Investigating War — with Iain Overton

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Hello, I'm Charles Mallet with a UK Column interview.

Today I'm joined by Dr. Ian Overton,

who is the Executive Director of Action on Armed Violence,

as well as being an investigative journalist and an author.

In a very warm welcome to UK Column,

and thank you very much indeed for joining me.

Thank you. No, it's a pleasure.

Good. Now, there is an awful lot to try to cover today.

How much of that will actually get through remains to be seen,

but just so that the audience have a basis for understanding

what it is that you're going to be talking about and why.

Would you just explain a bit about what it is that action on

armed violence does do and how your involvement with it started?

So we basically root civilian harm in conflict zones

at the epicenter of what we're interested in.

And we do that through investigating harm in conflicts,

as well as looking at what, for a long time,

I thought was sort of a rather tinfoil-hatted expression,

a sort of military industrial complex,

but as the longer I've spent in this space,

the more I think that actually McCarthy was right in calling it that.

So we investigate the military industrial complex,

and we do throw through field research,

so my work has taken me over the years to around 25 conflict zones

around the world of differing levels of harm,

as well as doing things like freedom of information request,

deep dive analysis into data,

and we run a global explosive violence data set

where we look at a daily basis at civilians killed or injured

by explosive violence in populated areas.

And we cross-reference that to things like the arms trade

and who is profiting from the sale of such weapons

to various regimes and nations.

Okay, thank you very much for that.

Now, the pursuit really is to try to staunch the flow

of, in particular, if I've understood correctly,

civilian casualties.

I mean, statistically, I think this bears sort of great scrutiny.

Can you just explain with particular regard to, say, explosive ordnance,

why it really is a matter of concern that we think about

civilian populations who get caught up in these sorts of conflicts?

So my background is I was a BBC journalist

and then a Channel 4 news journalist,

and then I set up something called the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

But around 12 years ago, I joined action on our violence.

And at the same time, we set up this global explosive violence monitor.

And it was quite a revelation because I've been to that point.

I'd been to lots of places where there were clearly huge sort of impacts

of conflict on towns and cities.

But we set out to look at all English language media reports

of civilians recorded injured or killed in these cities,

alongside all injuries and deaths.

And we found out relatively quickly that when explosive weapons were used in towns and cities,

around 90% of people killed or injured were civilians,

compared to something around 20% in lesser populated areas,

such as rural terrain.

And I thought in the first instance this might have been an anomaly,

but year two came year three, year four, year five, every year for a decade.

The same basic patterns of harm are very clearly evidenced.

And over that time, we've obviously seen homes and Aleppo and Marriapal and Gaza unfolding,

where we're back in the sort of terrain of Hiroshima and Dresden,

massive deaths of civilians in urban areas,

often very distanced from the general public's mind and concern,

although I think Gaza and Marriapal have brought it more fiercely into the living room.

But certainly, you know, a decade ago, nobody talked about this phrase,

explosive weapons in populated areas.

And I wonder if your listeners are familiar now with that framing.

And I would say that that's come out of the sort of lobbying work, an advocacy work,

that organizations like mine have tried to do to make this a concern.

And we actually got over 80 states signing a political commitment

to avoid the use of explosive weapons in populated areas in Ireland a couple of years ago.

And of course, you could say that this is, you know, since Ireland a few years ago,

we've seen the devastation of Gaza and the continuing terrors of Ukraine.

But I think at least we're now acknowledging that this is a real issue of 21st century warfare and civilians.

Strangely in a space where militaries are often distanced from the fighting

because of drone warfare and increasingly autonomous systems,

the civilians are really caught in the terror of the mall in between.

And this is a very different relationship to war that we saw potentially, let's say, in 1914,

where soldiers with the primary victims and civilians were often relatively protected

by being further away from the front lines.

Yes, now, obviously, the answer to this question is that it doesn't matter either way

because the important thing is that civilians are dying.

Clearly, that is not right.

I mean, let's go a step further and say that it's not right that competence are dying either.

I mean, nobody really should be dying.

But for what you've researched, are you suggesting, and it could be a combination of these,

but are you suggesting that this is a change in the nature of warfare

and therefore that battles are being fought more amongst the civilian population

or that civilians are more vulnerable because they don't have the tactical expertise

or, indeed, the sort of protections that competence would have,

or is it sort of hybrid of both of those factors?

I mean, I think it's a hybrid in a way.

So obviously, in someone like Gaza, the civilians can't leave their areas

and we've seen many an instance where people are hurt in one location,

they become refugees, and then they're hurt in the second location

and even a third location.

So we see multiple assaults on civilians that are moving within a space, particularly in Gaza.

In other places like Ukraine, yes, you saw a massive spike in the early days of civilian harm,

and then a kind of a slow leveling off as people began to pour it over the border

and to Poland, et cetera, realizing how terrible Russia's invasion was.

But I think I go to the very heart of the matter and the argument that

if you look at the origin of the rules of war, it really sort of began in Kressy or Ashenko,

where soldiers, and there's a reason why chivalry is called chivalry

because the chivalr, the knight on the horseback, was the sort of archetypal arbiter of faith and justice in the battlefield,

and chivalry was in a way not doing the kuda grar on your enemy,

but actually letting them live.

And so over time, I think that you saw soldiers actually creating rules of war

so that they had a fighting chance of survival if they were ever captured.

It wouldn't all just be executions all round.

And over time, even up sort of the middle of the 20th century,

the rules of war were very much discussed by soldiers, four soldiers.

And then obviously saw the total war of the 20th century emerging into the civilian space,

and you saw the Geneva conventions coming out of that and a whole raft of UN deployments,

and treaties and various other things.

But I think a mark of the 21st century has been a slow erosion of some of those sort of profoundly held beliefs about the protection of civilians.

We're talking about the rules based order being sacrificed on the altar of strategic convenience.

But at the same token, you're also seeing a distancing of a lot of soldiers from the battlefield

so that we're seeing people fighting drone warfare for far, far removed.

And I first helped expose, as part of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism,

the use of US drone strikes out of the Midwest killing civilians in Pakistan.

Can you get even further distance from war from that?

And so my concern is, as warfare becomes a very different beast fought by soldiers.

And I'm not denying soldiers bravery in all of this or their risk to them.

War can be a bloodless thing for many an heir crew.

And you combine that, the people who really suffering at the very basis of war

are often those civilians caught as people in the middle of this conflict.

And I think when we also now throw in the mix of AI and targeting systems fueled by artificial intelligence,

I think you're going to see even more people being targeted as competence

where merely they're just fighting age male, or they're in the wrong place at the wrong time,

or the AI system feel compelled to add a name because it doesn't want to say,

I think I finish now for the day, we don't have to kill anyone else.

And I think that all of these things are occurring at the same time that the rules of war themselves

are not being addressed through a civilian prism.

And I sit down with a lot of military types and speak to them about their rules and processes

and understandably because the world they live in is a military world.

They don't often consider civilians at the epicenter of what they're doing.

Civilians are a secondary or even tertiary thought.

I don't blame them for that.

But I do think that that then creates a space for civilians like myself

who have seen and witnessed war in all of its different terrible faces

to actually also be an advocate for the voice of civilians in the strategic planning and outcome of conflicts.

Yes, and there's a lot that can follow on from the points you've made there

and what you've been through.

I mean, I think I would first of all say that you're very diplomatic for one of a better word

in suggesting that you shouldn't blame members of the armed forces for conducting operations

that do have a civilian death toll attached to them.

I mean, I would say that the laws of armed conflict are very, very clear on this matter

and that that should be avoided at almost all costs.

Now, the question that falls out of that, therefore given the statistical background

and the changes in the nature of warfare and exactly what you're describing

where there is that divorce now from reality.

You know, you can sit in a port of cabin somewhere and kill people left and right

without even hearing anything go bang.

There's a huge sort of desensitization to the whole process.

I guess the question that falls out of it is what is happening in particularly populated urban areas.

Is that actually deliberate in so far as it is a deliberate attempt to kill civilians

in a sort of completely unjust method?

So I think that it's almost unequivocal that Russia and Israel have conducted campaigns

that through the rules of engagement rulebook if they even had one in the first place out the window.

So I think certain militaries have absolutely no conscience about the death of civilians

and I think we've even seen seat in the Knesset's political rhetoric.

Almost, well, I would say at points a genocidal intent and certainly Russia's framing of Ukraine

has been devoid of any human rights concern.

But let's talk about NATO countries.

So one thing which I was really surprised is I asked the British RAF

for lists of all the civilians killed or injured in their op-shadow,

which is their air flights over Iraq and Syria.

And they came back and they said they had killed or injured 4,300 Iraqi and Syrian militants

but that they had only killed one civilian in the entire space.

Now, I would put it to the RAF that they have therefore either done one of two things.

They've either broken the nature of war, in other words they've made war,

entirely bloodless to civilians, which is the first time this has ever happened in human history.

Or that they have willfully ignored the fact that civilians have died,

maybe even covered it up, or done a system, a bureaucratic system of casualty recording

where the default is always to the assumption of guilt as opposed to the assumption of innocence.

And that this willful failure then is a framing of how they believe themselves

to be good men conducting a conflict far away.

Now, when I go back, I mentioned that I don't blame the militaries.

I don't necessarily blame a corporal who's given a job as a drone pilot

and that's his role to go out and do this.

I don't blame him exquisitely.

Because I think obviously he can make the choice to resign or to hang up his commission or whatever.

But what I do blame are the more senior individuals who maintain this absolute belief

in that they are working for the greater good, that they have no faults.

And ultimately the war that they are fighting is essentially a good one.

So they lean into uncritically.

And then if they also within that bureaucratization of their own violence,

enable them to be violent against civilians, but pass that off as violence against militants,

then I would say that they probably deserve a long night of the soul where they have to sort of reconcile that with their own conscience.

And I think we don't see that exquisitely, and let's say drone strikes,

we're also seeing that emerging with the accusations by Special Forces killings in Afghanistan,

where we're seeing people at senior command level in UK Special Forces

saying that there was a willful cover-up by their seniors

to mean that they wouldn't properly interrogate allegations of civilians being caught,

being executed as part of routine Special Forces operations.

And I do think that the most incredible thing is that one of the individuals

who's been named by the BBC is actively hiding evidence, somebody called Hugh Jenkins,

is now for sea-lord, he's promoted even in the face of the BBC saying that he hid evidence

that civilians were killed in Special Forces ops.

So I think that there is real questions to be asked about,

the way that the British military frame themselves as a force of good.

And this means that they cannot ever contemplate that they haven't been a force of good.

And when you have individuals like myself come along and I expose this,

one thing I've noticed is that initially they were quite willing to speak to me,

and over time I've become persona non grata,

and I'm not allowed to speak to people at senior level of the MOD anymore.

And so I think that there becomes this sort of defensive framing

that if you're not with us, you're against us and therefore you have nothing of merit to say.

And there becomes this incredible hostility as if I am part of the problem

rather than exposing a problem.

Yes, that is something we will come back to,

because I absolutely want to talk about the relationship between the military government corporations and the media.

Sorry, just to clarify is Gwyn Jenkins actually the first sea lord.

Sorry, I'm sorry.

You said you said you, but Gwyn Jenkins.

Exactly, as you say.

And he was Director of Special Forces and we'll come back to that as well.

But just before we do, I think something again,

when we're talking about this idea that so much is in effect hidden from public view,

because unless you've gone into deep research and you've actually gone to these places as you have

and you've studied it, it is very easy, particularly for people in Western Europe,

to have really no sense of what is going on.

And now we set that against the, what it is that armed forces are doing under what they've been given as rules of engagement.

Now, of course, if you look into that, certainly for the British Army,

rules of engagement are written down in JSP398 at joint service publication.

And they are an expression of political will.

They're an expression of how to, how to use force.

Now, the reason I'm setting that out is because I'd be very interested to hear your views on, first of all, that in itself,

because I think a lot of people in the armed forces are not really aware that in actual fact,

when the rules of engagement change, that can be for political reasons,

rather than reasons of a change in threat or risk on the ground.

But also, in light of the comments, by the Secretary for War, Pete Hegseth in the United States,

who's basically saying, right, well, rules of engagement,

thing at the past, crack on, do what you like.

I mean, absolutely.

I think that the, you know, the class fits in,

framing war as an extension of politics by the means is very true.

And I think that there's this, I wouldn't call it naivety,

but that there's a certain reluctance by the British military to sort of say,

well, they always say we're not political, we're not political.

And there's a virtue, of course, in that, because a politicized military,

you know, is something that, you know, you associate, let's say,

with the Central American Republic in the 1980s, you know,

you've got to be wary of that sort of thing.

But I think that there is a kind of a wider political framing.

So I think that, you know, that this old idea of the British military

or the British nation, essentially post-empower,

is a nation seeking to find a role for itself.

And I think the military hasn't really caught up with that agenda.

And it's still to some degree wants to be everything everywhere all at once.

So I came out with a story today that showed that we,

our reservists were sent to 51 countries last year.

And the year before, British Army personnel went to 171 countries around the world.

And I think that there is this desire to constantly find an enemy,

to have this persistent framing that we are the last defenders of some bastion of civilisation.

And that this means we're always seeking to sort of find a role to be engaged with.

And when that role is then officially granted by the policymakers,

that we are allowed to be in Iraq or Afghanistan and fight a war,

then, of course, the gloves come off.

And then there's a question, well, what are we going to do?

Well, what's the end goal? What are we actually selling?

Can we sell democracy down the barrel of a gun?

Can we achieve this?

And one of the things I've really find striking and actually quite problematic

is that because the military says we're not, we're not, we are, you know,

we are the fort, let Caesar be under Caesar.

And then we will do what we have to do.

That to that degree that they refuse to sort of really bring on lessons of the past

in any meaningful way.

So if you say what were the lessons of Afghanistan?

What were the lessons of Iraq?

These, it's like pulling teeth. It's a very painful process.

I went to Basra a couple of months ago and I sat down with lots of families

who had been at the very hard end of British military engagement.

And families had been lost terrible events that occurred.

I'm not saying this was purposeful.

I don't think the British military aimed machine guns at civilians

like the Russians might do.

But nonetheless, I think that there were terrible outcomes.

And when, of course, we want to address this from the British military perspective.

I think that some of the rules of that led to those engagements

aren't particularly looked at.

You know, we shut down the Iraq Historical Allegations Team process.

This entire process of investigating these special forces in Afghanistan

has been a very slow and expensive process.

Even Northern Ireland has revealed nothing of any substance about 30, 40 years on.

And I think that the military's desire to learn from its failings,

which is negligible, means that when it comes to the next position

where it has to use rules of engagement in a lethal manner,

it doesn't sort of go, well, we can't behave in the way we previously did.

And I think that that failure of institutional memory to learn from its own mistakes

means that to a degree that is a political decision,

and the political decision ultimately comes, I think, from a fundamental,

which is that government after government after government treats the military

with a rare exceptionalism in British life, where they're always brave,

they're always doing exceptional work, and they're always to be praised.

And there's no public space in Britain to be anything but overtly critical.

And of course, you shouldn't be critical for the sake of criticism.

But when there is valid criticism, and I think the British military definitely has valid criticism,

whether it's racism or sexism in its ranks, whether it's claims of extraterrestrial killings

in Afghanistan, whether it's failing to protect civilians in Iraq,

whether it's the death of individuals in Kenya and allegations of wrongdoing there.

All of these are murky truths that are circulating around the British military at the moment.

But there's a reluctance, an institutional reluctance.

And I think that that stems from a political exceptionalism that the military has granted,

but is also something rooted in the British military's own framing of itself as a force of good

and an unassailable good, which means that, you know, as you say,

Gwyn Jenkins gets promoted rather than castigated even in the face of damning evidence.

Yes, I think what you say would be agreed with by a lot of former servicemen myself included.

I think that absolutely is the perception of what one is doing and the way that you're told

to sort of think about going about doing it.

I think just since you've mentioned it, it does give an insight on this theme.

The report that you've just referred to about, you know, we described just before we started recording,

effectively an exercise in what might be described as military tourism.

And really, you know, what should we take out of that?

Because clearly the purpose, well, is it?

But the purpose of an armed force could be said to be to deliver lethal force, you know,

in a place where it is required.

I mean, it's highly questionable as to whether it is ever required.

So that's perhaps a bit of a red herring, but when you set that alongside what you're talking about,

I mean, what is it that you do think about that?

What does that say about the way in which our armed forces are conducting themselves,

or indeed having money thrown at them to do this, that and the other?

So this is going to be quite controversial, but Johnny Beale, who's the BBC's defence chief,

said to me once that the one of the biggest controversies he's ever reported on,

was the number of public schoolboys who go to centres.

And I'm a former public schoolboy who got a scholarship to go to centres,

and I decided after university to join the BBC instead, which is a different form of corrupt institution.

Anyway, so what are the interesting things is that if you get an overseas foreign posting

as an army officer, as any soldier, but essentially obviously,

there's always a chance you're going to get, if you have a family,

you'll get a boarding school allowance.

And I was sent to boarding school on my father's boarding school allowance.

So there's a natural imperative, if you're a major,

to want to be sent as a defence attaché to a different country,

so then you get a boarding school allowance.

And I know somebody who sent four sons to Gordonston based on this premise.

Now, I think that that's part of, I mean, that's one of the incentives.

But I think there's also, and many of us, you know,

any of your listeners have been to boarding school,

or you know, there is this sort of framing of the boarding school came out

of this concept of empire.

This yearning to be in a far off location doing daring do worth worthy things,

often through a military prison.

And so the military mindset is very much always,

let's seek what's on the distant horizon.

The senior personnel of the military are often ex-special forces

who are granted not just the excitement of getting sent everywhere all the time,

but also in secret in a sort of James Bondish way.

So I think that there's very much rooted at the heart of the British military

desire to be in another place.

So as we play in his very boring,

if you compare it to doing maneuvers in Kenya or Brunei or Borneo.

But then, underpinning all of that, I think, is also this Britain wanting to punch above its weight.

It's a small nation, an island nation.

But, you know, we're part of the Security Council.

I think there's this also implicit understanding that we were last invaded

in the early 18th century.

You know, there's not much argument that anyone wants to invade us

with any meaningful force at the moment.

I don't think Putin desperately wants to take Edinburgh and London

with, you know, a phalanx of Russian soldiers.

So I guess the question is, what is the military for?

And of course, it's partly a projection of power.

But then I think we're entering a real crunch period

where our global ambitions don't really work out

to our budgetary constraints.

And so I think what you're seeing is us trying to be everywhere

everything all at once on a pound-land budget.

And that doesn't work.

So either you get the ex-military types who go on the today program

saying we need a lot more money in the face of, you know,

major cuts throughout other parts of the British governmental supply.

Or you have a position where we say, actually, we need to retract a bit.

And I did notice today that the MOD said that they're going to pull back

a little bit from some foreign deployments.

But I think there is a fundamental attention as to what Britain is

in the post-imperial age.

I think that that does aligns badly with a recruitment challenge

that the military have trying to say, look, join the military

and we'll send you skiing in the Alps or, you know, climbing the Himalayas

or whatever it is.

Which is obviously exciting and who wouldn't want to do that.

And so I think that there's this tension about what is Britain?

What does Empire mean, you know, years on after giving way to Empire?

And what does the British military have to say?

But, you know, as you know, if you walk the halls of Santas,

the halls of Santas to full of oil paintings of people doing, you know,

exciting and heroic things in, you know, Hindustan or, you know,

the Hindu Kush or whatever.

And this is incredibly exciting and who, you know,

that sort of roots itself in a consciousness of what we are.

But I think that there, you know, when you speak to Italians or French,

not necessarily the French because they have the French foreign legion,

but the Germans, the Spanish about their militaries,

they look at our slightly perplex and they go, you know,

why do you have to be everywhere?

And if you ask that question, you know, the intriguing thing is that

I don't think that this is a matter of a major public debate in the British,

sort of conversation.

We almost think, oh, that's just what the military do and they'll always do that.

But, you know, when I look back at our previous imperial endeavors,

and our footprint, our military footprint, and ask the question,

where are we a force of true good?

A much more complex question mark rises.

And so I think we have to be persistently vigilant as to what we're doing

in which countries and how we're doing it.

Because, you know, did we do good in Iraq?

Did we do good in Afghanistan?

And also from a very specific perspective, you know,

did our former soldiers sent to Afghanistan in Iraq?

How do they manage, you know, civilian life now,

knowing what they were asked and tasked to do?

And I think we need to have empathy from both perspectives about, you know,

not just the empathy and perspective of the Iraqi or the Afghan civilians caught up,

you know, in our own military endeavors,

but also the legacy of those wars on soldiers who were sent to places.

And I know at least three soldiers who took to have taken their lives

after tours of Afghanistan and Iraq.

And, you know, there does come with a moral injury that has occurred

as a consequence of us doing things that we're not entirely convinced did good.

Yeah, very much so.

Now, to go to the point you're making about the, in effect,

the background and the sort of lifestyle of a lot of people who do end up coming

big decision makers.

And relating that to what we are seeing all be it very slowly through the Afghan inquiry

and the suggestion that there have been extra judicial killings made by special forces

over a number of years.

And again, this is not isolated to British special forces.

Of course, what has been very interesting to observe is what's happened in Australia

with the case of Ben Robert Smith, the decorated corporal who was found guilty

or rather sorry, he was pursued a libel case, a civil case, therefore,

and lost because on the balance of probability the court decided that he had committed extra judicial killings

and yet no criminal trial and the same in the United Kingdom.

Now, do you think that what you've described bears relation to, in effect,

the lack of scrutiny really that's gone into, with the exception of the Afghan inquiry,

the lack of scrutiny and indeed the lack of any sort of suggestion that there might be consequences

for what may have happened?

I mean, I don't think that the inquiry into Afghanistan will result in a singular conviction.

In fact, explicitly, any evidence given to the inquiry does not then hold standing in a criminal court

which I don't think really has been highlighted anywhere of any significance.

And I think that that is an incredible thing that you set up an inquiry.

And by doing so, you actually, to a degree, render the fundamentals of British criminal process obsolete.

You know, we've seen it with Northern Ireland and the bloody Sunday killings.

And of course, I guess, reduced into this framing that somehow this is law fair.

These are terrible liberal left wing lawyers striving to sort of gut the heart out of our heroic soldiers.

And of course, you know, we did see one or two badly behaved lawyers don't get me wrong.

But simultaneously, the question I would raise is surely if you believe in due process,

the rule of law and the nature of democracy,

that inquiring about the overstep of the rights of individuals,

the failure of the rules of war, the death of civilians, surely this is part and parcel of the package we were promising, which is democracy.

So I see myself as a thaw in the side of the military, but because I believe that if we don't have people like me interrogating the military's actions,

then the military has carte blanche to do whatever it will.

So I almost see myself as an ally to the military because without people like me, everything is lost.

But so on a wider perspective, I think that the impunity that has been enjoyed by the Americans, the British and other forces,

that we may have seen begin in home in Fallujah, for instance, we saw the deaths of losses of civilians there.

The US got away with it. I teamed up with Julian Assange to expose the WikiLeaks military logs of Iraq.

And we saw war crime after war crime being committed and recorded by the American military,

not one of those allegations of war crimes ever ended up in court.

So the Americans laid out in the early 21st century clear case for the impunity of the American forces.

And the British simultaneously sort of got on board, and we had an inquiry, the Iraq historical allegations seem,

but that folded with no evidence of wrongdoing.

I think that then Russia saw that impunity acting, and they thought, well, if you're going to do it with Fallujah, we'll do it in Homs and Aleppo.

That led to no outcome. So then you sort of marry a poll, and then now we're seeing it in Gaza.

I would say that the impunity enjoyed by Netanyahu is rooted in the very claims of democracy that we sold to the world through armed conflict in the early 21st century,

that we didn't then support with due legal process of holding our own to account.

So I think this is part of a much bigger play of actually what do we mean by civilization? What do we mean by the rule of law?

We mean by justice. And so I don't, I mean, I'm a tiny actor in all of this.

But I do, that is a philosophy that spurs me on, that I believe myself to be a defender of fact and a defender of truth in an age when so much is contested.

Yeah, no, there's a lot of important substance there. Now you use the phrase holding to account. And I think this is really where we want to go.

You, I think I'm right, were with the BBC from 97 to 2005. And obviously that period is effectively exactly when the so-called war on terror was basically being wound up with the then, well, I suppose Afghan deployment 2001 and then Iraq 2003.

And this is, I don't mean this is necessarily a bar of question about your time at the BBC, but from the perspective of an insider, do you believe that during that period the BBC was doing what it is supposed to do and holding the government to account?

So it's very interesting. I was just talking to somebody the BBC the other day about this. I was in the BBC newsroom when we saw the second plane hit the Twin Towers. And in that moment, we knew our entire lives had changed.

And looking back on my role at the BBC. So I went on embeds with the British military. I was in Iraq during the descent into chaos in Basra.

I was embedded with the British military there. And I think I did all of that relatively uncritically. I was, you know, we felt that there was a major shift that occurred.

I think a lot of people got on board with, you know, we didn't quite go as far as US correspondence turning up with a rifle and a gun in our hands and saying we were on board.

But I think there was a lack of critical review. And I remember when I was at Channel 4, there was a very good journalist there called John Sparks who began to look, he was a Canadian.

And he began to look at extra renditions, renditional flights. And I remember thinking that that's an interesting perspective. Why would you look at that? And he began to find more and more stuff.

And I think it took a Canadian, actually, to sort of break through the patriotism that we all get can get infected with. And then a few years later, after I left the BBC, after I left Channel 4, I set up the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

And then this incredible report of Chris Woods came to me and said, I think we should begin to look at US drone strikes in Pakistan.

And we began to look at this. And to be honest, this was my first time. And this was 2012 that I began to look at the war on terror with any profound critical eye.

I'd been looking at a whole bunch of other things. And it took a while for me to actually have the veil taken off my eyes. And there was an absolute crunch point that came was when the, we were going to give our story of over 30 children and civilians killed by US drone strikes in Pakistan.

So a major international paper, I wasn't going to say which one it was, but they, they were going to run that front page.

They then called me the day before and they said, the CIA basically said that you're not trustworthy. We shouldn't work with you. You work with Julian Assange. Don't work with you. So we're not running the story.

And then I, the story ran with the Guardian the next day. So it came out anyway. A few months later, that major international paper got an exclusive from the CIA that they would own.

And I think that there was a deal made. I can't prove it. But there was something very wiffy. And when I raised that with the editor of this paper, he started screaming at me in a way that was far too emotional when you gave it as to the sort of, you know, the question asked did not merit the response given.

Anyway, my point is this is that I think it takes a great deal to be a journalist who is able not to be sucked in to patriotic endeavor or even nationalistic endeavor, if you will.

And I think it's taken me a long time to actually realize that the best patriot is the critical patriot. Somebody who can actually look at the intersection between the media, the politics, the military industrial complex.

In such a way that actually you say the truth will liberate us and the truth is the ultimate thing that we should seek out. And so I wouldn't say that there was a coherent editorial ploy at the BBC not to hold government to account.

But I think there becomes an institutional blindness that actually there are certain things that just remain beyond the Ken. And often it's outsiders in the BBC.

People who don't necessarily come from a certain group who can offer that. And I would raise my hat to Hannah O'Grady, who's been the BBC producer.

Behind the expose they ended up blowing the lid on the special forces allegations of killings in Afghanistan. So there are some exceptional people who do hold society to account, but equally speaking.

I have numerous on numerous occasions gone to the BBC gone to major news publications with stories that I truly believe are revelatory.

Let's say, so for instance, I expose that there have been over 600 spy plane flights by the British over Gaza during the Gaza conflict.

The BBC wouldn't touch that. And I think that there is a kind of a failure for the BBC to consider themselves sometimes as being the people who should investigate the military.

And I'm not saying that I'm not criticizing individuals for that. I think that that comes becomes a culture where they're caught between not wanting to seem as if they're unpatriotic, but at the same time not realizing that sometimes it's unpatriotic to hold the government of the day to account.

OK, I mean, you know, your perspective on this, albeit sort of almost 20 years ago is fascinating. And I think I just want to draw this out a little further, because obviously you're describing your own position as being one of not using what you're describing as a, as a critical eye at that period, but obviously now in retrospect, you see that things differently.

Again, in retrospect, were you sort of alongside people who you think were using a crystal eye? Was there a sort of, in a way, a blanket sort of effect on people at that period?

Because it was, you know, similar to what we've seen over the last five years in some ways, that there was such an assault on the public about how dangerous things were here.

And that was all related to what was going on in the Middle East and all the rest of it. Do you, do you think there were people there who genuinely could see what was going on or not?

I think there were occasionally some people and they often, as I said, they may have come from an Irish background or a Canadian background, or they were often weren't sort of invested in the Britishness.

So there was that, there was also, I think, something else that was occurring at the time, which was very unusual, is that we suddenly found ourselves as white journalists to be potentially a liable to violence.

So when I was in Basra, for instance, I remember going up to the, I was with the British military on an embed, and I, there was huge violence occurring in the streets of Basra, and the British army were under terrible attack.

And I was like, I want to leave the front gates here and go out and report on what the civilians out there are fighting, why they're so upset with us, given we're a liberating army.

And the Colonel at the time said, by all means, you're free to go, but if you get caught and trouble, I'm not risking a man to come and save you.

And it gave me a real pause for thought because I thought, you know, I could easily become somebody who is hanging off a bridge burnt alive because I am the first white person who's unarmed or diverse, you know, British person unarmed that they'll find and they can do harm to.

And of course, we saw that with ISIS. I mean, I wrote a book about suicide bombers and I met lots of, you know, would be suicide bombers.

And there was always a lurking fear that one of them might just decide to take me with them on their journey to paradise and blow themselves up while I was interviewing them.

So, you know, I throughout the last 20 years, I have had to navigate this space that has existed where the media have become seen by particularly some salafis jihadists as part of the problem.

And of course, certainly there are media institutions that have been part of the problem. We have that some, some people are unquestionably uncritical.

My wider comment of the British media in general is that it tries to occupy the space of patriotism.

It doesn't like to criticize the military in anything that unless is absolutely clear dry.

And it certainly is reluctant to contemplate the military industrial complex in a sort of more philosophical way.

So, I think that it requires, you know, in a strange sense, I mean, I come from a military family.

I understand how the military works. And, you know, I was very, very close to joining the military myself and I spent years in that sort of cadet space.

So, I kind of understand the military reasonably well. And I think that those two things that give me a relative understanding of the nature of the military.

I also know that there are lots of people in the military or veterans who are very similar-minded to me.

So, you know, I know that they are more than capable of having quite critical perspectives on the military as well.

And I think that there is this sort of lack of understanding to some degree by the British press as to actually how the military operates and what they see themselves as in some ways.

And within that space, there's, I know that there are certain names that the British military veterans who keep on being cited in the British military who are often exceptional voices, not universal voices.

And those names are often quite right-wing, quite pro-military, often more asking for more defense spending.

And I, you know, people like, you know, Colonel Kemp, for instance, keeps on being put out there as a kind of a spokesperson even though he left over a decade ago for the military.

And I think that the British press, including the BBC, has a kind of a failure to be truly critical of most institutions, up until the point that those institutions become so corrupt that you can't do anything but expose them.

Yeah, okay. I mean, it is, it is fascinating because it's very interesting to hear you say that the BBC in effect won't touch stuff.

You've not been sounding your previous inform with the organisation and that in itself is, is fascinating, especially in light of what, you know, Tim Davie falling very slowly on his sword after the January the 6th sort of editing issue and whatnot.

Now, just in terms of sort of what drives what, you spoke at the Oxford Union some years ago and you talked about the lack of influence that media has due to the fact that there's no, I mean, it's just part of the same cycle, but, you know, people aren't investing in news sources in the way that they once were.

And yes, we do still have this perpetual state of conflict and as the saying goes, all wars are bankers wars. Now, what is your take on that and in effect, what does drive what in so far as the result being conflict is concerned?

Well, so for instance, we, we sent 170 what troops to 171 countries the year before last and of those countries 19 of them appeared on the UK government's own list of human rights concerns.

Eight of them experienced since 2020 a military coup. We've trained up soldiers from African countries that then have gone back to militaries that then undertake coups in their own country.

We embed organizations like BA systems that the very heart of our notion of what is good for the British economy and BA systems sell to Israel.

They also sell to Saudi Arabia, both of which have been involved in terrible violations against human rights, particularly the dropping of bombs in towns and cities.

And so I think you've got this military industrial nexus where to some degree, our military, we have defense attaches all over the world.

And those defense attaches are to some degree tasked with being cheerleaders for Britain's military exports, our defense exports.

We also have an entire community as you know well of ex-soldiers who then go into the security industry and then they end up being deployed in paid roles in countries all over the world, particularly our special forces.

This is very lucrative for them. And so I think you've got this very close relationship between the military, the military industrial complex and then human rights abuses that invariably come from that.

One thing that really struck me for instance is I looked at the share price increases of BA systems post October the 7th and their shares went up remarkably high.

And the chief executive of BA systems ended up selling 3 million pounds worth of shares, which would have been a million pounds less before October the 7th.

I asked the press office about this and they said that one of the reasons for this is he wanted to purchase a flat.

And it turned out I think that he had bought a London based flat potentially for his kids, I don't know.

But anyway, this flat was essentially born out of the profits made from sales to Israel.

And that really strikes me that about the nature of goodness in society and CS Lewis once wrote a very interesting commentary.

He said he didn't see hell as being a concentration camp or a torture chamber. He saw that as an outcome of hell. That was a product of hell.

Rather he said that hell to him were offices where men with low voices and clean fingernails and well lit rooms, past resolutions, agreed minutes and issued memorandums.

And to me that I see hell in the same regard that hell is a place which is far devoid from war, but actually is the profit center and the profit nexus of how that is.

And this could be anything from former special forces chiefs having a polite dinner in the Athenaeum all the way through to a quiet closed board meeting of BA systems agreeing on the next tranche of weapons sales to Israel.

And these are this is the military industrial complex writ large and to me that this space is occupied often by former public school boys.

It's often occupied by people who you know understand the mechanisms and architectures of power.

And it was also occupied by individuals who absolutely detest true scrutiny.

And these people simultaneously wine and dine and sit in the same media space as other people who dictate what is to be in the papers and not in the papers.

And I'm not saying there's a grand conspiracy here, but I think there's an architecture of silence around certain issues that we don't like to call out the that the hell of London.

And these creatures that inhabit this sort of world of the military industrial complex, we don't call them out for their actions.

And also within there, there's this profound distance of cause and effect.

So, you know, the profiteering in the military industrial complex of Britain becomes more, becomes easier to consume and to live alongside because we are not witness to its consequences.

We don't feel the bombed out homes of Yemen or of Gaza. We don't witness them close up.

So, to me, one of the profound roles I believe I play and I think maybe you play as well is to try and remind readers and listeners that there is an outcome to these processes that the architecture of the military industrial complex has very real.

And a consequence to the lies of others. And I think that's really by traveling to the places of harm and coming back to record it and then aligning that harm with the profiteering made within the UK offers, hopefully, kind of a bridge of empathy to say, is it right that we do this? And is there a better way of doing it?

I mean, speaking of consequences, I think a story that well articulates this, which you've written about yourself is the relationship between Christopher Harbourn and Reform UK.

Of course, he's the major shareholder of the Defense Company Kinetic, which has made an awful lot of money from the British government by supplying arms and weapons systems that have definitely been used in Israel.

And we've now got a situation where he is funding a political party that may yet assume or form a government within this country, which will further prop up the business that he is the major shareholder in.

I mean, it is an extraordinary circle. And of course, we've now had the Strategic Defense Review published this year alongside the National Security Strategy, both of which are predicated despite what you're saying about Putin not having designs on Edinburgh or London.

Predicated on the threat of, you know, some sort of action from Russia. So the defense dividend, as it's called, is absolutely there for all to see.

And I mean, you know, it's not just BAE who are doing well out of it. You look across the board. They're all, you know, everyone's share prices sort of shot up in that period.

And so it looks like with that being the case, there is absolutely a necessity for that war in order to make it work.

Now, what's your view on that with regard to, you know, you've referred to the sort of recruiting difficulties, you know, trying to sell people skiing holidays.

And what is increasingly difficult in an army that may not be strapped for cash, but certainly doesn't have the money that it used to or indeed the personnel and the flexibility within the system.

And yet there are sort of whispers of conscription and whatnot. I mean, do you see that there is going to be an active push for engagement in a, in a kinetic conflict with the United Kingdom involved?

I mean, so first on the kinetic thing, which I think is absolutely intriguing and that kinetic would not survive if it wasn't for the British taxpayer.

So I think 92% of its income is reliant on the MOD. And as you say, then there's this strange and weird circumstance where it then flows back into the pockets of reform UK, which, you know, by all accounts, if you read Umberto Ecos framing of what constitutes air fascism, I think that, you know, reform UK certainly ticks lots of the boxes of something that could be a precursor to a fascistic political framing.

So I have great concern about that with regard to the general military industrial complex, you know, just as a gentleman is in need of a good wife, an army is in need of a good war.

And I think that if you don't then raise the specter of Russia or China, I mean, Tom Tuggenhatt is the thing that keeps him up at night is the threat of China.

Russia is obviously a more existential threat and I'm not trying to diminish I've been to Ukraine seven times so I'm not trying to diminish the fact that Ukraine has been absolutely devastated by Russian imperial endeavor.

But simultaneously when you look at the linguistic map of Ukraine, certainly Russia was a major feature there.

I mean, I, you know, there's not many people in Britain who speak Russian. I have yet to see any tangible appetite by Putin to, you know, to want to take the threat exquisitely into the NATO space.

Now, certainly they're, you know, there's a certain line of jostling that's occurring along the border, flyovers and all the rest.

But what I found very interesting is that, you know, I went, I did a freedom of information request six years ago. I think it was asking how many times RAF jets have been scrambled to address a Russian threat.

And I think it was, you know, every month, for instance, and I took this to the BBC and I said, you should report on this and they were like, no, it's not for us.

But intriguingly, fast forward six years, that story if I came out with it now would probably lead every single paper.

In other words, newspapers don't accept that, you know, there isn't a historic background to this. I'll give you another example.

Boris Johnson gave absolutely zero pounds to Ukraine in his first year of premiership as prime minister. His first year he gave zero pounds of aid to Ukraine at all.

So this notion is rhetoric. We are sort of always standing with Ukraine.

Didn't occur even after Donbass and Lohansk had been effectively taken over by pro-Russian forces. We didn't give them any money at all.

So I would say that there is always a danger of a constructed enemy and a constructed sense of urgency.

And I've charted the times where defense chiefs have come out saying that there is an existential national threat to our way of life at the same time the budgets are under debate.

And they rise and fall in almost perfect sync. So three months before any budgetary sign off is granted by number 11, you get a defense chief coming out or a former defense chief saying that Britain is under threat like never before.

And so I can't I can't I divest and one of the interesting things is I think there are only two people in British cultural life in the media who are asked for their opinion in the face of an economic reality.

So estate agents are always asking whether house prices will rise or fail. And of course the state agent is always going to say it's going to rise because no estate agent wants to be out of a job.

And the second person is always a defense chief. You always ask ex-military whether we need security and you know there are very few former generals who are pacifists.

So most generals will go of course we need more money. We always need more money. But actually if you look at where the UK is in terms of defense spend, we are only second behind Germany.

But in terms of per capita we're way ahead of Germany. So we are the biggest defense spenders apart from the US in NATO.

We, you know, and one of my questions ultimately is yes, maybe we do need to lean into defense spending if that's what the general rhetoric is.

But then I have to say, well, what are we defending? Are we defending our interests in Borneo or Brunei or Dara Salam or Kenya or wherever the hell we are because we seem to be everywhere?

Or are we actually saying our primary interest is this septid aisle? I mean we are, you know, granted one of the greatest opportunities that we have, you know, an island nation.

We would be pretty damn hard to invade us. And if we were invaded, I'm not entirely sure what mineral resources people would be able to claim as Putin is claiming in the Donbass.

So there's a question of why would we be invaded? What would be the benefit? What would be the outcome? And none of this is ever discussed.

And the only other thing that, just to, I'm sure you've got a question, but the next thing I'd finally like to say is that whenever we discuss about the defense of the realm, we never ever bring up the fact that we have nuclear weapons.

So obviously if we were invaded, we could just respond with a nuclear attack, which obviously would be terrible. But, you know, the idea that we have nuclear weapons is never really articulated in the media nor in the defense review as being a primary defense of our nation.

So the impulses always that we need more and more and more, and the enemy is always at the gates.

Yes, it is. Although it is interesting to know how many references there are to nuclear in the strategic defense review this year, but in a sort of more limited sense as though, you know, there are, there is such a thing as a tactical nuclear capability.

I mean, I think there's much debate to be had on that going back to what you were saying about, you know, the targeting of militants at the same time is apparently not killing single or at least any killing one civilian.

I mean, it just, it makes absolutely no sense. Now, we are sort of shortish on time now, but one thing I did just want to put to you, and I don't want to sort of, you know, bring the tone down as it were, but bearing in mind your, you know, your concern and your objective with regard to action on armed violence.

I've just put the words, I'm praising, because I can't remember exactly what he said, but Kieran Prendergast, who was under Secretary General Political Affairs at United Nations some time ago, was interviewed for a documentary about Sudan a while back.

And he was very, very candid in saying that, you know, plenary bodies like the United Nations will be full of people who do say we must do something about it.

We will do something about it. You know, we are going to stop X, Y and Z, but they don't mean it. And you spoke at the outset about getting 18 nations to sign up to, you know, making a commitment.

And I didn't mean to be cynical exactly, but I mean, where do you see the sort of divide between people committing either in writing or verbally, and actually doing something about it?

And is, are we on a, you know, a sort of sliding scale if things getting worse or better in that God?

I mean, I don't think it's a downer at all. And I mean, anyone worth their salt is having an existential, you know, contemplation about the nature of the international rules based order as they stand.

I certainly think that the creation of things like the Geneva conventions have certainly saved lives. I think that people, you know, particularly in the fog of war and the chaos of conflict need rules to fall back on, because then you have to be reminded as to what you're fighting for.

I think that one of the reasons why I'm an investigative journalist in this space is it seeks to align statement with deed.

And, you know, a lot of my life is spent saying, well, you signed up to this and then the realities you're doing this. So the UK government says there are 30 countries out there that are human rights of concern, and yet we're sending arms to 22 of them.

You know, and to me, that is, okay, I'm going to use your statement of goodness and intent, and I'm going to hold you up to the reality of what you actually do.

Now, does that have an impact? I can only say that I know I've been part of maybe some of the investigations are led to the inquiry into SAS killings in Afghanistan or allegations thereof.

I've been part I was involved in the WikiLeaks. I was involved in the early days of exposing the US drone strikes killed civilians.

I think I've created a small body of work that might have at the very least added some weight of truth to combat claims and rhetorical statements that are made in these halls of power.

And so, you know, does that hold an effect? I mean, I think one has to be modest in one's ambitions and honest in one's impacts. And I'm probably, you know, in the great in the great scheme of things I hope I will be able to die one day old and in my dotage, but knowing that I did no harm.

And I hope that that is the journey through life, but I can say that there are probably many people who will die, who will look back on their life and wonder whether they did inadvertently do harm or lie in their ambitions to either put themselves at the forefront or through misplaced nationalistic ambitions.

And so, I mean, do I think that the job that you and I have, which is trying to hold truth to power is important, unbelievably.

And I often contemplate democracy as being a very fragile bird that you have to nurture and tend. And if we wasn't for that nurturing and tending, which it requires truth and transparency and eternal inquiry, then, you know, we would be in a much darker place than we find ourselves now.

So, you know, I often contemplate and I've been to plenty of places where there is absolute restriction on journalistic activity around the world. And those places are far darker than Britain.

So, my pessimism, which aligns with some of the implications of the implicit statements in your question, my pessimism is always, I think, void up by an optimism that ultimately truth, goodness and fairness rooted in empathy.

And that is a very good place with which to draw to a close, but before I let you go, will you please tell us where we can find more about what you're doing and indeed any sort of social media sites that you use and so forth.

So, please come to that website, which is a oav.org.uk. You can subscribe to our newsletters on that. And everything is retweeted on blue sky and on X on a oav or my own name Ian with two eyes over to

super. And that will be in the notes that accompany this interview. That's been a fascinating insight to a slice of what it is you've been doing over the last several decades. And perhaps we'll reconvene in future. But Ian,

thank you very much indeed for joining me with UK column. Thank you.