 It's wonderful that you've come here for this great event. We're very excited to have Chris Woods come and present his new book, Sudden Justice, America's Secret Wars, which I think is going to be probably the book for people who are interested in this important subject. And of course, Chris's book tour coincides with a very interesting moment in with Warren Weinstein's tragic death and other recent revelations about the drawing program that have come out in the last couple of weeks. Chris is a former senior producer at the BBC and worked at Newsnight, Panorama. He also ran the drawing program at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which has done amazing work on this subject. So we're thrilled to have him here. And he's going to talk about some of the big themes and stories in his book. And then we'll open it up to a discussion. Thank you very much, everyone, for coming along today. And it's actually, for me, a particular pleasure to be here with New America. I first started focusing in heavily on drones almost five years ago now. I don't think I'd kind of really recognize that there was an issue until it was the floods in Pakistan in 2010 for those who remember very bad floods. And the Pakistan Health Minister stood up and complained in the Senate in Pakistan that they couldn't get supplies into a particular airport because the United States was using it for the drone war. And I think that was the first time I really thought there was something significant going on. And Peter with New America was already doing the numbers. I mean, it was already monitoring what was happening with the drone strikes in Pakistan. And we were getting a sense that under Obama, they'd escalated phenomenally and that something quite significant was happening. I thought today I'd talk really about transparency because I think that's what the drone debates so often come back to is this question of transparency and accountability. But I'm going to talk about not just the covert stuff that I think we all know quite well from the New York Times or Washington Post or Wall Street Journal, but also what's been going on the regular battlefield. And that's something I really tried to do with the book, about how drones have changed conventional warfare as well. And I think it's a big part of the picture we've really been missing. And I'm very, hopefully, there's a former drone pilot here in the audience today. I don't know if Chad Bruton managed to make it if he's here, if he could raise his hand. Maybe he'll pop along later. But I'm hoping that one of the contributors of the book, a pilot's also going to come along today. He'll be able to give a few insights into some of the stuff he was doing. I mean, around transparency, I suppose you could argue that it doesn't get more transparent than the president of the United States standing up and owning responsibility for the killing of Warren Weinstein, a terrible event and clearly an error. And President Obama very much took that on the chin. But moments like that, moments of direct accountability for the drone war are generally pretty absent. And it's about two years now since John Brennan, during his hearings to go in as director of CIA, said that he wanted to publish details of the civilians killed in the covert drone strikes. And unfortunately, we're still waiting on that. And I think the work that New America does in organizations like Bureau of Investigative Journalism trying to understand who has been killed and how in places like Pakistan and Yemen is absolutely vital. There was a comment by Mike Morell in the Washington Post a couple of days ago. Mike Morell was acting director between David Petraeus and John Brennan, in fact. And Morell used the term scoff when he was talking about the work of people, organizations like New America, in trying to understand the number of civilians killed. The public record has kind of coalesced around 400 civilians killed in Pakistan, for example. The CIA's argument is that that number is much, much lower. But we're in this bizarre situation now where agency officials will routinely mock those acting in good faith, trying to understand and present in the public domain, but without actually stepping up and saying what's actually happened and accounting for some of the errors that have happened over the years. I wanted to start with just read you a brief extract from the book. This was a 2006 event in Pakistan. This single event accounts for around a fifth of all the civilian casualties reported killed by the CIA in Pakistan in just one event. The United States has insisted that no more than 60 non-combatants had died in Pakistan in a decade of covert bombings. It's in a single reported drone strike in 2006. The CIA killed up to 80 civilians according to public records, most of them children. The continued refusal by Washington to officially confirm or deny any role in that attack, which may represent the highest civilian casualty toll of the entire covert drone war, perfectly illustrates the problems associated with a secret civilian intelligence service having been given command of a war. As UN investigator Ben Emerson would later complain, this created immediately a situation of huge lethality, while at the same time, an impossibility to achieve accountability. Mulvey Leacat was headmaster of a seminary for boys in the village of Chenagai and Bajara tribal agency. He was also a leader of the TNSM, an Islamist organization founded in 1992 and banned for extremism a decade later by Pervez Mashares military government. That move led to armed conflict with the state, though by autumn 2006 Islamabad was offering a peace deal to the TNSM and Bajara. Similar agreements in Waziristan requiring only that militants no longer target Pakistani troops had freed up thousands of fighters to join the fast-growing insurgency in Afghanistan. I go on to detail through an NBC correspondent on the ground, a guy called Mushtaq Yusuf Sahib, who was there that night for the signing, how he visited the seminary the night before the bombing. He only saw three adults during his visit. Most of the people he met were children. It was a seminary for kids aged really seven through 20. He was woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of a huge explosion, and he went straight to the seminary. I couldn't really believe my eyes. There were many human body pieces, not a single complete body. Everything at Madrasa was shattered. Survivors and villagers helped gather up body parts, and by dawn the death toll stood at 81. Most of them, reportedly children aged 17 or under. The only militant confirmed dead by locals was Mawrvi Lyakat himself, who'd been expected to take part in the signing ceremony. Now, up until this particular strike, the CIA we know from Mark Mazetti had an agreement with the Pakistan Army that the Pakistan Army would take responsibility for events like this, would step up and give cover for CIA operations. This event, which the Pakistan position remains was the work of the CIA, broke that arrangement, and from this point on Pakistan refused to give cover. If we think about the Peshawar massacre that happened about six months ago, I think 135 school kids murdered by the Taliban in Pakistan, the huge impact that had on Pakistani culture and society. We saw the restoration of the death penalty in Pakistan, we've just seen the hundredth person executed by Pakistan since then, an intolerance of terror of the Taliban, a huge upstep in attacks on the Taliban and the tribal agencies and so on. We can kind of imagine the impact it would have had back in 2006, not only had the CIA bombed the school and killed, as locals claim, 69 children, but the CIA and the US government has spent the last nine years denying that. What impact would that have on US-Pakistani relations? What impact would that have on radicalizing programs within the tribal areas? What impact would that have on the insurgency across the border in Afghanistan? How big a recruitment tool would that be? The CIA's never answered the question of whether it carried out Chenigai or not, but I did, for the book, get the opportunity to put the case to a former high-ranking US intelligence official with direct knowledge of the drone program. Now, this would have been, were at the CIA, the first drone strike of Mike Hayden's directorship at CIA. While admitting that the Chenigai attack could have been us, a senior former US intelligence official told me he had no recollection of that whatsoever. I would have remembered pictures, the narrative, just the whole thing, and I've got nothing on this in my memory. As to explain who might therefore be responsible, the former official would only say that maybe it was them, the Pakistanis, and they just decided to toss someone else under the bus. And I found that one of the most remarkable comments in the whole book, really, that an official with direct knowledge of the program could actually concede that it might have been us. I mean, I don't, I still think we need the CIA's official position on this. And in the book, by the way, there are many other eyewitnesses I've managed to track down relating to this event, a British barrister who was staying with the governor of Northwest Frontier province that night, as it then was, who saw firsthand the intelligence coming in from Islamabad. It was clear that it was the Americans, other eyewitnesses who were in Bajara at the time. But I think that event, and as I say, that single event, perhaps responsible for a fifth of all of the claimed civilian casualties. When the CIA is dismissive of organizations like New America or Long War and says our numbers are over-exaggerated, when you take out some of these big events, the numbers obviously drop quite precipitously. And the CIA denying that that event took place, of course, we're going to get this dislocation between public and private. There's been a big question mark recently over whether the CIA's drone strike should be transferred back to, or to the Pentagon. And I think all of this is kind of focusing around this question of oversight and accountability. Can the CIA's operations be overseen in Pakistan and Yemen? I think the answer to that is fairly complicated. When I put it to former and serving intelligence and defense officials, there is a lot of ambivalence about turning over the drone program to the Pentagon. What we're talking about really is them being handed over to special forces, to really to JASOC, which is carrying out the operations in places like Yemen and Somalia. There are two distinct issues, I think. One is the Senate Armed Services Committee simply under, it doesn't have the clout that the intelligence committees have in Congress. There's, if you like, a statutory obligation upon the CIA to talk to those committees. It may choose not to tell them a great deal, but there doesn't appear to be the same level of obligation on, for example, the Pentagon to tell Senate Armed Services what it's been up to. And I'm told that they get an awful lot less information. But I think we can also simply measure it on what JASOC is actually done in the field. We can look at those events where JASOC, for example, has made errors and we can measure whether there's been accountability and transparency there. And I'm sure you'll all recall there was a wedding strike a few years ago in Yemen where a convoy of vehicles was bombed in December of 2013. It injured the bride, that court a lot of headlines. It killed the groom's 25-year-old son from his first marriage and it killed 12 other people as well who were actually in that wedding convoy. The reason that convoy of vehicles was targeted that day was because there were alleged militants associated with the group, Ansar al-Sharia, who were present, a proxy of al-Qaeda in the Yemen. The Pentagon let it be known that it had done two investigations into that particular event and both of them came back and said very categorically that no civilians had died that day. I guess nobody bothered to send the Yemenis that particular memo. And I'll just read you a brief extract. Initial claims by Yemen security apparatus that only terrorists had died in the wedding attack were replaced within hours by a false unapology. A joint letter from the military commander and governor of Al-Bada offered the condolences of the political leadership in Sana'a and we come to you in solidarity with the victims of the strike. This is from the governor and the military commander of this province under government control. The government also offered 101 Kalashnikov rifles and 32 million Yemeni reels in total compensation for the dead and injured. The Yemen government simply wouldn't back the Pentagon's position that it hadn't killed civilians and it didn't do that except in those circumstances when the Yemen government itself was sure civilians had died. This wasn't something they did lightly. So there was a disconnect not only with the public record but with their partners in the war on terror within Yemen as well. And that attack actually had consequences that went far beyond the targeting of a group of men on a dirt road on a December afternoon. The attack may have violated the laws of war by failing to discriminate between combatants and civilians or by causing civilian loss disproportionate to the expected military advantage human rights watch stated. Two UN experts added their voice to a growing chorus of international concern noting that Yemen cannot consent to violations of the rights of life of people on its territory. And finally in Sana'a the national parliament voted for an end to all US drone strikes echoing a similar and equally impotent move by Pakistan's parliament almost two years earlier. And these individual strikes when they go wrong it's the absence of accountability and transparency. It's the refusal to put our hands up and say we got it wrong which in fact often inflames these situations that leads a tactical error into becoming a strategic problem and to then undermine broader US counterterrorism and other policies in places like Yemen. The very act of denial is in itself undermining the very things that the United States is trying to achieve I would argue. But I don't think it's just on the covert and clandestine battlefields that this is happening. And as I said earlier one of the things I really hope and try to do with the book is to really open up what's happening in places like Iraq and Afghanistan where armed drones are used. And in those places armed drones have revolutionized warfare. It's a story that's not really been told very much. They are often more effective. They're more discriminating. They reduce the risk to civilians on the battlefield. One of the people I spoke to for the book was Charles Blanchard, former general counsel for the Department of the Air Force. And Charles puts it very clearly there is an obligation on combatants to use the least damaging weapons available to them. And that can often mean drones. Drones can be a very good thing. But if we're going to understand whether drones are better or worse on the battlefield we need information about that. And one of the more perverse consequences of the CIA's program is that the use of armed drones on the regular battlefield has ended up bundled up with everything going on on the conventional battlefield as well. A couple of years back I managed to get Sankom to declassify some data for me. Which is really helpful. It showed, for example, that only one in 30 armed drone missions ended violently. 29 out of 30 were non-kinetic surveillance operations. It showed that proportionally that the number of armed drone strikes is rising to around one in five, in fact, by 2012 for the US. And it also helped to set the CIA strikes in their proper context, in the context of the war on terror, if you like. Literally weeks after Sankom released that information they had a change of policy. They scrubbed all of the data from all of their websites and reclassified that information. They did say at the time that journalists like myself could get that information if we freedom of information there. I spent a year chasing the Pentagon on that until eventually they came back and said you can't have this data now because we have reclassed it as being withheld on grounds of national security much higher than the operational security that they'd been using previously. So really straightforward data that we do need to understand if we're going to make these claims and calls for armed drones on the regular battlefield we're now denied to us. Now, you could, I guess, argue that there's, you know, if it's a national security issue that makes sense. The problem with that is the British. The British side by side with the Americans using their Reaper drones in Afghanistan. The British initially followed America's lead and their aim was to hide away their drone program. That was a respectful move, really, because of the problems America had because all of its drone ops were bundled together. But one very high-ranking RAF officer told me that, you know, basically we put a screen around our program and everybody just threw crap at it. And what the RAF felt was that they were getting contaminated by America's activities off the hot battlefield. So the British took a strategic decision to break away from the US and to become transparent or far more transparent about their own drone activities. So we have a situation today where the British, for example, will disclose, if you request to them, the number of drone strikes they've carried out, the number of civilians they believe they've killed, which is four in Afghanistan, interestingly, a tiny number. The British claim that that is because they introduced on the battlefield what they call a zero expectation of civilian casualties, which is a big difference from what the US regular military was practicing in Afghanistan as we understand it. We also know, because the British have told us, that while they used to use both the Hellfire and the much bigger GVU-12 bomb on their Reapers, they stopped using those big bombs shortly after they killed those civilians and they haven't used them since. So there's a big question mark there about the weapons that the British are using, impacts on civilians and so on. Now, all of this is in the public domain and the British will release this whenever you ask them. So we have this scenario where we have, on the one side that the Pentagon's saying, you cannot have any of this information because it's national security. And on the other hand, we have the closest ally and the only other nation entrusted to use the Reaper. With weapons on it, giving that exact same information. And the reason for this, as I said earlier, is because the whole program has become bundled up into this tight mess that it's very difficult to disentangle. All the drains, whether they're flown by CIA, by JSAR Corps, by the regular military, are flown by Air Combat Command personnel. The drains are owned by Air Combat Command. And when the Air Force talks about the 63 combat air patrols of drones, that's the weird way the Air Force kind of measures its drone use, the ability to field in any 24 hour period simultaneously drones. It bundles CIA, JSARC, and regular drones all together. So that's really at the nub of this refusal to release information about regular drone use. If you start telling one part of the story, they're afraid that the whole thing will come unbundled. But I think that's actually doing a disservice, as I say. One of the things for the book was having the opportunity to speak to many men and women, past and present drone operators, about their experiences of flying remotely piloted aircraft. Very honorable men and women, most of them very, very proud of the work they've done, not the PlayStation mentalities that you might imagine. And that might be a good story to tell, but it's a story at the moment that because of the secret drone wars, because of the absence of accountability, the regular military is hamstrung on it, cannot tell those stories. And we also can't answer some of the conundrums that are still there for us. And we need that kind of information and that data to make some more difficult choices, I guess. There was a report by Dr. Larry Lewis a few years ago in Afghanistan using classified data, which suggested that the use of armed drones in Afghanistan by an order of magnitude was likely to lead to more civilian deaths. Nobody I know can understand how that could be, but we're never going to be allowed to see that data on which Larry Lewis made his claims, we're told, because it's going to be bundled up in the interest of national security for years to come. But that might really matter right now for civilians on the ground in Iraq and Syria, for example, where America's reapers are striking almost every day. There may be things we should be discussing about when it's better or worse to use armed drones. It's just that we just don't have that opportunity at the moment. So maybe I'll just leave it there, really. I mean, that gives you a sense of some of the subjects that the book touches on. Peter, I don't know if there's anything you want to tell. Well, no, I guess the question is, thank you for all that. And I mean, so what should be done? Because your book, I'm sure, outlines the problems with this program. I mean, what drones are not going away? And in fact, it seemed a pretty reliable report of Hezbollah using an armed drone against a Nusra base in Syria about three months ago. And I don't think Hezbollah was manufacturing armed drones, but clearly had sort of received it from Iran, which does have an, so we're seeing an increase in the number of countries. So far, only the Americans, the British and the Israelis have used armed drones in combat, but clearly the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, the Pakistanis just recently claimed that they use an armed drone in combat. A lot of other countries are getting in the game. So looking forward, what should we be thinking about in the United States, and what should we be thinking about more generally about this issue as drones proliferate and the ability for including perhaps non-state actors to use them, what should we be doing? I think it's a really important point. One thing I didn't touch on when just was legality. And again, this is something that does inform the book. I'm a European, you can probably tell. But out there, the covert... I thought you were in London. London and I were a bit different. But out there, the general view is that America's covert and clandestine strikes away from the hot battlefield are unlawful. And I actually had some great lines from former US, very high-ranking former US intel officials who basically said, you know, we know we're out there. We know we're on our own on this. And in fact, I was asking about the sharing of potentially lethal intelligence by America's allies, for example. And one of the answers I got from one of these officials was really fascinating. He said, they don't share it because our closest allies view these strikes as unlawful. And it's fascinating to me that external to the United States, the lawfulness of these strikes is really the primary point of engagement for public discourse and for government discourse. Within the United States, it's absent. It's simply not part of the discourse at all at the moment. There's one exception to that. I mean, it became a matter of public debate in this country when we killed an American citizen, Anwar Alakhi. Until, I mean, yeah, I'm an American citizen, live in America. I mean, America can be very parochial about deaths of people other than Americans. And this is a pretty good example of it. So it did become, and you know, Heather Halpert works at New America, amongst other places, is doing a project about trans partisanship, which is kind of an interesting idea about where you get unlikely coalitions. And this was an example where the right basically said, well, why are we killing an American without due process? And the left was already opposed to this. So, I mean, you write about Alakhi in the book and, you know, was that a good thing or a bad thing that we began to have this debate in this country? Or is it a debate too narrow? I think it is very narrow when you talk about, I mean, you know, that more, by my count, I think 10 Americans have been killed in the covert drone war so far, of whom only one were led to believe was deliberately targeted. I don't believe that for a moment. I think the only one who was accidentally targeted was Warren Weinstein. I think the other nine, when you actually look at the evidence in the public domain, I would challenge this idea that they weren't, in fact, what they often say is they weren't specifically targeted. Not that they weren't deliberately targeted. I think the 16-year-old son of Anwar Alakhi would, by any stretch, was not a deliberate targeting. But there is a question mark over in Jeremy Scahill, for example, as cited officials close to Brennan as saying that he may have been deliberately targeted. And in fact, the initial reporting of Abdul Rahman, this was Anwar Alakhi's young son, actually put him as in his early 20s and as a militant living in the mountains. I think maybe they got the core intel wrong. Right, but that would be different from the, well, I see, so that they deliberately targeted somebody they thought was the son of Anwar Alakhi, but they didn't know his age. And that he was a noncombatant. I think that's a distinct possibility. But I think actually there was an associated press poll just published this morning, showing that even when there's a risk of killing Americans in these clandestine COVID strikes, 47% of the US public is in favor of them. So, I mean, that is a stunning figure to me. That's civilians, by the way. The risk of civilians being killed in these COVID clandestine strikes, almost half of Americans would appear to be in favor of those strikes, nevertheless. So, I'm aware that whatever the question marks over legality, there is huge support, both Republican and Democrat, for these ops. And I think the challenge for any incoming president is whether they can turn this off. There's a wonderful movie we made a couple of years ago called The Gatekeepers, about Israel, which was interviews with former heads of Shin Bet, the Israeli security service. And one of the interviews in that, former intelligence service leader, said the difficult thing about targeted killings is it's easy to turn them on. And we ended up with a conveyer about the problem for Israelis, we no longer knew how to turn it off. And I think that is the challenge that America is now in, that targeted killings is part of American foreign policy. The Gatekeepers relates to another kind of point that you make, and just, so the big takeaway from the film The Gatekeepers, which is an amazing film with six former heads of Shin Bet, and every one of them basically says, we're winning every battle, but we're losing the war. So I guess the big question here, one of the big questions is, we're obviously winning every battle with the drones, in a sense. But we seem to have lost the war in Pakistan where favorable views of the United States are, I believe, at 9%, so very close to zero, down from an average of about 20%, if you go back. In Yemen, I don't think the, I think the jury's a bit more out in Yemen. I mean, clearly, locally, there are people who object to the strikes, but I've not seen polling data, maybe because it doesn't exist in Yemen. Is there, you have a sense of, I know you did have Hadi coming to UN and embracing drone programming. Hadi was much more open than Salah before him, and actually had a much more transparent approach. He acknowledged when civilians were killed, he acknowledged the program. It was actually, you know, if you were going to do Pakistan again, you'd probably want to do it the way that Hadi did. But unfortunately, Hadi, like Salah, is now fallen, and Yemen is a basket case. I think there's a big question over the strategic effect of these drones. I think the drones can be effective, but they need to be part of a broader program. And one of the themes I keep coming back to in the book is too often in these covert clandestine strikes, the issues in these countries are reflected to a very narrow prism of US domestic counter-terrorism issues, which is very important. It's a very important stop al-Qaeda in Yemen from bombing airliners. And, you know, they are a deadly, deadly organization, but what we lose is the nation building, is the diplomacy, is the cash sometimes on the ground that's not for counter-terrorism needs, is the helping these nations to rebuild and reform themselves. And time after time in the book, you know, I speak to diplomats and they say they were completely marginalized. Cameron Munter, the former US ambassador to Pakistan, he did, he talked to me on the record. And he described being completely pushed to the side by CIA. And really, and he is still, I would say, very angry about that. Well, it's an interesting question when the CIA is actually driving foreign policy with very important countries like Pakistan. I mean, so the CIA, that, I mean, I'm agreeing with you completely, and I think Cameron Munter was absolutely right. There was a famous kind of discussion where there was very rare disagreement between Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta in the NSC, basically who's in charge, right? And Panetta basically said, you know, I mean, it became very clear that the state bomb was not in charge, whatever they thought. And in fact, they carried out a strike the very next day that was absolutely catastrophic to US-Pakistani relations, which people close to Munter have described as revenge by the CIA for the incarceration of Raymond Davis. The day after he was released. Yeah, yeah, I know it was a giant sort of little finger. So just getting back to the sort of big question then. So, I mean, it looks like the drone program, the drone program initially was to take out leaders of al-Qaeda. It evolved into a sort of counterinsurgency air force over time, right? In terms of, and so that's a sort of, you know, and obviously the Obama administration has sort of tried to unscrew this to some degree, which if you look at 120 drone strikes in 2010, you know, average of a couple of dozen a year now. So maybe there's, I mean, you know, and Obama gave the big speech at National Defense University and said, so has the Obama administration got better? They recognize the problem, you know, Pache, the Warren Weinstein case, which is obviously a mistake and that's indicative of certain things. But overall, I mean, you and I follow the drone strikes carefully and we both kind of agree that the civilian casualty rate is close to zero now with some exceptions. But so characterized for us, the Obama administration's, and if it has changed, why? You know, if things have got better? I think you're absolutely right in terms of, as far as we know, the number of civilian casualties has dropped to zero, although I think alarm bells should be ringing at the moment, the reporting has reached a point where we have to have CIA tellers when they've killed civilians now. I think that probably suggests there's some kind of reporting breakdown going on. With Afghanistan, with the regular war that happened there, according to the United Nations, which looked at this very heavily and worked closely with ISAF, for example, they could never get civilian casualties from air strikes below about 5%, despite everything they tried. So we should be expecting around 5%, with all the things you're doing, and that's good, actually, for air power. Air power has historically been indiscriminate, it's caused mass casualties. So if you can get civilian casualties down to about 5%, that's probably a good thing. That's what we should probably be expecting in places like Yemen and Pakistan. The reporting in Yemen probably puts it around that. Something, as I say, is a bit odd about Pakistan at the moment. But what has the Obama administration done that's different? I think it has, it's certainly improved the way that it carries out targeting. I think they've introduced effectively a similar line to the British now, which is not zero expectation of civilian casualties, but not far off that, which is a good thing, and has helped neutralize a lot of the criticism. But we're still seeing the Obama administration doing client killings, for example. So client killings. What are they? I would say that, I mean, I had an interesting exchange with a former US intel official about this just a few days ago. Throughout the drone campaign, particularly in Pakistan, there are certain people the Pakistan government wants killed that are not really of that much interest to the United States, but the US has killed them anyway, effectively as an act of clientism. Yeah, so what an example would be what? Well, for example, you could say Haka Mullah Massoud, the successor of Baitullah. Baitullah was killed during Bush, sorry, in fact, no, in fact, the first year of Obama, and his successor Haka Mullah Massoud, a much, much nastier piece of work, by the way. It's an interesting question, which one? The TTP, there was a brief tussle with TTP in the US, which sort of suicide bombing on cost, the attempt on Times Square and so on, but they sort of stopped fighting each other for a few years. So every now and again, we have these individuals killed, and I cannot see, they are mortal foes to the Pakistan government, and I don't doubt that. They're awful, vicious terrorists, but I don't view them as enemies of the US, but they're killed anyway, and I think so we do get these acts of clientism. So I think a lot has changed under Obama, but I think some of it's changed for the worse. I call Bush in the book, The Occasional Assassin, and I think that's a way of viewing the Bush administration's approach to targeted killings. Pretty much until 2008, very few targeted killings by Bush, by Drain. Was that a factor of the technology or a factor of policy? I think it was squeamishness as well. But I think Obama comes in, he takes this, I mean, there was no real legal framework that Bush had created around the Drain. So Obama's administration comes in, they create this legal framework, which we're not allowed to know. They codify it, they clarify it, they amplify it, and then they make it a part of foreign policy. And that, to me, is in some ways more problematic, and going back to that gatekeepers quote, how do you turn it off now when you're so used to as Robert Grenier, former CIA, has described it mowing the grass. But whether strategically, this is actually achieving what the United States wants, which is an end to these terrorist groups, that's a whole other question. I think the counter argument to that is if you look at the documents that Bin Laden was writing, you know, these massive memos that have been released publicly, I mean, the drone program, he was very concerned about, it was devastating to him, his organization. And, you know, there's no controversy that these are written by Bin Laden. So how would you deal with that? You're absolutely right, there's an extraordinary letter from Bin Laden to his son saying, get the hell out of Fata. In fact, not only get out of Fata, but move to Gutter, which is one of the safest places in the world, to Gutter, the Washington, DC-sized, richest country in the world per capita. So he was telling his son, don't... Because of the drones? Yeah. Because of the drones, it fundamentally changed Al Qaeda's ability to operate. It forced them to, they went from high tech to donkey in a day, literally. And that first drone strike happened in 2004. It forced them underground, it smashed them. I mean, Al Qaeda Central really doesn't exist anymore. And interestingly, the recent strikes that killed Gadan and Farouk were not aimed at Al Qaeda Central, they were aimed at the startup Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent, which has been decimated the second it popped up. Yeah, it didn't exist for more than three months before it's out of business. They're all dead. So there is a real efficacy there, particularly in Pakistan. Yemen, I think, is more of a problem because Yemen is simply such a complex world in which we tend to frame Al Qaeda as this international terrorist organization which they are in Yemen. But they're also a Sunni faction within the sort of morass that is present day Yemen. And so you have a sort of, when you target Al Qaeda in Yemen, it's very different from targeting Al Qaeda in Pakistan. Did you consider Somalia in your book because there have been some drone strikes in Somalia. Yeah. I did. I did look at... In fact, I was talking to AFRICOM about Somalia just this morning. There's a sort of weird situation where the Pentagon for some reason, and they'll never tell me why, but I mean, you might have the answers to this. The Pentagon press releases every targeted killing it does in Somalia. I don't know what's different. It might be simply it's not Sencom, but I went and every single targeted killing they've done, they're pretty much spokesmen on the record with press releases. So, you know, clearly you can have transparency. Maybe just AFRICOM should have all the drone strikes. Well, that's an interesting question. So maybe DOD does control any strikes in that area, right? That would be the only explanation. I think there's a big part of that. I mean, we know, for example, it wasn't a drone strike, but under Saleh, the first attempt, the first JSOC intervention in December 2009, which killed unfortunately around 40 local Bedou. We know that it was David Petraeus' head of Sencom, not head of CIA, he went to Saleh and sat down with Saleh and worked out how they were gonna deal with this. So clearly that was a Sencom. And we know that because? Because of WikiLeaks. This just turns out to be very useful. Yes, it does. A source of information. My name's Jim Ingram, I have no affiliation. Do you know of, or do you have contact with people in the branches of the American government who is knowledgeable as you about the drone program? Is there somebody who is on top of everything that is being done in all the agencies? Is there, are there really knowledgeable people that you recognize and can identify? I think there's a very high knowledge base. I mean, this is a form of warfare that's now in its 14th year. I mean, the very first drone strike anywhere on the planet was the first night of the air war in Afghanistan back in October 2001, where in fact the CIA failed to kill Malaromar. It's a very interesting story about broken command and nobody really knew what was going on. Was the first successful drone strike Mohammed Atif? No, it was before. So it was actually October. Mohammed Atif's usually the one that's given, but in fact the first successful drone strike was October 7th, so the very first night of the air war. And in fact, I tell the story of Chuck Wold who was the general in charge of the whole air war that night. The one aircraft he didn't have control of was the single armed CIA drone over Kandahar. And outside of his command chain, that drone was ordered to attack. Not Omar himself, the building he was in, but a vehicle next to the building that Omar was in that killed three guards. And so that's why it's the first lethal drone strike. Omar escaped. He fled. They didn't have another missile. They couldn't get the F-16s in in time and it was one of the disasters of the opening night of the air war. And in fact, it's a remarkable story from Chuck Wold who told me that he basically threw a tantrum and ordered and said that if he didn't get control of that predator that moment, he was calling all the aircraft home. Which is a kind of, you don't really think a general's running wars as being this kind of, you know, petulant, but you know, there are lots of knowledgeable people within the different agencies. And I think there is a holistic view of how the drones are used. I think there's also quite a strong counter narrative within CIA, within Pentagon, within special forces. The final chapter of the book is called countermeasures and critiques. It's partly about how al-Qaeda's tried to subvert the drones and mostly failed, but the critiques are really, every single voice in there is a former high place US diplomat, intelligence official, defense official politician. And I wanted deliberately to frame it like that to simply show that when the drone wars are critiqued, it's often presented as a kind of criticism from the fringes from the left and whatever. But actually, and you know this, Peter, it's a really fundamental strategic debate within the big agencies of government about is this what we should be doing? And I think we deserve to sort of kind of focus in on that territory much more and realize that the issues at stake here are not peripheral. They're actually kind of very central and a lot of officials do recognize that. It's on about here. I'm Bert Weidz, a recovering government lawyer. And I've been involved in oversight investigations of national security and excess of secrecy for about a half a century in this kind. So I really salute the work that your book represents, especially your effort to be balanced and realistic. I've got two questions related. One, a small empirical question and a policy question. The empirical question is that I had recalled, I thought, somewhere high level officials honor off the record being quoted in the press a couple of years ago as saying we would now no longer do signature strikes. And I gather that the Weinstein strike, at least as described as substantially of that nature. So I was wondering if you could comment on that. The larger policy question that you both raised is the question of CIA versus Defense Department Control. I started congressional oversight of the CIA for the church committee and for Jimmy Carter as his counsel for oversight of the community and helped set up the two committees. I think intelligence committees, you may be a little optimistic about their oversight. It's a little like Gandhi was asked what he thought of British civilization. He said, that would be nice. But my question is, do either of you, can either of you think of any strategic tactical operational reason why they should remain with the CIA rather than the Defense Department other than the obvious of it being easier for the government to keep things secret, less subject to both public and congressional oversight? There's quite an ugly answer to that, which is that the CIA in the past 14 years has got very good at killing. And... And in a way that doesn't kill civilians when they're speaking. I would say. And one of the problems we have when JSOC, for example, goes into Yemen in 2011, I spoke to plenty of special forces operators for the book and they all told me that they very, very rarely, if ever killed when they were flying drones, when they were operating drones. The mission for JSOC, this is fascinating to me, was almost always intelligence. They would even take the missiles off their reapers and predators to give them extra airtime for surveillance. Yeah. From the terrorism center in terms of our information and from the operational parts, over to DOD, to JSOC, by changing their employment and then you potentially change over. I think that's the case. And we've had these dual missions, the mission to kill Al Orlaki was joint JSOC and CIA, the mission as it was with the summer bin Laden, of course, but JSOC has kept getting it wrong in the killings. And I just think they just didn't have the structures, the networks, the intelligence apparatus that the CIA had spent more than a decade building up. So that's quite an uncomfortable answer, I think, but one argument might be the CIA simply cleaner at killing and you might wanna consider that. But, and I go back to my point, the idea that the handing over the covert plandestine stuff to the Pentagon will make the shred of difference to transparency or accountability is a fallacy. It's simply not going to make any difference in my view. It could be worse because Joint Special Operations Command is a covert organization that isn't... So, yeah, in theory it seemed like a good idea, but for the reasons that Chris has outlined and the fact that it might not make any difference in terms of the ability, the committees, to review what's going on. Is it a total statutory exemption from FOIA of anything in the CIA operations director? That is a very good point. I mean, in terms of it, yeah. But I know your question about the signature stripe, by the way, you're absolutely right to pick up on that. There's a weird kind of redefinition going on of signature stripes at the moment. Nothing about that Weinstein operation fits any definition of signature stripe we've been running by for the last donkey's years. Signature stripes are generally understood to be targets of opportunity, you know, pattern of life analysis. This was a building under observation for weeks as a targeted operation against al-Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent. And I've been really surprised to see it described as a signature stripe. It doesn't fit any modeling that we've seen around that. I don't know if you'd agree with that. I mean, I think it's a very good question. And I basically don't have anything to add to what Chris said. My impression was that they had stopped. And clearly, yeah, it's a little bit of a puzzle. This gentleman here? I think, first, I'm not going to tell you. OK, just wait for the microphone. Just an interested citizen. In my opinion, much of American foreign policy in my lifetime has been illegal. What would make this specifically illegal? I mean, we haven't declared war, so it may be there. But if you're at war, you're trying to kill people. So how is this illegal when some of these other operations have been considered legal? I mean, I would never, for a moment, say that all clandestine covert stripe. I mean, my own view, by the way, is I think the US courts need to engage on this. And the jury is out until the courts do get to see the paperwork and do get to rule on it. But of course, they've been blocked for all of this time. But not all covert and clandestine strikes, of course, are. I mean, you have the right of self-defense. There is the issue of imminence. There is, these are right there in international human rights law. The problem, as we just found out from the Wall Street Journal, and I truly can't get my head around this, is that imminence was taken out of the Pakistan drone operations when President Obama laid down his new rules in 2013. And that just strikes me as bizarre, given that imminence is one of your claims to legality. Can I suggest a possible answer to that? Because it gets to the question of force protection of American troops in Afghanistan. That's the reason that became the slow-level counterinsurgency air force, because under the rules of engagement about force protection, basically, it's looser. So it's not about imminent attacks on the United States coming out of al-Qaeda central. That's why we're seeing, I mean, we track the targets of the drone strikes. I mean, so many of them have been Taliban targets. And that's the explanation. Because as you've said, other than the Faisal Shazad example, which is the Pakistani Taliban, they're not really an imminent threat to the United States. So I think that explains that kind of question. But I think lawyers would still argue whether you have the right to take those wars across the border. I mean, I would agree that 80% of the drone strikes in Pakistan became about the war in Afghanistan. I'm not saying that the argument is correct. I'm just saying that's the argument that's made. Right. But that's interesting. Yeah. There's force protection. Force protection, yeah. Al-Qaq Paran, I'm a lawyer with Reprieve US, and I represent several civilian drone strike victims. I just want to drill down just a little bit more, if you don't mind, on the CIA versus DOD handling of this. Because, again, as a lawyer, we have pushed for the handover to DOD, primarily on legality grounds. And it sounds like that's really the only grounds on which to push for that. And you've painted a bit of a grim picture, because I don't really want to push for that if that's going to end up resulting in more civilian deaths. So is there, I mean, as a practical matter, if there's not going to be more oversight, if there's really not going to be more transparency, what would you suggest we push for? I mean, what should we be advocating for at this point? I'm generally stumped by that question, because I mentioned earlier about the sort of outside the US perspective versus inside the Gulf is huge. And I'm not sure what levers there are. I mean, one thing that would make a huge difference is a real shakeup of oversight. Whether it's Senate Armed Services or Senate Intelligence Committee, they have to stop being cheerleaders, which is clearly what they've become. There was a report in New York Times last week describing how they were berating CIA for not having killed an American yet, not for questioning about. They hadn't killed him yet. And what were they playing at? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And a few years back, Diane Feinstein, when she led Senate Intelligence, she said that her committee had done it utmost to check that CIA had the number of civilians killed was only in the single digits each year. Well, I ran an exercise back then, and I contacted every single monitoring organization and every single international agency that had conducted field studies in Pakistan into civilian deaths. Not one of them had ever been contacted by only the oversight committee. So whatever utmost meant to Senator Feinstein, it did not involve talking to practitioners and experts who might have been able to give them some insights. It's an insular, inward-looking, self-referential oversight system. Sounds like Washington. But can I ask you, you get me, Chris, this is all true. But let's just step back for one second. I mean, Harold Koh was the first American official to even acknowledge that the program existed. Now, lots of American officials, including the president. I mean, so there is a much more public discussion. There have been public hearings have been. Everything you said is true, but there's been a shift. If we had this conversation in 2011, no American official, other than Harold Koh, even acknowledged it was happening. And we're in agreement that the civilian casualty rate is close to zero right now. So there has been changes. And the changes are why is it close to zero? Because when you know your homework is being judged, to some degree, even as bad as the oversight may be on the Intelligence Committee or its cheerleading, something has changed. Things have got better. I would agree. And I think that the main levers have changed our pressure of public opinion. And Peter and I were talking briefly before. And the work of New America in actually putting those figures out there and saying, we'll come back to us on this. Tell us this isn't so. Make a big difference. And when I spoke to you, Nama, in Afghanistan about what helps get civilian deaths down in Afghanistan, deaths caused by ISAF and by international forces, one of the primary reasons was president Karzai picked up the phone every time civilians were killed and said, this has to stop. One of the problems we had with Pakistan was the government was complicit with the CIA. It was in cahoots with the CIA. And it never picked up the phone because it was too busy covering up those civilian deaths. That did change for a period. And I think Pakistan is now much more nuanced and does tend to engage more around civilian deaths. So perhaps it's only public opinion where you get to kind of exert that pressure on administrations. But I still live in hope that the legal arguments will make a comeback. I think really someday the US is going to have to take on the legality around these strikes. Otherwise, it would be accepting that it's setting a principle in international law that all nations are free to act like this. And I don't believe that somewhere the US would want to go. Well, as soon as it happens, we're going to change our minds. Heather? Thanks, Peter. Heather Herbert here at New America. Just to follow directly on from that, the political argument you hear now quietly is, well, maybe they don't work at a strategic level. And maybe they are illegal. But they keep the problem. I mean, if you really care about that international law stuff. But they keep the problem at a manageable level for an American government so we can go ahead and do the other things we want to do in the world. And that's in some ways a breathtakingly cynical argument. But if casualty numbers are really coming down, it's a much better argument. And because it's very, very hard to point to concrete consequences of the legal gulf that you were describing. And Alka is just one of many groups that have tried very hard to say, look, if you don't stop doing this, it's going to hurt you in the world. But you can't point. So what in your reporting have you seen that leads you to think that there's any legitimate argument you could make for that changing over time and it becoming less possible for the US to sit on both sides of this? I mean, I hear that argument all the time that it keeps it suppressed. When President Obama was justifying the air war in Syria and Iraq last year going after Islamic State, as I'm sure you will recall, he used Yemen as the model. I mean, and this is the problem. Yemen has catastrophically fallen apart, as has Libya. Both countries where we've gone in air only, no follow-up. And I'm not pinning the collapse of either states directly on that. I'm simply saying that none of the other stuff that should have been bundled around that is going in. David Kilcullen, who was one of the architects of the surge in Iraq in 2006. Indeed. And David has described drone strikes the Obama administration as addictive as catnip. And David's view, and that of many counterterrorism, counterinsurgency experts, is that they're just this easy option. We're not taking the hard options. And we are storing up more and more problems for ourselves long term. But also, just to go right back, that very, very first drain strike away from the hot battlefield that the CIA conducted back in 2002. Killed an American. And I say in the book, there's a lot of evidence on the table suggesting that he was knowingly targeted right at the beginning. Well, tell us about it. It's Kamal Darwish. Kamal Darwish. And you go back and you look at Darwish at that time. It was Darwish who was on the FBI's number 10 most wanted list, not Al-Hariri, who I think was the primary target for the bombing of the USS Cole. The Guardian ran a story just a few weeks before Darwish was killed, saying he was in Yemen. Special forces were about to go in. I got a US Marine who was stationed in Djibouti. He was supposed to go in with special forces for a killing off. And then Dana Priest. Washington Post, in 2010, ran a story saying the CIA knew all along that Darwish was there. And they killed him because the primary target was Hariri. But they didn't really care that Darwish was there. And I think we do need to go back and look at that. But the other thing about that killing, and this absolutely fascinated me, there was a seventh person in the vehicle that day who survived. And he was put on trial in a Yemeni court. It was a military court that owed him no favors. And he was found not guilty of terrorism charges. We are executing individuals on the battlefield without due process, without. We're not charging them. We're not. We're not inditing. They're not going through the criminal system. We're killing. And we always assume they're guilty. But we don't know it. And I do understand the argument about this is war or not, not policing. But then there was a time before targeted assassination, before drone strikes, when we had terrorism. What did we do? And again, in the book, I talk about the FBI was rolling up al-Qaeda in Yemen in 2002. They were never even informed that the CIA was going to carry out that strike. And in Pakistan, al-Qaeda had been destroyed in the cities. And that's why they'd fled to the tribal areas. Then they became a problem because the Pakistanis couldn't get to them. So we tend to think in this very binary way that there's always there is another way. It doesn't have to be targeted killing. But that's probably the liberal in me talking. Have you sort of looked at the Israeli drone program in any detail? I did. The Israelis are fascinating. I got some great engagement from a fairly senior or very senior IDF legal officials who'd helped to kind of draft the framework for the Israeli targeted killing program. And there was a Supreme Court case in the Israelis. That's right. What did the case say? It went to the Supreme Court in 2006 in Israel, pushed very much by the IDF. And the ruling that they got in Israel was actually very interesting. It said that targeted killings were neither lawful nor unlawful. Each had to be judged on its own merit. Well, actually, that's a very solemn on it. It is. But actually, I think that's actually a very good response. It simply says that you have to judge every single killing on its merit and judge it according to the laws of war and to IHL. And that's the Israeli position. One of the best comments I got in the book, by the way, was that the Israelis were about five or six killings into their targeted assassination program in the Second Intifada when a general came and spoke to the top IDF lawyer and said, is it legal? Which I was quite telling for me. But the Israelis, on paper, I think the Israelis have a much stronger position. And they are astonished that the US has blocked off the sort of legal engagement on the issue of targeted killings. For them, they're very surprised that that's been a USA. And there's no evidence that the British have used armed drones in any circumstances outside a conventional law zone. No. The Brits have been very careful to stay away from targeted killings. But having said that, I think, ultimately, armed drones are an assassination tool. They're very, very good at that. And what we know from the reports that the British have issued about the way their drones operated on the regular battlefield, they were carrying out assassinations with drones. But the British argue that that was within the laws of war. And you would rather have a targeted strike on the battlefield. But they describe in the British press release this, following suspects for seven hours, filming them in the bazaar, choosing the moment of killing. That makes a lot of people uncomfortable, I think. The warfare, regular warfare, is as much about assassination today. I don't know whether the public realizes that war has shifted in that direction. But the reality is, when you've got drones on the regular battlefield, that's what you're going to get. And I spoke with quite a few military commanders and said, that's what we want. We want targeted killings. We want to kill the one guy on the battlefield, not the 60 we have to kill to get to him. Scott Shane wrote a piece in The Times, which I'm sure you remember, which is the moral case for drones. He wasn't, it's not necessarily his position. So you are outlining the moral case for drones a little bit here. What is it? I would say within the laws of war, on the regular battlefield, there are issues with drones, what they call the so distraught, the sort of narrow view. They're very bad in dynamic situations. They tend to kill a lot of people. But mostly on the regular battlefield, drones are probably a good thing in their present iteration. The challenge around the drones is going to keep coming back to legality, I think, and where you use them as much as how you use them. Are there any analogs between drone warfare and cyber warfare that we should be thinking about? I tend to run away from cyber warfare. I think my head is so full of drones for five years that I just get this overload in my head about cyber. What are you going to do next? I'm tracking Iraq and Syria at the moment. We are in a situation where Sankom is claiming that after, I think, 11 and 1 1⁄2,000 bombs dropped in Iraq and Syria, 3 and 1⁄2,000 airstrikes, 8,000 Islamic state fighters killed, not a single civilian is dead. And it is utterly implausible, utterly implausible. It does seem implausible. But I've been surprised by the Sankom puts out a very useful press release every day about exactly what they did in the previous night, which it must be very, this is how you can track it, right? It is, but we've also got some funding. So we've got Syrian and Iraqi researchers pouring over sort of Iraqi, Syrian media, social media, and sort of trying to get to, I mean, we're putting the low-base number of the around 300 civilians killed. It's, I think it's- Who's we? It's called airwars.org. It's a start-up. It's, I think it's this broader question of we're seeing a lot of these air-only conflicts now. With no troops on the ground, we're being sold that this is great. We're often told it doesn't kill civilians. And it may be the way forward for warfare. I just think there just needs to be significantly more scrutiny than we're getting at the moment. Any other questions? I'm Chris, we'll be more than happy to sign books, I believe, so we want to thank him.