01/22/13 – Chris Woods – The Scott Horton Show

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Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
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And our next guest is Chris Woods from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
He wrote this thing back in November.
It's okay, fine, shoot him.
Four words that heralded a decade of secret U.S. drone killings.
Welcome back to the show, Chris.
How are you doing?
Thanks for having me on again, Scott.
Well, thank you for joining us.
I really appreciate it.
And you said you had some breaking news for us right now on this very subject.
Yes, it's an announcement this evening by two United Nations experts.
They've been discussing this for a while, but they've announced this evening that on Thursday, there'll be a press conference here in London to announce the new civilian casualty investigation.
This is the UN investigators looking at civilian casualties caused by U.S. covert drone strikes.
And they've now said that following their investigation, they intend to present that to the UN General Assembly later this year.
So that's quite an interesting development.
And I think an indication of how much higher this is climbing up the international agenda now in terms of concerns about covert drone strikes and their use, not just in Pakistan, but in Somalia, Yemen, and perhaps soon in Mali as well, if they've not already been used there.
Well, you know, at the rate technology advances, I guess there are a lot of leaders of a lot of states out there who are looking toward the not-too-distant future and are quite afraid that these things are just going to be everywhere and out of their control.
Absolutely.
And I think this is, you know, even officials within the Obama administration have raised concerns about the blueprint that's being laid down right now.
And, you know, if things are being carried out that you then later want other countries not to do, it's going to be very hard to turn around and wag your finger or demand that they stop if you've been doing it yourself for a number of years.
And I think this idea of an international rulebook is an interesting one.
And, of course, this week, we've also seen the announcement that the Obama administration is going to have its own rulebook or playbook, as they call it, for targeted killings.
But according to The Washington Post, the CIA is going to be exempt from that for up to two years to enable it to carry on its killing program in Pakistan.
So it does seem like there's going to be a tightening of the rules and even the publishing of a possible rulebook on targeted killings, which, of course, most countries in the world believe to be illegal.
There's only a handful of countries that actually carry out targeted killings and believe them to be legal.
But even with the U.S.'s playbook, the CIA, we're told, is going to be exempt from that process for at least 18 months.
Hmm.
Well, is there any question that it's illegal, the covert drone wars?
And I mean, never mind the obvious intervention in Afghanistan, that kind of thing.
But when we're talking about Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, is there any doubt that it's illegal what they're doing?
That's why it's quote unquote covert, right?
Well, the U.S. government's position is that it's legal and we tell you it's legal and you just have to trust us and believe us.
But we won't show you the legal basis for that decision that tells us that we can carry out these strikes legally.
Because that's a secret.
Yeah.
They assert that it's legal, but they won't show us the legal basis and the legal findings that prove that that's so.
And of course, there is split opinion.
Some international lawyers say, well, it may well be legal and there may be some legal basis to this going back to the laws that were passed in the U.S. after 9-11 and some of the United Nations Security Council resolutions that were passed that some international lawyers say, well, yeah, there could be aspects of this that are legal.
But that's a very split opinion.
And of course, we've never had this in a court in the U.S. and we've never seen the legal basis published for these covert drone strikes, which leads many people to just assume that they're illegal, of course.
All right.
Now, when you well, I guess this is sort of a two parter here.
Can you tell us about, you know, the casualties, your findings?
I know you guys really did the most on the ground work on this, right?
The numbers of dead from the drone war, I guess, first of all, in Pakistan.
But then also, I was wondering if you could explain how you define who counts as a militant and who doesn't?
Because according to the New York Times, they count, the government counts a militant as anybody that they kill.
But I think you probably have a different criteria.
Well, we don't actually.
I mean, the very term militant is an absolutely loaded question in a country like Pakistan.
I've just come back, actually, from a long research trip in Pakistan and did manage to get into Waziristan for a few days with the Pakistan Army.
So that was fascinating.
And into some of the villages where drone strikes have been carried out.
So in terms of the numbers killed, overall numbers killed, we understand that a minimum of 2,600 people in total have been killed in Pakistan and from drone strikes in Yemen, perhaps 400 people.
Yemen is more difficult because sometimes we just don't know if they're drones or conventional airstrikes.
So between Yemen and Pakistan, we're probably looking at a minimum of 3,000 people killed since 2002 in covert US drone strikes.
In terms of who's a civilian, well, our latest estimate puts the minimum number of civilians reported killed at around 475 in Pakistan out of around 2,600.
Our definition of a civilian is a noncombatant.
It is not the definition that the US military chooses to use and that the CIA chooses to use, which is all military age males they view as combatants, according to the New York Times.
That's not accepted in any international definition of a combatant and we certainly don't accept that.
So the people we identify as civilians in our reporting are those who've been clearly and categorically identified as such.
So women, children, obvious, but also adult military age males who, according to all reports, were not combatants but were civilians.
They could have been shopkeepers.
They could have been people caught up in an attack in the wrong place, as we've had on a number of occasions.
But simply to be adult and male does not mean that someone is no longer a civilian and that would be a terrible state of affairs if we were to suddenly class things in that way.
That's a slightly rambling answer to your question, Scott, but yeah, we certainly don't share the CIA's view of what a civilian is.
Do I have that right?
I'm terrible at arithmetic on the fly, but do I have it right?
You're saying approximately a fifth of those killed in the drone war in Pakistan are civilians by your count?
It looks like that way.
I mean, particularly when we go back to the earlier years, partly because of the intensity of the drone strikes, but also the poor reporting that was going on a few years ago, it's more difficult to establish what happened in those earlier years.
But there were some pretty high casualty numbers and some pretty consistent reports of civilian casualties.
We've also been clear that reported civilian casualties do appear now to be falling in Pakistan.
We think that they represented around 14% of all of the deaths in Pakistan in 2011.
That may be as low as 2% or 3% in Pakistan last year.
I think that is a result of the pressure that's been put on the administration and on the CIA and holding them to account for the civilians that they've been killing.
And I think that's a positive result if the proportion of civilians being killed is falling.
But nevertheless, civilians are still being killed in Pakistan and elsewhere with these strikes.
And as far as we know, because the government and the CIA won't tell us, there's no accountability when things go wrong and civilians are killed.
We simply don't know if anyone is ever disciplined or if anyone has ever moved from their jobs or if anyone is held to account.
What we do know in Pakistan is that of those hundreds of civilians killed there, not a single family has ever been paid compensation by the Pakistan or US governments.
So the implications for people caught up in these attacks can be very severe.
Not just a loss of life, but no access to any kind of compensation and any kind of recompense or any kind of apology when things go wrong, of course.
Well, you know, I don't want to give them too much credit, but I would have guessed if you just had any guess that the numbers would have been the other way around, or maybe a fifth of the people they kill or some guy they're actually looking for who supposedly knew Zawahiri back in the day or something, and then everybody else just happens to be around or happens to be, as you're saying, a fighting age male rifle owner, you know, but not necessarily a militant of any kind or member of any group that's at war with America anyway.
When civilians are killed in Pakistan, we tend to see quite different patterns of behavior from people.
To put it bluntly, when militants are killed, there is often an indifference in local communities, partly because the militant groups tend to separate themselves off from local communities.
Often there are foreign fighters there.
And so when we have militants only killed or alleged militants killed in places like Pakistan by the drones, we don't tend to see a response from the local communities.
When civilians are killed, however, you do tend to get very strong responses in the local communities.
You get announcements from the local mosque, you'll often get protests and demonstrations, quite spontaneous.
You'll have possibly retaliatory attacks against the army by the local people, not by militants and so on.
So there are indicators that help us to see when civilians are being killed.
It's the majority of those killed.
We don't know their identity.
It's assumed that they were alleged militants, but we're not able to say anything with any more confidence than that.
And in terms of named militants, well, we've been able to name around 200 militants killed in Pakistan out of two and a half thousand people.
So who the others are, perhaps they were militants, perhaps they belong to militants organizations that represented a threat to the United States, but we don't really know the identity of those people.
And we don't really know the affiliation of the groups that they were with if they were militants.
And if those militant groups are perceived as a threat by the United States, we don't sometimes know the answer to that question either.
Yeah, well, you know, some of the reports are that Afghan so-called militants have been turning up fighting on America's side in the regime change in Syria.
So I guess that's probably a safer bet for Mujahideen in Central Asia.
They ought to fight on America's side for a little while if they want to breathe there, you know, we're hiring.
I think the whole Middle East question now is getting very messy and complicated.
And, you know, we saw with Libya, you know, 15 months ago, Libya was very unusual situation where at some point, British and American special forces were fighting alongside Al Qaeda affiliates against the Gaddafi regime.
This is very bizarre when, you know, 12, 13 years into the war on terror.
And it was starting to look like, you know, was there a stand in the early 80s against the Soviet Union?
You know, when you're constantly telling people, these are the bad guys, and then you find yourself fighting alongside them for periods.
It's a very strange world we're finding ourselves in at the moment, I think.
Yeah, very so.
Now, listen, well, I want to ask you all about Yemen, but let's first go to Somalia, because that's the one that no one else seems to care about, but I do.
Can you tell us what you know about the drone strikes there and collateral damage, etc?
Unfortunately, we know very little about drone strikes in Somalia.
We know they take place.
We know they're predominantly launched from Djibouti, a nearby country in the Horn of Africa.
We've logged, I think, around nine US drone strikes there over the last couple of years.
They only started up in the summer of 2011.
Drone strikes, there have been airstrikes and other attacks by US special forces before them, but the drones only first really arrived in June 2011.
The problem we have with Somalia is there's no functioning social society there.
There's no functioning government.
There's no functioning media.
So when the things do happen in Somalia, they often happen without the world knowing about them.
And it is entirely possible that far more drone strikes and US military activity has taken place in Somalia than we understand.
And in fact, there was a very important United Nations monitoring group report published last year, which did start to unpick this issue and talked at some length about covert operations in Somalia, breaches of UN arms embargoes, use of CIA helicopters ferrying people backwards and forwards.
The UN even published pictures, in fact, of CIA contract helicopters, which was fascinating and I think annoyed the CIA a little bit.
But the reality is Somalia really is the secret war.
We don't know what happens there.
We don't know how bad things can be.
We do know there's an awful lot of propaganda going all sorts of ways.
And in fact, here at the Bureau, we did an investigation about 18 months ago where we found an Iranian TV station, which is funded by the Iranian government, had been putting out fake drone reports, had claimed more than 70 US drone strikes in Somalia, all of which, as far as we could find, and we put a lot of effort into trying to understand this, were all fake.
They were all false claims as part of the US-Iranian proxy war that's been going on for 30 years now.
So Somalia is very difficult to untangle.
We do know that US drones operate there.
We do know that militants belonging to groups, predominantly al-Shabaab, which is now affiliated with al-Qaeda, are the targets.
But really, what else is going on in Somalia?
I don't know.
Jeremy Scahill, you know from The Nation, did a very good report last year about the CIA having effectively contracted out a prison facility at Mogadishu Airport.
There clearly is a lot going on there.
Somalia is still a problem country in terms of international terrorism, militancy in East Africa, and revolutionary movements and so on.
So I can understand that focus.
But if you were to ask, does the Bureau accurately monitor what's going on in Somalia, I suspect we're only touching the surface of what's really going on there.
Yeah, I was just about to bring that up.
Scahill's work shows that there are American boots on the ground there.
They even have a torture dungeon.
Yeah, I think the suggestion was that that torture dungeon was being run by Somalis.
I mean, Scahill's view, I think, was that it was effectively subcontracted.
And obviously, the CIA has had a presence in Somalia for many years.
And perhaps it shouldn't surprise any of us that they're still picking up people there.
And al-Shabaab does represent a threat in the views of most Western governments to Western institutions and Western nations.
So I think you can understand their focus on it.
But what's actually being done there?
I think very few people actually know.
And they're certainly not telling us.
Well, what do you make of Stanley McChrystal coming out and saying that, hey, you know, the law of diminishing returns is kicking in here and you can't just drone strike the world forever and that kind of thing?
I think Stanley McChrystal's views are those held by many senior serving and former military officials, former intelligence officials, and former administration officials.
We've had people across the board now raising this issue and raising concerns about the overall effectiveness of the covert drone strikes.
Michael Hayden, former head of the CIA, Robert Grenier, former head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, Dennis Blair, former U.S. Director of National Intelligence, all have come out and raised concerns about the drones campaign.
And I think the question they consistently raise, well, sometimes the question is around legality.
And interestingly, Mike Hayden's raised a couple of points about the legal basis for the campaigns, even though he introduced the drone strikes in Pakistan back in 2004.
But I think also the focus of a lot of these former officials is you can have a tactical success with a drone strike, but how are we measuring the strategic success?
If, as one analyst put it a while back, we're simply mowing the grass in places like Pakistan, you keep killing militants and they keep being replaced.
What if in the long term you are creating more problems than you're solving?
And who is measuring that?
And who is making that decision about whether these strikes are actually effective?
And I think Stan McChrystal raises an interesting point.
And I think, you know, soldiers are particularly generals, you know, people of McChrystal's level, they have to be able to get out of wars.
That's part of their job.
They not only have to fight wars, they have to work out when a war is over and how you get out of it.
And I think this concern among former and serving officials is this idea of perpetual war, of how do we end this war?
Are we really in now for a war that's 20, 30, 40 years long?
And a hot war, not even a cold war as we had with Russia, or rather the Soviet Union 20 years ago that ended 20 years ago, but a hot war.
How do we manage a war of that intensity?
And, you know, do we want a permanent war?
I mean, how do we get out of it?
I think those are the questions that are being asked in a lot of officers' messes.
And a lot of political backgrounds at the moment.
It's not really being expressed publicly, I think, but I think the concern is there.
Well, that's probably the best news I've heard all day or maybe in a long time.
Any of them want an end to this rather than to just keep holding their job, doing what they're doing?
And speaking of which, can you tell us real quick what you think about the move to make John Brennan the head of the CIA?
And what role that's going to have in the future, the short-term future of this policy?
I mean, clearly, John Brennan has the confidence of President Obama.
He's been his chief counterterrorism advisor for the past four years.
He is absolutely instrumental in Obama's counterterrorism strategy.
He has the support of a lot of people.
I don't have an opinion directly on Brennan myself.
I have put out a couple of major reports on Brennan, particularly where he claimed that the CIA hadn't been killing civilians with the drones.
He claimed that back in June 2011.
And we really did come quite heavily on that and present the CIA with a list of several dozen civilians they'd killed in that time window.
And I've never really seen him address that issue.
And I've never really seen him explain why the CIA could claim that it wasn't killing civilians when it patently was.
And I know others have had concerns in similar areas.
But he seems to be the CIA chief that Obama wants and Obama thinks the country needs.
So it'll be interesting to see his confirmation hearings and whether the Senate will really get into this question of the drone strikes and the legal basis.
There have been some interesting noises from some senators and congressmen and congresswomen in recent weeks.
So perhaps it'll be an interesting confirmation process where Mr. Brennan will be tested and pushed really on some of this territory.
Yeah.
Well, we'll sure have our eyes glued to C-SPAN during that one.
That's for sure.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for your time, Chris.
I appreciate it.
It's a pleasure.
Thanks, Scott.
Everybody, that's Chris Woods from the Bureau for Investigative Journalism.
The website is thebureainvestigates.com.
Lots of great work there.
Please go and check it out.
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