Top Secret Documents Detailing U.S. Drone Program Leaked

Among the revelations included in the documents, provided to The Intercept by an anonymous source, are that US drone strikes routinely kill far more people than their intended targets, that drone operators frequently conduct strikes based on unreliable evidence, and that individuals killed in strikes whose identities are unknown are posthumously counted as “enemies killed in action”, without any evidence that they had actually been combatants.

Provided by an unnamed “whistle-blower”, the documents were published by the online publication The Intercept on Thursday as an eight-part investigation called “The Drone Papers”.

“These docs illustrate what a video game, drained of all humanity, these drone assassinations have become”, founding editor Glenn Greenwald tweeted on Thursday.

Meanwhile, former Central Intelligence Agency assistant-turned whistleblower, Edward Snowden, took to Twitter to praise the leak.

The Intercept’s source describes all of it as an outrageous explosion of watchlisting and monitoring people till they’re racked and stacked on lists with numbers assigned to them. They also highlight the futility of the war in Afghanistan by showing how the US has poured vast resources into killing local insurgents, in the process exacerbating the very threat the U.S.is seeking to confront. Of these, exclusively 35 have been the intended targets.

“Anyone caught in the vicinity is guilty by association”, the source continued. The Intercept granted the source’s request for anonymity because the materials are classified and because the US government has engaged in aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers. -/AFP/Getty Images Yemenis gather around a burnt auto after it was targeted by a drone strike killing three suspected al-Qaeda militants in January between the Marib and Chabwa provinces, a desert area east of Sanaa. The report provides a more in-depth look into Obama’s drone operations than the public has ever been privy to, including a number of bleak but sadly unsurprising aspects that anyone paying attention had likely expected.

This approach allows for more subjective, mistake-prone human interpretation – fuelling the risk that those involved in targeted killings believe they have “godlike powers”, the source said.

The use of USA drone strikes began after 9/11 by the Bush administration and was heavily ramped up by President Obama, who preferred the purportedly surgical nature of drone strikes against groups fighting the U.S.in battle zones to what his administration thought had been costly ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Moreover, according to a separate investigative report, numerous people helping compile this information are private contractors, who may not be bound by the same rules or accountability structure as members of the United States military.

Asked about the report, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said program officials “go to great lengths to limit civilian casualties”.

“Remember that the terrorists we are after target civilians, and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes”.