Thank you. Thank you for your talk. It was very informative. Im curious ive always been interested in a lost cause art. Things like the famous last parting of the end of jackson. But once upon a time in the paintings and also Stonewall Jackson got many homes now what we say that i grew up in petersburg and in petersburg it was like they were still on the other side of the river waiting to attack. As if so that was different, but many people in nice homes had a sort of somber reminder of their confederate heritage. But, you know i never saw any confederate flags in the homes so im curious where you would put them in the whole panoply of lost cause art. There are a lot of lost closeparen in that battle flag. Its a good time now to make sure that i do not leave the impression that other confederate flags were forgotten but certainly the battle flag became the primary flag even in a lost cause art. Usually the first, second and third down together. What i alluded to earlier in the this use of the flags between 1865 and 1938 was sent as president today as it is today. People didnt fly from the home as a rule. I have a chapter dealing and analyzing those before world war ii. But youre quite right im not surprised to hear you say that because it corroborates with what i was finding if of common uses among people that read here the flag and the confederacy today for whatever reason, availability to some degree but as well the values were different as we get further from the confederacy and the confederate generation and they were still walking the earth in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. It was something of a taboo in the ways that were not clearly reverential in the memorial of those men and having it fly in over your home if you were in a bastion of the outpost of the confederacy simply was not appropriate and i havent been able to quite determine how that was enforced but it seems to have been very true. Time for other questions. Thank you for coming out today. [applause] former producer for the bbc talks about americas use of drones in yemen, pakistan and somalia and reaction its caused. He says the targeted groups in the countries are figuring out ways to protect themselves from attacks and working on making their own drones. We changed our name and gave people many. Its wonderful that youve come here for this great events. Event. We are excited to have chris come and present his new book sudden justice, which i think is going to be probably the book for people who are interested in this important subject and of course, the book tour coincides with the very interesting moment in the tragic death and other recent revelations about the program that have come out in the last couple of weeks. Chris is a former senior producer at the bbc. He also ran the Drone Program in the Investigative Journalism which did anything work on the subject and hes going to talk about some of the themes and stories in his book and then we will open up to discussion. Thank you very much for coming today. And its actually, for me it is a pleasure to be here with new america. I focused heavily on drones almost five years ago now. To recognize that there was an issue until it was the floods in pakistan in 2010 for those that remember. They were using it for the drone it is the first time that i thought there was something significant going on. And they were already getting that number. It was already admonishing what would happen in the shrike and we were getting the sense that they had escalated phenomenally into something quite significant was happening. I thought today i would talk about transparency because that is the debate so often. We also know what has been going on on a regular battlefield and that is something we treated them in the book is talk about how theyve changed the conventional warfare as well and i think that its a big part of the picture we have been missing. Hopefully there is a former drone pilot in the audience today and if he could please raise his hand but im hoping one of the contributors will come along today and be able to get a few insights into some of this stuff. You could argue it doesnt get more transparent than standing up and owning the responsibilities and clearly in error. President obama took that its moments like that moments of the direct accountability are put out and its about two years now since john brennan joined the hearings to go in and he said he wanted to publish the details and unfortunately the work but america does trying to understand who has been killed and how in the places like pakistan and yemen. He was the acting director between David Petraeus and john brennan and he used the term scoff when he was talking about the work of people like organizations in new america in trying to understand the number of civilians killed. The Public Record has critical list. It is actually much lower. But the Agency Officials will routinely mocks those acting in good faith trying to understand and present the public stepping up and saying what actually happened and accounting for some of those that have happened over the years of. This single event accounts for around a fifth of all of the casualties reported by the cia in pakistan and the just one of them the United States insisted no more than 60 died in pakistan and the decade of the covert bombing. The refusal to confirm may represent the highest in the entire covert drone war that illustrates the problems associated in the secret civilian Intelligence Service having been given command of the war. The un investigated that they would like this creates a situation of huge with all the while at the same time an impossibility to achieve accountability. The headmaster was also a leader of the Islamist Organization founded in 1992 and a band for banned for extremism and decade later that move led to the Armed Conflict in the state but by august of 2006 paper offering a peace deal. It required they not only target the pakistani troops but the thousands of fighters in the insurgency in afghanistan. I do want her detail. Hell miss all three adults during the visit. It was a seminary. He was woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of the huge explosion. I couldnt really believe my eyes. There were many but not a single complete body. Everything was shattered. Survivors and villages helped gather up the body parts into the depths told stood but most of the reportedly children 70 and under. They had been at did two takes part. Up until this particular strike the cia as we know from what was actually had in the agreement with the Pakistan Army would step up and give cover for the operation. This event which the position remained was the work of the cia broke that arrangement and they refuse to give cover. If we think about the massacres that happened about six months ago i think 135 schoolkids committed huge impact that had on the culture and society we saw the restoration of the Death Penalty and we saw them executed over the importance of terror and the huge upset. We can kind of imagine the impact that it would have had in 2006 not only had they bombed the school and killed the cia and the u. S. Government had has spent the last nine years denying that he read what impact would that have on the relations and what impact would that have on radicalizing the programs in the trailer area and on the insurgency across the border in afghanistan and that would be the recruitment tool. They never answered the question of whether it carried out but i did get the opportunity to a former highranking u. S. Intelligence official with direct knowledge of the program. Now this would have been the first drone strike. Meeting in the attack could have been up for senior former u. S. Intelligence official told me he had no recollection of that whatsoever. I would have remembered the narrative and the whole thing. But i got nothing on this in my memory and it must therefore be responsible. The former official would only say that maybe it was then and they decided to talk someone else under the gun one of the most remarkable comments that an official could actually conceive that it might have been ours. I still think that we need the official position on this to track down staying with the governor to the province that night as we saw firsthand it was clear as the other eyewitnesses and the generals at the time but that was responsible as when the organizations like new america they are over exaggerated and the cia denied that took place. Of course we are going to get this dislocation between the public and private. Theres been a big question recently over whether the strikes should be transferred back. And i think all of this is kind of focusing on the question of oversight and accountability. Can be operations be overseen in pakistan and again in yemen i think the answer is fairly complicated when i put it to the former officials there is a is a lot of ambivalence about sending over the program. What we are talking about really is the special forces to carry out the operation in places like yemen and somalia there are two distinct issue one is the Senate Armed Services committee it doesnt have the clout of the Intelligence Commission has in congress. There is an obligation upon the cia to talk to the committees. If they choose not to tell them a great deal but it doesnt appear to be the same obligation on the example on the pentagon to help the Senate Armed Services and what theyve been up to and im told they get an awful lot less information. But its what theyve actually done in the field. We can look at those events and measure whether theres been accountability and transparency. And im sure you will recall there was a wedding strike a few years ago in yemen where the vehicles were bombed in december of 2013. Killed the other people as well. They said was targeted that phrase because there were a legitimate weapons in the group who were present. They had done two investigations into that if both of them came back and said that no civilians had died today. I guess nobody bothered to send them that particular memo. And i will review a brief strike only the terrorists had died in the attack and they were replaced within hours. A joint letter from the military commander of the government of all qaeda were the condolences of the Political Leadership did we come to you in solidarity they also offered 100 collections and 32 million in total compensation for the dead and injured. The government simply wouldnt back. They didnt kill civilians and they didnt do that accept in the situations they this wasnt something that could be dated lightly with their partners in the war on terror as well. And that the tech of consequences that went far beyond the targeting of the group of men on the dirt road on the december afternoon. It may have violated by causing the civilian loss disproportionate for the human rights watch. The two un experts noted that they cannot condemn the violation to the rightofway for the territory. And finally, the National Parliament had all u. S. Drought strikes in the similar sense from the parliament almost two years earlier. These individual strikes when they go wrong it is the absence of the accountability and transparency that has been the refusal to say we got it wrong which inflames the situations that lead syntax error and is becoming a strategic problem and to that undermines the terrorism and other policies in place. As i said earlier one of the things that i hope we try to do with the book is opened up what is happening in places like iraq and afghanistan. In those places theyve revolutionized as a story that hasnt been told that much. Drugs can be a very good thing. If we understand where they are in the battlefield we have information about that. One of the most perverse consequences in the cia progress bundled up with everything going on in the conventional battlefield as well. It shows for example that there are commissions and 29 out of 30 would be non connected in the operations. It shows that proportionately the number of foreign strikes is rising to about one in five. And it also helps to set the cia context. Literally weeks after they released that information they had a change of policy. They scrubbed all of the data from that website and reclassified the information. We did say at the time they could get that information if the freedom of information. I said yes chasing the pentagon until you cant have the state and now because we have it as being on held on the grounds of National Security much higher than the operation security but theyve been using previously. A really straightforward straightforward data that we do need to understand if it is going to make them on a regular battlefield now denied to us. If it is a National Security issue, that makes sense but the problem with that is the british. The british side by side with the americans using the germans in afghanistan. They follow americas lead, and the aim was to hide away the progress. It was a respectful move. An officer told me that they could put a screen around the protein and everybody just threw at it. They were off the battlefield. So they took it as a strategic decision to break away from the u. S. To become transparent or far more transparent. So we have a situation today where the british for example, will describe if you request to them the number of strikes that they carried out a number of civilians they killed and the british claim that is because they introduced on the battlefield with a cold for zero expectation of casualties which is a big difference from what the military was practicing in afghanistan from the understanding. We also know because while they used to use the much bigger bomb they stopped using them shortly after they killed two civilians and they had used them since when is that there is a question that the weapons that the british are using and the impact on the civilians and so on. Now all of this is in the public device and the british will release them whenever you ask them. It was introduced with weapons and the reason for this as i said earlier is because the whole program has become bundled up into this mess its difficult to disentangle by the regular military or the air combat command. When the air force talks about the patrol of the drones and in a 24 hour period simultaneously if bundles them together so that is another refusal to release information about the regular use. If you start telling one part of the story they are afraid that the whole thing will come unbundled but i think that is a disservice. One of the things in the book is having the opportunity to speak to many men and women past and present about their experiences. Very honorable men and women. Most are very proud of the work theyve done in the middle east but you might imagine. And that might be a good story to tell but its a story of the moment because of the secret drone or in the absence of accountability they cannot tell those stories and we also found the conundrums that are still there with us and we need that kind of information for the more difficult choices i guess. There was a report by doctor larry lewis in afghanistan using classified data, which suggests that the use of the drones in afghanistan by the order of the magnitude was likely to lead to more civilian deaths. Nobody i that i know can understand how that could be. If we are never going to be about to see that data on which he made his claims would hold because its going to be bundled up in the interest of the National Security. But that might really matter right now for the civilians on the ground in iraq and for example where they are striking almost every day there may be things we should be discussing. Its just that we havent had that opportunity. So maybe i will just leave it there and that gives you a sense of the subject. The question is what should be done because your book on short outlines the problems in the program. I mean, they are not going away. And in fact, it was a team using the drone in the base about three months ago and i dont think that it was manufactured and to sort of receded from iran so we are seeing an increase in the number of countries. So far the americans, british and israelis used to combat the chinese, the russians, the indians claimed that he had become but a lot of other countries are getting in the game. So looking forward what should we be thinking about in the United States or more generally as they proliferate in the ability for including perhaps nonstate actors. Cynic that is a really important point. One thing to touch on is the bug allergy. Out there that general view is the covert strikes and i have a great line from the officials who said we know we are out there and we are on our own on this and i was asking about the intelligence by the american allies. It was fascinating if they said they dont share it because of the closest allies view the strikes as unlawful. The lawfulness of the states is the primary point of engagement for the Public Discourse and for the government discourse. Within the United States is absent. Cynic just one exception to that. It became a matter of public debate in the country when we killed an american citizen, and are also lucky. They should have been hastert been very parochial about the deaths of american. This is a good example of it. That. So what did become the work of giving the kind of interesting idea about where you get the unlikely coalitions into this is an example where they basically said what do you do without the due process about the due process and the last was already opposed to this. So you write about this in the book. Is it a good thing or bad thing in the country or i think it is very new when you talk about i think ten americans have been killed so far. Only one is led to believe and i dont believe that for a moment. I think the only one that was accidentally targeted and the other night when you actually look at the evidence of the domain i would challenge this idea that they were not. What they often said they were not deliberately. Without any structure wasnt a deliberate target. Cynic. They actually put him in his early 20s and i think maybe they got it wrong. But that would be different if they delivered at the targeted but they didnt know his age. That is a distinct possibility that i think actually the polls just published this morning showing that even when theres a risk of killing americans in peace covert strikes, 47 defense of the public is in favor of them. The risk of civili