IBT | 15 Oct 2015
Nearly 90 percent of the people killed by U.S. drone strikes in Afghanistan over a five-month period were not the intended targets. The Pentagon internally admitted in 2013 that U.S. drone strikes are often carried out based on faulty intelligence. Even when drone strikes do kill the intended target, the Pentagon found, the killing may compromise more valuable intelligence-gathering operations.
Those are among the key revelations of a bombshell report published by the Intercept Thursday. The report, based on information passed along from a source involved in the operations, provides a rare glimpse into the classified U.S. drone operations throughout the Middle East between 2011 and 2013. The Obama administration has consistently declined to discuss drone operations publicly other than to tell the public that each strike is the targeted killing of a person who constituted an imminent threat to U.S. national security.
Documents published by the Intercept contradict those assurances.
One 2013 document circulated by the Pentagon’s Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance unit details how the U.S. government continuously updates a profile on potential targets. They’re each assigned a number, colloquially known as the terror suspect’s “baseball card,” at which point it took President Obama an average of 58 days to approve a strike on that person.
“Anyone caught in the vicinity is guilty by association,” the source told the Intercept. If “a drone strike kills more than one person, there is no guarantee that those persons deserved their fate … so it’s a phenomenal gamble.”
Strikes are carried out faster in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. warzones, than in Yemen and Somalia.
Previous reports revealed that the U.S. assumes all military-age males in a strike zone are potential enemy combatants. Former drone operators have also come forward to say many of the hundreds of strikes carried out since 2004 were based on metadata intercepted from a target’s phone. This remained true even after targets learned of the operational strategy and handed off their phones to unwitting strangers, the ex-drone operator said.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimated in April that 522 strikes have killed 3,852 people, including 476 civilians, though estimates vary widely.
“These eye-opening disclosures make a mockery of U.S. government claims that its lethal force operations are based on reliable intelligence and limited to lawful targets,” Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Security Project, said in a statement. “In fact, the government often claims successes that are really tragic losses. The Obama administration’s lethal program desperately needs transparency and accountability because it is undermining the right to life and national security.”
The civilian toll has also turned the local population against U.S. forces, undercutting many of the military’s goals in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon, attempting to rectify the dichotomy, has pushed for more advanced surveillance drones and recommended capturing more suspects rather than killing them.
“The military is easily capable of adapting to change, but they don’t like to stop anything they feel is making their lives easier, or is to their benefit. And this certainly is, in their eyes, a very quick, clean way of doing things” compared to putting American soldiers in danger, the source told the Intercept. “But at this point, they have become so addicted to this machine, to this way of doing business, that it seems like it’s going to become harder and harder to pull them away from it the longer they’re allowed to continue operating in this way.”
The Intercept | 16 Oct 2014
The Drone Papers
The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The documents, provided by a whistleblower, offer an unprecedented glimpse into Obama’s drone wars.
Secret military documents expose the inner workings of Obama’s drone wars
The Assassination Complex
By Jeremy Scahill
From his first days as commander in chief, the drone has been President Barack Obama’s weapon of choice, used by the military and the CIA to hunt down and kill the people his administration has deemed — through secretive processes, without indictment or trial — worthy of execution. There has been intense focus on the technology of remote killing, but that often serves as a surrogate for what should be a broader examination of the state’s power over life and death.
DRONES ARE A TOOL, not a policy. The policy is assassination. While every president since Gerald Ford has upheld an executive order banning assassinations by U.S. personnel, Congress has avoided legislating the issue or even defining the word “assassination.” This has allowed proponents of the drone wars to rebrand assassinations with more palatable characterizations, such as the term du jour, “targeted killings.”
When the Obama administration has discussed drone strikes publicly, it has offered assurances that such operations are a more precise alternative to boots on the ground and are authorized only when an “imminent” threat is present and there is “near certainty” that the intended target will be eliminated. Those terms, however, appear to have been bluntly redefined to bear almost no resemblance to their commonly understood meanings.
The first drone strike outside of a declared war zone was conducted more than 12 years ago, yet it was not until May 2013 that the White House released a set of standards and procedures for conducting such strikes. Those guidelines offered little specificity, asserting that the U.S. would only conduct a lethal strike outside of an “area of active hostilities” if a target represents a “continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons,” without providing any sense of the internal process used to determine whether a suspect should be killed without being indicted or tried. The implicit message on drone strikes from the Obama administration has been one of trust, but don’t verify.
The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret slides that provides a window into the inner workings of the U.S. military’s kill/capture operations at a key time in the evolution of the drone wars — between 2011 and 2013. The documents, which also outline the internal views of special operations forces on the shortcomings and flaws of the drone program, were provided by a source within the intelligence community who worked on the types of operations and programs described in the slides. The Intercept granted the source’s request for anonymity because the materials are classified and because the U.S. government has engaged in aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers. The stories in this series will refer to the source as “the source.”
The source said he decided to provide these documents to The Intercept because he believes the public has a right to understand the process by which people are placed on kill lists and ultimately assassinated on orders from the highest echelons of the U.S. government. “This outrageous explosion of watchlisting — of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield — it was, from the very first instance, wrong,” the source said.
“We’re allowing this to happen. And by ‘we,’ I mean every American citizen who has access to this information now, but continues to do nothing about it.”
The Pentagon, White House, and Special Operations Command all declined to comment. A Defense Department spokesperson said, “We don’t comment on the details of classified reports.”
The CIA and the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) operate parallel drone-based assassination programs, and the secret documents should be viewed in the context of an intense internal turf war over which entity should have supremacy in those operations. Two sets of slides focus on the military’s high-value targeting campaign in Somalia and Yemen as it existed between 2011 and 2013, specifically the operations of a secretive unit, Task Force 48-4.
Additional documents on high-value kill/capture operations in Afghanistan buttress previous accounts of how the Obama administration masks the true number of civilians killed in drone strikes by categorizing unidentified people killed in a strike as enemies, even if they were not the intended targets. The slides also paint a picture of a campaign in Afghanistan aimed not only at eliminating al Qaeda and Taliban operatives, but also at taking out members of other local armed groups.
One top-secret document shows how the terror “watchlist” appears in the terminals of personnel conducting drone operations, linking unique codes associated with cellphone SIM cards and handsets to specific individuals in order to geolocate them. – Continue
