Further, government officials’ statements in recent years minimizing the number of civilians killed by drone were exaggerated at best, “if not outright lies”, the source said.
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Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor now in exile, has previously supplied journalists at the online news site with top-secret documents detailing the intelligence community’s eavesdropping efforts – the likes of which has sparked worldwide debates concerning privacy and civil liberties implications, among other factor, as well as calls for legislative reform in the USA and overseas.
The documents reveal that in Afghanistan, drone strikes on 35 targets killed at least 219 other people.
The papers expose the Obama administration’s reliance on shaky intelligence when deciding to kill people by drone without any due process.
It took President Obama an average of 58 days to sign off on a target. Throughout one five-month period of the operation, in accordance to the documents, almost 90 % of the people killed in airstrikes weren’t the intended targets. The banality of the bureaucracy of assassination is so clear in these documents-the cold corporate words that they use to describe killing people.
“Outsourcing US kill/capture operations to local forces, which occurred frequently throughout the Bush administration’s time in office, regularly led to human rights abuses, torture, and extrajudicial killings”, wrote the Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill.
A top-secret document shows how the watchlist looks on internal systems used by drone operators. According to the article, the US military has become overly reliant on metadata from phones and computers as well as communications intercepts, also known as “signals intelligence”, rather than finding and fishing targeted enemies.
According to The Hill, the implications of the documents run contrary to the Obama Administration’s claims that drone strikes are a second option when capturing a suspected terrorist is possible.
Strikes against these so-called “high-value targets” must be authorized by the president and are carried out under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which Congress passed after the 9/11 attacks to give the commander-in-chief the power to hunt down Al Qaeda and associated forces.
“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”, the source said.
The source said: ‘And this certainly is, in their eyes, a very quick, clean way of doing things.
While government officials claim the drone strikes are accurate and rarely harm innocent civilians, strikes can kill or injure anyone in the area, even if they are only meant to kill a targeted individual.
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‘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’.
