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Home > 'The Assassination Complex': Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald Probe
Secret U.S. Drone Wars
________________________________________
'The Assassination Complex': Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald Probe Secret
U.S. Drone Wars
By Amy Goodman [1] / Democracy Now! [2]
May 3, 2016
As the Obama administration prepares to release for the first time the
number of people it believes it has killed in drone strikes in countries
that lie outside of conventional war zones, we look at a new book out today
that paints a very different picture of the U.S. drone program. "The
Assassination Complex: Inside the Governments Secret Drone Warfare Program"
is written by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept, and based on
leaked government documents provided by a whistleblower. The documents
undermine government claims that drone strikes have been precise. Part of
the book looks at a program called Operation Haymaker in northeastern
Afghanistan. During one five-month period, nearly 90 percent of the people
killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. The book is based on
articles published by The Intercept last year. It also includes new
contributions from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and The Intercepts
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald. We speak with Jeremy
Scahill and Glenn Greenwald.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
Amy Goodman: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace
Report. Im Amy Goodman. Were on the road in Sarasota, Florida. Ill be
speaking in Atlanta, Georgia [3], tonight. But here in Sarasota, were less
than an hour from Tampa, which houses the United States Special Operations
Command. Its the epicenter of planning for the global targeted killing
program and other covert military action. Well, we turn now to look at
President Obama and drones. On Saturday night, Comedy Centrals Larry
Wilmore criticized Obamas reliance on drone warfare during his remarks at
the White House Correspondents Association dinner. He compared Obamas
foreign policy to that of reigning NBA MVP Steph Curry.
Larry Wilmore: It looks like youre really enjoying your last year of the
presidency. Saw you hanging out with NBA players like Steph Curry, Golden
State Warriors. That was cool. That was cool, yeah. You know, it kind of
makes sense, too, because both of you like raining down bombs on people from
long distances, right? Yeah, sure. What? Am I wrong?
AG: Larry Wilmores comments come as the Obama administration prepares to
release for the first time the number of people it believes its killed in
drone strikes in countries that lie outside of conventional war zones.
Speaking last month in Chicago, President Obama addressed the issue of
civilian deaths in drone strikes.
President Barack Obama: Theres no doubt that some innocent people have been
killed by drone strikes. It is not true that it has been this sort of
willy-nilly, you know, "Lets bomb a village." That is not how itsfolks
have operated. And what I can say with great certainty is that the rate of
civilian casualties in any drone operation are far lower than the rate of
civilian casualties that occur in conventional war.
AG: A new book being published today paints a very different picture of the
U.S. drone program. Its titled The Assassination Complex: Inside the
Governments Secret Drone Warfare Program. Its written by Jeremy Scahill
and the staff of The Intercept, based on leaked government documents
provided by a whistleblower. The documents undermine government claims that
drone strikes have been precise. Part of the book looks at a program called
Operation Haymaker in northeastern Afghanistan. During one five-month
period, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the
intended targets. The book is based on articles published by The Intercept
last year. It also includes new contributions from NSA whistleblower Ed
Snowden and The Intercept's Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn
Greenwald. Snowden's introduction [4] to the book has just been published
onThe Intercepts website.
Joining us now, still with us, Jeremy Scahill, and Glenn Greenwald is
joining us from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They founded The Intercept with
Laura Poitras. Jeremy, lets go back to you. Lay out the scope of The
Assassination Complex, especially now as President Obama is about to reveal
at least what the government is willing to admit are the number of people
killed in drone strikes.
Jeremy Scahill: Right, well, Amy, you know, the covert drone program, for
the majority of its lifespan, has been shrouded in secrecy, and it was sort
of a kind of macabre joke in Washington, because the entire world could see
that the U.S. was raining bombs down on people across the globe and in an
increasing number of countries in the early stages of Obamas presidency,
and yet the United States would never officially confirm that it had
conducted a drone strike. And instead, you would see President Obama making
jokes at the White House Correspondents Association dinner about how he was
going to conduct a drone strike against the Jonas Brothers if they came near
his daughters, and everybody yucks it up and laughs in Washington about it.
He then answered a question on a Google Plus hangout, but never gave a
substantive policy speech on the use of drones, really, until 2013.
And what the Obama administration is doing right now is basically trying to
rebrand and engage in historical revisionism about what is going to be one
of the most deadly legacies of the Obama era, and that is that somehow they
came up with a cleaner way of waging war. I would say that the most
significant aspect of what President Obama has done, regarding drones and
regarding the so-called targeted killing program around the world, is that
Obama has codified assassination as a central official component of American
foreign policy. And he has implemented policies that a Republican probably
would not have been able to implement, certainly not with the support that
Obama has received from so many self-identified liberals. It will be very
interesting to see, if a Republican wins, how many of the MSNBCpundits and
other, you know, so-called liberalswhat their position will be on these
very same policies.
But the fact is that the White Housewe understand the White House is going
to be releasing statistics, that some indicate are going to say that upwards
of 60 peoplesix-zero peoplehave been killed in drone strikes outside of
Iraq and Afghanistan, which is aits a horrifying piece of propaganda, if
that isif thats true. The reason that the Obama administration and that
the president can say to the American people, "Well, weve only killed a
small number of civilians," is becauseand our documents in the book show
thisbecause they have embraced a system of counting the dead which almost
always will result in zero civilians killed, because anyone who is killed in
a drone strike, under this administration, is labeled as an enemy killed in
action, an EKIA, until or unless posthumously proven to have not been a
militant, a terrorist, what have you. This is a global assassination program
that is authorized and run under what amounts to a parallel legal system or
judicial system where the president and his advisers serve as the judge,
jury and executioner of people across the globe. And so, the documents that
we obtained will give lie to the proclamations that this somehow is a saner,
less deadly form of warfare when it comes to impacting civilians.
And the final thing, Amy, that I would say is that I think what you really
see come through in the militarys own assessments, that were publishing in
this book, of the drone program is that the U.S. is creating self-fulfilling
prophecies. Rather than stopping terrorism, the U.S., through its drone
program, is encouraging terrorism and providing terrorist organization with
recruitment material, just as the Guantánamo prison serves as recruitment
material for the people that the Obama administration claims its trying
stop from conducting acts of terrorism.
AG: Thats Jeremy Scahill. Were also joined by Glenn Greenwald. Hes in Rio
de Janeiro, and Im in Sarasota, Florida, right near SOCOM, the Special
Operations Command. In the afterword, Glenn, of The Assassination Complex,
you say that most of the revelations in the book, quote, "signify one of the
most enduring and consequential aspects of the Obama legacy: the
continuation of endless war." Can you expand on this?
Glenn Greenwood: It seems like a really distant memory now, but if you look
back to what President Obama, then-Senator Obama, was saying in 2006, 2007,
as his critique of the Bush administrations approach to terrorism, he was
essentially railing against not just the policies, but the mindset and the
approach that, once he became president, he ended up not only embracing, but
strengthening and increasing. He talked all the time about how terrible it
was to treat somebody like a terrorist and punish them with imprisonment in
Guantánamo, with indefinite detention, without so much as giving them the
right to have a trial. And not only has he continued the system of
indefinite detentionand he intended to continue the system of indefinite
detention, even if he were able to close Guantánamo; his plan was simply to
shift it to American soilhes done much more than that. He has
institutionalized a program where now we dont only just imprison people
without any charges or due process, we dont just eavesdrop on them, which
was one of his big critiques of the Bush administration, without first
giving them due process or a trial, we now just target them for execution,
for death, for a death penalty.
You know, for a long time, a staple of Democratic ideology has been that the
death penalty is wrong, even with a full trial and appeals and due process
and lawyers and all of the constitutional rights that are afforded to
criminal defendants. And yet President Obama has embraced a policy that says
that he can literally go around the world, target people for death anywhere
in the world that he wants, including places where were not at war,
including even American citizens, and simply eradicate their lives based on
his ordernot in a war zone, people who are not engaged in combat at the
time theyre killed. Theyre killed in cars, in their houses, while theyre
working, driving with their children, at funerals, rescuing people. Wherever
it is that they might be found, they can simply be killed.
And the most extraordinary aspect about it is that Democratic partisans, who
were cheering his critiques in 2006 and 2007 and pretending to oppose this
approach because it was a Republican who did it, switched completely on a
dime. And the minute that President Obama embraced these policies, they, as
public opinion polls show, completely switched how they think about all of
these policies and started supporting them. And what this has meant is that
these policies have shifted from being just a right-wing, extremist,
Republican framework into one that is fully bipartisan, and therefore will
be institutionalized and has been strengthened for years, if not decades, to
come, in a way that George Bush and Dick Cheney could only have dreamed of.
AG: I want to turn to a clip from National Bird, a new documentary on drone
warfare that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last month. This is Lisa
Ling, a former drone system technical sergeant.
Lisa Ling: This is global. This is getting information anywhere at any time,
shooting people from anywhere at any time. And its not just one person
sitting there with a little remote control, a little joystick, moving around
a plane thats halfway across the world. Thats not all there is. Its like
borders dont matter anymore. And theres a huge system that spans the
globe, that can just suck up endless amounts of your life, your personal
data. I mean, this could grow to get so out of control. And were not the
only ones that have this. This is going to be commonplace, if its not
already. Its a secret program. And what that means is that I cant just go
shouting off the hilltops telling the public what it is. What I can tell you
is that, to me, one person who worked within this massive thing, its
frightening.
AG: Drone whistleblower Lisa Ling in the documentary National Bird.
Amy Goodman is the host of Democracy Now! [5], a daily international
TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,200 stations in North America. She
is the co-author of The Silenced Majority [6], a New York Times best-seller.
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Source URL:
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-and-glenn-greenwald-probe-secret-us-drone-wars
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/amy-goodman-0
[2] http://www.democracynow.org/
[3]
http://www.democracynow.org/events/2016/5/amy_goodman_and_denis_moynihan_in_
atlanta_1310
[4]
https://theintercept.com/2016/05/03/edward-snowden-whistleblowing-is-not-jus
t-leaking-its-an-act-of-political-resistance/
[5] http://democracynow.org
[6] http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/The-Silenced-Majority
[7] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on 'The Assassination
Complex': Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald Probe Secret U.S. Drone
Wars
[8] http://www.alternet.org/
[9] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > 'The Assassination Complex': Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald Probe
Secret U.S. Drone Wars
'The Assassination Complex': Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald Probe Secret
U.S. Drone Wars
By Amy Goodman [1] / Democracy Now! [2]
May 3, 2016
As the Obama administration prepares to release for the first time the
number of people it believes it has killed in drone strikes in countries
that lie outside of conventional war zones, we look at a new book out today
that paints a very different picture of the U.S. drone program. "The
Assassination Complex: Inside the Governments Secret Drone Warfare Program"
is written by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept, and based on
leaked government documents provided by a whistleblower. The documents
undermine government claims that drone strikes have been precise. Part of
the book looks at a program called Operation Haymaker in northeastern
Afghanistan. During one five-month period, nearly 90 percent of the people
killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. The book is based on
articles published by The Intercept last year. It also includes new
contributions from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and The Intercepts
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald. We speak with Jeremy
Scahill and Glenn Greenwald.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
Amy Goodman: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace
Report. Im Amy Goodman. Were on the road in Sarasota, Florida. Ill be
speaking in Atlanta, Georgia [3], tonight. But here in Sarasota, were less
than an hour from Tampa, which houses the United States Special Operations
Command. Its the epicenter of planning for the global targeted killing
program and other covert military action. Well, we turn now to look at
President Obama and drones. On Saturday night, Comedy Centrals Larry
Wilmore criticized Obamas reliance on drone warfare during his remarks at
the White House Correspondents Association dinner. He compared Obamas
foreign policy to that of reigning NBA MVP Steph Curry.
Larry Wilmore: It looks like youre really enjoying your last year of the
presidency. Saw you hanging out with NBA players like Steph Curry, Golden
State Warriors. That was cool. That was cool, yeah. You know, it kind of
makes sense, too, because both of you like raining down bombs on people from
long distances, right? Yeah, sure. What? Am I wrong?
AG: Larry Wilmores comments come as the Obama administration prepares to
release for the first time the number of people it believes its killed in
drone strikes in countries that lie outside of conventional war zones.
Speaking last month in Chicago, President Obama addressed the issue of
civilian deaths in drone strikes.
President Barack Obama: Theres no doubt that some innocent people have been
killed by drone strikes. It is not true that it has been this sort of
willy-nilly, you know, "Lets bomb a village." That is not how itsfolks
have operated. And what I can say with great certainty is that the rate of
civilian casualties in any drone operation are far lower than the rate of
civilian casualties that occur in conventional war.
AG: A new book being published today paints a very different picture of the
U.S. drone program. Its titled The Assassination Complex: Inside the
Governments Secret Drone Warfare Program. Its written by Jeremy Scahill
and the staff of The Intercept, based on leaked government documents
provided by a whistleblower. The documents undermine government claims that
drone strikes have been precise. Part of the book looks at a program called
Operation Haymaker in northeastern Afghanistan. During one five-month
period, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the
intended targets. The book is based on articles published by The Intercept
last year. It also includes new contributions from NSA whistleblower Ed
Snowden and The Intercept's Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn
Greenwald. Snowden's introduction [4] to the book has just been published
onThe Intercepts website.
Joining us now, still with us, Jeremy Scahill, and Glenn Greenwald is
joining us from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They founded The Intercept with
Laura Poitras. Jeremy, lets go back to you. Lay out the scope of The
Assassination Complex, especially now as President Obama is about to reveal
at least what the government is willing to admit are the number of people
killed in drone strikes.
Jeremy Scahill: Right, well, Amy, you know, the covert drone program, for
the majority of its lifespan, has been shrouded in secrecy, and it was sort
of a kind of macabre joke in Washington, because the entire world could see
that the U.S. was raining bombs down on people across the globe and in an
increasing number of countries in the early stages of Obamas presidency,
and yet the United States would never officially confirm that it had
conducted a drone strike. And instead, you would see President Obama making
jokes at the White House Correspondents Association dinner about how he was
going to conduct a drone strike against the Jonas Brothers if they came near
his daughters, and everybody yucks it up and laughs in Washington about it.
He then answered a question on a Google Plus hangout, but never gave a
substantive policy speech on the use of drones, really, until 2013.
And what the Obama administration is doing right now is basically trying to
rebrand and engage in historical revisionism about what is going to be one
of the most deadly legacies of the Obama era, and that is that somehow they
came up with a cleaner way of waging war. I would say that the most
significant aspect of what President Obama has done, regarding drones and
regarding the so-called targeted killing program around the world, is that
Obama has codified assassination as a central official component of American
foreign policy. And he has implemented policies that a Republican probably
would not have been able to implement, certainly not with the support that
Obama has received from so many self-identified liberals. It will be very
interesting to see, if a Republican wins, how many of the MSNBCpundits and
other, you know, so-called liberalswhat their position will be on these
very same policies.
But the fact is that the White Housewe understand the White House is going
to be releasing statistics, that some indicate are going to say that upwards
of 60 peoplesix-zero peoplehave been killed in drone strikes outside of
Iraq and Afghanistan, which is aits a horrifying piece of propaganda, if
that isif thats true. The reason that the Obama administration and that
the president can say to the American people, "Well, weve only killed a
small number of civilians," is becauseand our documents in the book show
thisbecause they have embraced a system of counting the dead which almost
always will result in zero civilians killed, because anyone who is killed in
a drone strike, under this administration, is labeled as an enemy killed in
action, an EKIA, until or unless posthumously proven to have not been a
militant, a terrorist, what have you. This is a global assassination program
that is authorized and run under what amounts to a parallel legal system or
judicial system where the president and his advisers serve as the judge,
jury and executioner of people across the globe. And so, the documents that
we obtained will give lie to the proclamations that this somehow is a saner,
less deadly form of warfare when it comes to impacting civilians.
And the final thing, Amy, that I would say is that I think what you really
see come through in the militarys own assessments, that were publishing in
this book, of the drone program is that the U.S. is creating self-fulfilling
prophecies. Rather than stopping terrorism, the U.S., through its drone
program, is encouraging terrorism and providing terrorist organization with
recruitment material, just as the Guantánamo prison serves as recruitment
material for the people that the Obama administration claims its trying
stop from conducting acts of terrorism.
AG: Thats Jeremy Scahill. Were also joined by Glenn Greenwald. Hes in Rio
de Janeiro, and Im in Sarasota, Florida, right near SOCOM, the Special
Operations Command. In the afterword, Glenn, of The Assassination Complex,
you say that most of the revelations in the book, quote, "signify one of the
most enduring and consequential aspects of the Obama legacy: the
continuation of endless war." Can you expand on this?
Glenn Greenwood: It seems like a really distant memory now, but if you look
back to what President Obama, then-Senator Obama, was saying in 2006, 2007,
as his critique of the Bush administrations approach to terrorism, he was
essentially railing against not just the policies, but the mindset and the
approach that, once he became president, he ended up not only embracing, but
strengthening and increasing. He talked all the time about how terrible it
was to treat somebody like a terrorist and punish them with imprisonment in
Guantánamo, with indefinite detention, without so much as giving them the
right to have a trial. And not only has he continued the system of
indefinite detentionand he intended to continue the system of indefinite
detention, even if he were able to close Guantánamo; his plan was simply to
shift it to American soilhes done much more than that. He has
institutionalized a program where now we dont only just imprison people
without any charges or due process, we dont just eavesdrop on them, which
was one of his big critiques of the Bush administration, without first
giving them due process or a trial, we now just target them for execution,
for death, for a death penalty.
You know, for a long time, a staple of Democratic ideology has been that the
death penalty is wrong, even with a full trial and appeals and due process
and lawyers and all of the constitutional rights that are afforded to
criminal defendants. And yet President Obama has embraced a policy that says
that he can literally go around the world, target people for death anywhere
in the world that he wants, including places where were not at war,
including even American citizens, and simply eradicate their lives based on
his ordernot in a war zone, people who are not engaged in combat at the
time theyre killed. Theyre killed in cars, in their houses, while theyre
working, driving with their children, at funerals, rescuing people. Wherever
it is that they might be found, they can simply be killed.
And the most extraordinary aspect about it is that Democratic partisans, who
were cheering his critiques in 2006 and 2007 and pretending to oppose this
approach because it was a Republican who did it, switched completely on a
dime. And the minute that President Obama embraced these policies, they, as
public opinion polls show, completely switched how they think about all of
these policies and started supporting them. And what this has meant is that
these policies have shifted from being just a right-wing, extremist,
Republican framework into one that is fully bipartisan, and therefore will
be institutionalized and has been strengthened for years, if not decades, to
come, in a way that George Bush and Dick Cheney could only have dreamed of.
AG: I want to turn to a clip from National Bird, a new documentary on drone
warfare that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last month. This is Lisa
Ling, a former drone system technical sergeant.
Lisa Ling: This is global. This is getting information anywhere at any time,
shooting people from anywhere at any time. And its not just one person
sitting there with a little remote control, a little joystick, moving around
a plane thats halfway across the world. Thats not all there is. Its like
borders dont matter anymore. And theres a huge system that spans the
globe, that can just suck up endless amounts of your life, your personal
data. I mean, this could grow to get so out of control. And were not the
only ones that have this. This is going to be commonplace, if its not
already. Its a secret program. And what that means is that I cant just go
shouting off the hilltops telling the public what it is. What I can tell you
is that, to me, one person who worked within this massive thing, its
frightening.
AG: Drone whistleblower Lisa Ling in the documentary National Bird.
Amy Goodman is the host of Democracy Now! [5], a daily international
TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,200 stations in North America. She
is the co-author of The Silenced Majority [6], a New York Times best-seller.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
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Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [7]
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Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/assassination-complex-jeremy-scahill
-and-glenn-greenwald-probe-secret-us-drone-wars
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/amy-goodman-0
[2] http://www.democracynow.org/
[3]
http://www.democracynow.org/events/2016/5/amy_goodman_and_denis_moynihan_in_
atlanta_1310
[4]
https://theintercept.com/2016/05/03/edward-snowden-whistleblowing-is-not-jus
t-leaking-its-an-act-of-political-resistance/
[5] http://democracynow.org
[6] http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/The-Silenced-Majority
[7] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on 'The Assassination
Complex': Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald Probe Secret U.S. Drone
Wars
[8] http://www.alternet.org/
[9] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B