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The Intercept has published The Drone Papers, an 8-part series of reports on classified documents obtained from an anonymous whistleblower:
The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military's assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The documents, provided by a whistleblower, offer an unprecedented glimpse into Obama's drone wars.
Part 1: The Assassination Complex
The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret slides that provides a window into the inner workings of the U.S. military's kill/capture operations at a key time in the evolution of the drone wars — 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 granted the source's 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 "the source."
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.
[...] "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."
[More after the break.]
"Key revelations" include insight into the process that selects targets for assassination and places information about them on President Obama's desk for approval in a form referred to as "baseball cards". The President took an average of 58 days to sign off on each target, and U.S. forces had 60 days to carry out the strikes [THIS INFORMATION IS UNCLEAR, DID THEY GET TO RENEW THE 60 DAY PERIOD?]. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and 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 over which entity should have supremacy in those operations".
The documents acknowledge that the U.S. military has become overly reliant on "poor/limited" signals intelligence to identify and locate targets. According to the source, unreliable metadata "selectors" resulted in civilian deaths:
"It requires an enormous amount of faith in the technology that you're using," the source said. "There's countless instances where I've come across intelligence that was faulty." This, he said, is a primary factor in the killing of civilians. "It's stunning the number of instances when selectors are misattributed to certain people. And it isn't until several months or years later that you all of a sudden realize that the entire time you thought you were going after this really hot target, you wind up realizing it was his mother's phone the whole time."
The documents undermine Obama Administration claims that civilian casualties are minimal. For example, during a five-month period of Operation Haymaker in northeastern Afghanistan, "nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets". Unidentified people killed in targeted strikes are designated EKIA, or "enemy killed in action", unless evidence later emerged that the individuals were not terrorists or "unlawful enemy combatants". Statistics related to the number of targets approved for assassination by President Obama only count targets approved under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), and not CIA operations.
"Finishing operations" faced a "tyranny of distance". The pace of strikes in Afghanistan in Iraq was much faster than those in Yemen and Somalia. 80% of operations were conducted within 150 km of an air base in Iraq, whereas the average distance was 450 km in Yemen and more than 1,000 km in Somalia.
The White House's standards say only targets posing a "continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons" may be assassinated. However, the documents only once explicitly mention a specific criterion: that a person "presents a threat to U.S. interest or personnel."
While many of the documents provided to The Intercept contain explicit internal recommendations for improving unconventional U.S. warfare, the source said that what's implicit is even more significant. The mentality reflected in the documents on the assassination programs is: "This process can work. We can work out the kinks. We can excuse the mistakes. And eventually we will get it down to the point where we don't have to continuously come back ... and explain why a bunch of innocent people got killed."
Part 2: A Visual Glossary
Part 3: The Kill Chain
Part 4: Find, Fix, Finish
Part 5: Manhunting in the Hindu Kush
Part 6: Firing Blind
Part 7: The Life and Death of Objective Peckham
Part 8: Target Africa
Glossary: The Alphabet of Assassination
Documents:
Small Footprint Operations 2/13
Small Footprint Operations 5/13
Operation Haymaker
Geolocation Watchlist
This story is reported on by RT, Vice, Wired, Foreign Policy, PBS NewsHour, The Hill, CommonDreams, Democracy Now!, etc.
[Update: changed layout so less of the story appears on the main page. -Ed.]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 17 2015, @05:21PM
Why does this story get an unusually long summary on the front page? Is it takyon's favorite topic? Typically when stories have very long summaries, they are either edited down, or only part of the summary is on the front page. Why is this one different?
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Saturday October 17 2015, @05:47PM
I haven't checked if there's a missing “read more” or not on the front page but I'm sure that can be fixed if it was unintentional. Anyway I don't know anything about that.
But for the summary itself it's really hard to summarize “the story” because it's so verbose and spread over eight different articles by various authors saying similar but not necessarily identical things in addition to some (or all, not sure) of the documents provided by the source. Believe it or not takyon summarized part of/most of the first article and did cut it down a lot.
Takyon asked me (on SN IRC) if I could help but I had to chicken out (my brain was already fried and pretty much remains that way since I keep trying to filter and digest the articles); it is (at least to me, see by comment below) kind of a nightmare to read for various reasons. I get a headache trying to parse it all while filtering out the worst and trying to remain keen enough to notice when the Intercept does stuff like mixing percentages and small numbers like 5 or 25 people in their comparisons.
Maybe the submission in this case should be considered more as a summary of an introduction to the story/the leaked documents.
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(Score: 2) by Adamsjas on Saturday October 17 2015, @10:44PM
The summary could and should have ended after the first paragraph after Part 1. Maybe include links to the other 7 parts.
There simply isn't a reason to give it this much space, either above or below the fold. Especially when the source is The Intercept, where the characterization and wording often bears a heavy bias.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday October 17 2015, @06:29PM
The summary is scaled up to match the scale of the story. It's a big deal, very verbose, and they released it in 8-10 sections all on the same day.
In retrospect I should have started the extended copy after the first blockquote, but ehhh..
("Extended copy" is the text that appears on the story but not the front page)
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 17 2015, @09:01PM
I guess that's sort of my point, that it is important to you, so it is scaled up to some appropriate length. Were I to submit some story that was important to me, would I get the same consideration if you or others felt it wasn't that important?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 17 2015, @10:32PM
I'm saying i scaled it to match the gravity and scope of the source material. If you (anons) do a long submission, it will certainly be considered. I think we would prefer those to single URL and nothing else subs. Note that I'm not talking about a long single blockquote article grab. In this case I condensed a lot of information, and it is shorter than it would be if I hadn't rewritten it in my own words.
I do consider this important, and fresh leaks are big news that are received well here. Why would I submit something that I didnt feel was important?
You imply that I am getting special treatment. Why don't you submit something longform of similar quality? We welcome good submissions.
Btw, weekends typically allow for consideration for more niche/obscure topics anyway, since there are less submissions to soylent and less active news outlets.
(Score: 2) by Adamsjas on Saturday October 17 2015, @11:15PM
You mistake bulk for gravity.
And how come Takyon starts replying as anonymous? Outed yourself did you?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 18 2015, @12:15AM
Posting from phone. I argue it has bulk and gravity
(Score: 2) by martyb on Sunday October 18 2015, @03:17AM
tl;dr: Seven paragraphs of the story have been moved off the main page and into the section that appears only when viewing the entire story.
Terminology: There are two 'sections' available to editors for placing a story's text: 'Intro copy' and 'Extended copy.' The 'Intro copy' appears in all renditions of the story — most notably on the main page of the site (https://soylentnews.org/). Both the 'Intro copy' and the 'Extended copy' are displayed when the link to the story is followed.
Change: The story had already been split into Intro/Extended copy sections — seven more paragraphs were moved from the 'Intro Copy' into the 'Extended copy'.
Result: When looking at the story on the main page, the amount of the story that is presented should be more in line with the other stories that have appeared on the site.
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