Jeremy Scahill: The Secret Story Behind Obama’s Assassination of Two
Americans in Yemen
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The World Is a Battlefield: Jeremy Scahill on "Dirty Wars" and Obama’s
Expanding Drone Attacks
April 26, 2013
Guests
<
http://www.democracynow.org/appearances/jeremy_scahill> Jeremy Scahill,
National Security Correspondent for The Nation magazine, Democracy Now!
correspondent and author of the new book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a
Battlefield. He produced the award-winning documentary film with the same
name with Richard Rowley. He is also the author of the bestseller,
Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
The Obama administration’s assassination of two U.S. citizens in 2011, Anwar
al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old Denver-born son Abdulrahman, is a central part
of Jeremy Scahill’s new book, "Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield." The
book is based on years of reporting on U.S. secret operations in Yemen,
Somalia and Afghanistan. While the Obama administration has defended the
killing of Anwar, it has never publicly explained why Abdulrahman was
targeted in a separate drone strike two weeks later. Scahill reveals CIA
Director John Brennan, Obama’s former senior adviser on counterterrorism and
homeland security, suspected that the teenager had been killed
"intentionally." "The idea that you can simply have one branch of government
unilaterally and in secret declare that an American citizen should be
executed or assassinated without having to present any evidence whatsoever,
to me, is a — we should view that with great sobriety about the implications
for our country," says Scahill, national security correspondent for The
Nation magazine. Today the U.S. Senate is preparing to hold its first-ever
hearing on the Obama administration’s drone and targeted killing program.
However, the Obama administration is refusing to send a witness to answer
questions about the program’s legality. "Dirty Wars" is also the name of a
new award-winning documentary by Scahill and Rick Rowley, which will open in
theaters in June. We air the film’s new trailer.
<
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/24/the_world_is_a_battlefield_jeremy>
Click here to watch Part 2 of this interview.
Transcript
AMY GOODMAN: The U.S. Senate is preparing to hold its first-ever hearing
today on the Obama administration’s drone and targeted killing program.
However, the Obama administration is refusing to send a witness to answer
questions about the program’s legality. At today’s hearing, a Yemeni man
whose family village was just hit by a U.S. drone strike is testifying
alongside one of the key figures in developing President Obama’s
counterterrorism policy, retired James Cartwright.
Well, today we spend the hour with Jeremy Scahill, national security
correspondent at The Nation magazine, longtime Democracy Now! correspondent.
For the past several years, Jeremy has been working on a book and film
documenting America’s expanded covert wars and targeted killing program.
This is the just-released trailer to his new film, Dirty Wars: The World Is
a Battlefield. It’s directed by Rick Rowley.
JEREMY SCAHILL: I got a strange phone call. Someone from the inside was
reaching out to me, someone close to the heart of the president’s elite
force.
ANONYMOUS SOURCE: There are hundreds of covert operations on multiple
continents in full support of the White House.
JEREMY SCAHILL: It’s hard to say when the story began.
Greetings from Kabul, Afghanistan.
This was supposed to be the front line in the war on terror.
U.S. SOLDIER: What’s the name of this village out here?
JEREMY SCAHILL: But I knew I was missing the story. There was another war,
hidden in the shadows. A night raid.
So there’s the two men in the guest house with the first people killed.
GARDEZ RESIDENT 1: Mm-hmm.
GARDEZ RESIDENT 2: [translated] One woman was four-months, the other was
five-months pregnant.
JEREMY SCAHILL: You saw the U.S. forces take the bullets out of the body?
MOHAMMED SABIR: [translated] Yes.
U.S. SOLDIER: On your face! On your face!
JEREMY SCAHILL: Who were these men that stormed into Daoud’s home? And why
would they go to such horrifying lengths to cover up their actions?
ANONYMOUS SOURCE: Terror strikes, targeted killings—a lot it was of
questionable legality.
JEREMY SCAHILL: How had a covert unit taken over the largest war on the
planet?
RACHEL MADDOW: Joining us now is Jeremy Scahill.
LOU DOBBS: Jeremy Scahill.
PAT BUCHANAN: They’re dismissing what you’ve done.
JAY LENO: Why are you still alive? Are you paranoid? Is that the guy we did
Maher with? Oh, he’s dead. What happened? He had an accident.
JEREMY SCAHILL: The list of raids read like a map of a hidden war.
MATTHEW HOH: The right guys would get targeted. Plenty of other times, the
wrong people would get killed.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Algeria, Indonesia, Thailand, Jordan.
UNIDENTIFIED: [translated] If children are terrorists, then we are all
terrorists
ANONYMOUS SOURCE: What we have essentially done is created one hell of a
hammer. And for the rest of our generation, this force will be continually
searching for a nail.
GEOFF MORRELL: Despite whatever conspiratorial theories, there is nothing to
it.
UNIDENTIFIED: If they are dangerous, if they are too strong, definitely has
a missile in its future.
SEN. RON WYDEN: It’s important to know when the president can kill an
American citizen and when they can’t.
UNIDENTIFIED: [translated] If the Americans do this again, we are ready to
shed our blood fighting them.
MOHAMED QANYARE: When you are fighting the enemy, any option is open. No
mercy. America knows war. They are war masters.
AMY GOODMAN: This is the first time this trailer has been broadcast globally
on television and radio. This is the trailer to Dirty Wars: The World Is a
Battlefield, a new film by Rick Rowley and Jeremy Scahill. The film opens in
theaters in June.
Jeremy Scahill’s book, Dirty Wars, is being published today. Jeremy takes a
deep look at America’s new covert wars operated by the CIA and the Joint
Special Operations Command, or JSOC. From Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia and
beyond, Jeremy shines a light on America’s unregulated and increasingly
unilateral global assassination program. Two central figures in the book are
Anwar al-Awlaki and his Denver-born 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, two
American citizens killed in separate U.S. drone strikes in Yemen in 2011.
Today, an exclusive hour with Jeremy Scahill. I began by asking him to talk
about cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Anwar al-Awlaki was a U.S. citizen who was born in Las
Cruces, New Mexico. His father is quite an extraordinary guy. He, Dr. Nasser
Aulaqi, had come as a very young student to the United States, and he
studied English as a young man in Lawrence, Kansas, and ended up getting a
number of degrees in the United States. In fact, he was the alum of the year
in 2002 at New Mexico State University, where he got one of his degrees.
Very distinguished person in Yemen. And as a young man growing up in—as he
put it, in a country that didn’t have a name yet, growing up in the south of
Yemen, he dreamt of going to the United States, and his dream came true as a
young man.
And so, he was a college student in the United States when his young—when
Anwar was born, in 1971. And he really wanted to raise Anwar as an American.
He viewed America as the—you know, to quote Reagan, sort of a paraphrased
Reagan—the shining city atop the hill. I mean, he really did view it that
way. And I looked at his essays from when he first came to the United
States, and all of the international students wrote essays about, you know,
what it was they wanted to get out of it. And he said that "the
progressivism of America was electric, and I wanted to be a part of that,
and I wanted to take my education and go back to my very poor country and to
make something of my life." And so he started to build this family, and they
lived in Minneapolis. And they showed me pictures of Anwar pointing out
Yemen on the globe in his classroom, and he couldn’t pronounce the teacher’s
name, so he just called her "Mrs. M." And, you know, there were photos of
him at Disney World and—or, Disneyland in California.
And so, you had this family that really wanted to do two things. They wanted
to raise their children in the tradition of the American spirit, but they
also wanted to give back to their country. And when Dr. Nasser Aulaqi got
his engineering degrees, he went back to Yemen and became the minister of
agriculture and engineering in Yemen, and he actually built an entire
faculty at the university. He founded this department, working with USAID
and other U.S. officials to build this school of agricultural engineering.
And his main life’s work has been to deal with the water crisis in Yemen,
because Yemen is running out of water.
So, Anwar moved back with him, went to an international school in Yemen,
where he was studying in both English and Arabic. His English was stronger
than his Arabic, because he had spent the first seven years of his life in
the U.S. So he was in a very international atmosphere. In fact, Anwar Awlaki
went to school with the men who would end up working on the kill program,
from the Yemeni side, to try to hunt him down, with the children of the
country’s dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh. He went to school with some of them.
And so, then later in life, their paths would cross again.
AMY GOODMAN: Didn’t he go to school with Saleh’s son?
JEREMY SCAHILL: He did, yes, and I write about that in the book. And it’s
sort of—you know, Yemen, in a way, is a very small neighborhood and—when
you’re dealing with government ministers. This was a school, actually, that
Nasser al-Aulaqi helped to found in Yemen, this primary school, and it, to
this day, remains one of the top schools in Yemen.
So when Anwar finished high school, he wanted to go to the United States,
and originally he was going to follow in his father’s footsteps, and he was
going to study engineering. And he arrived in the United States and was
detained at the airport when he flew back into the United States, because
there was a discrepancy on his passport. His Yemeni passport said that he
was born in Yemen, and his American passport said that he was born in the
United States—actually, the other way around. His American passport said
that he was born in Yemen. And the reason it did is because a U.S. official
had told Nasser al-Aulaqi, "If you want to get your son a scholarship in the
United States, we should say that he’s born in Yemen, so you can have his
birth certificate reissued in Yemen, and then he can get the travel
documents." So, he ran into trouble because his passport—there were some
discrepancies with his paperwork, so that was sort of his first run-in with
law enforcement. But it was resolved, and he was released, and he ended up
going to school in Colorado.
And this was right at the time when the mujahideen war in Afghanistan—you
know, of course, the United States on the side of the mujahideen fighting
against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan—was sort of coming to an end,
and the 1991 Gulf War was beginning. And Anwar had never been a particularly
religious guy, and he had never been a particularly political guy, but he,
like a lot of people—and, I mean, I remember this myself; I was in high
school when the Gulf War started. It was really the first time that I came
to terms with the fact that these wars happen, and I remember being very
scared myself. And I think that, you know, Anwar, that deeply affected him,
and he saw the destruction of Baghdad the first time around, and started
going to antiwar meetings and was invited to go and speak at a local mosque
about the war and about student organizing. And the imam at that mosque
said, "You know, you have a real gift for speaking," and started to invite
him back. And Anwar, this sort of fire was lit in him, and he decided he
wanted to change course in life and decided to study to become an imam, and
he immersed himself in Islamic scholarship and, in fact, became an imam, and
eventually moved to San Diego and started his family. And his eldest son,
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, was born in 1995. He was actually born in Denver,
Colorado. And the Awlakis started to build a life for themselves, and Anwar
was an imam.
When 9/11 happened, Anwar al-Awlaki was living in Virginia, and he was the
imam at a very large, prominent mosque, the Dar Al-Hijrah religious center
in Falls Church, Virginia. And when 9/11 happened, Awlaki became the go-to
imam for large, powerful corporate media outlets in the United States to
understand the experience of American Muslims in the aftermath of the
attacks. And Awlaki passionately denounced the 9/11 attacks, said the United
States had a right to hunt down those responsible and bring them to justice.
He was someone that was profiled by The Washington Post for a piece that
they did about Ramadan. He was on PBS and NPR and was talking about this,
the feelings of many American Muslims, which is that you hear a president in
George Bush saying it’s a crusade and basically putting a number of Muslim
countries, you know, in the crosshairs around the world, the start of the
rumblings toward the invasion of Iraq, the initial invasion of Afghanistan,
clearly sort of turning into something that was going to be a much
longer-term presence. And Awlaki was affected by all of this. And when the
U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, you saw a real sort of tilt toward a
radicalization in Awlaki.
AMY GOODMAN: We’ll be back with war correspondent Jeremy Scahill on his new
book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: "Freedom," sung by Richie Havens in 1969. He died yesterday at
the age of 72 at his home in New Jersey. This is Democracy Now!,
democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re
continuing our conversation with Jeremy Scahill, author of the new book,
Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, the book coming out today. We return
to Jeremy talking about Anwar al-Awlaki and his time in the United States.
JEREMY SCAHILL: There’s this a whole other part of this story, which is that
Awlaki, at his mosque in San Diego, two of the 9/11 hijackers had been—had
attended services at his mosque, and a third one had also attended services
with one of the other guys at his mosque in Virginia. And the FBI—he was
already on their radar, but they brought Awlaki in a number of times for
questioning, and they basically cleared him and said that he had—you know,
had nothing to do with those guys except knowing them peripherally in his
mosque. But that’s been the source of a lot of—of intense scrutiny in the
aftermath of the attack and everything that happened with Awlaki, because
some people believe that he was directly attached to the 9/11 attacks, which
I think is a preposterous—I mean, it’s nonsensical to think that these guys
would have keyed in Anwar Awlaki to the 9/11 attacks at a time when he was
viewed as a very moderate guy. He endorsed George Bush for president in the
2000 election. In fact, Bush had a lot of support in the Arab-American
community, because many people felt that he would be better than Al Gore on
the issue of Palestine. And so, you know—but Awlaki had had this contact
with these 9/11 hijackers. He also had been busted twice on solicitation of
prostitute charges, and then those were resolved through community service
and probation. But—
AMY GOODMAN: And were they real?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, we don’t know. Awlaki says that they weren’t, that it
was a—that it was a setup. You know, I’ve—
AMY GOODMAN: To try to flip him?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, so what happened is that he gets busted, I think the
first time in '96 in San Diego on a solicitation charge, and then he's
pulled in. And he claimed—Awlaki claimed that the FBI tried to get him to
start informing on people in his mosque and keeping an eye on them and
telling them who was coming in and out of his mosque, and, you know, claimed
that he told them to get lost. There was actually an interesting sort of
development with this whole story, in that Awlaki had repeated interactions
with the FBI. And I talked to a former senior FBI agent who had worked the
Awlaki case, and said he believed that the bureau was trying to flip him or
that they maybe had in fact gotten Awlaki to start doing some informing.
And so, when Awlaki then, years later, leaves the United States, he’s
looking—you know, in terms of his public persona, he’s looking at the
impending invasion of Iraq, he’s looking at Guantánamo starting to grab
headlines around the world and the images that we saw coming out of that,
people being dressed in orange jumpers with hoods on their head, and, you
know, eventually then the Abu Ghraib photos. But he also had this private
battle that he was waging with the FBI. They were really putting pressure on
him to become a full-blown informant.
And so, Awlaki, for a combination of reasons, ends up leaving the United
States, spends a number of years in Britain, is a very prominent figure,
popular at Islamic centers and mosques, and still is preaching a message
that was very much in line, I think, with mainstream antiwar thinking and
also was in line with how a lot of Muslims around the world were feeling
about the—about the increasing global wars. And that’s really when Awlaki
started to end up on the radar of the U.S. counterterrorism community,
because they viewed him as someone who was speaking a language that a lot of
diaspora Muslims, English-speaking Muslims around the world, could relate
to. And they saw him sort of becoming more and more radical.
Awlaki then goes back to Yemen, where his father was living and was at the
university. And his parents build him an apartment for him and his young
family in their compound in Sana’a. And I’ve visited, and I’ve been in the
apartment. It’s sort of a big compound, and the family has—each of the
siblings have their families within this compound. And so, Awlaki was there,
and he wasn’t sure what he was going to do. His dad—and it was sort of
joking, but he’s like, "Anwar had these dreams of getting involved with real
estate." And he always had some, you know, idea of how he was going to make
money, but really he was just trying to—he was a man trying to figure
himself out. And he started preaching at some mosques in Yemen and attended
classes at a university there.
And then, in 2006, he is arrested on trumped-up charges of having intervened
in a tribal dispute in Yemen, and he spends 18 months in prison in Yemen, 17
of them in solitary confinement. And he comes out a totally changed man. And
I get into the book his prison writings. And they would only allow him, you
know, certain books, but he read the book by Michael Scheuer, the former CIA
operative, his writings about bin Laden. He read a lot of Dickens and
was—made comparisons of the U.S. government to various characters in Great
Expectations. And, you know, he did food reviews of the prison food. But
he—you could really see that when came out, he was a changed man.
AMY GOODMAN: And why was he imprisoned?
JEREMY SCAHILL: So, he was—my understanding is that he was arrested
initially on a request from the United States that—and I heard from a former
senior Yemeni official that there was a meeting with John Negroponte, who at
the time was the director of national intelligence, with Bandar Bush, you
know, the Saudi ambassador, then the Saudi ambassador to Washington, one of
the most powerful diplomats in the world.
AMY GOODMAN: Very close to the Bush family.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Very close to the Bush family. And—
AMY GOODMAN: Who, two days after 9/11, was having cigars with President Bush
on the Truman balcony.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Exactly. And, of course, the Saudis run a huge portion of
the U.S. counterterrorism operations to this day in Yemen. I mean, the U.S.
has basically outsourced anything vaguely resembling intelligence in Yemen
to a network of Saudi spies and to Saudi intelligence. I mean, that’s a
whole other fascinating story. But there was this meeting in Washington with
Yemen’s ambassador, Bandar Bush and John Negroponte, where Negroponte said
that they wanted, according to my sources, Awlaki kept in prison for four or
five years so that people would forget about him, because he was starting to
become popular at that time. His books and his speeches were on sale in
airports around the Middle East and also very popular in London and
elsewhere. And they basically just wanted him to go away. And so, he was
kept in prison for 18 months without charge. The United Nations investigated
his imprisonment and declared that it was wrong and that it was an unlawful
imprisonment. And the FBI came to interrogate Awlaki when he was in prison
and, you know, were trying to ask him questions about the 9/11 attacks, and
effectively trying to convince him to shut his mouth.
So, Awlaki comes out of prison and starts a blog, and essentially
becomes—and that’s why people often refer to Awlaki as like the YouTube imam
or the Internet imam. You know, he comes out, and he starts pontificating on
the state of affairs in the world, and he has a vibrant comments section in
his website, and young Muslims around the world are asking him questions
about different interpretations of the Qur’an or the hadiths of the Prophet
Muhammad. And Awlaki becomes this sort of figure on the Internet. And his
mosque was the Internet. And as the U.S. wars intensified, Awlaki’s rhetoric
intensifies.
And really the turning point in this story was in 2009, when Major Nidal
Hasan opened fire at Fort Hood, Texas, on his fellow soldiers. He was an
Army psychiatrist and gunned down more than a dozen of his fellow soldiers
and wounded many, many others. And he, himself, was shot and paralyzed. It
emerged, after Nidal Hasan did this massacre in 2009, that he had been in
email contact with Anwar al-Awlaki.
AMY GOODMAN: In Yemen.
JEREMY SCAHILL: While Awlaki was in Yemen. And so, the story was floated in
the media, and it continues to this day, that Awlaki helped to plan the Fort
Hood shooting. There has never been a shred of evidence produced publicly
that Awlaki had anything to do with the Fort Hood shooting before it
happened.
What we now know, because the emails have been released, the communications
between Awlaki and Nidal Hasan, that Nidal Hasan was sort of a pathetic man
who was writing to Awlaki saying everything from—asking him everything from
questions about the proper conduct of a Muslim in a military—one of them
should have caught the eyes of investigators. He was asking Awlaki,
basically, is it OK to shoot a fellow soldier if you think that they’re
engaged in, you know, crime against Islam, you know, if they’re going to be
going to another country? But he was putting it in the context of Israel and
Palestine, and not sort of directly asking about himself. But he also asked
Awlaki if he could help find him a wife. And then he tried to donate money
to Awlaki and said, "I want to give a prize in your name for the best
essay."
AMY GOODMAN: But as you point out in your book, he actually had interaction
with this man 10 years earlier.
JEREMY SCAHILL: So, Awlaki—so, in one of the emails, Nidal Hasan says, "You
might not remember me, but I met you once at your mosque in Falls Church,
Virginia." And Awlaki didn’t remember him, but it turned out that Nidal
Hasan’s parents were members of Awlaki’s mosque, and they had gone to Awlaki
concerned about their son at one point, that he wasn’t—I don’t want to
mischaracterize it, because I haven’t talked to the Hasan family. But in any
case, they went to Awlaki, and they asked him for some guidance for their
son, and so Awlaki had met him at one point, but it wasn’t—you know, he was
the imam at a big mosque, and this would happen. And Awlaki said that, you
know, he didn’t remember him.
Then, you know, the shooting happened, the discovery of the emails between
Awlaki and Hasan comes out, U.S. intelligence reviewed them, said there was
nothing to indicate that Awlaki had anything to do with it, yet the story
still persisted in the media. Then the shooting happens, and Awlaki writes a
blog post that says Nidal Hasan is a hero, and he praises the Fort Hood
attack and says, "This should be a sort of a model for Muslims in the
military going forward," and essentially calls on other soldiers to do this.
And that’s—he hit the tripwire there when he did that. And then it became a
thing from being concerned about Awlaki’s speech and the idea that he would
radicalize young people to actually praising this killing and calling on
other Muslims in the U.S. military to do the same thing. The U.S.
intelligence then got Awlaki’s blog shut down, and Awlaki started to be
harassed by Yemeni intelligence, and he eventually went to his family’s
province of Shabwa in southern Yemen to basically lay low.
And while Awlaki is there, he has numerous interactions with the U.S.-backed
Yemeni intelligence. The Awlaki family is in communication with the
U.S.-backed Yemeni dictatorship of Ali Abdullah Saleh. And they’re saying to
the Awlaki family, these U.S. proxies in Yemen, "Look, if you don’t get
Anwar to come back to Sana’a, to the capital of Yemen, and we’re going to
put him in prison here, the Americans are going to kill him. They’re going
to kill him with a drone. So you have a choice: He can either live under the
protection of our intelligence services in a prison, and we’ll treat him
nicely until the Americans forget about him, or he can continue doing what
he’s doing, running around in the mountains, and the Americans are going to
kill him with a drone." And they said this years before Awlaki was killed by
a drone. And Anwar’s father, the last time that he talked to him, I believe,
was in May of 2009. He went down to Shabwa, Nasser Aulaqi and his wife, and
they tried to convince Anwar to come back, because they were concerned that
the U.S. government was going to kill him. And their position was: You
haven’t done anything that’s criminal, and if you have, then you should be
able to face the evidence. And Awlaki said to his family, "I will not allow
the Americans to tell me which way to position my butt at night. You know, I
was born free, and I’m going to die free. And I’m not going to allow the
Americans to do this." And he said, "I’m going to continue to do what I
believe is right."
And that was the last conversation that Nasser Aulaqi had with his son,
because in December of 2009, the U.S. started bombing Yemen for the first
time in seven years. Bush had bombed Yemen once. It was a drone bombing in
2002, November, and ended up killing a U.S. citizen in that strike, though
he wasn’t the target of the strike. So the first time that the U.S. did a
targeted strike that killed a U.S. citizen in Yemen that we know of was
under Bush in November of 2002. In December of 2009, President Obama
authorizes a series of missile strikes, not just drone strikes. The most
deadly one that we know of was December 17th, 2009, cruise missile attack on
the Yemeni village of al-Majalah, and it killed 46 people, three dozen of
whom were women and children, which is stunning and horrifying. And we have
video footage in our film of the aftermath of that strike, interviews with
the survivors of when the missile hit. But it was in pursuit of one person
that they said was an al-Qaeda operative, and they wiped out an entire
Bedouin village. And we went there, and the cruise missile parts are still
strewn across the desert. They’re there to this day just rusting out there.
But the U.S. also used—
AMY GOODMAN: How many people were killed?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Forty-six people were killed, and I think 35 or 36 of them
were women and children. And I was leaked the official parliamentary
investigation in Yemen with the names and ages of all of the dead. And I
have it—I have it stained in my head, the images that I’ve seen of the
videos that people I met there had taken on the scene. You know, one tribal
leader, Sheikh Saleh bin Fareed, who’s the head of the Awlak tribe in Yemen,
he went there right after the attack. And he said to me, "If someone had
weak heart, they would collapse, because you saw meat, and you couldn’t tell
if it was goat meat or human meat. And you saw limbs of children." And he,
himself—and he’s this older man—actually found body parts and helped to
bury—try to bury people with dignity. And he’s this incredibly wealthy man
who went there himself and is the main reason why there still is agitation
for justice for the victims of the Majalah bombing, that—because these
tribal leaders have said, "We will not forget what you did to this village
of nobodies, one of the poorest tribes in all of Yemen."
Who knows why the U.S. bombed it? It could have been that the Yemeni
government was under pressure from Obama’s administration, and they said,
"No one will care about these people. Let’s just say this is an al-Qaeda
camp, because it’s in the middle of nowhere. No one is going to care about
them, and no one’s going to go there to investigate." But when we went
there, we saw it. The cluster bombs, these are flying land mines, they’re
banned. And yet the United States continues to use them, and they shred
people into meat. I saw it in Yugoslavia in the '90s, and I've seen it again
now in Yemen.
AMY GOODMAN: So the weapons used were?
JEREMY SCAHILL: The weapons used? They used a Tomahawk cruise missile, and
they used cluster bombs. And the cluster bombs are—they are like flying land
mines. And they drop in these parachutes, and they explode, and they can
shred people. I mean, it’s their—they’re probably the most horrifying weapon
I have ever seen the aftermath of in a war zone.
So, this is the first strike that President Obama authorizes, and it’s
unclear who the real target even was. They claimed it was this one man and
that he was killed. When I talked to people in Yemen, they said, "That guy
is old—that guy is—yeah, he was a mujahideen in Afghanistan, but he had
nothing to do with the leadership."
AMY GOODMAN: Mujahideen, who the U.S. worked with.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Who the U.S. worked with, right. You know, Yemenis went to
Afghanistan in the '80s in huge numbers. And, you know, they have a very
serious fighting spirit, and there were a lot of Yemenis that had gone there
and fought on the same side as the United States. But the point I'm getting
at here is that—so, the Obama administration starts to intensify this
bombing in Yemen. They bomb al-Majalah. And then, seven days later, they—but
remember that the Yemeni government claimed responsibility for the strike,
and Obama’s administration released a statement praising Yemen for this
attack. Yemen doesn’t have cruise missiles. Yemen doesn’t have cluster
bombs.
So, but for, you know, some brave local journalists going there and
photographing it initially, we probably would—never would have been able to
prove that it was a U.S. strike. And we could talk about him later, but
Obama, President Obama, is directly responsible for the first Yemeni
journalist to report on this story, Abdulelah Haider Shaye, continuing to be
in prison. He was arrested after he exposed the Majalah bombing, and he
remains in prison to this day. In fact, the last line in my book is to say
that he’s still in prison, and he should be set free. This was a journalist
that had worked with major U.S. media outlets, broke this huge story that
the U.S. had bombed Yemen for the first time in seven years, using cluster
bombs, and then he ends up in prison on trumped-up terrorism charges, put on
trial in a court that was set up specifically to prosecute journalists, and
then when he was going to be pardoned, President Obama called Ali Abdullah
Saleh and said, "We don’t want him released," and he remains in prison to
this day. So, he was the first journalist to do that. He’s in prison.
Seven days after that bombing, the Yemeni government puts out a press
release saying they’ve conducted these air strikes in Shabwa and Abyan
province and that among the dead is Wuhayshi and Shihri, the two heads of
al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and Anwar al-Awlaki. So the first time
that we know of that the U.S. intended to kill Anwar al-Awlaki was in
December of 2009. This is before we understood that he had actually been
officially put on the kill list. We didn’t find out about that until two
months later. So, this first strike, Yemeni government takes responsibility,
but in fact it was a U.S. strike. Then Awlaki knows that they’re trying to
get him. Drones start appearing all throughout Yemen. There hadn’t been
drone strikes in Yemen since 2002. So drones start appearing over Shabwa and
over Abyan, and people start seeing them, and there’s an intensification of
these attacks.
Then, in January of 2010, a story leaks to The New York — to The Washington
Post that there are a number of U.S. citizens that have been put on the kill
list that’s maintained by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command,
and that among these, most prominently, is Anwar al-Awlaki. And after the
Post published that story, they had to run a correction, because the CIA got
in touch with the Post and said that we don’t have Americans on our kill
list. So then they had to clarify that it was the Joint Special Operations
Command, and then, in fact, there were two separate kill lists. So, once
Awlaki knew that he was a target, he went totally underground and spent the
remaining two years of his life on the run.
And his father, Nasser al-Aulaqi, wrote a letter to President Obama begging
him not to kill his son and saying, "We could—there’s another way to resolve
this. And if there’s evidence that my son is involved with any criminal
activity, make it public." And the head of the Awlak tribe said, "If Anwar
is guilty of anything, we’ll execute him ourselves. But we want to see the
evidence, because we don’t think that the United States has the right to
simply say someone should be given the death penalty without ever giving
them a trial."
And, I mean, they understood something that barely registered a blip on the
radar of the U.S. Congress. When they—when we learned that Awlaki was on the
kill list, Congressman Dennis Kucinich put forward a bill that simply
stated—didn’t even mention Awlaki—that Americans have the right to due
process and that the government does not have a right to execute or
assassinate American citizens without having tried them or presented
evidence. And only six members of Congress signed onto it with Dennis
Kucinich, and no senators, which is interesting because then years later,
Rand Paul does this filibuster, and all these tea party and Republican
people are all up in arms about, you know, "Is President Obama going to hunt
them down and kill them in the United States?" when at the time none of them
ever said—none of them said anything about it. It was basically just Dennis
Kucinich and Ron Paul, who at the time was waging an insurgent campaign for
the Republican nomination for president, that said anything about this. And,
you know, so it’s sort of how times change.
So, Awlaki is on the run, and the U.S., by my count, tried to kill him more
than a dozen times. And I write in the book about one incident in May of
2011 where Awlaki very nearly was killed. He was in Shabwa. He was driving
in a two-car convoy. And the U.S. had drones and other special ops aircraft,
and they were doing this sort of bee swarm on him to try to get him. And
they—there was a misfire, and the drone—the drone missed Awlaki’s vehicle.
And they were driving in a car, in a vehicle that had gasoline canisters,
which is common in a lot of countries where there’s not just gas stations
everywhere you travel. So if it had hit it, it would have just, you know,
blown. So Awlaki and his cohorts believed that they’re being ambushed. They
don’t know that it’s a drone strike. They feel an explosion; they think
someone maybe has launched an RPG at them. So they try to do some evasive
maneuvers. Meanwhile, the U.S. aircraft are circling back around, and they
shoot—they fire another missile, and it misses again. And now there’s this
huge dust up. Awlaki calls for backup.
These two brothers, the Harad brothers, come to the rescue. And
there’s—they’re in the—there’s a chaotic scene. There’s all of this smoke
and clouds. And the Harad brothers get into Awlaki’s truck, Awlaki gets into
their Suzuki, and then they—it’s something like out of—out of like, you
know, some Hollywood movie. They drive in opposite directions away from the
smoke. And I talked to a JSOC planner who saw the after action reports. He
said, "We only had the top-down imagery. It looks like ants. So we didn’t
know." And they had to make a decision which truck to follow. So they follow
the original one, and they blow that one up. But, of course, Awlaki wasn’t
in it, and Awlaki watched his car with the two brothers in it blow up while
he was on a sort of cliff in the mountains. And then he slept overnight
there, and then he made his way to the home of a friend of his. And he said
that night, you know, that he counted 11 missiles, and he said they all
missed their target, but the next one could be a direct hit.
And sure enough, in—on September 30th, 2011, just a few months later, Awlaki
was in Jawf province in the north of Yemen, which was interesting because
the U.S. always was looking for him in the south, and he and another
American, Samir Khan, who is widely believed to have been the editor of
Inspire magazine, the al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula magazine, were
getting into their car and driving, and then the U.S. launched a drone
strike and killed Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan in one strike. And U.S.
officials said that Samir Khan wasn’t a target, but one congressman said it
was a "two-fer," you know, that they got both of them at the same time. And
I talked to the Khan family also, Samir Khan’s family. They’re from North
Carolina, Pakistani Americans. And they said that the FBI had met with them
repeatedly and said that Samir is not—hasn’t committed any crimes. A grand
jury did not return an indictment against him. And they were trying to
encourage the family to get him to come home. So this U.S. citizen, whose
family had been told he hadn’t done anything criminal that they knew of, was
actually killed that day with Anwar al-Awlaki.
AMY GOODMAN: War correspondent Jeremy Scahill on his new book, out today,
Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield. We’ll continue our conversation in a
minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: "Lives in the Balance," sung by Richie Havens, who died on
Monday at the age of 72. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War
and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue our conversation with The
Nation correspondent, Democracy Now! correspondent, premier war
correspondent Jeremy Scahill, author of the new book, Dirty Wars: The World
Is a Battlefield. We turn now to President Obama speaking September 30th,
2011, announcing the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The death of Awlaki is a major blow to al-Qaeda’s
most active operational affiliate. Awlaki was the leader of external
operations for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In that role, he took the
lead in planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans. He
directed the failed attempt to blow up an airplane on Christmas Day in 2009.
He directed the failed attempt to blow up U.S. cargo planes in 2010. And he
repeatedly called on individuals in the United States and around the globe
to kill innocent men, women and children to advance a murderous agenda.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response to President Obama, Jeremy Scahill?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I mean, I think one of the things that we have to
understand about Anwar al-Awlaki is that no evidence was ever presented that
he played an operational role in any of these attacks. I’m not saying that I
know that he didn’t. Maybe he did. But under our legal system, American
citizens should have a right to respond to the evidence presented against
them. And Awlaki was never afforded that. Nidal Hasan is getting a trial.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is in the justice system having, you know,
something resembling a trial. John Walker Lindh was given access to the U.S.
legal system and had—and if he had wanted to not take a plea agreement, he
could have fought the charges against him in court. Anwar al-Awlaki, though,
was sentenced to death by a president who served as judge, jury and
ultimately as executioner, and also prosecutor in public. They litigated
Anwar al-Awlaki’s death penalty case with leaks to the media. They never
gave him a chance to respond to it.
So, I don’t know what his role was in the so-called underwear bomber, the
Abdulmutallab case. I know from my own reporting on the ground in Yemen that
Awlaki had met with [Umar] Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was a very, I think,
deranged young man, this Nigerian who came and tried to bring down this
airliner. But it cuts to the heart of something else interesting: Was Anwar
al-Awlaki a member of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula? He never claimed it
himself. He referred to them as his brothers. And Nasser Aulaqi said, "I
know my son, and if he had been a member of that organization, he would have
said, ’I’m a member of that organization.’" My sense, on the ground, is that
Awlaki was around those circles, that they respected him as someone who was
definitely preaching things that were in sync with their agenda. But when
leaders of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula tried to get Osama bin Laden to
name Awlaki as the head of AQAP, bin Laden basically said, "We need to see
his résumé. He’s untested. I don’t—I mean, I know who this guy is, but I
don’t know anything about him. So, you keep—you’re still the head of the
organization. Don’t try to—don’t try to bring this to me until he’s tested
on the battlefield." So my response to President Obama is, if all of this is
true, what would the harm be in presenting that evidence to the American
people or having presented that evidence to Anwar al-Awlaki? Why—
AMY GOODMAN: That he couldn’t get him.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Why not seek an indictment against him?
AMY GOODMAN: That he couldn’t get him. That would be Obama’s, perhaps, his
response.
JEREMY SCAHILL: But why not seek an indictment against Anwar al-Awlaki, if
he’s guilty of all of these things, and then demand his extradition? And if
Yemen is not going to extradite him, then you could have sent in a team of
Navy SEALs to snatch him. Or you could have, I mean, probably had a much
easier time justifying his killing if you actually had presented evidence
against him. That title that Obama bestowed on Anwar Awlaki, no one—I talked
to—no one had ever heard of that before, that Awlaki was the head of
external operations for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. If Awlaki was
anything within al-Qaeda, he would have been very low-level management. We
in the United States get obsessed with Inspire magazine and Anwar al-Awlaki
because they’re speaking in English, and so we can get scared of their words
because they’re in English. If you read in Arabic what has been produced by
al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and you study who is important in that
organization, Anwar al-Awlaki is a nobody, in terms of the actual
Arabic-speaking jihadist population that is sort of in the circle of AQAP.
He was someone that was convenient because he was preaching in English to a
wider audience.
AMY GOODMAN: You quoted a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst about his
role, about Awlaki’s role.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right, just saying that, you know, he’s mid-level management
and that he—that he doesn’t do—he wouldn’t do anything without them telling
him what to do. He’s not a decider. He’s not making those decisions.
AMY GOODMAN: So, September 30th, 2011, Awlaki is killed in a drone attack
along with another American citizen, Samir Khan.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: Then talk about what happened two weeks later.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. So, around the time a little bit before Anwar Awlaki
and Samir Khan were killed, Awlaki’s son, Abdulrahman, who was living with
his grandparents and his mother in their house in Sana’a, he had just turned
16, and one morning he went into his mother’s purse before anyone had gotten
up, and he took the equivalent of $40 out of her purse and left a small note
saying, you know, "Please forgive me. I miss my father, and I want to go and
try to find him. I’m sorry that I took the money, and I’ll pay it back." And
then he climbed out the kitchen window. And I went into their house and saw
his bedroom, and I saw the kitchen, and I sort of recreated what had
happened. And he jumped out their kitchen window, and the security guard in
their family compound saw him leaving early in the morning and didn’t think
much of it at all. And so he goes to Babel Yemen, in the old city in Sana’a,
and he gets on a bus, and he goes to Shabwa, where he believes his father
is.
AMY GOODMAN: Hasn’t seen him for a few years.
JEREMY SCAHILL: And hasn’t—hadn’t seen him since 2009. And, you know, this
was a kid who was born in Denver, Colorado, and grew up—I mean, I saw these
videos of Anwar teaching his son how to ride a horse and playing at the
beach with him. And, I mean, the Awlakis showed me their family home movies.
And this kid clearly adored his father. And then, you know, his dad becomes
this outlaw and is on the run. And he’s sort of coming of age and decides
that he wants to go and find his father. And so he takes a bus to Shabwa,
where they have family, and was going to wait there and try to connect with
his father.
Anwar al-Awlaki’s mother, Saleha, told me that she was in a panic when she
found out that he had left, because she thought that it was possible that
the CIA was trying to use Abdulrahman to find his father, that they could
have been tracking him via text messages if he had been involved, you know,
with finding his dad or emails and that they were being monitored. In fact,
when we went to the Awlaki home in Sana’a the first time to film with them,
Rick Rowley, the director of the film, couldn’t find an open frequency on
the—on our recording system, because all of the radio waves were being used,
so they’re just being monitored intensely by all sorts of intelligence
agencies. So, you know, I know that every member of that family was being
watched in some way or another by intelligence.
So, Abdulrahman Awlaki goes to Shabwa to wait for his father. And when he’s
there, his father is killed and—nowhere near Shabwa. He’s killed in the
north of Yemen. And then he calls back to speak to his grandparents, and his
grandmother, you know, said, "Abdulrahman, it’s finished. Your father is
dead. You have to come home." And at the time, it was the—you know, the
so-called Arab Spring. These uprisings were happening, and it was happening
in Yemen, too. The roads were all blocked, so he had to stay in Shabwa for a
couple of weeks while he waited for things to calm down so he could safely
travel back to Sana’a, which is a treacherous sort of stretch of territory
where there’s a lot of fighting. And, you know, he’s depressed, and his
family members there are encouraging him to get out and to go out into the
world and do stuff, and so he goes with his teenage cousins to an outdoor
restaurant to eat, and they’re there on the night of October 14th when a
drone appears above them and launches a missile and blows up 16-year-old
Abdulrahman Awlaki and his teenage cousins.
And, you know, Nasser Aulaqi, Anwar’s father, loses his firstborn son, and
then, two weeks later, his eldest grandson is killed. And he said that when
they got the phone call the next day, that their relatives in Shabwa told
them that they—that they couldn’t identify the bodies completely because
they were all shredded and blown up to pieces and that they only could find
part of Abdulrahman’s head. And they knew it was him because he had this
very distinct afro. He had this very large head of hair that his family had
always—his mom and grandparents were saying, "Cut your hair," and he was a
rebellious teenager. And, you know, on his Facebook page, which, you know,
the family gave me all of his Facebook posts, this was a kid who was into
hip-hop music, who had lots of pictures posing as a rapper with his friends,
was into video games; when the revolution was happening in Yemen, would go
to the Change Square to hang out and was a part of the—wanted to be a part
of that change in his country. And he was killed in this drone strike. And
the U.S., to this day, has never publicly said who they were going after in
that drone strike.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s turn to Anwar al-Awlaki’s father, Nasser al-Aulaqi, the
grandfather of Abdulrahman. In this video, made for the ACLU and the Center
for Constitutional Rights, he spoke about the U.S. killing of his
16-year-old grandson, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.
NASSER AL-AULAQI: I want Americans to know about my grandson, that he was
very nice boy. He was very caring boy for his family, for his mother, for
his brothers. He was born in August 1995 in the state of Colorado, city of
Denver. He was raised in America, when he was a child until he was seven
years old. And I never thought that one day this boy, this nice boy, will be
killed by his own government.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Nasser al-Aulaqi, the grandfather of Abdulrahman
al-Awlaki. Jeremy Scahill?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. So, after he was killed, the story that we all know
in the public now is that U.S. officials leaked stories to the press saying
that he was 21 years old. He wasn’t; he had just turned 16, and we have the
birth certificate to prove that. He was born in Colorado in 1995. Then they
said that he had been with Ibrahim al-Banna, who is an Egyptian member of
al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. And the dominant story that’s been
floated is that the U.S. was trying to kill al-Banna and that Abdulrahman
Awlaki just happened to be next to him, which is an incredible coincidence
that this 16-year-old kid, whose father was killed two weeks earlier in a
targeted assassination by the U.S. government, is then killed himself while
in the company of another member of AQAP. The CIA said that al-Banna wasn’t
even on their target list, so opening up the speculation that it was a
unilateral JSOC operation, Joint Special Operations Command operation. When
I spoke to—I spoke to a JSOC guy who was in Yemen at the time working on
that strike, and he wouldn’t tell me any of the details, but he said, "The
guy we were trying to get, we didn’t get." And I said, "Well, what—how did
you feel when you saw that this teenage American citizen had been killed?"
And he goes, "Well, there’s a reason I’m not doing this anymore." And so, we
don’t know who it was. Was Ibrahim al-Banna there? If he was, AQAP says he’s
very much alive, and that it was lies that he was killed, if that’s the
claim.
Then the U.S. said, "Well, it was an outrageous mistake." This is all
anonymous, though. They’ll never—they’ll never talk about it. President
Obama has never been asked about the killing of this teenager. My new
reporting, though, that I did very recently, suggests that there—this was a
great controversy within the White House. I understand from a former senior
official of the administration who worked on this program at the time that
when it became clear that Abdulrahman Awlaki had been killed, that President
Obama was furious and that John Brennan, who at the time was the president’s
homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, the guy running all of these
operations, that Brennan believed or suspected that it was an intentional
hit against Anwar Awlaki’s son, this 16-year-old kid, and ordered a review.
And I asked this former senior official what happened with the review, and
he said, "I don’t know." And then when I got in touch with the White House
recently and I exchanged a series of emails with the National Security
Council spokesperson, she told me that she wouldn’t discuss any of the
specifics about this and said that they’re not going to talk about
operational details or any of the reviews, and then pasted a boilerplate
response about drone strikes into the email.
But then, when I asked this former senior official, "So, if the narrative on
this is that it was a mistake, then why didn’t you say that? Why didn’t you
say, you know, this 16-year-old U.S. citizen was killed as collateral
damage, or, you know, we were intending to get someone else, and we didn’t
do it?" And he said, "Look, we had just killed three U.S. citizens in a
two-week period, two of whom weren’t even targets—Samir Khan and Abdulrahman
al-Awlaki. It doesn’t look good. It’s embarrassing." That’s what this
official said to me. So, what my understanding is now is that they killed
these three U.S. citizens, two of whom weren’t targets, one of whom was a
16-year-old kid whose Facebook page you can look at online and photos you
can look at online and see what kind of a person he was, and the best thing
to come up with is: "We haven’t said anything to his family because it was
embarrassing for us politically." And that says a lot about where we’re at
with these drone strikes.
I also think it’s possible that Abdulrahman Awlaki was killed in what’s
called a signature strike, which, to me, is the most egregious part of the
whole drone program. Because the United States doesn’t have any actual
intelligence on the ground in Yemen, they’ve taken to doing these signature
strikes where they develop a pattern of life, and they say, if people are in
a certain region of Yemen or Pakistan or Somalia—if people are in a certain
region and they’re of military age—they could be anywhere from 15 to 70
years old—and they fit some kind of a pattern of other people we believe to
be terrorists, then they become legitimate targets. So it’s the most
horrific form of pre-crime. They don’t know the identities of the people
that they’re killing. They don’t know whether they’ve been involved with any
activity. They’re killed for who they might be or they might one day become.
And so, for whatever reason Abdulrahman Awlaki was killed that day, the
message that was sent is that the U.S. will operate with impunity in pursuit
of a small number of people, and even U.S. citizens can be killed, with no
explanation as to why, by their own government.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me play the clip of Attorney General Eric Holder, who
offered the Obama administration’s most spirited defense of its policy
authorizing the assassination of U.S. citizens abroad, speaking last March
at Chicago’s Northwestern University.
ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER: It is an unfortunate but undeniable fact that
some of the threats that we face come from a small number of United States
citizens who have decided to commit violent attacks against their own
country from abroad. Based on generations-old legal principles and Supreme
Court decisions handed down during World War II, as well as during this
current conflict, it’s clear that United States citizenship alone does not
make—does not make such individuals immune from being targeted.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Attorney General Eric Holder. Jeremy Scahill?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, I mean, I also—I want to—I mean, we’ve talked a lot
about U.S. citizens, but I also feel it’s necessary to point out that the
vast majority of the people being killed in these operations are not in fact
U.S. citizens, they’re Pakistanis, they’re Yemenis, they’re Somalis and, you
know, others. I mean, I think it’s ironic that you have a president that is
a constitutional law expert and that you have, you know, this attorney
general who was very well respected in the field of law coming forward to
put together the defense of the—a defense of the stripping of the most basic
rights in our Constitution. I mean, the idea that you can simply have one
branch of government unilaterally and in secret declare that an American
citizen should be executed or assassinated without having to present any
evidence whatsoever, to me, is a—we should view that with great sobriety
about the implications for our country. The idea that you don’t give people
the chance to respond to charges against them or to see the evidence against
them should be shocking to all Americans.
When Anwar Awlaki’s father tried to file a lawsuit before his son was
killed, before Anwar Awlaki was killed, challenging the government’s right
to assassinate him, CIA Director Leon Panetta, Defense Secretary Gates,
DNI—Director of National Intelligence James Clapper all submitted briefs to
the court saying that if the evidence was to be made public, it would
threaten the security of the United States, and they hid behind the state
secrets privilege. So their response to a U.S. citizen’s petition to
understand why they were put on the kill list was to say, "We have evidence,
but it’s too secret to—it’s too sensitive to be made public." And that’s
essentially what it’s come down to.
And, you know, I’m a believer in societies being defined by how they treat
the least of their people or their most reprehensible members of their
society. Anwar Awlaki said things that I find utterly despicable and
disgraceful, and I think that there probably would have been grounds to
charge him with some form of a—with some kind of a crime. His lawyers have
never contended he’s an innocent man or he’s this noble figure that should
be held up. He called for the killing of cartoonists who had drawn the
Prophet Muhammad, listed specific names of people. He did things that are
offensive to me and should be offensive to all humans. But that’s not—but
that, itself, is not a death penalty case. You know, you have to look at how
you treat people that you despise and what access do you give them and what
rights do you give them in a society. That defines who you are, just like
when a president is in power who you support, or maybe you voted for, or you
think is a great guy, your principles are tested by where you stand when
they’re doing things or implementing policies that you would have opposed if
the other guy had won. And so, you know, we have a crisis of conscience
right now in our country also, where people are—it’s like, you know,
partisan lemmings just going off the cliff. If McCain had won that election,
there’s no way that you’d see polls—70 percent of liberals supporting drone
strikes. No way. Obama has sold liberals a bill of goods and has convinced
them that this is a smarter, cleaner way to wage wars. And it’s just not.
AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, author of the new book, Dirty Wars: The World
Is a Battlefield. Tomorrow we’ll play highlights from today’s first-ever
Senate drone hearing and air part two of my interview with Jeremy on secret
U.S. operations across the globe, including Somalia and Pakistan.
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Received on Fri Apr 26 2013 - 13:47:04 EDT
