© www.prisonplanet.comYou are not a civilian; you are an "enemy killed in action."
GOSZTOLA: What is the "assassination complex"? When we talk about the "assassination complex," are we talking about a much larger system that includes, for example, the explosion of watchlisting, where people are intimidated and harassed? Typically, they are predominantly Arab Americans, and they have this experience when they try to fly on airplanes. Should we see that as a byproduct of this "assassination complex"?
SCAHILL: What's interesting [...] is the statement by a whistleblower, who provided us with a copy of the 180-plus page of watchlisting guidance, which is really the government's rule book for watchlisting. And it basically maps out a system where individuals have their data and metadata, their names, the people they are in contact with poured into several government databases, one of which has more than 1 million people and growing by the day. Everyone who goes into that system is preemptively categorized as a known or suspected terrorist. [...]
[Y]ou can end up on a watchlist because your phone number was discovered in the phone of someone else they were monitoring or someone else, who's phone was in the phone of someone else they were monitoring. And no matter why you are in that database, you are designated as a "known or suspected terrorist," a KST. Now, that information can trickle all the way to foreign governments and to state and local law enforcement in the U.S. So, if someone gets pulled over by a police officer and they run a check on someone, who happens to be a known or suspected terrorist because their name is similar to someone else's or because their phone number was in the phone of someone that the U.S. government was monitoring, then they are in the situation where a local sheriff or a sheriff's deputy is seeing someone is a known or suspected terrorist, which sounds like an extremely frightening thing.
Once you're in that database, you are assigned what's called a TPN number, and it's basically like a "terrorist tracking number." Every single person who has ever been killed in a drone strike intentionally, meaning the intended targets, has been assigned a TPN number. One of the things that has not gotten a lot of attention that we reported on is that 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, of course the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a drone strike—This 16-year-old U.S. citizen kid was killed two weeks after his father while he was sitting, having a meal with his cousins, and one of the things that our source was able to provide us with was the fact that Abdulrahman al-Awlaki had a terror watchlisting number assigned to him.
Now, was it because they believed he was a terrorist or was it because his father was top on a U.S. hit list? We don't know the answer to that question, but every single person, every bit of innocuous information that gets put into that database results in you being labeled a known or suspected terrorist. Basically, what it is is that is the very first step of a process that can eventually lead to your death by a drone strike. But the vast majority in there are not people that are on the kill list.They are people who posted something on Facebook or Twitter, know people, have made phone calls abroad, or their data ends up in someone else's phone. So, the direct answer to your question is, yes, this explosion of watchlisting is directly related to the assassination program across the globe.
GOSZTOLA: Currently, there is a focus at least among I'd say human rights organizations toward whatever the Obama administration is going to put out in terms of how they're going to count civilian casualties and what they're going to do to show a little transparency because they've been so secretive about this. And my question to you is, based on your drone reporting, these papers, and what you've had come to you from sources, how should we understand the ways the Obama administration has been concealing civilian deaths? How might this coming announcement about civilian casualties represent an institutionalization of undercounting civilian deaths?
SCAHILL: First of all, the White House claimed they were going to put this out over a month ago, and what they said is we're going to be—because you know we're the Most Transparent Administration In History—we're going to be putting out this unprecedented level of detail about who we have killed in drone strikes outside of declared battlefields. There are some initial leaks that are coming out that seem to indicate that they're going to claim they killed somewhere around 60 individuals outside of Iraq and Afghanistan, which of course is just a shockingly ridiculous number given the credible and conservative reporting of the Bureau for Investigative Journalism. Even if you take some of the statistics from the New America Foundation, which is even more conservative, the idea that there would only be a few dozen people killed is just ludicrous.
But the reason why I think the President is going to be able to say, with a straight face, that the number of civilians killed has been minimal is not because he's some kind of sophisticated liar. It's because the military and the CIA have colluded to create a mathematical formula for determining when civilians are killed that will almost always result in the number zero. What I mean by that is what the Drone Papers show us, these classified top secret documents, is that when any drone strike is conducted, there is only one "objective" or target. Each drone strike is aimed at killing one individual, not five individuals (except in the case of signature strikes which we can talk about later).
In the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, for instance, Anwar al-Awlaki was the target of a drone strike, but that drone strike also killed Samir Khan, who was a Pakistani American who had gone over to Yemen and was writing for Inspire magazine. He was killed in that strike, but he was not the target of that strike. One Republican congressman said at the time that he was twofer, but Samir Khan would have been categorized as an enemy killed in action (EKIA), even if they didn't know his identity. Now, in that case, you have two outspoken people, who were calling for global jihad, and there was not a lot of sympathy in those cases.
But if you look at this horrifying strike against the wedding party in Yemen that happened a couple Decembers ago, where more than a dozen people were killed—First of all, the person that was allegedly the target wasn't there and wasn't killed but a tremendous amount of other people were killed. And the immediate designation of all of those people was EKIA, and the standard that we reveal in these documents is that anyone whose identity is unknown is preemptively labeled an "enemy killed in action" unless they are clearly visible as women or small children. And the only way that designation is lifted is if they are posthumously proven not to have been terrorist or militants; you know, terms that are really difficult to define because the United States doesn't respect international law.
What this means is that the President's advisers can say, oh, we killed so-and-so in Pakistan, and there were ten other "enemies killed in action." Unless the President says, "Well, do we know that they were enemies? Who were these people?" The assumption is just going to be we didn't kill any civilians.
Comment: The other side of this faulty equation is that the numbers of "enemies killed in action," EKIA, are bumped up -- artificially implying the US is doing a stellar job of "fighting the enemy" when, in fact, they were really civilian kills.
Regardless of what you think of the morality of this policy, on a very technical level, I think all Americans should be outraged at the idea that when we're killing large numbers of people in Muslim countries around the world without knowing who they are, that we somehow are not going to pay a price later? That this is not going to be any blowback? That should a be a concern of everybody no matter where you fall on the political spectrum.
GOSZTOLA: The other thing that I really appreciate about this work is that, again, we have more information about the war in Afghanistan and how the war is being fought. But so often, we write this off. The Obama administration write it off as the "good war." Democrats write it off as the "good war." We also don't talk about it. It doesn't pop up in political discussions. We'll talk about Iraq, but we don't talk about Afghanistan at all, as far as what's going on. So what were you able to learn from the source that gave you the Drone Papers.
SCAHILL: My colleague, Ryan Devereaux, who has worked with me since the "Blackwater" days, reported out the Afghanistan part of our story because we realized one person would have to do a really deep dive into those documents because they all pertained to a special operations kill/capture campaign called Operation Haymaker.
What the documents say in a nutshell is that during this operation, which spanned the course of the year, but during one five-month period that the military reviewed of this operation being conducted by Joint Special Operations Command, nearly 9 out of 10 people that were killed in mostly drone strike; there were some other forms of air strikes. Their identities were not known, and they were classified as "enemies killed in action," which means that only ten percent of the people that were being killed in Afghanistan, which is a much easier battlefield in some cases to conduct drone strikes because you have bases within the country and you can send multiple assets at the same time—that they were killing a tremendous amount of unknown people.
The source for the Drone Papers, who had worked on these high-value targeting campaigns, as the Obama administration likes to call it, really described a sickening system, where there was a cavalier attitude about anyone who was around the cellphone that they believed to be a terrorist. Because the overwhelming number of cases, where people are killed in drone strikes, it's not that they're killing people. It's that you're blowing up a phone that you believe to be held by a person that you are hunting, and many drone operators and people who work on these targeting platforms never even know the actual name of the person that they are targeting. They're either given a designation, like Sandbox 1 or Sandbox 2, and those are describing a SIM card or the phone that they have. And then they are given just a number on a screen and so they know they are tracking this series of numbers, and it's a way of dehumanizing the enemy.
The other part of what Ryan reported on regarding Operation Haymaker is that you have the most elite forces in the U.S. military being unleashed in area of Afghanistan, where there was very little actual al Qaida or radical Taliban activity, and instead what ended up happening is the U.S. military's most elite forces found themselves pulled into a turf war between rival factions that are based along tribal lines, not political lines, including timber wars—fighting over natural resources. These guys that are much vaunted and viewed as superheroes. They killed Osama bin Laden. They're in the middle of a battle over trees that are being cut down in Afghanistan and not killing anyone that is even a member of al Qaida. I think they say in there they killed one individual in that whole year-long campaign, who actually had any links to al Qaida.
GOSZTOLA: Another critical development in the Obama administration is this expansion of warfare in the continent of Africa, which these documents address. I'm wondering when you look at what is in these documents related to the assassination complex, on one hand, please talk about Somalia and what's going on, but also the destruction of an entire country in Libya—How is the assassination complex fueling that, especially when it seems like we're almost into a new second or third round of warfare, where recent reports were that surveillance drones were sent into the country to survey the spread of militias once again?
SCAHILL: This is sort of the 1-2-3 punch of the Obama doctrine, where you have—You're going to use a lot of drones, weaponized drones but also surveillance drones. You're going to have small numbers of covert operations forces conducting direct actions, meaning targeting people unilaterally, not with foreign forces. And then you have this CIA-military attempt to build up local militia that can essentially implement the agenda of their paymasters from the United States, and of course, that opens the door for huge blowback, as we've seen over and over again throughout U.S. history. [...]
GOSZTOLA: Just to follow up on the political question, and then we'll get back to the book. An important political question is this issue of people who read our work on a daily basis, people who sympathize with what we do and are out doing organizing, but do give candidates like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton when it comes to drone warfare, when it comes to regime change policies. And I think now it's even more stark because I think what you say is very significant, the fact that this election's going to become about Hillary Clinton playing the woman card or it's going to become about the misogynistic sleazy attacks of Donald Trump, and the worst thing that people will say is that Donald Trump is going to become president and he's going to have this assassination complex at his fingertips to wield around the world, but the fact of the matter is that there is a real thing that has to be confronted, which is the extent to which the left has made it possible to be available post-election.
SCAHILL: You cannot understate the significance of the role that President Obama has played over both terms of his administration in seeking to legitimize assassination as a central component of American policy. In the early days after 9/11, Richard Clarke, who was the counterterrorism czar under President Clinton and then carried over with the Bush people, was called to a secret hearing that's since been declassified, a joint hearing of the House and Senate intelligence committees. The aim of the hearing was the Republicans were trying to blame Bill Clinton for 9/11. They were reviewing counterterrorism policy and why Bill Clinton didn't kill Osama bin Laden.
During this secret hearing, Richard Clarke said there was a consensus within the Clinton administration that they did not want to give the impression of running an Israeli-style assassination ring around the world. And so, the Clinton administration put in talmudic regulations before you could actually pull the trigger in an operation that was going to kill someone like Osama bin Laden. You then fast-forward to the Obama era, and we're hitting people left and right all over the globe with a very streamlined, almost scientific process for determining who lives and who dies on any given day.
The popularity of drone strikes, when it peaked in the seventies at one point [referring to poll numbers], and it didn't decline much at all in the question of targeting a U.S. citizen in drone strike—I think can overwhelmingly be attributed to the fact that Obama was viewed as a transformative figure. He has tremendous support among the liberal base across the country. He is a constitutional lawyer by training. He won the Nobel Peace Prize, and people sort of check their conscience at the door when their guy is in power. [...]
GOSZTOLA: Thank you, Jeremy. I expect throughout this general election we're going to see Hillary Clinton trying to prove to us that she's a smarter warrior-in-chief than Donald Trump we'll ever be. So, we'll need your clarity on these issues of the drone war and assassination complex.
SCAHILL: It's great: choosing between a fascist and a politician of the empire. It's just a wonderful collection that we have in this country.
To read the full interview, go here.
Editor Note: On May 5, I interviewed The Intercept's Jeremy Scahill about the new book released this week, The Assassination Complex. It has a foreword from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and an afterword by The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald. The book collects the organization's journalistic work based on the Drone Papers, which were provided to the media organization by a whistleblower, who disclosed top secret documents on the government's expansion of assassination policy in warfare on, and away from, declared battlefields.
Comment: See also: