Leaked: 'New Snowden' releases Obama's drone program papers
A cache of classified documents has revealed the inner workings of US drone operations in Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan, including the mechanism of targeting suspects slated for assassination.
The documents, slides, visuals and analysis have been posted by The Intercept on Thursday as "The Drone Papers." The cache contains two sets of slides detailing the US military's drone operations in Somalia and Yemen between 2011 and 2013, by the secret Task Force 48-4.
The documents were provided to The Intercept by a source within the US intelligence community who wished to remain anonymous because of the government's aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers. He says the American public has the right to know about the process by which people are placed on kill lists and assassinated on orders from US government officials.
After analyzing the leaked documents for months, the eight-part investigation was then published by the Intercept's Jeremy Scahill and his colleagues. It explores the ways drones - which "have been President Barack Obama’s weapon of choice, used by the military and the CIA" - have been used in both declared and undeclared war zones.
Saying that "there has been intense focus on the technology of remote killing" among top US officials, the report suggests fatal drone attacks targeting people were launched from bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in Somalia and Yemen - although "undeclared war zones... strikes [there] were justified under tighter restrictions."
With the first drone strike outside of a declared war zone conducted more than 12 years ago, "it was not until May 2013 that the White House released a set of standards and procedures for conducting such strikes," the Intercept said. Despite public assurances that such strikes are "more precise" than operations on the ground, the investigation questions the side death toll of such strikes.
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"It’s stunning the number of instances when selectors are misattributed to certain people. And it isn’t until several months or years later that you all of a sudden realize that the entire time you thought you were going after this really hot target, you wind up realizing it was his mother’s phone the whole time," the Intercept cited its source as saying, suggesting that drone killings "depend on unreliable intelligence."
"It’s stunning the number of instances when selectors are misattributed to certain people. And it isn’t until several months or years later that you all of a sudden realize that the entire time you thought you were going after this really hot target, you wind up realizing it was his mother’s phone the whole time," the Intercept cited its source as saying, suggesting that drone killings "depend on unreliable intelligence."
"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 whistleblower told The Intercept.
Data is most often gathered "from phone and computer communications intercepts," with cell phones and emails being "the primary tools used by the military to find, fix, and finish its targets." According to the whistleblower, such methods "require an enormous amount of faith in the technology that you're using."
"Faulty intelligence has led to the killing of innocent people, including US citizens, in drone strikes," the report says.
The strikes also allegedly hurt intelligence gathering. Saying that US drone operations have "a heavy tilt toward lethal strikes," only one of four targets were captured in the Horn of Africa, with other targets having been eliminated instead. "Kill operations significantly reduce the intelligence available," the report says.
"They also highlight the futility of the war in Afghanistan by showing how the US has poured vast resources into killing local insurgents," it added.
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