Drones, like this MQ-9 Reaper, are only as good as the intelligence gathered to guide them.
That intelligence is often flawed.
On Thursday,
The Intercept published a stunning exposé of America's "targeted killing" program titled "The Assassination Complex." The multipart work is based on the documentary revelations of an anonymous whistleblower, which will, of course, raise the hackles of those who believe the only proper course for such a person is "through proper channels." As if that would protect them from reprisals.
The introduction to what's in the documents—"The Drone Papers"—was written by Jeremy Scahill. As part of his distinguished career in journalism, he has written two important books—Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield and Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, which won the George Polk Book Award in 2007. He writes:
DRONES ARE A 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 the word “assassination.” This has allowed proponents of the drone wars to rebrand assassinations with more palatable characterizations, such as the term du jour, “targeted killings.”
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 “imminent” threat is present and there is “near certainty” that the intended target will be eliminated. Those terms, however, appear to have been bluntly redefined to bear almost no resemblance to their commonly understood meanings. [...]
The source said he decided to provide these documents to The Intercept 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. “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.”
Below the tangled web we weave is more on this subject.
The source told The Intercept:
"It's stunning the number of instances when I’ve come across intelligence that was faulty, when sources of information used to finish targets were misattributed to people," he told The Intercept. "And it isn't until several months or years later that you realize that the entire time you thought you were going after this target, it was his mother’s phone the whole time. Anyone caught in the vicinity is guilty by association – it’s a phenomenal gamble."
Some bullet points:
• Drone strikes in Afghanistan were 10 times more likely to kill civilians than conventional aircraft.
• Government statements that downplayed how many civilian casualties drone strikes caused were characterized by “exaggerating at best, if not outright lies,” according to the source.
• Body counts after strikes are typically inflated by the use of the military-age man technique, by which such dead individuals are considered to have been combatants unless proved otherwise, not easy to do.
• In Operation Haymaker, a still-classified operation, of the 219 people killed between January 2012 and February 2013, only 35 were the intended targets.
• Assassinations have depended on flawed intelligence. Much of the information the government has employed for its targeting is from electronic sources, signals intelligence or SIGINT, not backed up by reliable human sources on the ground, HUMINT.
• The Obama administration claims that drone strikes are precise affairs and only used when a threat is "imminent," but that term is loosely defined.