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 person who constituted an imminent threat to USA national security.
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“These docs illustrate what a video game, drained of all humanity, these drone assassinations have become”, founding editor Glenn Greenwald tweeted on Thursday.
On Thursday, the news site The Intercept unveiled documents leaked by a whistleblower about America’s use of drones against terror targets in the Middle East and Central Asia. The only response Intercept reportedly received was from the Defense Department, saying that they “don’t comment on details of classified reports”.
Secret government documents show the nation’s increasing reliance on drones comes despite their “shortcomings and flaws”, including the killing of innocent civilians, the Intercept reports.
“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 report states.
“Anyone caught in the vicinity is guilty by association”, the source said.
And the strikes often kill many more people than intended, which runs counter to White House and Pentagon claims that the strikes are precise and result in minimal casualties, it said. The report breaks out the details in several subcategories, such as: “How the President Authorizes Targets for Assassination”, “Assassinations Depend on Unreliable Intelligence and Hurt Intelligence Gathering”, “The Military Labels Unknown People It Kills as ‘Enemies Killed in Action.’ ” This is definitely a must-read in full. It may be implied that those discussions are part of the target development process, but the omission reflects the brute facts beneath the Obama administration’s stated preference for capture: Detention of marked targets is incredibly rare.
United States intelligence agents use information from government watch lists and other military agencies to begin tracking potential targets.
The Intercept’s documents include a chart showing how the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) got approval for its strikes in Yemen and Somalia at least through May 2013.
The Drone Papers has piled pressure on US President Barack Obama, with condemnation coming from human rights group Amnesty worldwide. Approval simply meant that the military had a 60-day window to attempt the kill, which could happen a couple of times per target. “And before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured – the highest standard we can set”. The massive leaks changed the way we view online privacy today and while the discussion still continues about whether or not these programs should be allowed to continue, there has been another leak of top secret documents possibly at the same scale as the Snowden leak.
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The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimated in April that 522 strikes have killed 3,852 people, including 476 civilians, though estimates vary widely.
