The Intercept, an online news source “dedicated to producing fearless, adversarial journalism,” recently published “The Drone Papers,” which gives an in-depth look of the United States assassination program.
A whistleblower inside the U.S. government revealed information to The Intercept, which included flaws of gathering data and the “kill chain” used to decide who will become a target.
Americans in general have known about the U.S. using drone strikes to eliminate potential threats overseas, and we know that not everyone killed was a terrorist. We have been kept in the dark, and a lot of the information we know today is incomplete.
A Pentagon review titled “Operation Haymaker,” which was an operation in which "special-operations teams on the ground in Northeastern Afghanistan worked with intelligence analysts and drone operators around the world to pinpoint targets," was given to The Intercept, and it shed some light on innocent casualties. The review stated that out of the 39 deaths that were recorded, 219 innocent people were caught in the drone strikes. This number is twice the amount that the government previously told the public.
One of the more important things covered in the "Drone Papers" was the kill chain. Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of The Intercept, explained what the kill chain is in an interview with Democracy Now. He said that it is a kind of “secret judicial system,” in which several government officials, including the president, sign off on what ends up being a death warrant.
These secret meetings that are held cannot be subject to actual judicial review, so the Supreme Court has no power in the matter. Scahill added that the President acts as an emperor, and has the final say.
Democracy Now also conducted another interview on the topic of the drone papers with Clove Stafford Smith, a British civil rights attorney, and he stated that a British kill list for Afghanistan was just uncovered.
Scahill and his team of writers also uncovered the flaws of how the U.S. collects it information. The U.S. prefers using signal intelligence instead of human intelligence, because it keeps the most people in the dark. Signal intelligence uses the metadata that streams to and from cellphones and their SIM cards. The whistleblower told The Intercept that this form of gathering information is unreliable.
“It’s stunning the number of instances when selectors are misattributed to certain people," the whistleblower said. “And it isn’t until several months or even years later that you all of a sudden realize that the entire time you thought you were going after this hot target, you wind up realizing it was his mother’s phone the whole time.”
In 2013, President Obama gave a public announcement stating they have started to use drone strikes in the Middle East. Drone Strikes actually have been used since the Bush administration, when they started using them in 2002.
As a nation, we all felt that some of the rumors surrounding the drone strikes were true, but they were only rumors. To have all this vital information leaked shows how secret our government can be, and sometimes their secrets are immoral.
