The Hill notes the Obama administration has often heralded the minimal number of civilians killed during drone strikes – but it has tended to consider unidentified people near or associating with identified targets to be suspected terrorists.
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On Thursday, the Intercept published a major package of stories that reveals the inner workings of the U.S. military’s drone program, including how and why people are targeted for assassination on the amorphous battlefields of Yemen, Somalia, and other countries. “The public has a right to see these documents not only to engage in an informed debate about the future of US wars, both overt and covert, but also to understand the circumstances under which the USA government arrogates to itself the right to sentence individuals to death without the established checks and balances of arrest, trial, and appeal”. The rest of the 136 people were considered “EKIA”, or enemies killed in action – another term for unintended target.
The Intercept’s source describes all of it as an outrageous explosion of watchlisting and monitoring people till they’re racked and stacked on lists with numbers assigned to them. It is also noted in the document that, during one five-month period of the operation, almost 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets.It is noted in the documents that more than half of these attacks are carried out based on “poor” or “limited” intelligence gathered using metadata from phones and computers, as well as communications intercepts. “Anyone caught in the vicinity is guilty by association – it’s a phenomenal gamble”. The documents offer the most detailed look to date at the secret and extensive military drone program run by the United States.
Reporter Jeremy Scahill said the documents came from a “new whistleblower” who wanted the public to know more about drone killings in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia.
The Intercept received the documents from a source who requested anonymity for fear of US policy against whistleblowers.
The White House and Pentagon boast that the program is precise and civilian deaths are relatively minimal.
Worldwide lawyers argue that air strikes using drones are state-sanctioned assassinations where the targeted suspected terrorist has no opportunity to defend the case against him.
Previous reports revealed that the US assumes all military age males in a strike zone are potential enemy combatants.
“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. “And this certainly is, in their eyes, a very quick, clean way of doing things”, the source told The Intercept.
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“It’s a very slick, efficient way to conduct the war, without having to have the massive ground invasion mistakes of Iraq and Afghanistan”, said the source. But he criticized the military for becoming “addicted to this machine” and said it would be “harder and harder to pull them away from it the longer they’re allowed to continue operating in this way”.
