{"id":123140,"date":"2015-10-18T09:24:59","date_gmt":"2015-10-18T09:24:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=123140"},"modified":"2015-10-21T05:49:06","modified_gmt":"2015-10-21T05:49:06","slug":"the-drone-papers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=123140","title":{"rendered":"The Drone Papers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jeremy Scahill — The Intercept Oct 15, 2015<\/a><\/h1>\n

\"obama_drone-550x366\"<\/a>From his first days as commander in chief, the drone has been President Barack Obama\u2019s weapon of choice, used by the military and the CIA to hunt down and kill the people his administration has deemed \u2014 through secretive processes, without indictment or trial \u2014 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\u2019s power over life and death.<\/span><\/p>\n

Drones are 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<\/a><\/strong><\/span> the word \u201cassassination.\u201d This has allowed proponents of the drone wars to rebrand assassinations with more palatable characterizations, such as the term du jour, \u201ctargeted killings.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u201cimminent\u201d threat is present and there is \u201cnear certainty\u201d that the intended target will be eliminated. Those terms, however, appear to have been bluntly redefined<\/a><\/strong><\/span> to bear almost no resemblance to their commonly understood meanings.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first drone strike outside of a declared war zone was conducted more than 12 years ago<\/a><\/strong><\/span>, yet it was not until May 2013 that the White House released a set of standards and procedures<\/a><\/strong><\/span> for conducting such strikes. Those guidelines offered little specificity, asserting that the U.S. would only conduct a lethal strike outside of an \u201carea of active hostilities\u201d if a target represents a \u201ccontinuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons,\u201d without providing any sense of the internal process<\/a><\/strong><\/span> 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\u2019t verify<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"small_footprint\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Intercept<\/em> has obtained a cache of secret slides that provides a window into the inner workings of the U.S. military\u2019s kill\/capture operations at a key time in the evolution of the drone wars \u2014 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<\/em> granted the source\u2019s 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 \u201cthe source.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The source said he decided to provide these documents to The Intercept<\/em> 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. \u201cThis outrageous explosion of watchlisting \u2014 of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them \u2018baseball cards,\u2019 assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield \u2014 it was, from the very first instance, wrong,\u201d the source said.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re allowing this to happen. And by \u2018we,\u2019 I mean every American citizen who has access to this information now, but continues to do nothing about it.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Pentagon, White House, and Special Operations Command all declined to comment. A Defense Department spokesperson said, \u201cWe don\u2019t comment on the details of classified reports.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The CIA and the U.S. military\u2019s 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<\/a><\/span><\/strong> over which entity should have supremacy in those operations. Two sets of slides focus on the military\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Additional documents<\/a> <\/strong><\/span>on high-value kill\/capture operations in Afghanistan buttress previous accounts<\/a><\/strong><\/span> 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<\/a><\/strong><\/span> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

One top-secret document shows how the terror \u201cwatchlist\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

A top-secret document shows how the watchlist looks on internal systems used by drone operators. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

The costs to intelligence<\/a><\/strong><\/span> gathering when suspected terrorists are killed rather than captured are outlined in the slides pertaining to Yemen and Somalia, which are part of a 2013 study conducted by a Pentagon entity, the Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Task Force. The ISR study lamented the limitations of the drone program, arguing for more advanced drones and other surveillance aircraft and the expanded use of naval vessels to extend the reach of surveillance operations necessary for targeted strikes. It also contemplated the establishment of new \u201cpolitically challenging\u201d airfields and recommended capturing and interrogating more suspected terrorists rather than killing them in drone strikes.<\/span><\/p>\n

The ISR Task Force at the time was under the control of Michael Vickers, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. Vickers, a fierce proponent of drone strikes and a legendary paramilitary figure, had long pushed for a significant increase in the military\u2019s use of special operations forces. The ISR Task Force is viewed by key lawmakers<\/a><\/strong><\/span> as an advocate for more surveillance platforms like drones.<\/span><\/p>\n

The ISR study also reveals new details<\/a><\/strong><\/span> about the case of a British citizen, Bilal el-Berjawi, who was stripped of his citizenship before being killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2012. British and American intelligence had Berjawi under surveillance for several years as he traveled back and forth between the U.K. and East Africa, yet did not capture him. Instead, the U.S. hunted him down and killed him in Somalia<\/a>.<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Taken together, the secret documents lead to the conclusion that Washington\u2019s 14-year high-value targeting campaign suffers from an overreliance on signals intelligence, an apparently incalculable civilian toll, and \u2014 due to a preference for assassination rather than capture \u2014 an inability to extract potentially valuable intelligence from terror suspects. They also highlight the futility of the war in Afghanistan by showing how the U.S. has poured vast resources into killing local insurgents, in the process exacerbating the very threat the U.S. is seeking to confront.<\/span><\/p>\n

These secret slides help provide historical context to Washington\u2019s ongoing wars, and are especially relevant today as the U.S. military intensifies<\/a><\/strong><\/span> its drone strikes and covert actions against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Those campaigns, like the ones detailed in these documents, are unconventional wars that employ special operations forces at the tip of the spear.<\/span><\/p>\n

The \u201cfind, fix, finish\u201d doctrine that has fueled America\u2019s post-9\/11 borderless war is being refined and institutionalized. Whether through the use of drones, night raids, or new platforms yet to be unleashed, these documents lay bare the normalization of assassination as a central component of U.S. counterterrorism policy.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe military is easily capable of adapting to change, but they don\u2019t 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. It\u2019s a very slick, efficient way to conduct the war, without having to have the massive ground invasion mistakes of Iraq and Afghanistan,\u201d the source said.<\/strong> \u201cBut at this point, they have become so addicted to this machine, to this way of doing business, that it seems like it\u2019s going to become harder and harder to pull them away from it the longer they\u2019re allowed to continue operating in this way.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Source <\/a><\/p>\n

A New Snowden? Whistleblower Leaks Trove of Documents on Drones & Obama\u2019s Assassination Program
\nDemocracy Now — Oct 15, 2015<\/h2>\n