The Drone Demon: Leaked Slides Expose An Imperial Secret War
By Farooque Chowdhury
Countercurrents.org
Drones, the seemingly dramatic flying machines, appear damaging to image world powers try to build up as the machines are exposing imperial behavior – kill blindly, stay above all sorts of ethics, law and practice. Just exposed papers are telling all these as these shows the inner world of drone-war.
The Intercept, as the online news medium claims, “has obtained a cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the US military's assassination programs in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. The documents provided by a whitsleblower, offer an unprecedented glimpse into Obama's drone wars.”
The secret slides provide, The Intercept writes, “a window into the inner workings of the US 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.” So, the related stories refer to the source as “the source.”
The Intercept says:
“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.”
Imperialist secret plans, wars, etc. get exposed regularly. One can recall the My Lai killings. It was hushed up for a long time. A young reporter's persistent effort exposed the carnage. Countries in Latin America bear evidenced of similar secret-wars-exposed-gradually.
The articles in The Drone Papers were produced by a team of reporters and researchers from The Intercept. They spent months analyzing the documents. It's a long narrative of a few thousand words. Here, in this article, comments/analyses may appear unnecessary. Hence, those have been kept as minimum as possible.
The articles provide an opportunity for the common readers to have knowledge about “the methods and outcomes of the US assassination program.” This campaign”, claims The Intercept, “carried out by two presidents through four presidential terms, has been shrouded in excessive secrecy.” It says: “The public has a right to see these documents not only to engage in an informed debate about the future of U.S. wars, both overt and covert, but also to understand the circumstances under which the U.S. government arrogates to itself the right to sentence individuals to death without the established checks and balances of arrest, trial, and appeal.”
Jeremy Scahill writes on October 15, 2015:
“From his first days as commander in chief, the drone has been President Barack Obama's weapon of choice, used by the military and the CIA to hunt down and kill the people his administration has deemed — through secretive processes, without indictment or trial — worthy of execution. There has been intense focus on the technology of remote killing, but that often serves as a surrogate for what should be a broader examination of the state's power over life and death.”
The article headlined “Assassination Complex” writes:
“Drones are a tool, not a policy. The policy is assassination. While every president since Gerald Ford has upheld an executive order banning assassinations by U.S. personnel, Congress has avoided legislating the issue or even defining the word ‘assassination.' This has allowed proponents of the drone wars to rebrand assassinations with more palatable characterizations, such as the term du jour, ‘targeted killings.'”
It said:
“When the Obama administration has discussed drone strikes publicly, it 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. Those terms, however, appear to have been bluntly redefined to bear almost no resemblance to their commonly understood meanings.
“The first drone strike outside of a declared war zone was conducted more than 12 years ago, yet it was not until May 2013 that the White House released a set of standards and procedures for conducting such strikes. Those guidelines offered little specificity, asserting that the U.S. would only conduct a lethal strike outside of an ‘area of active hostilities' if a target represents a ‘continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons,' without providing any sense of the internal process used to determine whether a suspect should be killed without being indicted or tried. The implicit message on drone strikes from the Obama administration has been one of trust, but don't verify.”
Jeremy writes:
“The Pentagon, White House, and Special Operations Command all declined to comment. A Defense Department spokesperson said, ‘We don't comment on the details of classified reports.'
“The CIA and the U.S. military's 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. Two sets of slides focus on the military's high-value targeting campaign in Somalia and Yemen as it existed between 2011 and 2013, specifically the operations of a secretive unit, Task Force 48-4.
“Additional documents on high-value kill/capture operations in Afghanistan buttress previous accounts of how the Obama administration masks the true number of civilians killed in drone strikes by categorizing unidentified people killed in a strike as enemies, even if they were not the intended targets. The slides also paint a picture of a campaign in Afghanistan aimed not only at eliminating al Qaeda and Taliban operatives, but also at taking out members of other local armed groups.”
The report cites one top-secret document that “shows how the terror ‘watchlist' appears in the terminals of personnel conducting drone operations, linking unique codes associated with cellphone SIM cards and handsets to specific individuals in order to geolocate them.”
Jeremy's report mentions the costs to intelligence gathering “when suspected terrorists are killed rather than captured are outlined in the slides pertaining to Yemen and Somalia, which are part of a 2013 study conducted by a Pentagon entity, the Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Task Force.” It cites the ISR study, which “lamented the limitations of the drone program, arguing for more advanced drones and other surveillance aircraft and the expanded use of naval vessels to extend the reach of surveillance operations necessary for targeted strikes. It also contemplated the establishment of new ‘politically challenging' airfields and recommended capturing and interrogating more suspected terrorists rather than killing them in drone strikes.”
Citing the ISR study Jeremy's report says: The study “reveals new details about the case of a British citizen, Bilal el-Berjawi, who was stripped of his citizenship before being killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2012. British and American intelligence had Berjawi under surveillance for several years as he traveled back and forth between the U.K. and East Africa, yet did not capture him. Instead, the U.S. hunted him down and killed him in Somalia.”
As a conclusion the report says:
“Taken together, the secret documents lead to the conclusion that Washington's 14-year high-value targeting campaign suffers from an overreliance on signals intelligence, an apparently incalculable civilian toll, and — due to a preference for assassination rather than capture — an inability to extract potentially valuable intelligence from terror suspects. They also highlight the futility of the war in Afghanistan by showing how the U.S. has poured vast resources into killing local insurgents, in the process exacerbating the very threat the U.S. is seeking to confront.
“These secret slides help provide historical context to Washington's ongoing wars, and are especially relevant today as the U.S. military intensifies its drone strikes and covert actions against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Those campaigns, like the ones detailed in these documents, are unconventional wars that employ special operations forces at the tip of the spear.”
The key revelations that the slides make, according to the article, include:
Baseball card
[1] “It has been widely reported that President Obama directly approves high-value targets for inclusion on the kill list, but the secret ISR study provides new insight into the kill chain, including a detailed chart stretching from electronic and human intelligence gathering all the way to the president's desk. The same month the ISR study was circulated — May 2013 — Obama signed the policy guidance on the use of force in counterterrorism operations overseas. A senior administration official, who declined to comment on the classified documents, told The Intercept that ‘those guidelines remain in effect today.'
“U.S. intelligence personnel collect information on potential targets, as The Intercept has previously reported, drawn from government watchlists and the work of intelligence, military, and law enforcement agencies. At the time of the study, when someone was destined for the kill list, intelligence analysts created a portrait of a suspect and the threat that person posed, pulling it together ‘in a condensed format known as a “baseball card.”' That information was then bundled with operational information and packaged in a ‘target information folder' to be ‘staffed up to higher echelons' for action. On average, it took 58 days for the president to sign off on a target, one slide indicates. At that point, U.S. forces had 60 days to carry out the strike. The documents include two case studies that are partially based on information detailed on baseball cards.
“The system for creating baseball cards and targeting packages, according to the source, depends largely on intelligence intercepts and a multi-layered system of fallible, human interpretation. ‘It isn't a surefire method,' he said. ‘You're relying on the fact that you do have all these very powerful machines, capable of collecting extraordinary amounts of data and information,' which can lead personnel involved in targeted killings to believe they have ‘godlike powers.'”
Unreliable intelligence
[2] “In undeclared war zones, the U.S. military has become overly reliant on signals intelligence, or SIGINT, to identify and ultimately hunt down and kill people. The documents acknowledge that using metadata from phones and computers, as well as communications intercepts, is an inferior method of finding and finishing targeted people. They described SIGINT capabilities in these unconventional battlefields as ‘poor' and ‘limited.' Yet such collection, much of it provided by foreign partners, accounted for more than half the intelligence used to track potential kills in Yemen and Somalia. The ISR study characterized these failings as a technical hindrance to efficient operations, omitting the fact that faulty intelligence has led to the killing of innocent people, including U.S. citizens, in drone strikes.
“The source underscored the unreliability of metadata, most often from phone and computer communications intercepts. These sources of information, identified by so-called selectors such as a phone number or email address, are the primary tools used by the military to find, fix, and finish its targets. ‘It requires an enormous amount of faith in the technology that you're using,' the source said. ‘There [are] 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.'
“Within the special operations community, the source said, the internal view of the people being hunted by the U.S. for possible death by drone strike is: ‘They have no rights. They have no dignity. They have no humanity to themselves. They're just a “selector” to an analyst. You eventually get to a point in the target's life cycle that you are following them, you don't even refer to them by their actual name.' This practice, he said, contributes to ‘dehumanizing the people before you've even encountered the moral question of “is this a legitimate kill or not?”'
“By the ISR study's own admission, killing suspected terrorists, even if they are ‘legitimate' targets, further hampers intelligence gathering. The secret study states bluntly: ‘Kill operations significantly reduce the intelligence available.' A chart shows that special operations actions in the Horn of Africa resulted in captures just 25 percent of the time, indicating a heavy tilt toward lethal strikes.”
Often many more killed than intended target
[3] “The White House and Pentagon boast that the targeted killing program is precise and that civilian deaths are minimal. However, documents detailing a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. In Yemen and Somalia, where the U.S. has far more limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are the intended targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse.
“‘Anyone caught in the vicinity is guilty by association,' the source said. When ‘a drone strike kills more than one person, there is no guarantee that those persons deserved their fate. … So it's a phenomenal gamble.'”
Unknown people killed = “enemies killed in action”
[4] “[T]he military designated people it killed in targeted strikes as EKIA — ‘enemy killed in action' — even if they were not the intended targets of the strike. Unless evidence posthumously emerged to prove the males killed were not terrorists or ‘unlawful enemy combatants,' EKIA remained their designation, according to the source. That process, he said, ‘is insane. But we've made ourselves comfortable with that. The intelligence community, JSOC, the CIA, and everybody that helps support and prop up these programs, they're comfortable with that idea.'
“The source described official U.S. government statements minimizing the number of civilian casualties inflicted by drone strikes as ‘exaggerating at best, if not outright lies.'”
Target number & actual number
[5] “According to one secret slide, as of June 2012, there were 16 people in Yemen whom President Obama had authorized U.S. special operations forces to assassinate. In Somalia, there were four. The statistics contained in the documents appear to refer only to targets approved under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, not CIA operations. In 2012 alone, according to data compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, there were more than 200 people killed in operations in Yemen and between four and eight in Somalia.”
Inconsistencies
[6] “The White House's publicly available policy standards state that lethal force will be launched only against targets who pose a ‘continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons.' In the documents, however, there is only one explicit mention of a specific criterion: that a person ‘presents a threat to U.S. interest or personnel.' While such a rationale may make sense in the context of a declared war in which U.S. personnel are on the ground in large numbers, such as in Afghanistan, that standard is so vague as to be virtually meaningless in countries like Yemen and Somalia, where very few U.S. personnel operate.”
The leaked documents reveal a lot that appear as material for learning today's imperialism. These also reveal a part of the working of a type of democracy. It's a learning material also for those dreaming “state has taken a backseat”. The more crises deepen the more aggressive and reckless turn states and world powers. This aggressiveness is a show of weakness, not strength. The secrecy is a show of weakness, not strength as transparency within existing reality, and within its working condition disallows world powers to move in a fashion that appear reckless. The secrecy is also a show of gradually rising public awareness. The documents show: Drones have limit, an assertion made months ago in a similar article.
Farooque Chowdhury, a free lancer, writes from Dhaka.
