All right, y'all welcome to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and we're going to start off the show today with Chris Woods from the Bureau for Investigative Journalism.
The Bureau investigates.com is the website.
We spoke to him last summer about drone strikes, CIA drone strikes in Pakistan.
You might remember, and now he's got a new one done in cooperation with the Sunday Times of London, I believe it is, and with co-author Christina Lam.
It's called Obama Terror Drones.
CIA tactics in Pakistan include targeting rescuers and funerals, and it has quite a few sidebar articles as well.
Welcome back to the show, Chris.
How are you?
Thanks for having me on, Scott.
Good, actually.
Yeah, it's cold in London, but otherwise very nice today.
All right.
Well, I appreciate you joining us on the show.
It's a very important story that you have here, an outrageous story.
Is this really true?
Can you prove it?
What are your sources?
How can you assert in writing here that the American Central Intelligence Agency would target rescuers and funerals?
It is a genuinely shocking story.
I agree.
We first came across this last summer when we were putting together a massive database on CIA drone strikes in Pakistan.
And as part of that process, in fact, as you and I discussed last year, we went through literally thousands of press reports from the time from credible news agencies.
And back then we noticed there were multiple references to these attacks on rescuers.
We didn't take that at face value.
We thought that it was an important possible story.
This was from news agencies like Reuters, from CNN, from New York Times.
These were big media players who were reporting this individually.
But we didn't just run that story as it was.
We decided to look at this in depth and worked with field researchers out in Waziristan, working in conjunction with the London Sunday Times to really get to the bottom of what were on paper 18 reports of attacks on rescuers and on funeral goers.
And indeed, our researchers have stood up 12 of those strikes.
10 of them are attacks on rescuers.
These are people, a mix of Taliban and civilians who've come forward after an initial drone strike to help the dead and injured who've been almost immediately attacked again by CIA drones.
And on two occasions, we can categorically say that the CIA has deliberately attacked funerals.
On one of those occasions, as many as 45 civilians may have died, more than 80 people died in total in that attack.
As many as 45 of them may have been civilians.
So a really shocking story about the kind of tactics that the CIA has been using out in Pakistan.
Well, in reference to that last one, I believe this is the one where you wrote in your article that they were trying to get Massoud or one guy or another named Massoud and that they didn't even get him anyway.
They killed a bunch of civilians, as many as 45, you say.
But then they only caught up with him a few weeks later, six weeks later.
That's right.
The leader of the Pakistan Taliban back in 2009 was a notorious man by the name of Baitullah Massoud.
And the CIA fired off a number of drone strikes in an attempt to kill him.
As far as we understand, and we've got this from a number of sources, the CIA killed a middle ranking Taliban commander in the hope that that would draw out Baitullah Massoud to his subsequent funeral.
And it was that subsequent funeral at which almost 5000 people were reported at the time of having attended that the CIA drones attacked.
So this isn't an opportunistic attack.
This was a deliberate planned attack on a funeral at which a large number of civilians were present.
Baitullah Massoud wasn't killed in that attack and nor were any senior Taliban commanders.
As you say, Massoud was killed some weeks later in a separate drone strike.
We do understand that about 80 people died in that attack.
Some of them were militants, but as many as 45 of them were civilians.
And I do think that's shocking.
I think that is an extraordinary thing.
And it gives us an understanding of the drone strikes that we haven't perhaps had until now, that this deliberate targeting of rescuers and of funeral goers.
And I think this raises a whole host of legal questions about, you know, what is the legal status of such strikes?
And there's some speculation today about whether these might constitute war crimes.
Well, and your timing is good, because as you point out in the article, Barack Obama has finally addressed this, the president basically claiming that don't worry about any innocent people dying.
If anybody dies in this, they are bad guys bent on attacking Americans in America, he said.
I don't know where the president's getting his information from.
You know, we go to great lengths.
Leon Panetta and David Petraeus, I think.
I mean, we go to great lengths to try and validate these reports.
We've now provided CIA with more than 100 named civilians that they have killed during the Obama administration.
These are names that we've obtained through our researchers in Pakistan of people we can say, these are the names we're offering you, the names of the individual civilians, the villages in which they died, the circumstances in which they died.
You would hope that CIA might look at that and say, well, actually, we should be investigating that.
Perhaps we've been getting it wrong.
And perhaps our information on the ground is wrong.
In fact, their reaction to that today in the New York Times has been to turn around and effectively accuse the Bureau, my news organization, of helping al-Qaeda, which is an absolutely stunning response from an anonymous U.S. counterterrorism official.
In fact, there's an absolutely fiery piece from Glenn Greenwald in Salon running right now on this very subject about how disgraceful it is for a U.S. official to hide behind anonymity, to really smear our organization, to accuse us of helping al-Qaeda when we are acting as legitimate journalists, raising significant issues of concern is a disgrace.
It's an absolute disgrace.
Well, and they're admitting by implication that for the truth about what America is doing inside Pakistan to get out is to help the enemy.
So, I mean, what does that tell you?
They can blame the Bureau all they want, but we can see which Bureau is creating the blowback here.
It's not the reporters.
Yeah, it's interesting.
There's a really strong piece in the Los Angeles Times this weekend, which some of your listeners may have missed, which was quoting Michael Hayden, the former director of CIA, the former boss of the CIA.
He's raising significant questions about the drone strikes.
Michael Hayden saying that the current U.S. policy, there may only be two other countries that might agree with that, Afghanistan and possibly Israel.
And he also says that it's a strange situation where an agency needs a court order to wiretap someone like Anwar al-Awlaki, but only the president's word to assassinate him.
Now, is Michael Hayden helping al-Qaeda by making comments like this, the former head of the CIA?
Is it the case that anyone who raises issues and concerns about current policy is the enemy?
I do think this raises really troubling questions about how U.S. policy is being conducted at the moment.
Well, and, you know, I'm not the most thoroughly versed on this, but attacking the rescuers, I thought always was a hallmark of cowards and terrorists.
That's like the kind of thing that I think Eric Rudolph, the abortion clinic bomber, that was his thing.
Set off one bomb and then wait till a bunch of EMS people show up and then set off another bomb.
That kind of thing.
That's the hallmark of being a bad guy there.
If it was anyone but the American government doing it, that would certainly be how the American government would define it.
I mean, absolutely.
I had a very interesting email this afternoon from people working on the very reputable website, Iraq Body Count, and they monitor civilian casualties in Iraq.
And one of their researchers said to me today that one of the most despised terror tactics in Iraq has been this double bombing, where you set off an original device and then as rescuers come forward, you detonate it and kill the rescuers.
We have no issue with defining that as terrorism.
I think the CIA really needs to address why it's been doing this and what the possible consequences of that might be.
And it's interesting, Scott, because these attacks seem to have stopped last summer when Leon Panetta stepped down from CIA.
We can't find evidence of any attacks after July of last year.
They all seem to have occurred between, I think, about May 2009 and July 2011.
There was a defined period when it was acceptable to carry out attacks by this, based on the evidence that we have.
And I think that means there's a policy involved here.
That means somebody's taken a decision to do this and has subsequently taken the decision to stop it.
All right, well, hold it right there.
We've got to take this break.
On the other side of it, we'll be back with Chris Woods from the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, a piece they've done with the Sunday Times of London.
It's at thebureainvestigates.com.
CIA tactics in Pakistan include targeting rescuers and funerals.
Also, check out Glenn Greenwald on the subject.
We'll be back right after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and we're talking with Chris Woods from the Bureau for Investigative Journalism.
They've got a special report just out.
CIA tactics in Pakistan include targeting rescuers and funerals, written by Chris Woods with his co-author, Christina Lam, and published in cooperation with the Sunday Times.
That would be, I think, times.co.uk.
OK, so do I have it right, Chris, that you were saying just before the break there that that this was a Leon Panetta practice when he was running the CIA, and then when he left and was replaced by David Petraeus, that this practice of deliberately targeting rescuers and funerals with drone strikes, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi style, end it?
Is that right?
It would seem to be, yeah.
I mean, we looked, as I said, at about 18 cases from May 2009 to July 2011.
Our researchers have found absolutely no records or reports of attacks on rescuers or funeral goers, actually, after July of last year.
And of course, that is the period.
It may be a coincidence when Leon Panetta stepped down, and we had a period of a temporary head of CIA before David Petraeus came in.
So since the turnover at the top of CIA, we haven't seen a repeat of these tactics.
So whether this means it's come from Leon Panetta itself or something happened, something changed, then I don't know.
We can only speculate.
But certainly, time frame-wise, all of this occurred while Leon Panetta was at CIA.
Absolutely.
Well, now, how much of this drone war inside Pakistan is run by the Joint Special Operations Command or other parts of the army under now Leon Panetta as Secretary of Defense?
This question comes up quite a bit.
We've never found in our own research evidence of JSOC drones running in Pakistan.
It's our understanding that JSOC pretty much run the show in Somalia, and they also have a significant presence in fighting the covert war in Yemen.
And until recently, when CIA drones joined them out there, JSOC operated their own fleet of drones out of Djibouti, which flew over Yemen.
But as far as Pakistan is concerned, there's an awful lot of rumors about JSOC activities.
And we certainly know that special forces have had various incursions into Pakistan and also a presence as military trainers and so on on the ground in Pakistan.
But this question of whether JSOC have their own drone strikes, I don't actually believe that that's the case.
I may be proved wrong on that.
But it's our understanding that every drone strike we've seen in Pakistan has been the work of CIA.
Okay, now, I want to give you an opportunity to go through a little bit.
I think you said that you hired local researchers on the ground there to ferret out as much of this as you could, and then back it up with as much open source material as good.
Maybe you could talk a little bit more about the process and then give us a short rundown anyway, of, you know, examples and what it is you found.
Of course, you already mentioned the one funeral where up to 45 civilians were killed in a missed strike at a Taliban leader.
I'd really advise your listeners to go and have a look at our website and look at this unmediated information for themselves.
We've laid everything out, all of our sources, all of the links to the original reports of these attacks on rescuers and funeral goers.
We have an interview on there with national security correspondents at the Washington Post confirming that the CIA deliberately targeted a funeral and so on.
Well, the way our investigation works, along with Christina and the Sunday Times, we work with a very reputable Pakistani journalist by the name of Rakemullah Yusufzai.
He's based in Peshawar and over 30 years of covering conflict in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Rakemullah has built up an extensive and independent network of contact.
And really, we worked through Rakemullah's sources and contacts, field researchers who were able to go into Waziristan on a number of occasions.
They went into the villages where these strikes occurred, and they spoke with villages, local Pakistan intelligence officials, and with the Taliban themselves about what had taken place.
And through that, we got an understanding of the numbers who died, whether rescuers had died in these attacks.
It wasn't always the case that they had.
And where possible, we were able to name the civilians who were killed.
The other thing we have on our website is eyewitness testimonies.
We have three eyewitness testimonies from people who were present when U.S. drones attacked.
Now, in two of those cases, the eyewitnesses absolutely confirmed that CIA drones returned and attacked rescuers.
And on both of those occasions, civilians were killed, civilian rescuers where they were working alongside Taliban because these strikes occur in villages and everyone comes out to try and rescue the dead and injured.
And so civilians and Taliban being killed together.
And the third occasion, what was initially reported as an attack on a rescuer, we have an eyewitness testimony from somebody saying, actually, on that occasion, that wasn't the case.
So we're absolutely transparent with our findings.
We've not hidden where people have come back to us and said, actually, rescuers weren't hit in this strike.
We're transparent about that.
We've put all of our sources up.
And really, this is for us, why we feel the CIA should be sharing their information.
But the lunacy of claiming that this is a secret war now, when the president of the United States goes on Google and talks openly about it, only serves those people who say that CIA is doing bad things under the veil of secrecy.
There seems to be no benefit any longer of CIA hiding this away.
And we really do call on them at the very least to investigate our findings and the very clear evidence we've presented over the last couple of days of many civilians killed.
And we think that's something they should be investigating, not attacking us for.
Well, and of course, they have the ultimate double standard when it comes to all those things.
As far as secrecy, they can anonymously leak whatever they want, whether they're accusing you of helping Al-Qaeda or making up funny numbers to make it seem like they're less evil or whatever it is.
But then when it comes to someone exposing parts of what they're doing that they don't want exposed, especially this Obama administration has proven they'll nail you to the wall for that off to Gitmo with you for, you know, leaking the truth about the same things that they lie about in the media behind anonymity all the time.
I think there is a significant abuse of the anonymity feature going on right now.
Anonymity is there to protect members of the US intelligence and counterterrorism community so that they can do their job and so that they can fight terrorism.
And we understand that and we respect that.
What we don't accept is where officials abuse that anonymity to smear and attack and selectively leak information that is unhelpful.
It actually distorts the reality of what's taking place and allows officials, as we've seen today, to smear a legitimate news organization as aiding Al-Qaeda.
And that is absolutely disgraceful.
I've been a reporter for more than 20 years.
I've worked for organizations like the BBC, for the British Channel 4.
I've written for a host of newspapers.
I've been embedded with multiple US military units.
I've known David Petraeus, current head of the CIA, since back in 2004.
I met him in Mosul in Iraq and I've met him on a couple of occasions.
And he's been very helpful to my work.
To accuse me and journalists like Christina Lamb and Rekha Muller-Yusufzai of aiding Al-Qaeda is really beneath contempt.
It is a disgraceful tactic.
And they should be ashamed of themselves.
They really should.
And now, I guess this should go without saying, but if you could just say it real quick, you did talk to lawyers who said that this kind of thing would be a crime, right?
Even for government officials to do it?
Targeting rescuers and funerals?
Yeah, it is a very gray area, legally.
There's a whole article up on a website called A Question of Legality, which is about...
The answer is, we don't know.
The Bush and Obama administrations have prevented any cases relating to drone strikes from ever reaching the US courts.
So the courts have never taken a position on it.
And although both administrations say that they believe that the strikes are legal, there is significant and expert legal opinion that really questions that.
And there's been a whole host of discussion today.
So I'm sure you can understand questioning whether attacking rescuers and funeral goers is a war crime.
Now, I'm not qualified to make a judgment on that.
I think a court is where those judgments should be made.
But unfortunately, we're not seeing these strikes getting ruled on in the courts at the moment.
They are legal because the President of the United States and the Director of CIA say they're legal.
That doesn't mean that they are.
Right.
All right.
And we'll have to leave it there.
But thank you very much for your time.
I hope everybody will check this article out.
It's Chris Woods at the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, thebureainvestigates.com.
And again, the piece is called CIA tactics in Pakistan include targeting rescuers and funerals.
And it comes complete with a few sidebars of sourcing and better information for you there.
Thanks very much, Chris.
Thanks, Scott.
