Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and probably if you just threw a dart at a board, you would guess correctly that our next guest is Gareth Porter, because he almost always is our next guest if he's not already on the line.
Welcome back Gareth, how are you doing?
Hi Scott, I'm fine, good, thanks.
Appreciate you joining us today.
Everybody, of course, you know Gareth Porter, he writes for Interpret Service, that's ipsnews.net.
Your phone sounds terrible, hold still, and we reprint all of his news articles at original.antiwar.com/porter, where the latest is CIA's push for drone war, driven by internal needs.
So I guess, tell us first Gareth, about their push for the drone war, and then the internal needs.
Well, I mean, this is a story that is one of those things that often happens with me.
I see something in an article, in this case it was a Washington Post piece on the CIA a few days ago, which catches my eye.
There's something in there that I really hadn't known about, and which suddenly I put together with some other facts that I've already been aware of, and I see a pattern here, a real story that people are not aware of.
Now this is the pair of articles in the Post about the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command in their Top Secret America series that came out earlier this week.
That's right, and the one that I was particularly interested in was the story on the CIA, which not only gave very interesting statistics about the growth of the counter-terrorism center from 300 before 9-11, the 9-11 attacks, to 2,000 today, but also intriguingly what has happened to the analytical side of the CIA, that is the Intelligence Directorate, where as much as one-third of the Intelligence Directorate's personnel are now involved, in fact, in supporting the operations side of the agency.
That's a huge shift in the nature of the CIA from an organization which is fundamentally and primordially an agency involved in gathering and analyzing intelligence, to an agency that is now really all about, or primarily about, supporting operations, and so that's the tie-in that I made between the internal bureaucratic dynamics of the CIA and the drone war.
Let me take you back to the beginning of the drone war in 2004, and for the next four years, the drone strikes in Pakistan were very few and far between, only three per year during that four-year period, and if you actually look closely at what happened, they were disastrous in terms of the consequences.
They were supposed to be aimed at high-value targets in Al-Qaeda and their affiliates, and they were supposed to be done in a way that would not create what they call collateral damage.
Of course, that's a term that really means civilian casualties, civilian dead.
In fact, what actually happened in those four years in the 12 strikes that they did was exactly the opposite.
They actually could only claim to have killed three high-ranking or even middle-ranking Al-Qaeda, but they killed 121 civilians.
This is my own count, but it's based on a very careful analysis of all the news reporting of the 12 strikes during four years.
So my point here is that, really, the drone campaign was in serious trouble.
After four years, the CIA hadn't really shown very much for their effort, and, in fact, one can easily imagine that it was very much a question of whether it would be allowed to continue, given the fact that there was such a high incidence of civilian casualties per Al-Qaeda high-value target hit.
So what really changed?
It was just the video game joystick lobby, or what?
Well, here's the factoid from the Washington Post article that I connected with the history, the early history of the drone war in Pakistan.
In 2005, the CIA had made a decision to create a career track within the intelligence directorate for people who wanted to be involved in targeting.
Obviously, that means targeting drone strikes.
And so, in 2005, the CIA was making a bureaucratic decision about future career paths for its analytic directorate, its intelligence directorate, which opened up new opportunities for a large number of analysts.
So the CIA, which, basically, if we just rewound ten years and we said, okay, the CIA, half of them, they're analysts, they analyze the intelligence that they get, they pass it up the chain of command of the President so that he knows the best information he has so he can make his terrible decisions based on that, and then the operations side, they support coup d'etats and they train people how to torture people to death, and they finance Hosni Mubarak's internal police, that kind of thing.
What you're saying, though, is that the operations side has gone from hiring people to kill people to killing people all day long, and the analytical side has come to be, I think you say, a third of it now is devoted to finding people for those guys to kill.
That's right, exactly.
And that's it.
So the CIA is an entirely different organization than it was ten years ago, in that sense.
That's exactly right.
And so what I find here in the Washington Post article is evidence that the CIA had made a fundamental commitment in creating this career track to a big drone war in Pakistan and beyond that to other countries as well.
They expected fully to see the drone war continue to expand in 2005, 2006, and beyond, so that they would have lots and lots of drones to be managed by the CIA and for the analytical side to support through their studying of various intelligence data in order to support the drone managers.
And so they were expecting a big drone war, and in fact what was happening was that this whole enterprise was struggling.
And so what happens is that the leadership of the CIA under General Michael Hayden, the former head of the National Security Agency, who took over from the floundering former Florida congressman who was head of the CIA in 2004-2006, he actually decided, made a decision, to lobby the White House very hard to remove all of the restrictions on the drone strikes so that they could plausibly make an argument that they could ramp up the number of drone strikes very rapidly.
Well, in January 2008, we know from David Fang of the New York Times in his book The Inheritance that George W. Bush did in fact begin to remove some of the constraints, but most of them remained, and he's quite cagey about exactly what constraints were removed.
Apparently he wasn't told precisely what was changed, but for the most part, the constraints remained in place, and in fact in the first half of 2008, the CIA only carried out four drone strikes.
In Afghanistan?
No, this is all in Pakistan.
Oh, all in Pakistan.
Four in Pakistan, whereas the previous four years there were three per year on average.
Well, the way I remember though, I thought that in September, October 2008, that George Bush had been ramping up the Pakistan strikes right then, because it was such a funny anecdote that John McCain, Barack Obama, and Tom Brokaw all sat there pretending that he wasn't doing it when they were debating whether Obama would bomb Pakistan all day or not if he was the president.
They all sat there just pretending George Bush isn't doing it, it's not in the front pages of at least the foreign papers right now.
You're absolutely right, he did in fact do that in mid-2008, Bush made a major decision to basically remove the raps from the CIA drone strike program, and essentially gave them a free hand from everything we know now.
Oh, I'm sorry, so the few that you were saying, you were saying before that?
That was the first half of 2008, yeah.
I understand, I screwed up the chronology.
Alright, well hold tight right there Gareth, everyone, it's Gareth Porter, we're going to go out and take this break, and I still got a hundred questions, about a hundred things to ask, and we'll see what we can do.
It's Antiwar Radio, look up IPSNews.net and Antiwar.com/Porter.
Alright y'all, welcome back, it's Antiwar Radio, I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Gareth Porter from Interpress Service, IPSNews.net and Antiwar.com/Porter.
We're talking about how Michael Hayden, George Bush, Leon Panetta, these guys have vastly escalated the drone strike program in Pakistan, they've done this for so long now that they've changed the entire order of the CIA, where they're now this industrial scale killing machine in their own words, and they're tearing Pakistan apart, which probably won't be a problem, right Gareth?
No, this is a huge problem for us, we've got to be thinking much more about this as I know you have, I remember you talking about this more than once, and so have I, that this is a fundamental issue in US policy, that we must have a change, a very sharp change in US policy, and in fact it was suggested by none other than the former Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, Admiral Dennis Blair, that the United States should give up its control, its sort of singular control over drone strikes, and allow the Pakistani government to say no when they know that a drone strike is really a stupid thing to do.
So that's at least a beginning of a change in policy, which the United States so far has resisted, in fact is resisting as of this moment, as we know, so yeah, this is an issue underlying the discussion we're having today, which I think we need to come back to again and again.
But let me just, just to remind people, I mean, this situation that we now see of an escalation of the drone strikes is a result of a series of events that begin with Hayden, as we just talked about in the previous segment, lobbying Bush only partly successfully to remove all of the restraints that had been installed and established by the Bush administration on these drone strikes.
And by the way, apparently the reason for these being established in the first place, the restraints on the drone strikes, is that they were so worried that if they did something to destabilize Pakistan because of anger at these drone strikes, that the result would be that their favorite boy, Musharraf, would be thrown out of power.
Now of course, what was happening in the second half of 2008 was that Musharraf was already on his way out, and furthermore, the Director of National Intelligence at that point, Mike McConnell, had gotten it into his head after a trip to Pakistan that the Pakistani intelligence agency was in fact playing a double game and was supporting America's enemies in Afghanistan, that is, the Afghan Taliban and their allies in Pakistan.
And so he had a bee in his bonnet about that, came back and issued a report that went to everybody in the national security team of the Bush administration, of course the White House as well, and put George W. Bush in a position where he knew that if he didn't do something more dramatic to show that he was tough on the Pakistanis as well as on the Afghan Taliban inside Pakistan, that he could be accused of being soft on terrorism.
So that's when he decided to respond finally to the pressure from the CIA to go ahead and ramp up the strikes by the drones in Pakistan.
And immediately after that decision was made in mid-2008, the pace went up to four or five a month for the rest of the year.
Well, but isn't anyone, I understand there's a lot of targeting of families to be done for these drones, but isn't someone at the CIA asking, hey, maybe possibly this could be as bad for Zardari and the parliament of the country, for our friends in the military of Pakistan, as it was for Musharraf, helping to lead to his downfall?
Could this possibly lead to the disillusion of this country?
How long can we bomb it?
The opinion polls have shown, the New York Times version of the opinion polls, is that the people of Pakistan now hate the Americans' guts over this.
How long can this go on?
Is the CIA, pardon me, my real question started out to be, before I went babbling on and on, my real question was, isn't anyone at the CIA asking whether they're making a big mistake with this policy?
And the answer is clearly yes.
There are plenty of analysts at the CIA who understand that this is a big mistake.
You know, you remember I did a story a couple of years ago about CIA people involved in the drone strike program themselves, who questioned the wisdom of this, in fact said this is counterproductive, leading to more and more jihadism in Pakistan in response to killing civilians and so forth.
So we know for sure that there are plenty of analysts in the CIA who understand that this is a disastrous policy.
But what is important to understand here is that the nature of the game at the CIA is that the analytical side of the agency is allowed to make analysis of sort of the general situation, and within that analysis they can talk about anti-Americanism and so forth, but they are not allowed to comment explicitly on the policy.
That is a standing rule which is clearly a problem for the analytical side of the agency because they are essentially prevented from being critical of any program that the agency itself is carrying out.
And that's really a fundamental problem.
The best they could do is put it between the lines of some reporter.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And that's I'm sure what has been happening.
Well, and I guess this is just the economics of bureaucracy too, right?
Some senator, I'm thinking, I don't know, Chuck Schumer or somebody like that says, yeah, yeah, I really like the drone strike program a lot, guys.
And they go, hey, the politics say we can expand our drone strike program.
So they open up a new drone strike training program and whatever, whatever, they start bringing more and more people in.
Now they got to hire more and more middle managers.
Now there's this whole new drone strike agency of the American government that's not going to go anywhere.
It's like every other government department that's ever been created.
Exactly.
This is, I think, one of the clearest examples that we've ever had a chance to discuss on your program of exactly how the internal logic of the permanent war state operates.
You begin with the idea, oh, we have an opportunity here for more money, more personnel, more power.
And they plan for it, in this case, in 2005 by creating this career track.
And then if things aren't going in the right direction in terms of the success of the program, they simply have to lobby to override that, to get around it, which is exactly what happened in the case of the drone strikes.
All right.
Well, now, I don't know, man.
There's a couple of different things I wanted to ask you about.
There's one question I have here about Libya, and it's based on something I don't know if you know.
Did you read Justin Raimondo this morning by any chance?
I have not.
I've not read.
Islamist neocons?
Nope.
Well, in a nutshell, he's saying America's backing these former, quote unquote, jihadists in Libya who promised to reform and be nice and whatever, and he's making the parallel with the CIA backing anti-Soviet leftists, especially in Europe, but here in America, we know them now as the neoconservatives, Irving Kristol and his friends, saying that this is America's divide and conquer strategy now is try to recruit as many jihadists as we can and just make them...
They're still jihadists, but at least they're pro-Western to try to divide and conquer and whatever.
And this will just lead, of course, to more battlefields for more drone strikes and that kind of thing.
What do you think of that?
Well, I think that there's no question that they're jihadists who have been right at the forefront of the anti-Qaddafi effort in Libya, and the United States, U.S. intelligence has known that from the beginning.
It's been a matter of public record that they were concerned about jihadists who were in the forefront of the resistance to Qaddafi's forces.
And I think that the evidence suggests that both the military and the intelligence agencies were quite skeptical about this whole policy from the beginning, in large part because of this, that they knew that in the process, the U.S. was going to end up supporting people who had been in line with al-Qaida, who had been affiliated with al-Qaida, and who could turn back in that direction again.
So I think there's absolutely a very good reason to believe that the U.S. has gotten itself into another position, which is very similar to so many other historical cases of blowback of a policy of supporting a war, which ends up coming back to bite the United States.
In this case, the interesting point is that there was quite explicit warning from the intelligence analysts about this, and it's been on the record.
Yeah.
Well, I said before the first bomb fell on this show that, hey, look, guys, as soon as we win this war, we're going to have to occupy the place one way or another in order to prevent the people that we help win from winning.
This is as obvious as anything.
I think it goes back to the absolute absence of any strategic thought whatsoever behind this war.
Maybe it's about oil.
I don't know.
I don't know if that's the case.
It's about expanding that drone strike department they've created in the CIA.
Somebody's drone strike department is at stake.
All right.
Well, we have to leave it there.
Thank you very much, Gareth.
You're the best, man.
Thank you.
All right, everybody.
That's the great Gareth Porter, IPSnews.net, Interpret Service, also Antiwar.com/Porter.
