Rise of the Drones – UAVs After 9/11

[Peter Lemkin]

AMY GOODMAN: In a Democracy Now! special today, we spend the hour with Richard Clarke who served as the nation's top counterterrorism official under President Clinton and Bush. A year before the September 11 attacks, he pushed for the Air Force to begin arming drones as part of U.S. effort to hunt down Osama bin Laden. According to Clarke, the CIA and the Pentagon initially opposed the mission then September 11 happened. Two months later on November 12, 2001, Mohammed Atef the head of Al Qaeda's military forces became the first person killed by a predator drone. Since then, U.S. drones have killed at least 2000 people in at least five countries; in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Richard Clarke has just written a novel about drone warfare titled, "Sting of the Drone." Democracy Now!'s Aaron Maté and I interviewed Richard Clarke last week. He joined us from Washington, D.C. I started by asking him to describe the plot of his novel.

RICHARD CLARKE: It was very incongruous that the American pilots who are flying over the Swat Valley in Pakistan are actually in Las Vegas, or just outside Las Vegas in Creech Air Force Base. And I try to imagine and actually did some research into what it was like for those pilots. They work in darkened, air-conditioned rooms. They work at night because they're trying to fly their planes over Pakistan and Afghanistan in the daylight. So because of the time-shift, they are on the night shift in local time. But they fly for hours on end. They can fly an eight hour shift, they can fly even longer. That entire time, they're looking at a screen shot, a live screen shot on an area in Pakistan or Afghanistan. And they think they are there. They get into it. They think they're flying over Pakistan. They are all trained pilots. They're all people who actually know how to fly fighter planes and have flown them in the past. Most days, they do nothing except reconnaissance. But some days, they actually do a strike, and kill people. Then they get up and walk out from this darkened, air-conditioned room into Nevada. They get in their sports cars and perhaps drive down the road to Las Vegas. It is a very incongruous sort of war. It looks a lot like playing a computer game and it has to change the way they think about things. I think they have to really work at realizing that they're killing people, that these are real people, this is not a video game. But it is very hard for them to realize that when they go home to their nice ranch houses outside of Las Vegas. So I wanted to capture that. I also wanted to capture the notion that the people who are the repeated targets of the drones might fight back against the drone program. And if they did that intelligently, using all of the techniques and tricks, political propaganda, intelligence, cyber and military terrorist, what would that look like? And could that include coming to the United States and hunting down the pilots who live in Las Vegas? I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but that is the premise.

AMY GOODMAN: Why did you choose to write this book as a novel? Why did you write, "Sting of the Drone."

RICHARD CLARKE: Well, Amy, I thought if I written a sort of polemical nonfiction work that provided the history but also provided my opinions in clear form, that would reach a very limited audience. But I thought if I could write it in a thriller format, if I could succeed in channeling Tom Clancy, then it would appeal to a broader audience that would just not pick it up if they thought it was a screed against drones. So, I wanted people to read it for enjoyment, but in the process of doing that, to cause them to think and to cause them to learn. Not with a heavy hand, but subtly enough that they would buy it, they would like it, they would recommended it to their friends. But in the process, maybe it would open their minds to some issues.

AMY GOODMAN: Think about what? You said cause them to think. What are you most concerned about? You are a chief architect of the U.S. drone program.

RICHARD CLARKE: Well, I'm not sure I'd accept that title. What is true, and I outlined in the author's note at the end of the book, is that under President Clinton and briefly under President Bush, I was in charge of counterterrorism. It became very clear to us that Al Qaeda was trying to kill Americans. They did kill Americans. And that they were looking to do it in a big way. We asked the Justice Department, the FBI, the military to try to get this guy. And our goal initially was to get him and bring him back to the United States and to try him in a court in the United States, as we had with so many other terrorists successfully, I might add. But they couldn't do it. So, the question arose, if we can't get him if we can't arrest him, is there anything we can do to stop him. One of the questions was, could we do something other than just throw Cruise missiles into Afghanistan as had been done in the past with no real success? Was there some way that we could have a very precise weapon where we would know that we were attacking him and very few other people, and that there would be very limited collateral damage? That was the program I tried to create. I was unsuccessful in creating it. And then after 9/11, everybody who had opposed it then said they were in favor of it. I was never the architect of what happened after that. What happened after that, as you say, is probably 2500 people got killed in five countries. And that program is, I think, pretty obviously counterproductive. And it is that I would like people to think about.

AARON MATÉ: So, is this a problem then of scale? Has the drone program grown too big? You have President Obama vowing to reform the drone program. Where is the middle ground in your eyes?

RICHARD CLARKE: Well, I think the first question you have to ask yourself first threshold is are you willing to use lethal force against a terrorist based on what you believe is evidence or intelligence that he is about to kill Americans? Is it just and fair and good policy to get them before they get us? I answered that question yes in the case of Bin Laden. I was very confident that he was trying to kill large numbers of people, including large numbers of Americans and there was no way I could stop him short of a lethal attack. So having answer that question yes, then the question is, well, if you're going to get him, who else can you get? Who else can you have that same justification for? I think what happened and it happened largely under President Obama was that the aperture got very, very broad. Not only were they targeting people whose names they knew, but they were targeting people whose names they didn't know. They were targeting people in so-called signature strikes, when a place look like a terrorist camp. And they were able, after looking at that place for days on end, to satisfy themselves that it was a terrorist camp. Then they attacked that camp without knowing, frankly, the names of the people who were there. The result was, collateral damage. We don't know how much. There are widely varying estimates of the number of innocent people who have been killed in each of these cases. But, we do know that innocent people were killed. As recently as the attack in Yemen at the end of last year that blew up a wedding. When you do things like that, you cause enemies for the United States that will last for generations. All of these innocent people that you kill have brothers and sisters and tribe tribal relations. Many of them were not opposed to the United States prior to some one of their friends or relatives being killed. Then, sometimes, they cross over not only to being opposed to the United States, but by being willing to pick up arms and become a terrorist against the United States. So you may actually be creating terrorists rather than eliminating them by using this program in the wrong way.

AMY GOODMAN: What are your estimates, your best estimate of how many innocent civilians have been killed? You say roughly 2500 people have been killed in five countries. There's the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Human Rights Watch, the Stanford NYU study, they say hundreds, if not thousands of innocent civilians have been killed. What do you think it is, Richard Clarke?

RICHARD CLARKE: Well, it is clearly not thousands, but I don't think any of the I have looked at most of those studies and I don't think any of them are systematic enough and the sources are good enough to put a number on it. It is clearly too many.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you say clearly hundreds?

RICHARD CLARKE: I don't I don't know hundreds. It is very difficult for me to know without access to the intelligence, frankly, I don't have anymore. John Brennan, who replaced me a couple removed in the White House, at one point said there were none which I found laughable. No program has none.

AMY GOODMAN: John Brennan is now head of the Central Intelligence Agency. In a minute we will continue with Richard Clarke who served as the nation's top counterterrorism official under President Clinton and Bush. In the last segment of today, we ask Clarke of President Bush should be tried for war crimes. Clarke has just published a novel titled, "Sting of the Drone." Stay with us.
[Break]
AMY GOODMAN: We continue our conversation with Richard Clarke on drone warfare. He served Counterterroism Czar under President Clinton and President Bush. A year before the September 11 attacks, he pushed for the Air Force to begin arming drones as part of the U.S. effort to hunt down Osama bin Laden. Richard Clarke has just published a novel titled, "Sting of the Drone." This is President Obama in May 2013 giving a major counterterrorism speech in which he spoke about drone strikes.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Before any strike is taken, there must be near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured. The highest standard we can set. Yes, the conflict with Al Qaeda, like all armed conflict, invites tragedy but by narrowly targeting our action against those who want to kill us and not the people they hide among, we are choosing the course of action least likely to result in the loss of innocent life.

AMY GOODMAN: That was president Obama in that address where you were sitting. That was May 23. As you pointed out, just in December, the bombing of the wedding party in Yemen.

RICHARD CLARKE: Well, that's right. I mean, clearly, there was a mistake made in Yemen. It leads you to wonder, are these new rules really fully in force? Who is making the decisions? The president led us to believe that individual decisions on strikes are made in Washington with large numbers of people involved, including a lot of lawyers involved, making sure that very specific rules are followed. Well, if that is the case, and if you have to look at the target for more than a day and be very sure there's no collateral damage, no innocent civilians in the area, it is very hard to understand how that attack in Yemen occurred.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to your book. Often it is said that you can write more truth in a fiction book than in nonfiction. You, Richard Clarke, have written "Sting of the Drone." By the way, CIA officers, agents who write books have to be vetted by the CIA. But did your book have to be vetted by any government agency?

RICHARD CLARKE: Yeah, unfortunately, all of my books for the rest of my life have to be reviewed by the government.

AMY GOODMAN: And did they object to any parts of this book?

RICHARD CLARKE: They did not.

AARON MATÉ: There is a part of the book where a drone bombs a luxury hotel in a major European city. Is that a warning of a scenario that you envision that we might face?

RICHARD CLARKE: It's meant to ask the question, what is too far? In that incident in the novel, the American's say to each other, we can do this precisely. We can do this very, very narrowly so the only people who are damaged in any way are terrorists who are plotting an imminent attack on the U-Bahn, the metros, the subways in Germany. We can prevent that attack and no one else will be harmed. And, oh, the Austrian government won't let us do this if we ask them for permission, but we can have a wink wink nod nod with the Austrian security service and they won't really mind, and this is all a good idea. Well, we have been in that decision several times. You remember the CIA was doing extraordinary renditions in Italy where the CIA station in Rome went out and picked people up off the streets terrorists to prevent terrorists attacks without the permission of the Italian government, but with a clear understanding from the Italian security services that this was OK. Well, now those CIA personnel are wanted in Italy. And I think they have even been tried in absentia. So I don't think that the scene that you're talking about is too much of a stretch from where we've already been.

AMY GOODMAN: You also talk, Richard Clarke, about the drone disintegrating. Are you talking about real technology here? How these drones I mean, you yourself were the one that suggested arming drones, arming surveillance drones, but is this real, a drone disintegrating so that no one could detect it after the attack?

RICHARD CLARKE: It's not a program that I know about. It may be a program that exists, but certainly not one that I know about. There are several things in the novel where I am stretching the existing technology to where I think it is going so that we can see in the near future what kind of things we might be faced with. Clearly, one of them is if you want to do a drone attack that leaves no trace, that looks like a gas explosion, that looks like a car bomb, could you do that? The problem today is, if you use a drone attack, there is going to be fragments of the missile. Well, what if the missile were designed to totally disintegrate and disappear so there would be no fingerprints? I don't think that is far off in the future. It may exist now, I'm not sure.

AMY GOODMAN: Two principal characters in "Sting of the drone," go to the unmanned aerial vehicle exhibition and conference in Las Vegas. Interesting so much of this happens in Las Vegas, whether we're talking about Creech Air Force Base or you're talking about this convention. One says to the other, this is the fifth Israeli company I have seen so far. Talk about Israel's involvement in drones. You say there are three countries that have used military drones drones as weapons, but 40 countries have the potential to. Talk about what happens in your novel.

RICHARD CLARKE: Well, in that seen in the exhibit Center in Las Vegas, there is not the boat show, not the car show, but the drone show. People who have read the novel has said, well, that will never happen. Actually, it happens every year. It is perfectly true. There is a drone show and it is in Las Vegas. Companies from all over the world bring their drones and put them out on the floor for display and, presumably, sale, just like you'd would see at a boat show. When you go to that drone show, one of the things that is so striking, is the number of Israeli companies, the number of Israeli drones. The reason for that is the Israelis started this all. The Israelis created the first drone in fact, the first drone that the United States had was one that the Marines bought from Israel. The Israelis are very good at this sort of thing. And they have a wide variety of drones in a wide variety of sizes. The Israelis have used them armed. The Russians have used them armed. To the best of my knowledge, no other country has used an armed drone. But as you say, I think about 40 countries have them. If you look at the Chinese inventory again, they have a wide variety as well but they have one that looks just like, just like the U.S. predator. It is so remarkably like the U.S. predator that people in the U.S. government believe that the Chinese hacked into General Atomics, the company that makes the predator, and got the blueprints and diagrams and essentially built a predator and are now selling it to almost anybody who will buy it.

AARON MATÉ: On the issue of private citizens using drones, I'm wondering if you have concerns about what, say, an extremist could do with drone technology if they wanted to attack a government building like the man who attacked an IRS facility a few years ago, what concerns do you have about how citizens could use drones for untoward ends?

RICHARD CLARKE: Well, the FBI conducts these sting operations around the country where they find someone who is interested in fundamentalist Islam, and then they try to turn them into a terrorist. And they did this with a guy up in Boston. They suggested, the FBI pretending to be Islamists, suggested to this fellow that he buy a drone, a toy aircraft and put explosives into it and fly it into the Pentagon. Well, he didn't know where to get it so the FBI told him. Then he said he didn't have enough money to do it, so they gave him the money. After they virtually forced this guy to buy the thing, they arrested him. So it is clear that at least the FBI is thinking that there are people who are going to get these existing drones or whatever you want to call them and put explosives on them. I think that is one thing that we do have to worry about. I know the Secret Service is worried about the president giving a speech outdoors some day and a drone dive-bombing onto the podium. Will they see it coming in time? We have already had an incident in Florida where somebody flying a commercially available drone, private citizen, almost ran into a passenger jet that was landing in Florida. There's an issue about whether or not you can fly a drone over somebody else's backyard or fly it up to their window and take pictures. And the law is a little hazy. Apparently, in most states, you don't control the airspace above your house. And so you can be out skinny-dipping in the backyard in your pool and somebody can fly a drone overhead and take pictures. And post them on the Internet. And that appears to be legal. I think there are lots of issues with regards

AMY GOODMAN: And Richard Clarke, can you talk about the size and shapes of some of these drones, what they look like, how small they can be like an insect that flies?

RICHARD CLARKE: There is work going on, government-sponsored work going on, to make drones that really do look like mockingbirds or hummingbirds. Really quite small. Nano, if you will. That can be used for spying, can be used for reconnaissance, and they can be that small and they can be as large as a 737. The one that the government is using now called Global Hawk, which is Northrop's, is the size of a 737. There's everything from that at the high-end to the hummingbird at the low end, everything in between. And they're being made all over the country, they're being made all over the world. And it is going to be a big part of our future. Whether or not they're delivering Amazon books, which I don't think will ever happen but they will be a big part of our future. They will be doing the traffic reports for us. Farmers are already using them to look at crop yields. The Coast Guard is already using them to do search-and-rescue. So drones are going to be part of our future, and we need to understand what the rules are that we want so we control them and not the other way around.

AMY GOODMAN: It is interesting in the new plot line of Fox's "24," a terrorist group takes control of the U.S. drone fleet and uses it to attack a civilian population of London.

RICHARD CLARKE: Well, that is also an incident in my novel. And it springs from a couple of things. First, the Iranians saying they hacked their way into a U.S. drone and caused it to land in Iran. The Pentagon says that is not true, that it just happened to be over Iran and happened to land. The Pentagon doesn't really explain in any detail how that happened. So it's possible that the Iranians did in fact hack their way in. Anything that is networked, for my work on cyber security, I know, anything that is on the network can be hacked. Any control system can be taken over. And the possibility of people hacking their way into the control systems on drones is quite real.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think President Bush should be brought up on war crimes and Vice President Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld for the attack on Iraq?

RICHARD CLARKE: I think things that they authorized probably fall within the area of war crimes. Whether that would be productive or not, I think is a discussion we could all have. We have established procedures now with the International Criminal court and the Hague where people who take actions as serving presidents or prime ministers of countries have been indicted and have been tried. So the precedent is there to do that sort of thing. I think we need to ask ourselves whether or not it would be useful to do that. In the case of members of the Bush administration. It is clear that things that the Bush administration did, in my mind at least it is clear, that some of the things they did were war crimes.

AARON MATÉ: Now, Richard Clarke, you were obviously part of the Clinton administration and you took part in the discussions on the issue of who to target. So, on this issue, in 2002, you testified before Congress and it's since been declassified, and you said "We didn't want to create a broad precedent that would allow intelligent officials in the future to have hit lists and routinely engage in something that approximated assassination." You went on to say, "There was concern in both the Justice Department and in some elements of the White House and some elements of the CIA that we not create an American hit list that would become an ongoing institution that would to just keep adding names to and have hit teams go out and assassinate people." Can you talk about the deliberations that took place when you were there under President Clinton?

RICHARD CLARKE: So, we had established that bin Laden wanted to kill large numbers of Americans. And the only option that we had to target him, since we couldn't fly in and pick him up and arrest him, although, we had tried that, was cruise missile attacks. And those cruise missile attacks created high risk of collateral damage and introduced a whole set of problems. And so, we looked at if it was legal to use Cruise missiles, which would kill a lot of people, why wasn't it legal to you something that was more precise that would just go after the very few people that we were concerned with? And that discussion went on for a while. We knew there was a barrier there that we weren't sure we wanted to cross. Ultimately, the fact was that President Clinton did authorize CIA to attempt to arrest bin Laden and failing that, he authorized the use of lethal force. That was a time when we crossed the barrier and actually had a name on a hit list. We knew, however, the Israelis had been doing this for a long time, coming up with hit lists. We knew it was extremely counterproductive in their case. We wanted to avoid that. Fast-forward to the Bush administration and then the Obama administration, and you have, as I described in Chapter two of the novel, a kill committee. People who sit around in the White House passing folders back and forth of names and voting on who they're going to kill. I just find that it went way too far. If any of us back in the Clinton administration would have imagined that in the same room, in the same chairs a few years later, people would be sitting around with a long lists and folders with pictures and names of people and voting on who would live and who would die, I think we might never have authorized the first use of lethal force against bin Laden.

AMY GOODMAN: Richard Clarke, I want to go to a clip of journalist Glenn Greenwald on Democracy Now! just a few weeks ago talking about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's reaction to drones.

GLENN GREENWALD: One of the things he told me that was a turning point for him was he had in NSA job in Japan where and this was the job right before Dell - that he said he was able to watch the real-time surveillance being fed by drones in which you could see an entire village and a place where America is not at war, like Yemen or Somalia or Pakistan. And you could see literally little dots of people and what they were doing. And then you would have intelligence about who they were and who were they calling, and this vast picture that was able to be created of them by not even physically being in the country. And the invasiveness and the extent of that surveillance he said was something even he, working inside this community, had no idea even existed. And -

AMY GOODMAN: He was watching a village before it was struck by a drone?

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. I mean these were surveillance drones, typically. So it wasn't even necessarily that the drones were killing people, although, a lot of times they did. That was the reason for putting these villages under surveillance, was to decide who to kill. But, he could watch just how much the U.S. government covertly could put entire populations under a microscope. The fact that this had been done without any democratic debate or without his fellow citizens knowing about it was extremely alarming to him. And the more he came to see just how ubiquitous this system of suspicionless surveillance was the more compelled he felt he felt not to keep it a secret.

AMY GOODMAN: That is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald who, with Laura Poitras, revealed the a number of the documents that Edward Snowden made available to them when they interviewed him in Hong Kong. Richard Clarke, you sat on an NSA advisory committee for president Obama in dealing with these revelations. In a sense, Edward Snowden is having the same reactions that you had alarmed at what he was looking at, villages that could soon be struck by U.S. drones.

RICHARD CLARKE: Well, I did for six months serve on an advisory board that looked into some of the revelations about NSA and recommended the termination of the so-called section 215 program, the telephone metadata program recommended we close that. We made 46 recommendations. They're all unclassified, they're all online. The president has taken some of them. Unfortunately, he hasn't taken all of them. That is a subject for another discussion. I have no problem with reconnaissance. Reconnaissance occurs all the time. There are lots of countries now that have satellites with high resolution cameras that take pictures all the time. That doesn't trouble me. I've grown used to it. I've grown used to the fact that in this city, that in Washington, I'm probably on 100 cameras a day whether it is the elevator or on the sidewalk or driving in my car. I know when I'm in the car, and the cameras get me because they send me a ticket. But we're on camera all the time. And not just by the government. In stores we're on camera. And stores are now combining that information with our mobile phones to look at our buying patterns and notice that we spent some time at the perfume counter and we didn't buy anything, and then we get a little text or e-mail telling us about perfume because we have an interest in it. Because they saw us on a camera standing in front of the counter. The surveillance by government and by the private sector and the use of data big data analysis, matching data from one source with data from another, is a real issue that we need to address. President Obama has started that. He has asked John Podesta to do a major review of the big data of the possibilities out there. But, I think we as a country need to have a discussion about that. Your thoughts about Edward Snowden. In an interesting way, he's similar to you. You quit over the U.S. invasion of Iraq. You talked about how President Bush came up to you and said, what, the issue was Iraq and you looked at him startled when after 9/11 saying, Iraq has nothing to do with it. You blew the whistle like Edward Snowden did. Your thoughts on that kind of parallel and what you think should happen to Edward Snowden?

RICHARD CLARKE: Well, there's not too much of a parallel. I resigned, quit the government altogether, testified before congressional committees and before the 9/11 Commission, wrote a book revealing what the Bush administration had and had not done to stop 9/11. And what they did after the fact. How the president wanted me, after the fact, to blame Iraq for the 9/11 attack. What Snowden has done has clearly exposed programs that were stupid, that were, I think, were illegal, some of them, personally, my view, and those programs have some of them have stopped. And I have been part of the effort to stop some of them, particularly the 215 telephone metadata program, which I did not know about. I had been out of the government for 10 years. When I found out about it as a result of the Snowden revelations, I was gob smacked. I couldn't believe that the government was doing it.