All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Of course, we're streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and also at AntiWar.com slash radio.
And I'm happy to welcome Noah Schockman to the show.
He writes the Danger Room blog at Wired.com, and he's also got his own website, NoahSchockman.com.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Hey, man.
I appreciate you joining us today.
Yeah, no problem.
All right, so the biggest story, obviously, is the attempted terrorist attack in Times Square the other night, and you have an article here on your blog at Wired.com slash Danger Room.
Any spy plane may have snooped on bomber.
So could you please tell us about what you know about that, and then what might be the controversy there?
Well, I think the question is, you know, how did the feds find this guy Faisal Shahzad?
Because he apparently was using an anonymous cell phone, like one of those prepaid cell phones.
So there's been a number of theories bandied about, one of which was the military may have been using one of the spy planes that it typically uses in a place like Afghanistan over New York to listen in on his communications and track him that way.
It's only one in a host of theories, though, I should add, and so I don't think there's anything definitive at this point.
I see Jeremy Scahill was the first one who came out with this, right, based on an anonymous source.
Yeah, that's right.
There's also the New York Times reported yesterday that Shahzad, who really has turned out to be one of the lamer terrorists ever to try and attack New York here, actually gave the Customs and Border Patrol one of his phone numbers when he was coming back into the country from Pakistan, and then they were able to track that back to this anonymous cell phone.
So that could be true.
The other one could be true.
It could be both.
Well, the controversy would be, right, is if it is, in fact, the case, as Scahill's source is saying, the question is whether this is legal or not to use the army.
Yeah, that's a good question, right, because there's posse comitatus, which is the rule that basically the U.S. military can't act here on our shores.
It's for fighting people abroad.
There's been all kinds of, oh, let's call it massaging of that law since 9-11, and this may be another case of that.
Yeah, well, in fact, there's kind of been loopholes in that law all along, mostly because of the drug war and stuff, but it seems like they are making more and more of them.
But now, you know, it's funny, because I guess I would imagine that in Congress, if not, you know, in the unitary executive theory somewhere or something, that they would make a loophole for this.
We're talking about, you know, electronic surveillance on a case where somewhere along the line, you know, the judicial branch must have said, yeah, sure, go get this kid, tap his phone, do whatever you want, you got probable cause, like crazy here.
So I mean, the National Security Agency, for example, they're allowed to tap phones in the United States, you know, do electronic surveillance, as long as they have permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, right?
And so in other words, you know, this sort of what's supposed to be a somewhat ironclad wall is really a little bit more like Swiss cheese.
Yeah, I guess.
Yeah, my point is, I'm surprised this is even a controversy at this point, you know, I don't know if it's controversy, but I think just there's just a bunch of us trying to figure out what actually went down.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, listen, the real reason I wanted to talk with you was from a few posts that you've done over the last couple of weeks here about the global strike option.
And this is such an important story.
And you know, I hope it's easy to get across to people to just how important it is.
But can you talk to me a little bit about the plans for putting conventional explosives on three stage intercontinental ballistic missiles?
What's the purpose of that?
And what's the danger of that?
No.
Yeah.
I mean, we've had this crazy idea kind of floating around the Pentagon for a while now that the U.S. should have the ability to attack any target in the world, any target in the world, any place in under an hour.
Now, how do you do that?
That's pretty hard.
And one of the things they've come up with is, well, we'll take ICBMs, intercontinental ballistic missiles, the same things that we would, you know, start a thermonuclear war with and instead of putting a nuke warhead on it, we'll use a conventional warhead.
And then, you know, if by chance, you know, one of our agents happens to have Osama in his sights, we can fire off this ballistic missile and take him out that way.
The small problem with that is that that conventional ballistic missile looks an awful lot like the nuclear ballistic missile and could, it could inadvertently start World War Three very easily.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the thing.
Very easily.
I mean, that's not, this isn't a joke here.
We're talking about a situation where, as far as we know anyway, there have been approximately 20 almost nuclear wars based on bad information.
Flock of birds coming over the pole or a Norwegian satellite being launched and the chain of information in Russia breaks down and they don't get the warning that, don't worry, it's just a Norwegian satellite.
They think they're about to get, you know, be the victims of a first strike.
And everybody puts their nukes on high alert.
This happened almost 20 times or approximately 20 times.
We've almost had accidental nuclear war on this planet just in the last, you know, half a century.
And now we're talking about deliberately putting three stage rockets into play on a regular basis and we're just supposed to, I guess, believe that the Russians and the Chinese will sit on their hands and always assume it's not a nuke and it's not headed for them and that they can just, you know, chill out and wait.
Yeah, it's pretty crazy.
And the thing is, look, I'm a native New Yorker.
I grew up in downtown Manhattan.
I lived most of my life in downtown Manhattan.
You know, I want Osama bin Laden caught or dead just as much as anybody.
OK, but I'm not willing to even have a point one percent chance of risking a nuclear war to get it done.
Right.
I mean, there's no there's no amount of risk of a nuclear war that I would accept in order to catch Osama.
It's just it's a crazy trade off.
So there's got to be another way to do it.
Yeah.
Well, it's amazing to me.
I mean, you know, how big is the meeting room?
How big is the table where they sit around and talk and talk about these things?
And is there not a Noah Shockman equivalent saying, hey, man, but what if you were the Politburo in Beijing and you saw a three stage missile being launched?
What might you panic and think?
Yeah.
No, there there are.
The table is actually pretty big.
And this was actually the subject of some really vigorous discussion within the Pentagon.
And there's a lot of guys in the Pentagon that think this idea is totally, totally loopy.
And so my guess is that there's going to be slow rolled by those people and that, you know, hopefully you're just not going to see anything out of this for a long time.
Well, now, what about all this first strike capability from space?
They've launched this new kind of remote controlled miniature space shuttle that they say they can leave up there for I don't know how long.
And presumably its purpose is also to be able to kill anybody on anywhere on the face of the earth.
So.
Right.
Yeah.
I don't know if that's necessarily so.
No.
Look, the space shuttle is going to be retired.
Right.
Mm hmm.
So the Pentagon would find it very useful to have sort of a mini space shuttle that it could use to take stuff up into space.
There's all kinds of things you could take up into space, not necessarily bombs.
Sure.
The satellite isn't working.
It'd be very useful to have something, you know, to take repair equipment up into space.
Well, they already do that with regular rockets all the time anyway.
Right.
True.
But reusable has its advantages.
Right.
Mm hmm.
So I don't necessarily think that this particular space vehicle is necessarily part of the same family.
That said, some of the same concepts, ideas, tactics could be used for a for a weapon.
So it's not totally unrelated either.
Well, and I think that's kind of the thing, right?
There's a lot of secrecy about this.
They won't tell us how much it costs or exactly what it's for.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
And so that opens up a lot of suspicion.
You know, and a lot of times it's funny with these classified programs, the truth is sometimes a lot scarier than the conspiracy theory.
But for some reason, they're not willing to just come out and say what's actually going on.
Yeah.
OK.
So what about this glider thing?
There was some I'm sorry, because this is such a non educated question.
I saw a few headlines.
I didn't even get a chance to read about it.
There was some space glider thing and then it crashed and didn't work or something.
Yeah.
Right.
OK.
I mean, it's a crazy there's a crazy array of programs.
So what you're talking about is this is not the space plane.
This is not the missiles with the conventional warheads is a third program that's called the hypersonic test vehicle.
And the idea of it was you take a rocket, shoot into space and then out would come this glider that would glide back down to Earth three thousand miles later.
And the idea with it is very much part of this global strike program that, you know, it's a way to get something very quickly around the world and shooting back down to hit a target.
It was the first test of this program and it failed.
It went up for nine minutes and then the Pentagon lost track of it and don't know what happened to it.
Presumably it crashed into the Pacific about a week and a half ago.
So it's a way to try to do this conventional strike stuff a little more safely than with the conventional missiles.
But so far, at least in this first flight test, it hasn't worked out either.
Well, and, you know, as long as the government can just print money, why not just put a predator drone flying circles over every bit of square acreage on Earth?
Then you don't need to weaponize space.
How many of these things?
How many Reapers can they crank out a week?
Plenty, right?
Yeah.
I mean, not enough to put anywhere.
But but look, the point is well taken, which is this whole idea of trying to strike anywhere on Earth is kind of crazy because it presupposes that we've got a super important target right in our sights.
Right.
You know, we know exactly where Osama bin Laden is, but yet somehow there's no gun.
There's no plane.
There's no drone.
There's no aircraft carrier.
There's nothing else around there that can hit this guy.
I mean, it seems like a completely implausible situation, you know, like something that James Bond's writers would have to reject as being too loony.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, I'm just guessing.
But you've got to be some kind of expert, at least from the journalistic point of view on missile defense systems and the amount of money that goes into that and how workable these things are.
I saw a thing last week.
Well, now, a few weeks ago, it was this weird Chinese cartoon and I couldn't understand what they were saying.
It was a cartoon about, hey, look, we have these ballistic missiles that mean that we can take out any aircraft carrier in the world.
They might be able to shoot down a sea skimming missile coming at them from the side.
But they're completely helpless for a ballistic missile was basically the point of the cartoon.
But I thought that the Aegean radar and the surface to air missiles that the Navy has nowadays and whatever are supposed to be able to shoot down any incoming ballistic missile.
Right.
Which is it?
What's going on?
Well, the answer is right now that the Aegis radar that the U.S. is using to shoot down ballistic missiles is, you know, would be very helpful if Iran or North Korea decide to fire one off, right?
It would be very helpful in those situations.
However, the Chinese are developing stuff that is more advanced and and there's a real big fear that what the U.S. has got right now could protect our, you know, 10 billion dollar a piece aircraft carriers.
Is that because the Chinese would have multiple warheads per rocket, that kind of thing?
To be honest, I don't know.
I can't recall technically what the the issue is.
I believe it's both speed and angle of attack that make it very difficult.
But I can get back to it.
OK, well, that's it's very interesting topic to me, I guess.
My understanding from reading the war nerd over there at the Exiled Online is that it's just all about which direction it's coming from, whether it's falling on top of your head or whether it's coming at you from the side and that if it's a ballistic missile falling on your head, that basically the Navy is unable to do anything, anything to defend itself from that kind of attack.
You know, there's definitely a lot of concern in Navy circles about it, both about this missile in particular and about, you know, what the relative balance of power is between the U.S. and China.
There are some folks in the military that really kind of want to do Cold War two with China taking the place of the Soviet Union.
And then there's a lot of guys in the military, including the defense secretary, actually, who think that that's just like a crazy game that we don't want to play and that we've got to worry about stuff like, you know, Afghanistan and, you know, not try to get into a pissing match with China.
Well, that is one of the interesting stories over the last few years to me is the fight between, I guess, from from my quite uneducated point of view on the details.
It seems like it's basically just Gates versus the Air Force.
And he's telling them, look, get it together.
We don't need F-22s for, you know, some imaginary dogfight with the Chinese.
What we need is F-35s so that we can bomb civilians on the ground in their own country.
Get with the program here.
No comment.
All right.
Well, now, my nuclear weapons expert friend, Dr. Gordon Prather, who built and tested nuclear weapons, you know, for his career, was in the Navy, worked at Lawrence Livermore in Sandia, was the chief scientist of the Army and advisor to Senator Bellman and and others.
He tells me that, look, if you want missile defense, you want to be able to shoot down an incoming atomic bomb.
What you do is you shoot atomic bombs, giant, high megatonnage, enhanced radiation, thermonuclear hydrogen bombs, and you set them off in space right about where you think the incoming ICBMs are.
And you try to knock them out that way.
That's the only way, really, to try to defend yourself from a nuclear attack.
And what these idiots are doing instead is they're putting heat seeking missiles on a cold target coming in from space that's falling ballistically.
That's why I call it a ballistic missile.
It ain't got a rocket on it anymore.
It's falling now on its parabola or whatever.
And they're putting a heat seeking missile on it.
Without a nuclear warhead, that's just supposed to hit it or shoot some little cone of shrapnel in front of it or something that has to be really close.
Yeah.
I mean, OK, I don't know of any plans.
I mean, maybe they exist, but I don't know of any plans that talk about trying to shoot a nuke with a nuke.
I just I've never even heard of that.
I do know that, you know, the idea of trying to, you know, hit an incoming ballistic missile is hard.
You know, it's definitely hard.
And the tests have been somewhat successful and somewhat not.
And it's in a pretty scripted scenario where, you know, they kind of know when it's going to happen.
So it is no joke hard.
That is definitely true.
If you do it at the later in the game, you do it the harder it is.
In other words, if you can do it kind of in the middle of the flight, it's a little easier to do.
And that's why some of these sea based defenses are a little or a little bit more promising.
That's one of the reasons.
But to do it at the at the end is hard.
And the defense system that was really pushed by the Bush administration and continues, although somewhat less enthusiastically by the Obama White House, you know, is not perfect at all.
And it might be useful to get one missile, but to do lots may be very difficult.
Well, I'm sure you remember the hell you may have written it.
I don't know the story in The Washington Post from a few years back about the guy that was just making millions scamming the missile defense program.
You know, I'm talking about.
I don't remember that particular one, but there's so many like it.
It's a little hard to remember which is which.
Yeah, this one was a big deal at the time.
But yeah, I mean, that's kind of thing going back to when I was in elementary school.
They've been talking about missile defense.
I guess it's at least part of the story.
I don't know if I have a perfect footnote on me, but it's part of the story that this was the deal breaker when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev almost made a deal to completely dismantle every single one of the Soviet and American nuclear bombs, that this was what broke the deal was Reagan's promise that he was going to build a missile shield to protect us, even though if the technology doesn't work now, it sure as hell was a laughing matter back in 1986 or whatever.
And it sort of seems, depending on a point of view, I guess I'd like to know what you think that this whole missile defense thing is not about missile defense.
It's simply about giant welfare checks for people who are already billionaires.
It's a big joke, isn't it?
I think it's like, I think it can be both and, you know, I don't think it's got to be either or.
Yeah, I think it can be a welfare check and it can be a negotiating point and it can be the best hedge you can figure out against an extremely unlikely but scary event.
I remember in Andrew Coburn's book, Rumsfeld, he talks about how Dan Coats got the first job interview to be secretary of defense.
And he said, missile defense, oh, come on, what are you kidding?
That's the biggest waste of money I ever heard of.
And they said, yeah, well, anyway, don't call us.
We'll call you, dude.
And then that's how Rumsfeld ended up getting the job as Cheney said, well, I know a guy.
That's interesting.
I hadn't heard that.
Yeah.
But I mean, but but Rumsfeld, you know, was before he was even at the Pentagon was a huge missile defense fanboy.
And so his views on that were very well known.
All right.
Now, I remember now that I got my Mozilla working again, what my awesome question was going to be, and it was really actually a follow up to something that you had talked about about this global strike weapon and how it all just presupposes, I think was how you said it, that, well, we know where our target is like at Simon Al Zawahiri or something.
And we got to get him right now, this second.
And I knew there was something on your blog that I wanted to mention in context of that.
And it was this no name terrorists, now CIA drone target.
So apparently it doesn't have to be Iman Al Zawahiri at all.
No.
Tell us about this.
What is this?
So basically, look, let's let's roll back the clock, like two years ago, two years ago in Pakistan, if the CIA wanted to use one of its drones to whack somebody, it really had to be pretty sure who they were going to whack.
You know, it was more like, hey, we've got a specific guy.
He's on the top 100 or top 200, top 500 list.
And you know, this guy needs to get got and we're going to use a drone to do it.
Then in the middle of 2008, that changed and they shifted from more of a covert kind of take out of one particular bad guy operation to much more of using drones as a tool of war.
And, you know, in a war, you don't necessarily shoot at somebody, you know, you don't necessarily know the guy's name.
You know, in World War Two, you know, the American G.I. s weren't like, hey, Franz, hey, Yosef, I'm going to shoot at you now.
And so the drone attacks have really expanded.
And instead of going after specific guys, it's really going after people that appear to be terrorists or guerrillas, not just specific ones.
So how's that working out?
I mean, are they cleaning up the last of the bad guys so we can get out of there?
You know, the answer is, I don't think we know.
On the one hand, you know, there's all these sort of anonymous assurances that things are going awesome and that we've really decimated Al-Qaeda's ranks.
On the other hand, I don't think anybody, you know, really knows.
And you could sort of see the Times Square bomber as evidence of both theories in a way.
In one sense, it's like, hey, Al-Qaeda and, you know, just the militant community over there is so lame that the best guy they can produce is this numbnuts who gives the government his real phone number and his real e-mail address and thinks that fireworks will set off a car bomb.
On the other hand, you know, if guys like him who weren't radicals before are being radicalized by the drone strikes, then that's a real problem.
And it's totally possible, and both are true, that we've really, you know, given Al-Qaeda and affiliated groups a blow with these drone strikes and really, you know, hampered their ability to plan spectacular attacks.
But it's also radicalized a sort of more, oh, amateur group of terrorists who are going to try to strike here and may, in fact, even be American citizens.
Yeah, well, we've seen a number of Somali-Americans travel to Somalia to fight on the side of the resistance.
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
So exactly how that plays out, I don't think we know yet.
By the way, speaking of the Times Square thing, have they released a video yet that shows this guy getting out of the truck?
Because there's got to be, what, a hundred video cameras down at that intersection, right?
Yeah, I haven't seen one.
But just because the cameras are there doesn't mean, like, these aren't cameras, you know, this isn't like pointing your movie camera somewhere.
You know, a lot of these cameras have really low frame rates.
They might only take a couple of images a second, so it's possible they missed it, you know.
I'd like to hear them explain that.
I want to see that.
Yeah, and the answer is, I don't know.
You know, I certainly, I haven't seen a tape, and, you know, at first they thought they had the guy, you know, you remember the first footage they released was of some guy leaving a bag on the ground and then taking off his shirt, and then it turned out they had the wrong guy all along.
So I don't know.
Hmm.
All right, well, I'm sorry, I don't either.
I want to say this to you, Noah, which is that I don't know why I haven't interviewed you a thousand times.
I read your blog all the time.
You do such great work.
I wish I had taken better notes before this interview, because I'm sure there's 10,000 other questions I would like to ask you.
I hope we can do this again on a regular basis, because you really do great work, and I appreciate a lot.
Well, thanks so much, man.
I appreciate it.
All right, everybody, that's Noah Schachtman.
You can find him at wired.com slash Danger Room.
