
But all the civilian casualties in the drone wars, especially in Pakistan, but I guess in Yemen, Somalia, and the rest of it too, am I correct?
That's right, yeah.
And one of the things I do with the book is look at the more conventional wars, like Iraq and Afghanistan, and how drones were rolled out there.
Interesting, I managed to get special forces people to talk to me, for example, about how they were using drones.
So a lot of new stuff coming.
Yeah, Afghanistan is the drone war we never hear about, but of course, they're killing people with drones all day in Afghanistan, right?
Absolutely.
And it's just not explicitly a drone war, so it doesn't get lumped in with that Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, like I just listed.
Exactly.
But in fact, targeted killings happen just as frequently in Afghanistan, as they ever were in Pakistan.
And it's just become a part of warfare now to assassinate on the battlefield.
And one of the things I go into quite a lot in the book.
All right, well, so now back to the Islamic State.
And you know, with all the headlines, the Islamic State, just like Al Qaeda, it exists wherever people claim it.
So it seems like we've got little franchises, at least trying to prop themselves up in the Sinai Peninsula and Libya, and etc. like that.
So I guess it can spread.
But if we try to define it more narrowly as the, I think you got to admit, it is a new country there in what was formerly western Iraq and eastern Syria, now the Islamic State, and the war that America has been waging there since, at least officially since what, August the 8th.
How many people, how many civilians have been killed?
How do you know?
Well, we're not really sure.
That's one of the big problems that we have.
I mean, when you talk to credible monitoring groups, like Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is tracking this on the Syrian side, or Iraq body counter, indeed anti war that's been monitoring casualties, the numbers could be anywhere from maybe 50 civilians killed to maybe 120 plus civilians killed.
One of the problems we've got is that the corroboration that we used to be able to rely on in these areas occupied by Islamic State has just fallen apart.
And I for this feature for foreign policy, I spoke with international news agencies, and back there with reporters on the ground, and so on.
And a lot of those networks have gone, or the people who work for the agencies, it's too dangerous for them to operate, the NGOs can't get in.
So we often get claims of civilian casualties.
And it's proving very, very hard to verify and follow through on that.
It doesn't mean they're not happening.
It just means that we can't be absolutely clear what is happening on the ground, which is, as I talk about means there should be a greater emphasis on the US and its allies in telling us what's going on and and saying when they get things wrong, as they inevitably will do.
Well, and they've said that they're changing the rules, that they had a very restrictive process that they have on Terror Tuesday, when they pick out their signature strike targets and etc, like that.
In order to prevent civilian casualties, all the bending over backwards, they assure us that they're doing that your work, you know, basically proves otherwise.
And they're saying, no, we got to loosen those rules.
Because you know, this war so important that we got to go ahead and take even more risks of killing civilians at the same time, as you're reporting here, that they're saying, yeah, and we're not even going to bother trying to keep up with compensating the survivors of the dead either.
Yeah.
And I mean, that's a that's a really important point.
By the end, the drone war in Pakistan that evolved this rule of not striking unless there was a near certainty of no civilians to be killed.
We can argue about what the CIA thinks a civilian is, but at least it was a positive step that they had that rule.
But the National Security Council has been really clear that rule doesn't apply in this war.
And of course, it's because it's a it's really a hot war that we're involved in the UK, United States 10 other countries bombing in both Iraq and Syria.
And they're treating it as a hot war.
So they're not taking the same kind of care that they are with drone strikes in Yemen or Pakistan or even in Afghanistan today.
But also, you know, many of the places that are being bombed are in cities and big towns in both Iraq and Syria.
So a lot of reasons why we should be concerned about civilian casualties, significantly greater risk to civilians on the ground.
But the noise coming out of the Pentagon, I mean, the Pentagon still insists that they've got no confirmation of a single civilian death in either Iraq or Syria.
That's after more than 1200 airstrikes in four months.
And I don't think that's really a credible position for them to have, to be honest.
Well, and it seems like unless they kill Baghdadi, Caliph Ibrahim and his, you know, top cabinet, all sitting and meeting at their, you know, Cobra headquarters or whatever Cobra Command Center, then these pinpick strikes are useless in this war.
Basically, all they can do is kill civilians.
You know, even if it's just, you know, the remainder of it's just the collateral damage or the civilians, that might as well be all they're doing is accomplishing the public relations goals of the Islamic State.
You take out a stolen Humvee here and a stolen Humvee there.
You're not changing the tide of anything.
I mean, they would argue that they are.
And, you know, I don't want to be in a position of arguing for or against, you know, the Pentagon's position here.
But, you know, certainly it's their position with so many airstrikes now.
And it is a lot.
I know it's often portrayed as there's not much happening in Iraq or Syria.
But actually, the number of airstrikes is pretty unprecedented outside, say, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 or Iraq in 2003.
It's a lot of airstrikes going in there.
Yeah.
The US and the allies will argue that they're predominantly hitting Islamic State, Islamic State's ability to move the command and control structures, bunkers, captured military equipment like Humvees, armored personnel carriers, and so on.
And they argue that they're being affected, whether they are or not.
I mean, that's less clear.
I mean, certainly we've not seen the Iraqi army really reoccupying territory yet.
But I think it would be fair to say that the air intervention had some significant role in halting Islamic State's advance.
And we know, for example, that Islamic State has changed their tactics on the ground.
They're tending to attack strategically now on cloudy days, on days when US and allied aircraft can't operate.
So there's, you know, clearly they're having effect.
Clearly, they're changing the way Islamic State is operating.
But big picture stuff, I don't think any of us knows the answer to that.
And probably not even the Pentagon yet whether all of this is actually working.
Syria, I think, is a whole other question.
You know, Iraq, it's almost a sort of binary position with Syria with so many players involved in such a complicated situation on the ground.
It's really not clear to me exactly what's going on in Syria and who's being, we know Islamic State's being targeted.
We know the Khorasan group are being targeted.
But, you know, by targeting them, do we make it easier for the Assad regime?
Do we make it?
I mean, it's really complicated there.
Right.
Geez, I'm spacing on who it was that told me that, was it Prothero, Mitchell Prothero?
Or no, I forget who it was that told me that al-Nusra when they were in Syria, al-Nusra was under specific orders to leave the Americans alone.
We don't want to pick that fight.
But now embalming the so-called Khorasan group, that's all they're doing.
They're bombing al-Nusra and al-Qaeda in Syria.
As John Kerry said yesterday, it'll be war for years and years.
As Rand Paul said, yeah, let's go ahead and declare it like we really mean it.
So anyway, more bad news on the other side of this break with the great Chris Woods in just a second.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Chris Woods.
He's the author of the new book, Sudden Justice, America's Secret Drone Wars, coming out next spring.
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All right.
He's got one.
It came out yesterday at foreign policy, foreignpolicy.com.
Pentagon in denial about civilian casualties of US airstrikes in Iraq and Syria.
I think I want to go back to what you said about, hey, this is the biggest air war since the invasion of Iraq.
I think it was.
Can you help us with some numbers there of just how many sorties are being flown against IS targets right now?
Yeah.
So we're four months in, I think, 16 weeks in now.
And the last numbers the Pentagon put out said one thousand one hundred and forty five strikes.
Now, even that is kind of hiding a number, some fairly big numbers inside there.
So what the Pentagon might report is two or three strikes.
They might be hitting 20 targets.
At our location, we had news of a mission the other week where seven nations took part, 20 aircraft.
They hit 40 targets around Kirkuk, and that was only reported as three airstrikes.
So there's a lot of stuff going on.
And in terms of the number of airstrikes, Libya was was intense for short bursts back in 2011.
But I think over the whole period of Libya, not the same kind of intensity.
So, yeah, it's a it's an intense air war.
And they're throwing as they're pulling more assets in.
I suspect that's going to get a little bit more intense in the months ahead before it plateaus out.
So, yeah, a lot of bombing.
Yeah.
And then well, and I guess we can see why it became necessary.
At least the commanders thought there for a time to call out the Apache helicopters from the Iraq airport there west of Baghdad in order to try to put down Islamic State encroachments to the western border of the capital city there.
And I guess they haven't had to.
Well, that we've heard of.
They haven't had to to launch the helicopters again.
But you can see why they're worried if the Islamic State is really controlling all that land right up to within 15, 20 miles of the capital city.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And of course, huge cities in Iraq is still under occupation to create Mosul.
You know, pretty much all of our provinces all occupied by Islamic State right the way up to the edges of Kirkuk.
You know, the the the Kurdish areas.
This is a lot of territory that Islamic State controls.
And and the same into Syria as well.
And as you said, you know, at the top of our chat, you know, they are controlling a big part of Iraq and Syria now.
So, yeah, they can't really pay reparations to people when they can't get anywhere near them.
They got to fly robots even to bomb them.
They're so scared of getting near the place.
Yeah.
I mean, I think the issue with compensation is interesting.
I mean, American law is interesting.
I didn't know this before I started researching this story.
You know, there was a law passed in 1942 called the Foreign Claims Act, which actually makes it you can't the United States can't pay out for civilians it lawfully kills on the battlefield.
This was an act passed during the Second World War.
But what happened with Iraq and Afghanistan, Iraq, the first time around in Afghanistan is they realized that this was kind of undoing their own war aims.
If they didn't compensate people for killing them, it was turning communities against them.
So they evolved the system of no fault payment.
So the Pentagon would say, we don't accept responsibility for this.
But we realize that bad has been done.
We don't say that your your relatives have been unlawfully killed.
But because we feel bad about this, we're going to pay you.
And it actually did go a long way to calming some of the tensions in some of the places that were getting bombed where civilians were being killed.
You know, payments are two and a half $3,000 for somebody killed.
And the smaller payments for injuries, not a huge amount of money, but they make a difference in these in very poor countries.
The problem we've got with Iraq and Syria now is they've gone back on that recent program.
And they've they've said, again, we're not going to pay any compensation.
But of course, if you're fighting a war that everybody believes is to save the civilians of Iraq and Syria, but you're then saying, but if we kill them, we're not actually going to pay up for it.
Where's the incentive really for the allies to limit killing civilians?
I mean, they would argue that that's top of their list.
But again, when I looked into this, I found that of the 12 allies bombing in Iraq and Syria, eight of them, two thirds of them refused to say where they're bombing.
So you know, and with seven countries at a time taking place in some airstrikes, if civilians are killed or injured, how are their relatives supposed to know who the heck bombed them?
Nobody's telling them.
And even if they do find out, they're probably never going to get compensated anyway.
I mean, there's been some criticism of the piece today.
People say, you know, this doesn't matter compared to, you know, the kind of bigger picture.
This is just a small part.
And well, you think, well, you know, there are reasons we evolved this stuff first time around in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
And we seem to be unlearning those lessons.
Yeah.
I mean, you know what, Chris, if you go back to 2003 and even people from Saddam's own tribe saying, you know what, these guys, these Baathists were such bastards.
Well, we're even willing to look the other way at all the innocent people you killed in this invasion just to get rid of them.
They're so horrible.
But that's it.
You were all the way at the end of your permission, your permission slip as of right this instant.
Right.
We're talking still the spring of 2003.
You're welcome is already worn out.
You can't kill any more innocent people.
And this was, you know, it's amazing to it's an amazing testament to just what a bastard Saddam Hussein was that, you know, you had antiwar writers like Aaron Glantz quoting Sunnis, even members of the Iraqi army saying, yeah, we're happy that you invaded to get rid of this guy.
I'm not saying I'm justifying it.
I'm just saying that's their attitude.
But that is an absolute miracle.
Right.
Like Donald Rumsfeld couldn't have made up a lie like that.
And yet it was true anyway for a moment.
But that was in 2003.
We've been bombing those people nonstop this whole time, telling them it's for their own good.
And, you know, for them, for D.C. to pretend like that's the world that they're living in right now is completely ridiculous when their whole strategy, of course, has to be recruiting the local Iraqi nationalist and tribalist Sunnis against the jihadists.
Yeah.
And I think this is a really interesting I think the Pentagon's kind of stuck in the 1980s model here of of of how it deals with publicity around war.
It's as if Facebook, as if Twitter, as if social media has never been invented.
And they just say no matter how many times you ask them, no matter how much evidence you show them, they say we have no confirmation of civilian deaths.
But meanwhile, you know, pictures are all over Twitter.
You've got videos running on YouTube.
People are seeing the pictures.
Now, they may be right.
It may not have been an allied airstrike.
Some of it might even be propaganda.
But unless they actually engage with that stuff and say, actually, no, we didn't do that.
Or, yes, we did do that.
And we're going to deal with that.
We're going to compensate that and so on.
It's like they kind of pretend civilian casualties don't don't don't happen.
And they think it will all go away.
And they did exactly the same in Libya, by the way, at the end of the Libya air war, the head of NATO Rasmussen stood up and said, Hey, that was a great air war for us.
We didn't kill a single civilian.
And five independent studies came back and said, Well, that's just not true.
You killed anywhere between 50 and 80 civilians in those air strikes.
And in the end, NATO had to withdraw their claim that they hadn't killed a single civilian.
So it's like they're stuck in this old model.
And there seems to be a lack of understanding that, you know, there's a parallel war being fought on Twitter, on Facebook, on YouTube right now.
And they're losing that war if they don't actually start to deal with these civilian deaths and say whether it was them or not.
That's the way my dad describes the coverage of Vietnam.
Oh, we only lost five guys and we killed 1000 of them is the official Pentagon statement.
And then the next clip is the actual CBS reporter in the field going, Oh, man, it was a bloody massacre out here today.
You know, and, and putting the lie to the official statement in real time.
It's exactly that same effect.
Of course, they don't they don't have CBS reporters who would be so bold these days, but we don't need them now as well.
We don't need them now.
You're absolutely right.
And you know, Iraqi friends of mine, and you know, I'm still able to talk to friends of mine in different parts of Iraq.
And, you know, it's I mean, just for context, of course, you know, the number of civilians being killed, you know, allegedly killed by allied air strikes, because we don't know the exact number is really very small compared to the overall bloodbath going on out there.
And you know, from from the work that anti war is doing, you know, we I think the latest estimate just from August when the airstrikes began, almost 7000 Iraqi civilians have died in that short period of time in the violence, which is as bad as the worst part of 2006.
And seven, yeah, it is we're into that civil war territory now.
And we don't even know who's killed more than half of those people.
We can't attribute the you know, who killed them.
We just don't know.
Yep.
Yeah, no, you're right.
I mean, when you say it's less than 100 civilians were killed in the airstrikes in Libya.
I mean, that sounds amazing.
But then again, look at all the people who've died and all the strife caused by that war.
So that all counts too.
But I'm sorry, the drums beating we got to go.
Thank you so much for your time, Chris.
A real pleasure.
Chris Woods.
He's at foreign policy.com.
See y'all tomorrow.
Thanks for listening, man.
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