All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Our next guest is Noreen Shah.
She is associate director of the counter-terrorism and human rights project and lecturer in law, human rights clinic of Columbia university.
She develops research and advocacy on human rights and counter-terrorism policy, including transfer of detainees, safeguards against torture and lethal targeting with drone technology.
And, uh, that's the piece here at the Guardian drone attacks and the Brennan doctrine.
Finally, the Obama administration admits us drone strikes killed civilians.
Yet the man we trusted say so on who is a terrorist.
Welcome to the show.
Noreen, how are you doing?
Great.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
Um, wow.
So, uh, they had denied all along, right?
John Brennan had laughably said no civilians have ever died in an American drone strike about what?
A year ago or something like that.
He's finally admitted.
That's not the case.
He has in the speech and, uh, he actually did the day before on a Sunday talk show.
He's admitting that civilian casualties are happening, but he's saying that they're exceedingly rare.
And a lot of folks would disagree with that.
Well, yeah, I mean, I guess it depends on, on how you count it now.
Was there a specific reason other than just, you know, PR that he told that outrageous lie a year ago?
Was he, there was some letter of a law that he was trying to hide within.
Um, I would, uh, I would guess, or I would, I would kind of concede that he really probably thought according to him, there really were no civilian casualties.
He's getting his figures from the CIA.
Now what the CIA is telling him, you know, we don't really know what, what that is, and the CIA is also informing Congress regularly about drone strikes and they're kind of getting a, a closed loop of information.
They get the information from the CIA.
They're not really paying attention to reports by journalists and lawyers saying, no, there actually are quite a lot of civilian casualties.
So I would say it's a problem of information that they're getting.
Well, that, that may be somewhat true.
I mean, I think the average reader of antiwar.com oftentimes has a lot better grip on what's going on in the world than the people who are actually making the policy who we oftentimes imagine are just so well briefed that they know exactly what they're doing when they do these horrible things, but oftentimes really, no, they're just a bunch of nimcompoops.
Well, I, I do think that John Brennan is probably pretty well informed on what's happening on the ground, but you know, there, what I point out in the op-ed is that the reason why there might be different assessments of how many people are being killed is because they might have different definitions of who's a terrorist and who can be killed.
So a lot of the individuals that a journalist or a lawyer who works in Pakistan might say, you know, those people are civilians.
Those people shouldn't have been killed.
John Brennan might, under his definition of what a terrorist is and of who's targeted, who's targetable, he might think that person is a terrorist.
So it's not just about a difference in the facts and being informed.
It's about a different difference in, in legal definitions.
Yeah.
Well, and of course they're trying to protect themselves too.
If somebody died in something, that's a terrorist.
If somebody who got shot with a hellfire missile, otherwise they killed an innocent person.
They don't want to kill innocent people.
I'm not sure what might happen to them.
I guess nothing, but at least it looks bad in the newspaper if they kill innocent people.
Yeah, it does look very bad.
And that's why I think for so long, the U.S. government has been maintaining that there aren't any civilian casualties and that the people we're going after in Pakistan are, are high level militants or high value targets, as opposed to saying or admitting that there are individuals who are often kind of foot soldiers who are easily replaced.
They're also, even if they are militants, if they're, they're you know, they're brothers and fathers and sons and killing these individuals creates a lot of antagonism against the United States.
And of course it also destroys the livelihood of a lot of people in those countries.
So it's really not a matter of legality, right?
When he came out and he gave this speech, he said, yes, we do kill civilians.
He says it's exceedingly rare, but it has happened.
He then says, I forgot the exact quote, but sometimes you have to do this, you know, in order to save more lives, right?
So it's not that a year ago, he, you know, really needed to pretend that no civilians were dying.
No, he didn't.
He didn't.
I mean, if the, you know, there's a lot of different legal questions.
One is whether the U.S. even has authority to be waging a war in Pakistan and there's Pakistan state sovereignty kinds of questions, but setting all that aside, the U.S. if it was lawfully in engaged in an armed conflict, under the laws of war, the U.S. can kill a certain amount of civilians when, when targeting a legitimate military target, and that's what, what's referred to as collateral harm or collateral damage.
That's lawful under international law that to some extent has to be proportional, has to be a matter of military necessity.
And we don't really have enough facts to know whether or not what's happening would comply with those particular principles of international humanitarian law.
But regardless of that, there's a real civilian, a cost of civilian life.
There's, there's a moral reasons not to engage in this kind of targeting in other countries.
Well, and you know, part of the riddle of the whole thing too, is that, you know, on the war party side, they say that, you know, the basic Geneva style laws of war don't apply.
We can't just, we don't just abduct these people and hold them as prisoners of war as we would if they were soldiers in an official state army, so we can do all these other things to them, like hold them for the rest of their lives, whether without trial at Guantanamo Bay or who knows where else, that kind of thing.
But at the same time, it means that we're really fighting.
I mean, we're fighting for the rights of civilians, and we're fighting for But at the same time, it means that we're really fighting.
I mean, we're fighting just a guerrilla force that is not a state army.
By definition, really, even the Taliban are civilians.
That's who they are.
I mean, they're not a government anymore.
So what the hell are they?
Except a bunch of civilians who happen to have rifles, which makes them just civilians with rifles.
And yet from the other end of the drone scope in Nevada, a fighting age male with a rifle, that's an insurgent.
That somehow is an unlawful combatant that it's okay to kill.
And they don't need any more information than that, right?
And that's a legitimate target.
The guy's armed.
Well, actually, I mean, a lot of the people who live in these areas, even if they weren't part of a kind of militant group or, you know, people carry guns, and that's just a different...
There's cultural things that are at play here that a person in Nevada might not be very familiar with.
For instance, there was an incident last year where some children were out digging at nighttime.
And they were digging actually to irrigate a field, but the way it looked from the drone was that they were digging to plant IEDs.
Why else would children be out there at midnight?
And so those kids were killed.
But if you had a greater cultural familiarity with, you know, just practices, and this was actually in Afghanistan where we've been for 10 years, so you'd think that that would exist.
If these operators had had that cultural familiarity, they wouldn't have aimed at those children.
And it's a real tragedy.
These sorts of things happen when we are operating in countries that we just don't know enough about.
And of course, civilians die in conflict all the time because of these mistakes.
Well, and apparently from time to time, when they'll speak frankly on the subject, they'll say, you know, our intelligence here is just horrible.
Most of the time when we're targeting somebody, it's just because somebody pointed their finger at them.
But a lot of times it's just local grievances or whatever.
That guy brought me back my wheelbarrow with a dent in it.
And so, you know, American would call 911 on his neighbor over something like that.
A pack, an Afghan, he might call in a drone strike on somebody over, you know.
Well, I think that raises an important issue with drone technology.
We're often relying not only on aerial surveillance that we get from operating drones, but we're also relying on people we pay to act as informants in these countries.
So, you know, with limited cooperation from the Pakistani government, especially it's the CIA and special operations forces from the U.S. government that are going out and paying people to act as informants.
So that when we're hovering overhead, we're the drone operators are not usually just relying on what they see.
They're also relying on what they'd call human intelligence, people on the ground.
But those people on the ground are paid informants, you know, and their motivations and their interests will definitely influence who, you know, who they're identifying as a militant.
And then that really adulterates the quality of intelligence that we have overall informing our drone strikes.
All right.
Well, there's a lot more to talk about here.
The legalities of the drone war in Afghanistan, Pakistan and on into the rest of the Middle East and Africa and on down.
We'll be talking more about this with Noreen Shah from Columbia University and author of this piece in The Guardian Drone Attacks in the Brennan Doctrine.
We'll be right back.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Noreen Shah from Columbia University, and she's got this piece in The Guardian Drone Attacks and the Brennan Doctrine.
And a lot to talk about here.
Noreen, I guess one of the things about the war and you mentioned this, it's not altogether clear whether it's legal for there to be a drone war of any description, I guess, a CIA or a JSOC drone war inside Pakistan.
We sort of, kind of, but not officially, I don't think, have the permission of the Pakistani government to bomb inside their country.
We certainly don't have authorization from the U.S.
Congress.
Does this just fall under, well, the CIA is allowed to break the law and do covert action.
And so this is just one of those or what?
Well, there's two questions you raised there.
One is under U.S. law, do we have the authority to be conducting these strikes in Pakistan and against the people who we're allegedly targeting there?
And then there's the other question of under international law, what about Pakistan's sovereignty?
So the first question about U.S. authority, there's a law passed soon after September 11th called the Authorization for the Use of Military Force.
And that's a statute that provides authority to use force against the planners of 9-11.
And it's been interpreted by this administration and by the Bush administration as authorizing use of force and detention of a wide range of individuals.
And the speech by John Brennan on Monday, he named threats, not just people in Afghanistan who are associated with the Taliban, not just people in Pakistan even who are associated with what he would call a core of Al-Qaeda, but a lot of other groups, what he calls affiliates.
And those are affiliates in West Africa.
They're possibly affiliates in Nigeria.
They're in Somalia.
And, you know, the Bush administration called it a worldwide war on terror without kind of geographic boundaries.
And this administration has really tried to distance itself from that and really thrown out the term war on terror.
And instead, they say it's a war against Al-Qaeda and its affiliates.
But the problem is, you know, how many of those affiliates are now going to become part of this war that was really supposed to be about the September 11th attackers?
That's what Congress authorized.
But but it's definitely extended beyond that now.
Yeah.
Isn't that interesting?
They tried to change it.
Well, it's an overseas contingency operation.
It's a kinetic use of kinetic energy and stuff, whatever they call it, in order to not call it the war on terrorism.
But then they turn right around and they define Al-Qaeda so broadly that it means pretty much anything that they want.
And it's funny, too, because, you know, I guess Bush claimed that the commander in chief clause meant that he had all this inherent authority that nobody could actually point to any words written in the Constitution about it.
But he was pretty sure he could override any law or do anything that he wanted to anyone that he wanted.
And then Obama said, no, that's really not right.
But I can do anything that I want and to anyone that I want because of the authorization to use military force.
So he has an even broader interpretation of the AUMF than Bush, because Bush thought he needed to make up this whole new thing about all his Article 2 powers, you know?
Yeah, in a sense, the difference between the Bush and Obama administrations is that while the Bush administration kind of openly flouted at least international law, the Obama administration really takes a lot of pains to talk about how it's complying with international law and doing things by the book.
And he talks a lot about the respect for the rule of law.
But the problem, I think, is that oftentimes the way they're saying that the law authorizes what they're doing is a way to sanitize what's happening.
And it's a way to to kind of provide this veneer of legitimacy that if you start to really look a little more closely at the legal definitions and standards that they're providing, doesn't really hold up.
Hmm.
Well, and the thing is, too, is from time to time, they'll admit that they know this is all self-defeating and that they're really creating al-Qaeda wherever they take their terror workers.
Like, for example, that piece in The Washington Post under Obama, an emerging global apparatus for drone killing in there.
They admit that they're worried that if they keep bombing, this is the Obama team that's doing the bombing.
They admit that they fear that if they keep bombing al-Shabaab in Somalia, that it could turn from a regional militia with a local grievance into an organization that would attempt to strike the United States and kill American civilians.
That's right.
And the other specter is of the CIA becoming the most notorious arm of the U.S. around the world and it clearly being an agency set up to avoid public scrutiny and avoid and circumvent the law.
And and if that is what people know the United States for, that could be very detrimental to U.S. reputation everywhere.
Well, you know, yeah, I think that's really true.
And it seems to me and I don't know why people don't pick up on this more, really.
It's just bad sportsmanship.
I mean, already you got guys and fighter bombers dropping bombs from way in the sky on people who don't even have so much as a shoulder fired anti-aircraft piece.
Right.
But now you got them flying with the entire diameter of the earth as their shield, as they send the air conditioned trailer in Nevada, killing people like it's a video game.
And even if they were able to shoot high enough to shoot down the plane bombing them, there's not even a pilot in there.
It's just not fair.
Well, I don't imagine that having a fair fight is ever the purpose of most military technologies.
I mean, if you if you start from going from hand to hand combat and then having, you know, bow and arrow, this is a trend in the way military technology developed.
You're right.
They ended up with the H-bomb.
You're right.
The special problem with drone technology is that if we're increasingly fighting wars that are basically by remote control, that we never have a ground troop presence.
In some ways, you know, that's good.
And that having a ground troop presence in another country is a kind of occupation.
But in another way, at least when you have a ground troop presence, there's some responsibility and responsiveness to the local population.
So if we don't have ground troops in Pakistan and we're killing people and people are claiming, hey, you killed my family member, you killed my son, my child, and we don't have U.S. troops there to go and investigate what happened and we don't have U.S. troops there to go and meet with the local officials and talk about what happened and provide compensation and make amends for what's happened, then we're really not fulfilling our ethical responsibilities to those people who we've seriously harmed.
And that's, I think, the problem with drone technology displacing any other kind of warfare.
We'll just be waging these wars, not just from the sky, but by remote control from Nevada.
Yeah, it just makes it so easy.
You could just keep pumping out these Predator and Reaper drones forever.
They're like the battle droids of Star Wars, too.
You just keep churning them out.
You could have them flying in the sky over every city in the world in 25 years, you know?
They do make war a lot less costly in the public imagination, a lot less politically costly.
And I think that a lot of ethicists have pointed that out.
The other aspect of drone technology is that, as you mentioned, they're just less, you know, they don't cost all that much money.
And it's easy for us to, you know, say we're withdrawing from Afghanistan.
Obama, President Obama can say that we've ended the war in Iraq and say now we're pursuing this easier war, this cleaner war, a surgically precise war, a cheaper war.
But of course, there's still true costs for the people who live in those countries and and those costs in terms of civilian harm.
And also the cost for our country is the kind of country that's engaging in lots of wars, you know, not just in Afghanistan now, but in all these other countries.
And the list just keeps going of what those countries are.
I mean, you're going from axis of evil, a couple of countries named by President Bush to actually a much longer list of possible targets in the Brennan speech that happened on Monday.
Well, yeah.
And, you know, General Ham from AFRICOM just gave a talk, I think, last week where he said that or at least he told a reporter that, yeah, you know, there's loose weapons from Libya now that are getting out all over the place.
And that is creating a lot of instability.
We might have to begin intervening over there now.
And I mean, they can really just make themselves sick and write their own prescription and keep on going.
Here they are talking about Nigeria, this group of bark eaters from the jungle, a bunch of illiterate crazies.
You know, knowledge is a sin is their slogan.
And, you know, in other words, they're nowhere men.
They're not getting anywhere anyway.
But now, you know what?
We need to figure out how to link them through our Al-Qaeda allies in Libya and our Al-Qaeda enemies in Somalia to bin Laden's corpse somewhere and start bombing them.
Now, West Africa, they want to spread this thing.
Yeah, I think that their point, you know, the one of the points that John Brennan made on Monday is that drones have been so successful that Al-Qaeda's core has been decimated and there's few capable leaders.
But then to kind of counterbalance that, he said, but there's all of these other kinds of emerging threats across the world.
And I think the problem is that we as the public and we as concerned people in the human rights community, lawyers, journalists, it's very hard for us to go into conversations like, you know, meetings with these government officials and say that we have better facts than they do because they can always say, well, we know we have intelligence sources.
We know exactly what's going on and you, the public, just don't know nearly enough.
And that's the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, you know, that there's so much secrecy about the program and about the intelligence that we, the public, can never really powerfully or effectively intervene in these conversations because we'll just be told that we don't know what's going on.
Right.
Well, it's just like I'm sorry, I forget who I'm cribbing from here.
I read something along these lines where they talked about Jose Rodriguez.
The former director of covert operations at the CIA who was running the torture program and who says, hey, look, we got what I determined to be very valuable intelligence and this and that.
But he, in Robert Gates's words, is talking about someone else is looking at the war through a soda straw.
He doesn't have as much vision as you and I can even have just sitting and flipping through the news articles and seeing how does this look all across the rest of the world?
How many more terrorists have been created by our CIA torture program and how much more harm has come from that than could have possibly been stopped by a couple of good leads, which we know is mostly bogus anyway.
You know, most of what they did was torture a bunch of lies about Saddam Hussein out of those people.
Yeah, no, I mean, I think that the link between torture and killings as tactics in this war is very important to make.
One of the things that John Brennan said on Monday was that we have a preference for capturing people instead of killing them, that when we can, we'll capture these high level leaders because we want to interrogate them for intelligence purposes.
But the question is, you know, if if we're operating in countries where we don't really have a presence, like an overt presence of U.S. troops, then who is capturing these individuals?
We know that President Obama issued an executive order to shut down black sites and these secret detention centers.
But when when you listen to these speeches and there's a kind of locating of a terrorist threat all over the world and you have to ask, well, if they are trying to capture these individuals, then who is capturing them?
It's not U.S. military.
It's the CIA or it's the Joint Special Operations Command or its partner governments that have lower standards for human rights and for humane treatment.
Right.
One very important indication of that is Jeremy Scahill's work in The Nation about the CIA's secret sites in Somalia.
That's what it's called.
And it's the CIA and the JSOC have a dungeon beneath Mogadishu for just this.
Right, and it's frightening and it's also very hard to reconcile with this administration's, you know, very, very often touted commitment to having people held in open facilities or facilities where, you know, they're registered and the International Committee of the Red Cross is visiting and monitoring what's happening.
So as a lawyer who's worked a lot on detention and torture as well as targeting, I'm very perplexed and confused when I see a report like Jeremy Scahill's and then stack it up next to everything that the Obama administration has said it's committed to doing.
Yeah.
Well, who knows?
We there's so much secrecy surrounding this entire thing.
There very well may be an entire network of black sites that still exist somewhere, maybe under JSOC control instead of CIA control this time or something.
That's not too far fetched, is it?
You know, I really don't know.
It's something that a lot of people are starting to ask questions about.
There's a kind of term renditions 2.0 where we're asking, OK, well, maybe the U.S. government is kind of working around the legal requirements.
Maybe they're having foreign governments do the apprehending and do the detaining and they just feed the intelligence to them and feed the questions.
It's a kind of version of outsourcing of torture.
That's possible.
We don't really have enough evidence yet to know for sure.
Right.
All right.
Well, we're already over time.
Thank you very much for your time.
I really appreciate it, Noreen.
Thanks for having me.
Everybody, that's Noreen Shaw.
She's got this very important piece in the Guardian drone attacks and the Brennan Doctrine.
She is associate director of the Counterterrorism and Human Rights Project and lecturing law, the Human Rights Clinic of Columbia University.
We'll be right back after this.
