‘The Intercept’ Just Published Secret Documents About Obama’s Drone Wars

According to a new report from The Intercept, almost 90 percent of people killed in recent drone strikes in Afghanistan “were not the intended targets” of the attacks. 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.

“A number of damaging secret government documents about the United States” drone program were published online Thursday after being leaked by an anonymous source “within the intelligence community”, CNN reports. As the Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill writes, the White House “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”.

The information shows that during Operation Haymaker, a campaign in northeastern Afghanistan which ran between January 2012 and February 2013, a few 219 people were killed by drones.

The Intercept characterizes the source’s motivations this way: “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 USA government”.

The disclosures have undermined the Obama administration’s claim that its strikes are being conducted with respect for civilian life.

A team of reporters at The Intercept spent months analyzing the documents, which were mostly internal recommendations for improving the unconventional US warfare.

“Anyone caught in the vicinity is guilty by association”, a source told The Intercept. Killing the target with a drone means there’s little left over in terms of documents or electronic devices that US analysts could use to go find his contacts and associates, i.e. more targets.

The investigation indicates that American drone strikes frequently kill civilians. Former drone operators have also come forward to say numerous hundreds of strikes carried out since 2004 were based metadata intercepted from a target’s phone.

The military is facing “critical shortfalls” in Somalia and Yemen and has called using phone data alone a “limited” way of guaranteeing a kill. “And this certainly is, in their eyes, a very quick, clean way of doing things” compared to putting American soldiers in danger, the source told the Intercept. Shamsi added that, given the nature of the revelations published today about the nature of the criteria used for drone targeting, the administration must disclose “the criteria it uses to determine civilian or “militant” or “combatant’ status, the identities and numbers of civilians killed and injured in its operations, and an assessment of the strategic consequences for national security of this unprecedented lethal force program”.

“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”.