Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with Marc Garlasco, senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch, about the use of missiles in the Gaza conflict.
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LISA MULLINS: Marc Garlasco is a Senior Military Analyst at Human Rights Watch in New York. He headed the Pentagon's high value targeting unit for the Iraq war in 2003. Garlasco and three of his colleagues at Human Rights Watch are about to head to Gaza. They'll try to determine whether both sides have been complying with the Geneva conventions.
MARC GARLASCO: We'll be taking as much testimony as we can. I'll go to the place, look at it, look at the type of debris that's there. Look at the type of weapons that the Israelis used, try to ascertain what type of military target it was. Whether there was Hamas there, whether there was weapons storage. And oftentimes, there is quite a bit of forensic evidence left behind that can help inform us on that.
MULLINS: What kind of forensic evidence would there be in the absence of some kind of leftover munitions?
GARLASCO: Well, when a munition strikes, there's an awful lot of things that get thrown up into the air. And you have secondary explosions if Hamas is hiding munitions there, and those will let out pieces of metal fragments, things that we can then take a look at and try to assess whether or not they've been hiding things there. Things that look very different than Israeli munitions. And so we'll be looking at that, but also speaking to the Israeli Defense Force. I'll ask them what was their anticipated target, what kind of collateral damage assessments they're doing, and why they struck that facility.
MULLINS: How do you -- as you look at what is strangely enough to use the word “appropriateâ€, an appropriate amount of civilian casualties? How do you determine that especially in a place like Gaza, and is there any way the military can limit the amount of those casualties? If you're going to go into an area that's one of the most densely populated places on Earth, is the only option, is the only alternative to military force to not shoot at all?
GARLASCO: Well, first of all, it's so important that your listeners understand. We're speaking very dispassionately about civilians being killed. And we have to divorce the type of discussion that we're having on military utility, and on law, on what is permissible and is not, from the more moral side. You know, whether or not this should be happening. So –
MULLINS: Just to interrupt for a second. There are rules that guide civilian casualties in terms of – I mean, separate from morality, there are rules of war.
GARLASCO: Absolutely. Absolutely.
MULLINS: Right.
GARLASCO: There are rules of war. There are laws of war. And people may not like to hear it, but not every civilian death is a war crime. In fact, most are not. International law allows for civilians to be killed in warfare. I remember back during my Pentagon days for example, when we were targeted during the Iraq invasion in 2003, anytime we had a target that we're dropping bombs on and we anticipated lower than 30 civilian deaths, we did not have to get higher authority for that. And there are two things that you have to have under International law when you're targeting. One is distinction, and the other is proportionality. By distinction, one of the first things I look at when I go into a place such as Gaza is was this a distinct military target? Not just were civilians intermingled in there – that's allowable – but was it military in nature? Then we're going to look at proportionality. Proportionality states that the military gain must outweigh the civilian harm. And that's a very difficult thing. When I go in, it's a lot easier for me to assess whether or not it's a military target than whether or not it was a proportional number of people killed.
MULLINS: And that's something that you can't determine unless you're there?
GARLASCO: That's really it, and we need to do it on a case-by-case basis. One of the reasons we need to speak to Israeli Defense Forces for example is to understand at that time, when you attacked that target, what did you know? And when you're doing targeting, there's two things that really inform whether or not you're going to have a successful strike. One is technology and the other is intelligence. On the technology side, the Israelis have incredibly high technology. But just because your weapon is a precision-guided munition, a SMART bomb as it's called sometimes, does not necessarily mean you're going to kill who you want to kill. Because if your intelligence is faulty, then no matter how accurate it is it really doesn't matter.
MULLINS: Can you determine when you're on the ground whether or not Hamas is using civilians as human shields?
GARLASCO: When it comes to the human shield issue, it's important for people to understand what it means to be a human shield. “Shielding†legally means that you're forcing people to stay in an area during fighting. Just because you're intermingling with the population is not shielding under international law. Now, under a different side of that, there's a requirement, a positive requirement on Hamas to take all feasible precautions to make sure that civilians are not unduly harmed. And as part of that, intermingling with them is included. But that's not specific shielding. Now, we will look at shielding. We looked at shielding during the war against Hezbollah in 2006 and the way that we look at shielding is to go into an area, to speak to the civilians there, to get the information from them, from the medical community, the ambulance drivers, interview the fighters, try to understand where they were; interview Israeli soldiers to try to understand where they were meeting resistance from Hamas; and also look at forensic evidence. So you know, you can put together a holistic picture and then come out with an assessment. There's no one thing that's going to give you the, “Oh yeah. There's absolutely fighters here.†On the flip side, though, it's important to understand that in an urban fight, targeting is so very difficult that even when a commander has direct observation of a target, they can be wrong, and civilians are going to pay the price.
MULLINS: Does that mean that the Israeli government should find a different way of dealing with Gaza if civilian casualties in high numbers are simply unavoidable?
GARLASCO: You know, it's very interesting. The human rights community, the international law community, many others – when we look at conflicts like this, we tend to look at what's called the [INDESERNBLE] which is the “conduct of warâ€. That side of international – of conduct of war. And we tend to ignore just ‘ad bellum' which is whether or not we should even get into a war, that kind of “just war†idea. And I think we need to spend more time looking at whether or not we want to fight these wars and looking at the options other than kinetic attack. And this is really not a war that favors anyone and certainly the civilians are bearing the brunt of it.
MULLINS: Marc Garlasco is the Senior military analyst of Human Rights Watch. He is heading to Gaza. We hope to talk to you there. Thank you, Mark.
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