08/20/12 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
My website is scotthorton.org.
I keep all my interview archives there, more than 2,500 of them now, going back to 2003.
And also check out my blog at scotthorton.org/stress.
All right, our first guest on the show today is the great Gareth Porter from Interpress Service and Truthout.org.
He's the author of Perils of Dominance about America's role in the Vietnam War.
Welcome to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
Thanks again for having me, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And I was pretty blown away by this piece you got in the Truthout here, cover up of civilian drone deaths revealed by new evidence.
So let's start with who's covering up what and then how was he figured that out?
Well, I mean, I think we've got a two level cover up at one level, of course, the Obama administration before the Bush administration have been arguing that the CIA's drone war in Pakistan, as well as elsewhere, but particularly in Pakistan, is highly effective, highly accurate, that they know who they're targeting and they're able to minimize civilian casualties, what they call collateral damage.
And at the same time, you have a much more detailed accounting for casualties in the drone strikes on the website of the New America Foundation, this website called Year of the Drone, that terrorist expert Peter Bergen is the sort of the master of.
They have been providing a running tally of civilian casualties and what they call militant casualties in the drone strikes for the last three years or so.
And what I'm suggesting in this article, what I'm documenting in this article, I should say, is that the NAF accounting is highly skewed.
It is essentially systematically covering up the degree to which these casualties in the drone war in Pakistan are, in fact, civilians, non noncombatants.
Well, you know, to see Peter Bergen talk about these kind of things on CNN, for example, he seems all very excited and on board for it.
This is how the war on terrorism should be fought.
Yeah, I mean, he's been defending the the drone war for years now, and I mean, he's clearly part of the national security apparatus in this regard.
And there's no question that he has used the website Year of the Drone to continue to put forward this idea that civilian casualties are minimal and getting smaller and smaller all the time.
And in order to do that, he's had to fudge the figures, I think, quite seriously.
He's had to ignore evidence that was very clear and even can be found on his website that that there was a much higher level of civilian casualties than he's let on.
Right now, how high is much higher?
Well, what what I have shown in my article is that the 24 drone strikes that have been now documented in much greater detail based on primary sources in the region where the strikes are taking place by the Pakistani lawyer Akbar Shahzad Akbar and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London.
What they what those 24 strikes show, that is the data on the 24 strike show, is that the level of civilian casualties is, in fact, about 70 percent of the total, whereas originally it was shown to be much closer to like 30, 30 percent, 30 some percent of the total.
So, I mean, we have a dramatic reversal in these 24 drone strikes that have now been documented in detail in terms of who the real victims were.
We have a dramatic reversal of the relation between a militant on one hand and civilians on the other.
Yeah, well, I know this is really surprising, right?
Even The New York Times treatment on this, the famous kill list story and all that, which was obviously put out by the administration itself, included parts about, well, if a guy has a bag of fertilizer, which how in the hell can they tell if it's fertilizer or what it's a bag of?
Maybe it's just, you know, mulch or something.
They don't know from their drone.
But anyway, he's got a bag of something that could be fertilizer.
Well, maybe he's an Afghan McVeigh.
So just go ahead and kill him.
Or if they're doing jumping jacks.
Well, that's just like that file footage they always play on CNN of the guys on the monkey bars, which is a lot of fun.
And so here these guys are doing jumping jacks or playing on monkey bars.
Well, then they must be terrorists to kill them.
And in fact, if an Afghan has a rifle, well, that guy's a militant to a Pakistani with a rifle.
Those are militants.
Light them up.
That's the policy.
In some ways, of course, you're right.
But in some ways, the situation is even worse because in many cases, these strikes are based on the fact that they're being shot at.
These strikes are based on targeting that is somebody's tip them off, that a particular house is being used by militants, whereas in fact, what is happening is that some guy has neighbors over or is simply having dinner with the family.
And in one case, in the most egregious case, of course, was the targeting of a Madrasa back in 2000 to 2009, if I remember correctly, correct me if I'm wrong here, because I sometimes get the dates wrong.
But this was a strike which was supposedly targeting a gathering, a large gathering of the Haqqani network, whereas in fact, it was a Madrasa where there were 83 young students, 21 of which were under the age of 15.
And we know that this is the case because the Pakistani newspaper, the news actually published a complete list of all 83 students at the Madrasa with their names and their ages.
So, I mean, this is perhaps I mean, I think this is the worst of the cases of mistakes that have been made constantly over the last few years in the drone war in Pakistan.
But what it shows is that that they simply act on tips that may or may not be accurate.
And when they're inaccurate, the results can be horrific.
Well, you know, this goes to the whole counterinsurgency strategy, too, right, is you have a giant with a flyswatter running around trying to fight a war against an army that isn't even really an army.
They're just we're fighting local militia men spread, you know, basically throughout the entire Pashtunistan region there along that border.
And, you know, it's like Mickey Mouse chopping up the brooms trying to make them stop because he doesn't know the magic word.
He doesn't know how to call a bad enough, well enough alone, you know?
I mean, the idea that the United States can somehow succeed in this kind of war is so far out that even people in the counterinsurgency community themselves have criticized it, even though they with very rare exceptions will not come out and say that carrying out drone strikes against these people is evil and should be stopped immediately.
They question very often whether this is a tactic or a strategy, if you will.
In fact, they say it's not a strategy, but a tactic that can possibly prevail, that can possibly be successful against this kind of of enemy because it is decentralized.
It's it's they're not targeting for the most part.
Very rarely do they target middle or high level officials.
They're targeting low level people and everybody who happens to be in the room or in the building with the with that individual.
And the result is, of course, predictable that you're going to kill at least as many civilians as you are so-called militants.
And the militants, of course, are in many cases simply people who happen to be involved in one way or another with an organization, not people who are actually fighting a war.
Well, this should be easy for Americans to understand.
They call the cops on each other all day long, just trying to get each other in trouble with the law, you know, not necessarily about something that's really an emergency.
So you can see how, hey, if there was a foreign power around here killing people with drones, you would have Americans ratting on each other, pointing the fingers at each other, trying to get the foreigners to kill their enemies for them because they're weasels like that.
Well, exactly.
And, of course, even more importantly, it should be easy.
I'm not going to say it is easy, but it should be easy for Americans to imagine how they would feel if a foreign power were killing people with drones in the United States and killing large numbers of civilians.
I mean, I think it's predictable that there would be outrage that would certainly be the vast majority of Americans, not everybody by any means, but the vast majority of Americans would be outraged and would demand an end to it and would regard the power that is carrying out those drone strikes as an enemy of the primary enemy of their country, the primary danger to their country.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the whole thing when we talk about that intel.
I mean, it is important, right, if they're just going around waging war without any kind of real information.
But it almost implies that, well, if they could do a good job of hunting down their enemies and destroying them, then that would be, you know, more justified somehow when the whole point is the entire occupation is just one big trespass.
They have a right to be militants.
It's their damned country.
Well, yeah, I mean, the point is the point is the United States has no right to carry out that kind of war under international law.
It's an extremely shaky, to say the least, case that is being made by the Obama administration, that it has a right to to carry out the drone war in Pakistan.
And by the way, what the Obama administration has been doing systematically from the beginning is to make the case that, oh, we're just targeting al Qaeda high level officials who are threatening to do plotting against the United States, the people of the United States of America, whereas, in fact, the vast majority of these strikes, the overwhelming majority of these strikes have nothing to do with al Qaeda plotting whatsoever.
The vast majority of the targets are, in fact, not connected with al Qaeda.
They are Haqqani network people or Afghan Taliban people who are, in fact, involved in the war against the United States and NATO in Afghanistan.
This has become this drone war in Pakistan has become an adjunct of the war in Afghanistan.
And this is something that the Obama administration has refused to own up to.
It's still selling this as something that is protecting Americans somehow, whereas, in fact, it has very, very little to do, if anything, to do with protection of Americans against terrorism.
All right.
Now, if we rewound it a few years to Iraq, I think you and I both agreed from the very beginning when we first started talking about that war, that the plan to train up the army, they'll stand up, we'll stand down and all of that, it at least was plausible in that our government was fighting on the side of the majority.
And in fact, well, the political leader, self-appointed political leaders of the majority anyway.
And in fact, they came in the form of the bottom brigade and which was already basically a private army asset of the Iranians.
And they became the core of the new Iraqi army.
And so it made sense that they would eventually be able to train up an army to rule at least the land from Baghdad to Basra, if not take over the entire kind of Anbar province, Sunni triangle part of the country, which I guess is still in play to this day.
But but now in this case, if they're ever going to really gain control of Anbar.
Yeah, I mean, I think Cheney may have been right when he, you know, talked about the disaster.
If we leave, who's going to take over?
Of course, it was his fault.
And of course, actually staying there wouldn't have got rid of him.
But just who's going to be running Sunni stand there?
You know, he may have been right at that part of it.
But anyway, so now we look at Afghanistan and we're fighting for a coalition basically of the political leaders of the Tajiks and the Hazaras and the Uzbeks versus the Pashtuns, which is obviously oversimplifying it a bit.
But even all combined, they're hardly the majority.
They're still only like, what, 40 to 60 percent Pashtun or something like that.
And it seems like the project of building up their army to ever be the army of Afghanistan, even in the year 2024, like in the deal that Obama recently signed, seems like a fantasy.
Do you think, especially with all the green on blue attacks lately, do you think that at least, you know, as far as it goes, their announced project to build up an Afghan army could ever even work?
Well, I think the question answers itself, Scott.
I mean, there's no way that that's going to work.
And it is so fundamentally out of sync with reality that if you go back to the Bush administration, the the entire Bush administration practically was extremely leery of getting involved in Afghanistan precisely because of the point or the points that you are making.
They understood that to try to put together a an army or to to support an army that was essentially made up of the conjuries of non-Pashtun people in Afghanistan to fight the Pashtuns, that is to say, the Taliban, was a losing proposition that they had to have Pashtun support for anything that the United States was going to do in Afghanistan.
So, I mean, even the Bushes, even the neocons understood that they weren't going to be able to get away with a war in Afghanistan, which is part of the reason I'm not saying it's the entire reason, because obviously what they really want to do was was to invade Iraq.
So this was connected with that.
But they did, in fact, have a clear understanding that this would never work.
And I think what what happens is that, you know, the United States gets committed to a war and then, you know, all the truthful understandings that had been in existence before are simply thrown out because they're in the way of supporting the mission and supporting the mission comes first.
Right.
So their plan was just keep a low level, escalate maybe a little bit here in 05 and a little bit here in 07 and whatever, but just leave it to other presidents to decide what happens.
Try to sneak out without the American people really focusing on Afghanistan.
And I really wanted to fight in Afghanistan.
Certainly the neocons in the defense department, starting with Rumsfeld himself, if you want to call him a neocon, whether you do or not, totally opposed to getting very deeply involved in Afghanistan, thinking that it was a losing proposition all along.
And of course, the only reason that they ended up militarily in Afghanistan is because of 9-11.
And the feeling, you know, I mean, quite understandably, that if the White House failed to do something to show, you know, very muscular response, the policy would be repudiated by the vast majority of Americans.
They demanded that the United States do something about Afghanistan militarily and that the White House had to oblige.
Right.
Well, especially after they deliberately let bin Laden go when they surrounded him on three sides, except for his perfect escape route into the country next door, that they'd already decided they would never attack across that border until later.
And then they would attack and kill civilians there all they wanted.
Yeah, they did not want to get into capturing bin Laden.
It was regarded as too difficult and too troublesome.
They were really quite, I mean, again, the neocons particularly were quite opposed to targeting bin Laden.
They were quite explicit about it.
And this is very well documented.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, on the actual discrepancies here, did you take specific cases where you go through and you're comparing the journalism of the New America Foundation, such as it is within, I guess, what's that guy's name over at the Bureau for Investigative Reporting and other Pakistani reports?
You're taking case studies to check.
I've got it.
I can give you the overall totals here.
That contrast what the New America Foundation had suggested on their website and what we find from both the Pakistani lawyers data based on the interviews with the families of drone strike victims and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's data from eyewitnesses in the region and others who are familiar with the details of the strikes on the 13 strikes that they studied.
So total of 24 strikes, the 11 strikes studied by Akbar, the Pakistani lawyer, and 13 strikes studied by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism for the 11 strikes that the Pakistani lawyer gathered data on.
The New America Foundation scored the 37 percent of the casualties in those strikes were civilian.
And that meant that, therefore, 63 percent of the casualties were so-called militants.
But what the Pakistani lawyer gathered in terms of data from the victim's families showed that, in fact, 75 percent of the casualties in those 11 strikes were, in fact, civilians and only 25 percent or maybe a 74 percent and 26 percent of the casualties were not civilians.
So it was a very, very sharp reversal in that in those 11 strikes.
Then the Bureau of Investigative Journalism studied 13 strikes.
And in those 13 strikes, the New America Foundation had shown 77 to 153 very, very large range of estimates were militants and only 13 to 24 of the casualties were civilians.
Whereas the Bureau of Investigative Journalism showed that, in fact, as many as 80 to 107, several times more, five or six times more of the casualties were civilians than militants or excuse me, than the New America Foundation had had shown in its data.
So what we have here is a very sharp reversal in the total of the 20, 24 strikes.
It turns out that the civilian casualties are, in fact, something like 70, 70 percent of the total rather than about 30 percent, as was shown in the New America Foundation.
Yeah.
Well, without having crunched all the numbers myself, you're sound believable.
Thank you.
Give me a break.
Like a bunch of guys in Sarasota, Florida.
Was it somewhere in New York?
I forget.
Las Vegas, sitting in a trailer, flying a robot on the other side of the planet.
Has any idea who he's killing, please?
Well, and, you know, I think the real point here is that there's a systematic effort here that has been going on for many years to prevent the American people from understanding what's really going on here in the drone war.
And the reason is that these people at the CIA have vested interest in maintaining this drone war.
This is this is like a corporation which has basically been selling this product and has done very well.
And to actually have the American people learn the truth would actually threaten the market that they have created for their product.
Right.
Just like the rest of the world killing Pakistanis.
Right.
Well, you know, The Washington Post had that piece about the CIA where they said the entire analyst side of the house is nothing but drone strike targeters now.
Well, it certainly has been has become a very important part of the analytical side of the of the CIA.
And, of course, what they're doing is making the analytical side more and more an arm of an adjunct of the operations side.
And that is, of course, a serious problem for for the agency, because it was meant not to be an operations agency.
It was meant to be a gatherer of intelligence which could could be objectively presented to the president to make decisions.
And what is happening is that the CIA has become primarily an operations arm.
And, of course, the advice that the director of the CIA is going to give the president is going to be skewed by that fact.
Speaking of which, tell me about David Petraeus these days.
Has he just spent most of his time lying about what a great job he did when he was the general in charge of CENTCOM in Afghanistan?
Well, I think what the pattern that I've seen is that David Petraeus has used his position as director of the CIA certainly to defend the CIA's interest and to continue to defend the drones, the drone war in Pakistan and elsewhere, because that's what the CIA does and he cannot afford to do any differently.
And by the way, we know that Petraeus had severe questions about the drone, the drone war in Pakistan when he was the CENTCOM commander.
But we don't hear that from him these days.
And secondly, I think what Petraeus is doing is using his position to sell the idea of Iran as a serious threat to the security of the United States and the rest of the world.
He had become a major enemy of Iran when he was the commander in Afghanistan, as well as commander in Iraq.
It became part of his his whole rationale that that Iran was a dangerous power.
And of course, he's going to continue to try to defend that because he had already made a record of that when he was a commander.
Yep.
All right.
Well, you see what I mean now, Gareth Porter, my favorite reporter, IPSnews.net for his work at Interpress Service and Truthout.org for this one cover up of civilian drone deaths revealed by new evidence.
Thanks very much for your time, Gareth.
Thanks again for having me, Scott.