Former Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clarke: U.S. Drone Program Under Obama “Got Out of Hand”

TRANSCRIPT

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.”

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