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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

[WELCOME TO A LONG SUBMISSION, SEE EDITING NOTE WITHIN IN TEXT BELOW]

The Intercept has published The Drone Papers [theintercept.com], 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 [theintercept.com]

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."

"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 [theintercept.com] 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 [theintercept.com] 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."

[EXTENDED COPY]

Part 2: A Visual Glossary [theintercept.com]
Part 3: The Kill Chain [theintercept.com]
Part 4: Find, Fix, Finish [theintercept.com]
Part 5: Manhunting in the Hindu Kush [theintercept.com]
Part 6: Firing Blind [theintercept.com]
Part 7: The Life and Death of Objective Peckham [theintercept.com]
Part 8: Target Africa [theintercept.com]

Glossary: The Alphabet of Assassination [theintercept.com]

Documents:

Small Footprint Operations 2/13 [theintercept.com]
Small Footprint Operations 5/13 [theintercept.com]
Operation Haymaker [theintercept.com]
Geolocation Watchlist [theintercept.com]

This story is reported on by RT [rt.com], Vice [vice.com], Wired [wired.com], Foreign Policy [foreignpolicy.com], PBS NewsHour [pbs.org], The Hill [thehill.com], CommonDreams [commondreams.org], Democracy Now! [democracynow.org], etc.

Original Submission