Citizens and people participating in the democratic government and we have the ability can to control the use of these technologies. One of these tests is whether we can safeguard privacy. I agree with that. Effectively i think that if we dont acknowledge the fact that everything that a machine has access to, we have just compromised it. Everyone sees this and they give them a nickel or a penny and they want to pay him to do his work for him and that is what we are doing with our content on the internet. And so he we are trying to build mousetraps versus those that catch our tail at the time. And we will have a much more productive relationship. Please had out there to get the book, thank you so much and we certainly appr youre watching booktv, television for serious redders. Readers. You can watch any program you see here online at booktv. Org. Andrew coburn looks at the rise of drones. During this event he reads transcripts from actual drone strikes and describes the role of the different participants. This is about an hour and contains language that some viewers may find offensive. Im rick mcafternew the publisher of mcarthur, the publish per of harpers magazine, not a waiter on break. [laughter] im delighted to welcome you to a continuing serious series of events sponsored by harpers and is rapidly becoming a neighborhood institution. You will noted that this is note that this is not a chain store or a Citibank Branch which means that we really need your patronage to thrive. And and so far the support of our customers has been remarkable, and were grateful for it. Its my great pleasure tonight to introduce Andrew Coburn who is the author of the justpublished kill chain the rise of the hightech assassins. I like doing this for two reasons. First, as publisher of harpers, im lucky to have annandrew as our andrew as our washington editor with pieces of equality that you simply cant find anywhere else these days. Andrew is a combination of outraged journalist and studious craftsman who never lets his anger get in the way of scrupulous accuracy and wellwritten storytelling what always strikes me about andrews work is the great amount of detail rendered in sentences that enliven rather than weigh down their subject. This talent is very much in evidence in the april issue of harpers magazine in his piece about the history of corruption and, shall we say loan sharking at citibank. Im so proud to be publishing this article that i rushed early copies here that i hope youll buy right after youve bought account quill chain. Kill chain. I cant resist reading a brief passage from this book that i think captures the essence of the story and the deeply disturbing approach to modern warfare practiced by the pentagon and the executive branch. Kill chain, as you may know is an expose of the Remote Control drone and Missile Program that nowadays sucks up such an immense amount of money and thought in washington. But its also a history of the peculiar american obsession with assassination and with system mattized supposedly sanitized military tactics an obsession that works itself out at a dangerous remove from reality on the ground. That this obsession is delusional and selfdefeating should have should have been proven finally by our defeat in vietnam, but it lives on today seemingly stronger than ever. But i couldnt resist this because as reporter to reporter, this is a lot harder to get than you may realize. Andrews describing a meeting between i guess you could call him a kind of internal whistleblower, tom christie who has tested the predator drones and figured out theyre highly inaccurate. In fact overwhelmingly inaccurate, only about 21 hit their targets in their tests nevada. But in nevada. But hes up against the military Industrial Complex in the form of a i forget what her name is its, shes known as the dragon lady of procurement at the pentagon, the Principal Deputy undersecretary of the air force. And she would eventually be sentenced to a nine month prison term for corrupt dealings with the boeing corporation. But on that october morning when she went in to confront christie to complain about this report that hed written about the inaccuracy of the drones, she was still much, very much im quoting now much feared for her commanding role in negotiating prices in multibillion dollar contracts. The pentagon building was still smoking from the devastating impact of American Airlines flight 11 on 9 11 when she marched into christies third floor office with, quote four or five sycophantic generals trailing behind her unquote. Not known for diplomacy she came straight to the point. What the fuck is this, she shouted at the officer director. What do you mean sending out this fucking report saying the predator doesnt work . Who is the fucking asshole that wrote this report . Im going to ream him a new fucking asshole. Unquote. [laughter] that is the votes of the military voice of the military Industrial Complex in the 21st century. Anyway, christie is unfazed. He reports hold on. Have you found anything have you found anything in this report thats wrong . Er no, admitted the official. Couldnt you at least take the bit out about, quote, not operationally suitable, unquote, out of the cover letter . All present were well aware that this was as far as most officials would ever read. Christie gave no ground. The letter and report stood, but it didnt matter. Washington was already entranced by the notion of killing people at a distance. Anyway bravo andrew cockburn. [applause] well, thank you rick. Thanks very much rick. Im bowled over by your very kind introduction, and you must have broken the fourletter barrier on cspan, i think, right now. [laughter] together, we did it. Okay. Im going to go back, im going to start by reading a, what is it part of the book which is a description of an actual drone strike which its the [inaudible] i think youll see because it contains all the communications between the various perpetrators of the drone strike, the pilots in nevada and the people on the ground in afghanistan. So without further ado on a cold february dawn in 2010, two small suvs and a fourdoor pickup truck headed down a dirt road in the mountains of southern afghanistan. They set out soon after midnight traveling across the country to reach the countrys principal paved road. Crammed inside were more than 30 men, women and children four of them younger than 6. Everyone knew one another, for they all came from the same cluster of mountain villages roughly 200 miles southwest of kabul. Many of the men were on their way to iran in hopes of work. Others were shopkeepers heading to the capital to buy supplies. The women carried turkeys gifts for their relatives in kabul. An ethnic majority of shia muslims who the taliban treated with cruelty whenever they had the opportunity. Now theyre in taliban country and, therefore very dangerous for them but they risk the shortcut because they were short on gas. They met no other cars and little foot traffic. The world around them must have seemed empty but it was not. Unbeknownst to them, they were unbeknownst to them they were being watched and their every movement, even the warmth from their bodies, transmitted across the globe. As the ram shack bl vehicles clattered around, people they would never meet conferred across oceans and continents as to who they were, where they were going, what they were carrying and whether they should live or die. Unwittingly, the little group was watching toward a u. S. Special forces patrol dropped in with a supporting force of Afghan Soldiers soon after midnight to attack a nearby village. Such raids were routine in afghanistan, planned and executed by the semimythic special Operations Command that specializes in the pursuit and elimination of high value targets. Someone thought this operation important enough to give it the code name operation noble justice. Sunday february 21 4 12 a. M. Mqi predator time eyes on the first vehicle. Observed to try and pid on tracks in the open. Stand by for movement on the second. The 27footlong predator drone was circling at 14,000 feet. Below its belly it cared a carried a variety of cameras. Almost in an instant but not quite, the images flashed across the world to twin screens inside a metal box roughly the size of a shipping container in the nevada desert. Facing the screen sat kirk 97 a pilot guiding the drone by Remote Control. Beside him sat a sensor operator who guided the cameras and weaponstargeting laser. In another room sat the Mission Intelligence coordinator who was watching the same video images. The pictures had audiences elsewhere, Florida Panhandle is headquarters for special Operations Command and home to one station of the vast but little known Global Network referred to as the distributed Common Ground system, dcgs. This is the Central Nervous system of drone warfare, sharing quantities of imagery and electronic information collect by reconnaissance planes around the globe. In theory, anyone in any part of the system has access to any information thats been fed into the system wherever they are. Thus it was that the images captured by the predator were being watched by a dedicated team a mini bureaucracy of young men and women, each with specialized task. An overall charge was supervising two screeners. The chief screener, civilian on contract from a major Defense Corporation heavily involved in Drone Operations, outranked a Junior Air Force officer who happened to be her husband. Also present were two fullmotion video analysts. While one watched the screen, the ore typed products other typed products conclusions drawn from the imagery then pass today the screeners to the Mission Intelligence coordinator sitting in his trailer in nevada. Another analyst generating relevant geographical information made up the complement. The ultimate beneficiary of these complex arrangements were the joint internal track controller, responsible for communicating by radio with any and all air support and relaying orders and intelligence to and from the young captain commanding the party. Calling himself jaguar 25, the sergeant was the forces only link with the team in nevada which in turn was the sole link with screeners in florida. Almost as soon as the Raiding Party disembarked from their helicopters shortly after midnight, someone out in the darkness had switched on a hand held radio. They are here, he said. Let us get all the mujahideen together and defend this place. It was a simple uncomplicated ex40ation, awed exhortation. Americans listening in were bemused by their enemys concern for eavesdropping and indeed the taliban summons was overheard by a number of posts on the ground and in the air. Accordingly, the word was passed to look out for enemy reinforcements. Two vehicles in tandem, the pickup and suv easily fit that picture, and suspicions hardened when they and another suv flashed lights at each other. 4 15 a. M. Mission intelligence coordinator see if you can zoom in on that guy because hes like pilot what did he just leave there . Is that a fucking rifle . Sensor operator maybe just a warm spot from where hes been sitting. Pilot i was hoping we could make out a r50eu6. Sensor the only way i see a rifle is if theyre moving them around slinging them across their shoulders. Drone operators are are not in immediate contact with the real world literally so. A reference to the time it takes for information to make its way from the drone to a satellite 22,000 miles up in space down again to a ground station in germany, switching to a fiber optic cable through which it travels across western europe, the Atlantic Ocean and the continental United States before reaching nevada and the screen in the pilots trailer. As the electronic pulses have split, reunited and buffered into packages pending their dispatch to the next weigh station, microsecond delays steadily accumulate. The screen on the pilots screen is out of date usually two seconds, but sometimes as much as five seconds. As the crew reacting to what theyre reacting to what theyre seeing, that signal in turn takes 25 seconds to deliver. This time lapse is why drone takeoffs and landings must be handled by a special team of pilots stationed closes to the runway so they can see the planes flying in real time. Potential targets on the ground are aware of the delay. Yemeni members of alqaeda reported in 2011 that when they hear a drone overhead, they move around as fast as possible. Nor do the pictures themselves necessarily always bear close resemblance to the world as the rest of us see it, no better at look than looking at google earth through a straw as one veteran told me. For most of the time the convoy was under watch the sensor could only focus on two of the three vehicles at a time. If the operator zoomed out slightly, the resolution was lost. Imagery became less precise. The drone was too high, and both infrared and daylight cameras lose efficiency. When the sensor operator could not focus properly. The video received on the ground was even poorer, described as crap, full of static and crackling. 4 24 a. M. , jaguar 25 what were looking for is a Quick Reaction force. We believe we may have a highlevel taliban commander. Pilot wouldnt surprise me if this is one of their important guys, just watching from a distance, you know what i mean . Then came an unwelcome message from florida. 4 37 a. M. Mission intelligence coordinator screener said at least one child near suv. Sensor bullshit, where . Send me a fucking still. I dont think they have kids at this hour. I know theyre shady but come on. Pilot at least one child, really . Listing him as a mam militaryage male. That means hes guilty. Sensor well maybe a teenager, but i havent seen anything that looks that short. Granted, theyre all grouped together but Mission Intelligence coordinator theyre reviewing. Pilot yeah resaw that shit. Why didnt he say possible child . Why are they so quick to call fucking kids . Just as the sun rose above the mountains, many of the passengers got out. To the watchers, the pictures revealed something ominous. 5 10 a. M. , pilot theyre praying. Sensor this is definitely it. This is their force. Praying . I mean, seriously thats what they do. Mission intelligence coordinator theyre going to do something nefarious. All the adults in the party including the women got out when the convoy stopped at the river. But to the camera high above the men and women were merely indistinguishable blobs. Since the party was taliban enforcements, no one thought to ponder their gender. An hour later the vehicles, which had been heading south toward the american ground unit turned off in a different direction. This led them, ultimately 12 miles away from the americans on the ground, an indication that whoever they were, they most likely had no hostile intelligent. Nevertheless, the predator pilot assessed this as a flanking maneuver cotut off their escape cut off theirs calm route. Pilot cant wait until actually happens. Though far removed from the scene of the action drone crews see themselves in the same tradition as the Fighter Pilots of an early age down to the flight students they wear to work the combat stress, not to mention the pay theyve commanded. Their chatter echoed that of combat crews flying through a battle zone for real. They were on the ground 7. 5 thousand miles away. 7 1 a. M. sir would you mind if i took a bathroom break real quick . Pilot no, not at all. The crews spoke a language almost incomprehensible to outsiders, plain establish was often supplanted, but that nights conversation showed that the military jargon imposed another layer between them and the reality on the ground. Any man militaryage male became enemy fighter and, therefore, a legitimate target. Positive identification, pid, is an official u. S. Military term for someone positively identified as an immediate hostile threat and therefore a he jet mate legitimate target. The term meant entirely Different Things to different people. 7 38 a. M. Pilot our screeners are currently calling 21 mams, no females and two possible children. Jaguar 25 roger. And when we say children, are we talking teenagers or toddlers . Sensor i would say about 12. Something more towards adolescents or betweens. Pilot yeah, adolescents. 7 40 a. M. , pilot our screener identified one adolescent, so thats one doubledigit age range. Jaguar 25 well pass that on the ground to the ground force commander. Like i said, 12 to 13 years old with a weapon is just as dangerous. Sensor oh, we agree. Pilot we understand and agree. 8 35 a. M. Pilot all right the plan is were going to watch this thing go down, and when they run out of ammunition thats some helicopters that are also unattended, we can play cleanup. Sensor follow the largest group. Pilot yeah, sounds good. When it all comes down, if everybodys running in a separate direction, i dont care if you just follow one guy, you know . Like whatever you decide to do im with you on it so long as you keep somebody that we can shoot in the field of view, im happy. The first missile from the lead helicopter who scored a direct hit on the pickup killing instantly killing 11 passengerrings. The two following suvs jerked to a halt, and the passengers began frantically to scramble out. The second missile hit their rear vehicle in the engine block. Four died immediately. A third missile missed the middle suv with the blast blowing out the rearview mirror. As a matter of routine the attackers pursued those squirters their word for people fleeing a strike with 2. 75 inch rockets, though all of these missed. Then someone noticed something strange. The people who escaped were not running. 8 52 a. M. Sensor thats weird. Pilot cant tell what the fuck theyre doing. Safety observer are they wearing burkas . Sensor thats what it looks like. Pilot they were all pidd as males, no females in the group. Sensor that guy looks like hes wearing jewelry but he aint a girl. Despite the sensor operators hopeful theory, these were not taliban in drag, but women who had scrambled out and were waving their scarves at the helicopters. 23 people had been killed including two boys, one 3 and one 4. Eight men, one woman and three children ages between 5 and 14, were wounded many of them severely. 9 10 a. M. Mission intelligence coordinator screener said there werent any women earlier. Sensor what are these . They were in the middle vehicle. Mission intelligence coordinator women and children. The conversation in the nevada trailer was losing its previously jaunting term as mams became mothers and adolescents turned back into children. 9 15 a. M. Pilot it looks like one of those in the bright garb may be carrying a child as well. Sensor younger than an adolescent to me. Safety observer well, no way to tell man. Sensor no way to tell from here. So just going to move on to, actually that same, following year describing a dinner at the finish its an annual dinner held by the Cia Officers Memorial Foundation which raises money to support the families of those who have died in action. And thats a big jamboree attended by, well, as youll see, a lot of Defense Corporations. Who pay for tables and so forth. Decades earlier Richard Helms the cia director for whom the event was named, would have customarily referred to the defense contractors who pressured him to spend his budget on their wares as those bastards. Such disdain was now long gone as demonstrated by the corporate sponsorship of the tables jammed into the grand ballroom that evening. The executives were there to rub shoulders with old friends and current partners. It was totally garish one attendee told me afterward. Seems like every arms manufacturer in the country had taken a table. Everyone was doing business right and left. In the decades since 9 11, the cia have been regularly blighted by scandal. Revelations of torture renditions, secret black site prisons, bonus intelligence ignored signs of the 9 11 attacks, but such unwholesome realities saw no echo in the gathering. Even george tenet, the director who had presided over all of the aforementioned scandals, was greeted by heart felt affections as he along with almost every orr living cia direct canner stood to be introduced by john mclachlin, a former Deputy Director himself deeply complicit in the iraq fiasco. Each, with the exception of Stanfield Turner still bitterly resented received ringing applause but none more than former cia director and thencurrent secretary of defense robert m. Gates. Although gates had left the cia early 18 years before, he was very much the father figure of the institution and a mentor to the intelligence chief active and retired, who cheered him so fervently that night at the ritz carlton. He had climbed through the ranks with a ruthless determination all too earth to those around him. Ray mcgovern his supervisor in his first agency post as an analyst for the intelligence directorates foreign soviet policy branch, recalls writing an efficiency report that the young mans quote, evident and allconsuming ambition is a disruptive influence in the branch. Brennan spent the next three years heading the analysis corporation, an obscure intelligence contractor engaged in preparing terrorist watch lists for the government, paid 753,000 in 2008 alone. Among the useful relationships he had cultivated was well connected democrat anthony lake a former National Security adviser to bill clinton who recommended him to president ial candidate barack obama. Meeting for the first time after obamas election victory the pair bonded immediately with obama finishing brennans sentences by one account. Among their points of whole hearted agreement was merit of a surgical approach to terrorist threats, the need to target quote, the metastasizing disease without destroying the surrounding tissue, as brennan put it, for which drones and hellfire missiles seemed the ideal tools. Obama was initially balked to make brennan cia director because of his association with the agencys torture program. So instead the new president made him his assistant to counterterrorism with an office down the hall from the oval office. Two years into the administration, everyone in the ritz carlton ballroom knew that the bulky irishman was the custodian of the president s kill list on which the chief executive and former constitutional law professor insisted on reserving the last word. Making his final selections for execution as regularly scheduled tuesday afternoon meetings. You know, our president has his brutal side, a cia source cognizant of obamas involvement observed to me at the time. Now, along with the other 600 diners at the helms dinner, brennan listened attentively as gates rose to accept the award for Exemplary Service to the Central Intelligence agency. After paying due tribute to his pride of being part of a the cia family gates spoke movingly of a tragic incidence of cia sacrifice, the seven men and women killed in afghanistan in 2009. All present bowed their head in silent tribute. Gates then moved on to a more upbeat topic. When first he arrived at the pentagon in 2007, he said he had found deeprooted resistance to new technology among quote fly boys with silk scarves still wedded to venerable traditions of fighter plane combat. But all that he said, had changed. Factories were working night and day, night and day to turn out the vital weapons for the fight against terrorism. So from now on he concluded, his voice rising, the watch word is drones, baby, drones. [laughter] the applause was long and loud. So, what you consider a civilian. In their eyes, a 13yearold child is not a civilian. Its a military age male and one deserving death. Im sure its a horrible embarrassment when they kill children but since the speech, in yemen theyve called unquestionably killed civilians. In pakistan, as well, im not into sure about that but in pakistan they dont really know. In because of the nature of Pashtun Society with women and girls, infants girl babies, kept away and the neighbors dont know their names or know how many there are there. You couldnt know how many people you killed. So basically a protestation that obama im sure if you put a Lie Detector Test on him he hates the idea of killing civil alleyoops. But the fact is with a this warfare dependent on the intelligence they do it on, which is almost wholly electric electronic maybe a little input from questionable sources and partial sources, its inevitable youre going to kill civilians whatever obama says. Anyone else . Is there any data that shows theres more killing of civilians using drones than there is conventional methods . Theres some spectacular ones which have been done by like in 2009, for instance, a b1 bomber bombed what they felt absolutely assured was a taliban concentration in afghanistan and killed somewhere between 80 and 120 civilians in one go. I should say you know, although we people particularly fascinated by drones. In a way those theres a very narrow line between drones, which operate by Remote Control by someone sitting half a world away and, for instance, b1 bomber. The operator there is a person who presses the button and aims the weapon. He is sitting in a metal box inside the plane looking at a billiard screen. So maybe the signal gets quicker. But not a huge amount of difference. The same distance, one removed from reality. Where they to answer your question, i think just because the nature of the weapons being dropped, a manned bomber can kill more people at one go. The thing is, about drones, is apart from the people they actually kill, its the whole effect on a society because of their omnipresence in yemen and other places you can hear them all the time i should say in gaza too. The constant buzzing. So seems to have a much more privatizing effect on the society because they know at any moment a missile could come out of the sky and blow people away. Thats why children in pakistan and northwest frontier, you know not to play when its a sunny day because the drones have good visibility. They play when its cloudy. That why people dont gather for they used to in that society as a main gathering be for weddings and funerals. People are scared of going to those now because many of those have been hit. Funerals are particularly popular target for drone strikes. So if you added up the numbers its hard to tell. Because so many cases civilians i did a story a couple years ago about a strike on from a b1 on a far compound in afghanistan, where the planes were initially dispatched with two pilots and two fighter planes. They looked because theyre equipped to look at the ground. They said this is an innocent family. Its a farm family taking in the animals at night. The b1 up above they refused to bomb and said, were going home. A b1 up above said were happy to do it, and they dropped the bombs, and blew away seven people the parents and five children. But that was classified as a successful operation. Actually the classified record was actually stolen, disappeared from the files because they were embarrassed about it. But initially questioned, they said weve blown away seven terrorists. So its a difficult thing to assess. Bombs, yes do have killed more people in one go, but its the steady insidiousness of the drip drip, drip, of the drones, that is more horrifying in a way. Anyone else . A followup question . Go ahead. Seems to me that the inincity gators the white house obama theyre still removed from the action and i wonder if you feel theyre more removed they sense themselves more distant and more capable of this kind of directing these kind of killings because of their drone strikes because for me, and i think for most of news the public, were so far removed from the violence so far removed from recognizing he have veterans and soldiers among us who we have asked to do these things on the ground. Perhaps obama and the cias mind there isnt that much more difference because theyre drones. Theres still a great deal of distance between the conceptual killing that theyre doing whether theyre sending troops to do it by handtohand combat, or their distance is drones. I think the insidious thing that happened, very much thanks to the drones, they think theyre in touch. Obama the famous picture of the night of the Osama Bin Laden raid theyre all all the white house staff you think they took the afternoon off to watch the watch the enemy being killed. So theyre all watching the video. So they all we know it was taken from a couldnt have ban very great picture but taken from a particular stealth drone high above the area, and they all so they feel theyre in real time. Theyre watching it on live tv and thats happening more and more not just for the president but for the senior commanders. It gives them the illusion of being close to the action in a way that they felt they might not have had if they just sent troops or were relying on written reports. Fourstar generals can now play platoon leaders in a firefight. Theyre in direct control they think. But of course, for all sorts of reasons, including those which i talked about when i was reading theyre not in contact. Gives you an entirely false picture. First of all its out of date because of lite ten already late ten si and the picture is blurry and theres no context. So i think the insidious thing that generals increasing distancing from reality from the real picture. As exemplified by that strike on the farm house i was just talking about where the people who could see the ground said, theres nothing there and the people who couldnt, blew away the family. The think its happening on an ever larger scale. Obama thinks this weird thing he think if he has a book with the pictures of that week, people recommend for death that is prepared by a huge bureaucracy, and he goes through the pictures and says, no, him seems to say him him not him. And he thinks he is controlling the whole thing then. The fact its all been fed to him. Its quite interesting the intelligence people have given them they roped him in, so he is culpable. He is involved. So a longwined answer but that to me is one of the most basic points of what is wrong with what is going on. This illusion of contact. Anybody in congress trying to do anything about this . Sure. Yes, they are. Theres not enough of them. Generally very popular in congress. Some them not as eloquent denouncers of this is rand paul. Who actually made the most eloquent statement when it came out that they released the legal extremely squishy legal opinion on which they give themselves permission to kill an american citizen. Rand both of congress, most of washington, sat very quiet for this. Absolutely outrageous they had some tame lawyer, who they accidentally made a federal judge, run up an opinion saying its absolutely okay, and it was cobbled together opinion took a bit the israeli the legal justification the israelis have for blowing people away which they do in quantity, that what slapped in. And rand paul came out with a very eloquent statement saying this is completely outrageous. The president of the United States has the power given himself the power to kill anyone he wants anytime. Which is not there are a few others barbara michaels, barbara lee sorry Congress Woman from berkeley, the only member of congress to vote against the original authorization for the use of military force on which all these wars have been based. So congress has somewhat redeemed the reputation of congress but you meet a friend of us, a liberal senator on the intelligent committee, love the drone program. Its so clean and precise. It gives the liberals a letter. At least were not carpetbombing them. Thats really the situation. Sort of keep core point of my book is the whole notion that assassinating people, picking off top leaders is really the way to gain victory and a laudible thing to do. And a lot of people said, well, maybe thats not true, and but until now i dont think anyone produced a printed explanation how we know thats not true. Actually been an empirical study done someone did one about israeli strikes the data wasnt as hard. But this is a study done in iraq by actually someone i know, a very interesting analyst named rex rivalo, former Fighter Pilot attached to a security cell in iraq and he started to investigate this policy or the strategy of based on which the whole war was based picking off enemy leaders and this comes after a passage where im talking about the completely other ineffective technological fixes they tried to find for ieds for homemade bombs. So one story about no mitch staking who controlled the principle strategy for defeating the ied. Most of the equipment around the base was pretty beat up, according to one of those tens of thousands of americans who passed through its heavily guarded gates. The Head Military hawks camp victory, during the years of the occupation. One single story however close to odiernos office was different. You walked in there and everything was brand new remembers a visitor the most up to date Computers Big servers big plasma screens on the walls. You can tell it had priority. This is the home of the high valued targeting cell, a counterpart to the cell in the pentagon that attract saddam. Here analysts tracked individuals on nsa manhunt lists ands combed through units around iraq for sightings of wanted men to be added to the list, a master list of targets for elimination. All around iraq and afghanistan every unit had its own list as high value targets. Each death or capture dutifully reported in the situation report. For example may 5, 2006 report on a shooting, spotted from a u. S. Army observation post and then shot as he tried to escape by car was smazed at 8 10, three 187 op engaged and killed an hdr and a long list of code words. So the high value target industry, the benefits of hitting down the leaders of the ied network appeared selfevident. Like assassinating hitler. Since the elimination of formerly critical nodes such as saddam and played little different depend, the list is always expanding. And rivalo began to look for data that would reveal whether or not the strategy worked. He found it in the reports. With full access to the database, he distracted the records of 200 cases in which highvalued targets had been killed or captured between june and october 2007. Then he went through the records again to see what happened to the neighborhood where each leader operated. This is the crucial question. Had his elimination made a difference in the fight against the insurgents . He counts the number of ied attacks against american in the 30 days following each death or arrest within a given distance and compared it to the number in the 30 days before the death or arrest as a percentage of change. Repeating this procedure for different distances he plotted the results on one axis of the graph and the distance on another. When complete, the graph delivered a simple unequivocal message. The strategy was indeed making a difference but not the one intended. Hitting hvis did not reduce attacks and save american lives. I increased them. Each killing quickly appropriate mayhem within three kill almoster to of the targets base of operation attacks shot up by 40 . Within a radius of five kilometers a typical area of operations, it was still up 20 . Summarizing his finding for odierno he added a punch line. Conclusionment. Hbi strategy in iraq is counterproductive and needs to to be reevaluated. How could the removal of from the scene of ringleaders with attacks on americans generate such a counterintuitive result . Just as the field officers are told during the 2005 trip, dead leaders were invariably replaced quickly, usually within 24 hours or within 48. For a variety of reasons new commanders were eager to press the fight harder. Often they would be relatives of the dead man and hot for revenge. In addition, having just succeeded to the command they would feel the need prove themselves especially if the late leaders energies had been faltering due to battle fatigue or other interest, highlighting the need for a new brew. Always more deadly. A week after submitting his finding he asked odierno if he read the study . Yes, he said, theres a limit to what i can do. Bureaucratic policies superseded empirical truth. Sir . Nonmilitary non a nonmilitary, noninternational question. If you think back years ago people worried about the proliferation of handguns. Now people on the streets have ak47s and automatic weapons and all kinds of things. And i already read that drones are being used they talk about delivering packages, about farmers using them, about photographers using them. Will we in the near future, soon have drones being used by, lets say, hit professional hitmen, by various drug groups or fighting against each other . Is that going to be the inevitable result of all this . Well, its possible. Theres been efforts to smuggle drugs across the mexican border, although it towns out they keep crashing. Drones are kind of unreliable. So the border area between u. S. Mexico and the u. S. Is apparently littered with help yourself some kris school neglect crystal meth. We have the case the other day of a drunk Intelligence Agency who decides to fly his friends drone at 3 00 a. M. And flew it over the white house and then crashed into a tree. So its this is all made possible by gps which is the essential thing that makes drone warfare possible, and the technology really isnt even that is sew take. Esoteric. Its going to happen. People worry about other countries mounting drone attacks on us. A least for the moment i dont think any other country has the kind of global command and control system we have built up at staggering cost, that unless enables them to run Drone Operations on the other side of the world which is very complicated business and extremely expensive. So i think theres lots of other things to worry about in the meantime. I just started reading your book and its very, very illuminating and interesting. I had two questions actually, unrelated. The first one is, im wondering i wanted to get a sharper sense of your critique. Seems there are two critiques that one can make around drones. One critique is the one about technological failure. The one that says, they actually cant see as clearly as they claim. Theyre killing too many civilians, et cetera. Thats a critique that can we need more transparency, more accountability, and that is a critique that can sit very comfortably within the american empire to make an empire more efficient. Right . And so the other critique is one that is more about immoral political principle which is lets assume these things work at top form. Lets assume that they can actually see quite well, and they dont kill civilians. Does the United States does the is it okay, then, for drones to be used . It seems to me like we tend to not question the sort of politics of the issue and the reason i ask that question is because i have spoken with survivors of these eye tacks and when ive spoken with them, theyre not talking about accountability and transparency. Theyre talking about wanting these attacks to end and querying the logic by which the u. S. Allows itself to give itself the right to attack. So im wondering if you can talk about where you place yourself in that. The thing is, you have to ask yourself they do work a lot of the time. I dont want to make im not trying to say theyre always failing and falling out of the sky. You have to ask why it is we pursue why it was when the think that rick read when you were read about the reports said that this thing is a technological bust, fails all the time and yet the air force chief official was very angry that the test was reported. Its all about money. People make a huge amount of money out of this, and that is why you get a very faulty system like this with all sorts of drawbacks, gets feeled. Ill give you one quick example of the imperative. The drone lobby got the congress to tell the Border Patrol to buy made them put in appropriations for them to buy six reaper drones, which they so they duly flew them and they detected lots Something Like 5,000 illegal border crosses many including drug mules. Then some subversive person, some sub very sis official, in a regular plane and equipped it with a simple inpractice redskin and telescope and flew that on the same route for the same amount of time and that caught 50 more illegal border crossings, whereas the drones each capture had cost, if you broke it down, 7,000. The cessnas captures cost 230. So whereupon the inevitable result which is that no cessna was ever used again and congress immediately orderedded the Border Patrol to buy more drones. So you have to think about what really drives all this and why the decisions that get made, get made that way. Lets assume that it worked. Okay. Enough assumed works. Then is it okay . No. It does work a lot of the time, and as we can see the results are not kind of interesting. That last bit i read showed talked about the whole idea of highvalue targeting. Those are hundreds of Successful Missions where theyve taken out mr. Big here and there. And what is the result . Not victory. We have this has been our principle weapon, occasional dips into other programs but its been our principal weapon in these wars on terror. So the result has been, in 2001 al qaeda were a bunch of roughans living mostly hiding in caves, in afghanistan the famous video which was used to scare us all showing al qaeda training. And pact when al qaeda made that video, they had so few people they had to rent a neighboring tribe to play terrorists. Now we have mr. Albaghdadi presiding over an area the size of texas with millions of inhabitants and recruits, thousands of recruits streaming in every week, and with Branch Operations as well. You can sea thats a result of the successful drone and other things we have done. So theres that. And the other win when it works, drones you can hear all the time in the air above the areas in yemen or the south of yemen. Somalia gaza. Theyre all working. Thats all going fine. But the results as i said, is traumatizing and huge whatever possibility you had of reconciling the inhabitants diminishes sharply. Do you identify a turning point here . Until about 2007, the air force chiefs werent wild about drones at all. When gates became secretary of defense he wanted to order more drones because every ground commander in iraq was saying, need more drones, theyre just for reconnaissance and the air force chief of staff didnt buy them. They wouldnt deploy them. The chief of staff and were fired beau they were resistant on getting drones. The cover story was the Nuclear Accident but thats awful it was thats all it was. But was it a kind of a generational thing, a new kind of air force officer coming along . The air force chief of staff was replaced be the goo wood lan about the commander of transportation command dealing with special forces. Was that it or what was going on