Truthdigger of the Week: The 'Drone Papers' Whistleblower
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/truthdigger_of_the_week_the_drone_papers
_whistleblower_20151018/
Posted on Oct 18, 2015
By Roisin Davis
The Young Turks / Youtube
No U.S. drone strike has been made without "near-certainty that no civilians
will be killed or injured," President Obama assured us in a 2013 speech.
Last April, when the long civilian death trail left in the wake of his drone
war finally claimed an innocent American life, he declared: "It is a cruel
and bitter truth that in the fog of war generally, and our fight against
terrorism specifically, that mistakes, and sometimes deadly mistakes, can
occur."
Such words, we learned this week, are nothing but cruel and bitter
deception. Thanks to an anonymous whistleblower's exposure of the inner
workings of America's drone war, we now know that nearly 90 percent of
people killed in recent strikes in Afghanistan were not the intended
targets.
Thursday's publication by The Intercept of a groundbreaking new collection
of documents leaked by the whistleblower provides details of the grisly
process of how and whom the U.S. government chooses to kill, from the use of
so-called "baseball cards" of profile information created for individual
targets to the chain of authorization that leads directly to the president.
For strikes in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia, "The Drone Papers" reveals an
alarming number of defects, including strikes resulting in large part from
electronic communications data, or "signals intelligence," that officials
acknowledge to be unreliable. The documents "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," according to The Intercept's Jeremy
Scahill.
Above all, the leak reveals "the normalization of assassination as a central
component of U.S. counterterrorism policy." Since 9/11, this policy has
resulted in the deaths of more than 4,000 individuals in the course of 500
drone strikes.
While Obama may have inherited the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he has made
the drone war his own. "From his first days as commander in chief, the drone
has been President Barack Obama's weapon of choice," Scahill reminds us,
"used by the military and the CIA to hunt down and kill the people his
administration has deemed-through secretive processes, without indictment or
trial-worthy of execution."
While "the first drone strike outside of a declared war zone was conducted
more than 12 years ago," Scahill continues, "it was not until May 2013 that
the White House released a set of standards and procedures for conducting
such strikes. Those guidelines offered little specificity, asserting that
the U.S. would only conduct a lethal strike outside of an 'area of active
hostilities' if a target represents a 'continuing, imminent threat to U.S.
persons,' without providing any sense of the internal process 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't verify.' "
The Intercept report confirms this brutal message. The leak differs from the
information brought to us by whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Chelsea
Manning in that the newly revealed classified government documents are
accompanied by statements about the source's motivation in his or her own
words.
According to the whistleblower, the decision to provide the documents to The
Intercept sprang from a belief that the public has a right to understand how
and why people are put on kill lists and ultimately assassinated on orders
from the highest ranks of the American government. "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 source said.
"We're allowing this to happen. And by 'we,' I mean every American citizen
who has access to this information now, but continues to do nothing about
it," the source explains. "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. And this certainly is, in their eyes, a very
quick, clean way of doing things. It's a very slick, efficient way to
conduct the war, without having to have the massive ground invasion mistakes
of Iraq and Afghanistan," the source said. "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."
Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, says: "In
some ways it reconfirms and illuminates much of what we knew, or thought we
knew, about a lot of these programs, like that the administration firmly
prefers kill over capture despite claiming the opposite, and that there's
not 'a bunch of folks in the room,' as Obama calls it-that there's a clear,
bureaucratic process for this."
During the course of Obama's presidency, it has become harder for
journalists to obtain information from the government on the results of
particular strikes. There is no transparency or accountability in the U.S.
drone program, and Obama's Justice Department has fought in court for years
to keep secret the legal opinions justifying strikes.
But in light of this new information, Obama can no longer hide under an
ambiguous "fog of war" pretense, and neither can our nation.
Laid bare in these documents is a program of state-sponsored terrorism,
plain and simple. For exposing the truth about the Obama administration's
high-tech policy of assassination, The Intercept's anonymous whistleblower
is our Truthdigger of the Week.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
Truthdigger of the Week: The 'Drone Papers' Whistleblower
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/truthdigger_of_the_week_the_drone_papers
_whistleblower_20151018/
Posted on Oct 18, 2015
By Roisin Davis
The Young Turks / Youtube
No U.S. drone strike has been made without "near-certainty that no civilians
will be killed or injured," President Obama assured us in a 2013 speech.
Last April, when the long civilian death trail left in the wake of his drone
war finally claimed an innocent American life, he declared: "It is a cruel
and bitter truth that in the fog of war generally, and our fight against
terrorism specifically, that mistakes, and sometimes deadly mistakes, can
occur."
Such words, we learned this week, are nothing but cruel and bitter
deception. Thanks to an anonymous whistleblower's exposure of the inner
workings of America's drone war, we now know that nearly 90 percent of
people killed in recent strikes in Afghanistan were not the intended
targets.
Thursday's publication by The Intercept of a groundbreaking new collection
of documents leaked by the whistleblower provides details of the grisly
process of how and whom the U.S. government chooses to kill, from the use of
so-called "baseball cards" of profile information created for individual
targets to the chain of authorization that leads directly to the president.
For strikes in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia, "The Drone Papers" reveals an
alarming number of defects, including strikes resulting in large part from
electronic communications data, or "signals intelligence," that officials
acknowledge to be unreliable. The documents "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," according to The Intercept's Jeremy
Scahill.
Above all, the leak reveals "the normalization of assassination as a central
component of U.S. counterterrorism policy." Since 9/11, this policy has
resulted in the deaths of more than 4,000 individuals in the course of 500
drone strikes.
While Obama may have inherited the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he has made
the drone war his own. "From his first days as commander in chief, the drone
has been President Barack Obama's weapon of choice," Scahill reminds us,
"used by the military and the CIA to hunt down and kill the people his
administration has deemed-through secretive processes, without indictment or
trial-worthy of execution."
While "the first drone strike outside of a declared war zone was conducted
more than 12 years ago," Scahill continues, "it was not until May 2013 that
the White House released a set of standards and procedures for conducting
such strikes. Those guidelines offered little specificity, asserting that
the U.S. would only conduct a lethal strike outside of an 'area of active
hostilities' if a target represents a 'continuing, imminent threat to U.S.
persons,' without providing any sense of the internal process 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't verify.' "
The Intercept report confirms this brutal message. The leak differs from the
information brought to us by whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Chelsea
Manning in that the newly revealed classified government documents are
accompanied by statements about the source's motivation in his or her own
words.
According to the whistleblower, the decision to provide the documents to The
Intercept sprang from a belief that the public has a right to understand how
and why people are put on kill lists and ultimately assassinated on orders
from the highest ranks of the American government. "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 source said.
"We're allowing this to happen. And by 'we,' I mean every American citizen
who has access to this information now, but continues to do nothing about
it," the source explains. "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. And this certainly is, in their eyes, a very
quick, clean way of doing things. It's a very slick, efficient way to
conduct the war, without having to have the massive ground invasion mistakes
of Iraq and Afghanistan," the source said. "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."
Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, says: "In
some ways it reconfirms and illuminates much of what we knew, or thought we
knew, about a lot of these programs, like that the administration firmly
prefers kill over capture despite claiming the opposite, and that there's
not 'a bunch of folks in the room,' as Obama calls it-that there's a clear,
bureaucratic process for this."
During the course of Obama's presidency, it has become harder for
journalists to obtain information from the government on the results of
particular strikes. There is no transparency or accountability in the U.S.
drone program, and Obama's Justice Department has fought in court for years
to keep secret the legal opinions justifying strikes.
But in light of this new information, Obama can no longer hide under an
ambiguous "fog of war" pretense, and neither can our nation.
Laid bare in these documents is a program of state-sponsored terrorism,
plain and simple. For exposing the truth about the Obama administration's
high-tech policy of assassination, The Intercept's anonymous whistleblower
is our Truthdigger of the Week.
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