Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/9/21 Joe Dyke on the Civilian Bodycount of American Airstrikes

Episode Date: September 15, 2021

Joe Dyke from Airwars.org joins the show to discuss his new report, coauthored with Imogen Piper, which attempts to count civilian deaths resulting directly from U.S. airstrikes during the Terror Wars. Dyke says he and his colleagues want civilian deaths to be part of the broader ongoing discussions about the cost of these wars. Scott and Dyke discuss the difficulties involved with trying to count civilian deaths and examine the costs and benefits of different methods. Both agree, regardless of method, it’s important work. Especially since the U.S. government has made no official estimates.  Discussed on the show:  “Tens of thousands of civilians likely killed by US in ‘Forever Wars’” (Airwars.org) Cost of War Project at Brown University  “The Other Afghan Women” (New Yorker) “Looser rules, more civilian deaths, a Taliban takeover: Inside America’s failed Afghan drone campaign” (Connecting Vets) “The Drone Papers” (The Intercept)  George W. Bush speech after 9/11  “The Iraq War Logs” (Wikileaks)   “Iraq war logs reveal 15,000 previously unlisted civilian deaths” (The Guardian)  Joe Dyke is Senior Investigator at Airwars. He has a decade of experience living and working in the Middle East, carrying out in-depth investigations into conflict-related civilian harm. Follow his work on Twitter @joedyke. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt; Lorenzotti Coffee and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0L0VcEtDiE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, time to end the war in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already, time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2000. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show hey guys on the line i've got joe dyke from airwors dot org welcome back to the show joe how you doing hi thank you so much for having me again it's great to be back uh very happy to have you here very important piece that you guys have put together tens of thousands of civilians likely killed by U.S. in forever wars, and by that you mean indirect air strikes, drone or airplane strikes, not shot or artilleryed, correct?

Yep. With all, with the very, with the caveat that the early years of the Iraq war, the data comes from Iraq body count, and they don't disaggregate between heavy, between artillery and airstrikes. But the rest of the data is all air strikes only. I see. And then just like with air war, or with, pardon me, with Iraq body count, this is an attempt to do a specific count of dead individual people from all of these various strikes, 91,340 strikes over the length of the terror war so far, correct? Yeah. So, I mean, essentially the principle was that, you know, we felt it was very likely that in the conversations around 20 years since of these Forever Wars, the conversation would focus around the cost, the trillions of dollars, and it would focus around the 7,000, more than 7,000 U.S. service people killed.

But we really wanted to bring the focus back to the civilians as well who have lost their lives at the direct hands of US actions. So obviously there are much bigger estimates for civilian deaths in all of these conflicts, which is somewhere around 360,000 according to Brown University. What we wanted to do was try and work out just from US strikes only, how many of those were. were responsible, how many did the U.S. kill in those wars? Well, and that those numbers from the cost of war project also are low ball estimates, too, where they're essentially being very careful trying to count, you know, individual reports of deaths rather than, say, for example, taking the excess death rate from before the war, say Iraq War II and then comparing that to the death rate during the war.

you know it was found by 2004 October 2004 that 100,000 people had already been killed in the war and then you know something like 650,000 I think by 2007 and there have been various other estimates where if you include Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Syria and I'm not sure what There's this doctor's association, their estimate was above one million killed. And so then that would include, like, killed by all sides in Iraq War II, for example, where the Civil War was absolutely out of control for like three and a half years straight. And then in the war in Syria, for example, too. There's a lot of killing going on besides in airstrikes.

And, you know, there are various estimates there have it. That's something like 500,000 people died. But that wasn't an American invasion. that was just a CIA operation in cooperation with our allies to support certain armed groups against the state there. And so, you know, you ask me, all those deaths, every one of them is on Barack Obama and his government for causing that war in the first place. But that kind of count is not going to make it into your study here or into the cost of war study there, right? exactly exactly i mean you know we can argue about uh the exact what exactly happened in in syria but you know we were we were trying to look very specifically at you know a very

conservative estimate of direct civilian harm caused by the united states um and you know the i think most americans would understand that if you are killed in a direct U.S. strike, that the U.S. is responsible, whereas, you know, many Americans may say, okay, well, it's not my fault if the Islamic State blows up a market in Iraq. Now, we might argue that, you know, because the reason why the Islamic State was able to predominant and become powerful in Iraq was due to the invasion and then the chaos, you know, the subsequent vacuum. But That's an indirect thing. What we were looking at is very specifically direct civilian harm caused by the United States strikes.

And I'm belabor in the point here because I don't want anyone to think that you're trying to play down the numbers or anything like that. It's just the direct approach you're taking is very direct. It's not the same as trying to count excess death rates and things like that. That's an entirely different kind of attempted science here. So in other words, you're going into this with. this is all I can prove to you. So it must be a low ball estimate, you know, on the face of it, correct? And, yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, some of our data sets, you know, we don't, we as an organization, don't track Afghanistan. So we were using the data from the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan. So Unama. Now, Unama has a very different methodology to other organizations. So, you know, we personally at Air Wars might believe that they essentially what they do is that they can, they include data where they have been able to go and verify it, which enables more accuracy in, you know, they can prove in exactly this location that they had a field of researchers that the number of civilians killed in this particular institute was exactly this. But it often leads to criticism that they miss events and that, you know, they're not doing all source monitoring and there are parts of, Afghanistan, you know, where the, you know, civilian harm is just not trapped. So, you know, we would definitely say that, you know,

certainly the 22,679 figure is probably a lowball estimate, you know. But that was, the aim was to really bring back as much certainty as we could. But with all the necessary caveats that we don't know for certain, We don't know exactly, you know, and that we do think that particularly the early years of Iraq and Afghanistan, the numbers may well be significantly lower than they were in actuality because civilian harm monitoring was not very advanced. It was very early days. The internet, there was not local communities were not able to report in the same way. There wasn't social media. There wasn't ways for people to express, you know, the civilian harm within their families.

or, you know, if they had a cousin killed, they couldn't post about it on Facebook, which would, etc. So there's lots of reasons to believe these numbers may be lowball estimates, but those are the numbers that we reached. Right. And it's worth mentioning, too, that, you know, compared to Afghanistan, Iraq is New York City or something like that. I mean, the countryside out in Afghanistan, you got people who, you know, have never traveled more than 20 miles in their life, have never seen a city before. don't know anything about even their own country and are so isolated out there. And this massive country is the size of Texas, which is huge if you ever been to Texas. And so I think there's probably every reason to believe that the majority of civilians killed in airstrikes in Afghanistan were never reported to anyone. Because who is there to report to?

There's no AP Bureau in the Hellman province, you know, to take the testimonies of farmers and things. I'm sure you saw this piece by Anand Goebel in the New York. I was actually just, I was just going to bring that up. Yeah. It's a brilliant piece. And from our methodological stuff, it raises some really interesting stuff because as you said, he does a straw pole of, I think it's eight or ten or twelve families in Helmand and finds that on average, each of them has lost 10 to 12 family members

in the conflict. And though, but, and this is something that Iraq, body count, our friends at Iraq, body count have documented previously is that actually if you look at civilian harm you know we we as the as westerners particularly folk often end up focusing around the instance when lots of civilians were killed when dozens of civilians were killed but actually the worst civilian harm happens when one or two people you know the vast majority of civilian harm happens when one or two people are killed and it almost is never tracked it almost is never documented and and that was something I agree with you that Anangopal's brilliant piece captured.

Yeah. And by the way, for people who haven't seen that, it's called the other Afghan women in the New Yorker. And I'm trying to get Anon back on the show. I haven't talked to him in a few years. But he's, of course, the author of No Good Men Among the Living and has spent a lot of time in Afghanistan. And there's just this one section of the article where he says, yeah, Jimmy was out, you know, planting poppies and got bombed by a drone. And Joey was walking down the street and got bombed by the drone. and Grandpa Jack was out there, you know, with his granddaughter, they got bombed by a drone. And then it just goes on down the list. I'm making up the names.

It goes on down the list of innocent civilians. And let's see what's interesting, too, from this point of view, is just a day or two before that, I interviewed this guy, Jack Murphy, who's a former Green Beret turned journalist and who wrote this thing for Connectingvets.org, all about the Trump-era drone war in the Hellman province. And I don't know if you saw this, but. What had happened, according to his reporting here, and he had a ton of sources and stuff, was that in Iraq War III against ISIS, the rules of engagement were far looser than they had been in Afghanistan, even though we know the rules of engagement in Afghanistan, was anybody you kill, you call them an enemy killed in action, and then move on with your life anyway. But what happened was they took these much looser rules from Iraq War II, and they kind of imported them.

to Afghanistan to the war against the Taliban. So even while there was a ceasefire during the negotiations, that was only ground combat. And air strikes continued essentially the whole time through the Trump air there. And then Murphy got, you know, all kinds of quotes and sourcing from the guys actually doing the strikes

who talked about, you know, anybody with anything that looks like it might be an antenna is a dead man, you know, and this kind of thing where the rules of engagement are just stretched so broad, and you have the lowest possible level officers under the law authorizing the strikes. And so we already knew that from, you know, the legal end reporting and from the overall casualties in Afghanistan and the rate going up from air strikes over the past couple of years.

But then here was it the same story told from the point of view of the guys flying the drones and just a few days later, a non-Gopal from the point of view of the people down in the Helmand Province getting bombed by those drones. And it's just, you know, from their point of view, absolutely relentless, ultra-violence coming and just absolutely destroying their lives and families and communities in ways that, as we're talking about, go completely unreported, you know? Who knew the people of Helmand Province, you know, weren't being won over their hearts and minds to the American project there that they resented being killed so often, you know?

yeah and I think it does capture the I think you call it relentless but in a way I think that's such a good phrasing because it is that kind of you know it's not that somebody is shooting you every single day it's the possibility that it could happen any day that really you know the one of your cousins was out in the field he goes out in the field 200 times and then the 200 time is hit by a strike and kill. That is what changes behavior and that's what changes civilian populations in a way and changes their understanding and, you know, makes it almost impossible to, you know, what I think that piece captures so well is, is the folly of American attempts, and particularly I'm talking about American attempts, but, you know, you can use other nationalities, but is the folly of attempts to win hearts and minds, military. thoroughly. And, you know, this is something that you've seen in multiple locations. And, you know, in Afghanistan, it fundamentally, it never really succeeded. And there was no military strategy that was going to be enabled to do that. And I think it was, yeah, I think it's really captured that phenomena and where where we believe, you know, that both airstrikes and occupations are not, are blunt, can be blunt tools to try and achieve the aims of a particular military organization.

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and the show will get a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale. Happy hunting. Hey, y'all, Scott here for Lorenzotti Coffee. It's great stuff. It's actually how I'm conscious in recording this spot right now. You probably also like and need coffee. Well, Lorenzotti.comffee's got a great dark roast and these really cool grinders so you can brew it as fresh as possible.

Here real soon, they're also going to have a nice medium roast and other options available. Check them out at Lorenzotti.comffee. and use promo code Scott Horton.org to save 10%. They ship fast and it tastes great. Support good anti-government stimulant suppliers. Go to Lorenzotti.comfee today. Yeah, I think a big part of the problem is, right, is all the lingo here.

Just like with intelligence, make it sound like, oh, yeah, sure, every bit of information that you have makes you smart, right? Like, it might not be right at all. It's just information. You call it intelligence and you build in this giant bias toward how correct it all must be. And, you know, they do the same kind of thing with, you know, hunting militants or whatever it is.

They change the language and make it all seem like, you know, whoever they kill are guilty. We mentioned the, from the Daniel Hale leak, the drone papers there about how anyone they kill is E-K-I-A. and then if someone does an investigation and proves after the fact that they were actually innocent, then they'll update the records. But since they never do that, they never investigate. They just get to hold their own record. As John Brennan once claimed, we haven't killed any civilians at all. Right?

We don't count anyone that we kill as a civilian. It's really easy. Anyway. Yeah. And I would just say that also, you know, even with the best, intelligence and, you know, reconnaissance that you have in the world. You know, quite a lot of the time they will monitor a site for 48 hours, 72 hours before hitting it. And then they will say, well, we didn't see any movement from that in that 72 hours.

So we assumed that there were no civilians. I mean, if you're in the middle of an active conflict zone, people hide in their homes, right? and they often are sleeping in bunkers downstairs right and so so it is a it's a common refrain that you know you find people who you find people you know the united states will say we did or in a western military will say we did 24 hours 48 hours of reconnaissance on this particular target before striking it and saw no signs of life now that doesn't mean that there are no signs of life and that's a very common refrain that we come back to yeah Well, that was, you know, famously they bombed a, what, supposedly a Hacconi network house, I think, in Pakistan and killed American hostages there.

And said, oh, man, we've been monitoring that house for a very long time. I saw no evidence of hostages being held there. Well, they're locked up inside, you know, just as you're saying. Yeah, you hadn't seen them come and go because they weren't coming and going. They were prisoners. And, you know, anyway, all right. So to try to zoom back out here, you mentioned that as they say now, in 80 countries across the globe, it'd be nice if I could speak English. In 80 countries across the globe, they have some kind of special operations going on.

I think probably most of that is training, but possibly advising and assisting special operators from other countries going on missions against their own people. who may or may not claim to be associated with ISIS or Al-Qaeda? I mean, just how broad are they defying this? I mean, I notice in here, for example, you don't characterize the war against Gadda as part of the war on terrorism. You don't count that. You only count when they're going after Al-Qaeda

or ISIS guys there at later times. So it can be hard when they bait and switch all the time. You know, the American people might have thought the war against Gaddafi had something to do with terrorism. You know, it's a Muslim country over the... there somewhere, that kind of thing. It was in the same era as the other Middle Eastern wars that were being fought in the name of killing bin Laden's men, you know, that kind of thing. But I wonder how you define that, how broadly you define that. Hunting Joseph Coney doesn't

count, right? No, I mean, we did have active conversations about particularly, I mean, that's a particular one you've hit on there is an interesting conversation. And, you know, It was within this kind of Arab Spring narrative of 2011, and, you know, it wasn't primarily led by the Americans as well, if you remember, the Americans were leading from behind was the language that Obama used, but, you know, the French were really pushing for that war, and it wasn't framed in that way. But I think another analysis could have included it. I don't think it's, you know, we kind of came to the inclusion that we didn't think it was, you know, it was, you know, it was. wasn't really seen as part of the classical war on terror. But, I mean, the other thing I would say is, you know, it's written in the piece. I hadn't read the George W. Bush speech for a few years.

And I'd kind of forgotten how, you know, the ones relatively straight, a few weeks after 9-11, I'd forgotten how much he lays out what was to come to pass, you know, where he talks about our war will not end until every terrorist of global reach has been found stopped and defeated Americans should not expect one battle but a lengthy campaign unlike any we have ever seen it may include dramatic strikes visible on TV and covert operations success secret even in success and then the real kicker for me is just like every nation in every region now has a decision to make either you're with us or you're with the terrorists and you know obviously we can we remember 9-11 and the days and weeks after it and how that how you know I'm

obviously British but you know how Americans were scared and felt threatened and in a way that perhaps they've never felt before and it is interesting that you know at that time Bush enjoyed mere universal support for that language and for that speech that speech was one of the most, you know, welcomed speeches. And, you know, and it was only really a couple of years later with Iraq that you started to have European nations criticizing it and saying, look, this is not a feasible strategy, not Britain, I should point out. But it is interesting just to look back and to realize that, you know, it was almost

put in motion very quickly after 9-11, you know, and that, you know, and that, you know, If 9-11 had been discovered through intelligence mechanisms and had not happened, then this 20-year war on terror would not have happened. So these deaths are direct response to 9-11 and the atrocities of 9-11. Yeah. Or, you know, at least they're based on the decision to exploit the American people's fear to cynically get away with launching all these other extracurricular activities. You know, Gary Burnson, who was the second CIA commander on scene at Torabora, who it wasn't his fault. They basically forced him to let Bin Laden go or wouldn't allow him or his Delta Force counterparts to finish the job there. He told Michael Hirsch back in 2016 and General Zinney, who had been the commander of Central Command under Bill Clinton, also told Michael Hirsch that, yeah, the whole war could have been over by the end of 2001.

Imagine a global war to fight 400 men. And by, you know, terrorist groups of global reach, we mean the secular atheistic governments of Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gadda and Bashar al-Assad, you know, the latter two of which were extremely cooperative with the war against al-Qaeda, dating back to the 1990s when, you know, Gadda was the first guy to put an interpolar arrest out for Osama bin Laden. in 1996 after this MI6 was using the LIFG to try to assassinate him but anyway and this goes you know back to your data sets here like it's pretty hard right like you got to count the war against aQAP in Yemen from you know essentially 2009 I know Bush had a couple of drone strikes there in Yemen but Obama really got the drone war going 2009 but then he almost entirely called off the war against aQAP when he switched sides in that war and it's been fighting for a QAP against the Houthis since and that includes all through the Trump years since 2015 and so

you can't count any of that and that's also leading from behind where it's American jets sold to Saudi princelings who are dropping bombs on civilian targets for you know six and a half years straight but that can't make your data set either because it doesn't count because it's the war for terrorism? Yeah, again, you know, we can disagree on some of the politics there, but yeah, we would not include that in the sense of, you know, as I said, if at all possible, we were looking at direct civilian harm. Now, the support for the Saudis, and, you know, as you said, as you correctly identified,

the Saudis would not be able to continue this campaign. without some US support, certainly not in the early years and probably now. So, you know, if you were to start looking at indirect civilian harm, then that was certainly a conversation you could have. It's just we were looking at a very specific, you know, substrata of civilian harm and, you know, doing our best to identify this, knowing that it's an imprecise, you know, mechanism, you know, knowing all of these things. And also, as I would, as we say in the piece, knowing that there are no US estimates for this, right?

There are no publicly released US estimates for this, for these figures, for how many civilians that they accept having killed. You know, they have improved in recent years, but in the early years of the war, we really We had, you know, the early year, Afghanistan and Iraq, I would refer you to the British Chilcott report, which says that Tony Blair informed, was telling people in the days before the Iraq war, the estimates for civilian harm would be in the low hundreds. And, you know, and we all know how that ended up, right? So there really was no mechanism for monitoring civilian harm in the early years of Afghanistan or Iraq.

And the U.S. has never, as far as we know, published and made available their assessment for how much civilian harm they have caused. Now, in the Iraq war logs, there was something in the Iraq war logs where they admitted that there were 15,000 more civilians killed than they had admitted so far. But I don't guess they had the entire kind of background research, right? They just had sort of one paper that referred to that. Is that correct? Yeah, I believe so. And I'd have to double check on exactly what I remember the thing that it's a while back. But yeah, whether that was civilian harm, direct civilian harm or indirect, or that was more civilians killed as a result of the war, et cetera.

You know, as you said at the beginning, there are many. ways that you could do this, you could look at how many civilians, you know, as John Hopkins, I believe, did and found hundreds of thousands of people had died. If you do an assessment of takes a certain sample size of family, how many people, is each family lost and then extrapolate that to the Iraqi population at large? That's very, very different to what we're trying to do. And, you know, all of these different methodologies, we don't say that one is right or one is wrong. And, you know, they're doing slightly different things to try and understand different phenomena. And, you know, really what we were trying to do is just trying to make sure that the civilian impact of U.S. strikes and 20 years of U.S. actions was not forgotten in conversations around, you know, 20 years of forever wars.

right um i just found the the piece from the iraq warlocks it's not all air strikes of course it includes you know all kinds of uh you know violent deaths in the iraq war there and the guardian has a piece all about it from uh october 2010 uh but uh yeah no listen i really appreciate the work that you guys are doing here and chris woods is still part of the group right he's he's he's my boss yeah that's what i thought i just hadn't talked to him a little while I want to make sure he didn't float away and start another project somewhere. No, no, Chris is still the director and leading us strongly forward. So I had the investigations team.

Chris is the director. Dmitro is the deputy director. And now we have a new head of research called Emily. Great. All right. Well, listen, you guys are doing really important work here, and I urge everybody to check it out. I think we ran a big piece about it, or at least we ran the main piece at anti-war.com the other day. It's airwors.org, and the piece is titled, tens of thousands of civilians likely killed by U.S. in forever wars.

Thanks, Joe. Appreciate it. Thanks so much for time for time for. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.