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A New Snowden - Documents Reveal Assassination Policy - Whistleblower Leaks
Trove of Documents on Drones & Obama's Assassination Program
Jeremy Scahill
Thursday, October 15, 2015
The Intercept
The articles in The Drone Papers were produced by a team of
reporters and researchers from The Intercept that has spent months
analyzing the documents. The series is intended to serve as a long-overdue
public examination of the methods and outcomes of America's assassination
program. This campaign, carried out by two presidents through four presidential
terms, has been shrouded in excessive secrecy. 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.
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.
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 [1] 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."
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 [2] 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 [3],
yet it was not until May 2013 that the White House released a set of standards and procedures [4] 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 [5] 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.
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.
"We're allowing this to happen.
And by `we,' I mean every American citizen who has access to this information
now, but continues to do nothing about it."
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 [6] 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 [7] on high-value kill/capture operations in Afghanistan buttress previous accounts [8] 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 [9] 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.
One top-secret document 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.
The costs to intelligence [10] 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. The ISR study 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.
The ISR Task Force at the time was under the control of Michael Vickers,
the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. Vickers, a fierce proponent of
drone strikes and a legendary paramilitary figure, had long pushed for a
significant increase in the military's use of special operations forces. The
ISR Task Force is viewed by key lawmakers [11] as an advocate for more surveillance platforms like drones.
The ISR study also reveals new details [12] 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 [13].
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 [13] 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 "find, fix, finish" doctrine that has fueled America's
post-9/11 borderless war is being refined and institutionalized. Whether
through the use of drones, night raids, or new platforms yet to be unleashed,
these documents lay bare the normalization of assassination as a central
component of U.S. counterterrorism policy.
"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."
Among the key revelations in this series:
How the president authorizes targets for assassination
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 [14], drawn from government watchlists [15] 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 [16] 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 [17] 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."
Assassinations depend on unreliable intelligence and hurt intelligence
gathering
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 [19] has led to the killing of innocent people, including [20] 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'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."
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.
Strikes often kill many more than the intended target
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."
The military labels unknown people it kills as "enemies killed in
action"
The documents show that the 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."
The number of people targeted for drone strikes and other finishing
operations
According to one secret slide [22], 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.
How geography shapes the assassination campaign
In Afghanistan and Iraq, the pace of U.S. strikes was much quicker than in
Yemen and Somalia. This appears due, in large part, to the fact that
Afghanistan and Iraq were declared war zones, and in Iraq the U.S. was able to
launch attacks from bases closer to the targeted people. By contrast, in
Somalia and Yemen, undeclared war zones where strikes were justified under
tighter restrictions, U.S. attack planners described a serpentine bureaucracy
for obtaining approval for assassination. The secret study states that the
number of high-value targeting operations in these countries was
"significantly lower than previously seen in Iraq and Afghanistan"
because of these "constraining factors."
Even after the president approved a target in Yemen or Somalia, the great
distance between drone bases and targets created significant challenges for
U.S. forces - a problem referred to in the documents as the "tyranny of
distance." In Iraq, more than 80 percent of "finishing
operations" were conducted within 150 kilometers of an air base. In Yemen,
the average distance was about 450 kilometers and in Somalia it was more than
1,000 kilometers. On average, one document states, it took the U.S. six years
to develop a target in Somalia, but just 8.3 months to kill the target once the
president had approved his addition to the kill list.
Inconsistencies with White House statements about targeted killing
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 [22] 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.
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."
The architects of what amounts to a global assassination campaign do not
appear concerned with either its enduring impact or its moral implications.
"All you have to do is take a look at the world and what it's become, and
the ineptitude of our Congress, the power grab of the executive branch over the
past decade," the source said. "It's never considered: Is what we're
doing going to ensure the safety of our moral integrity? Of not just our moral
integrity, but the lives and humanity of the people that are going to have to
live with this the most?"
Jeremy Scahill is one of the three founding editors of The
Intercept. He is an investigative reporter, war correspondent, and author of
the international bestselling books Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield
and Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He
has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Nigeria, the former
Yugoslavia, and elsewhere across the globe. Scahill has served as the national
security correspondent for The Nation and Democracy Now!.
Scahill's work has sparked several congressional investigations and won some of journalism's highest honors. He was twice awarded the prestigious George Polk Award, in 1998 for foreign reporting and in 2008 for Blackwater. Scahill is a producer and writer of the award-winning film Dirty Wars, which premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award.
Scahill's work has sparked several congressional investigations and won some of journalism's highest honors. He was twice awarded the prestigious George Polk Award, in 1998 for foreign reporting and in 2008 for Blackwater. Scahill is a producer and writer of the award-winning film Dirty Wars, which premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award.
Links:
[1] http://fas.org/irp/crs/RS21037.pdf
[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2013/02/drones_law_and_imminent_attacks_how_the_u_s_redefines_legal_terms_to_justify.html
[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2402479.stm
[4] https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/uploads/2013.05.23_fact_sheet_on_ppg.pdf
[5] https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-comment-presidents-national-security-speech
[6] https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/find-fix-finish/
[7] https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/15/operation-haymaker/#page-1
[8] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?_r=0
[9] https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/manhunting-in-the-hindu-kush
[10] https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/firing-blind/
[11] http://intelligence.house.gov/sites/intelligence.house.gov/files/documents/ISRPerformanceAudit%20Final.pdf
[12] https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-life-and-death-of-objective-peckham/
[13] https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/14/small-footprint-operations-2-13/#page-22
[14] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/08/05/watch-commander/
[15] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/23/blacklisted/
[16] https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/15/small-footprint-operations-2-13/#page-41
[17] https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/14/small-footprint-operations-2-13/#page-23
[18] https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-kill-chain
[19] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/world/asia/drone-strikes-reveal-uncomfortable-truth-us-is-often-unsure-about-who-will-die.html
[20] http://www.wsj.com/articles/american-italian-hostages-killed-in-cia-drone-strike-in-january-1429795801
[21] https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/firing-blind
[22] https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/15/small-footprint-operations-5-13/#page-6
[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2013/02/drones_law_and_imminent_attacks_how_the_u_s_redefines_legal_terms_to_justify.html
[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2402479.stm
[4] https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/uploads/2013.05.23_fact_sheet_on_ppg.pdf
[5] https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-comment-presidents-national-security-speech
[6] https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/find-fix-finish/
[7] https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/15/operation-haymaker/#page-1
[8] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?_r=0
[9] https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/manhunting-in-the-hindu-kush
[10] https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/firing-blind/
[11] http://intelligence.house.gov/sites/intelligence.house.gov/files/documents/ISRPerformanceAudit%20Final.pdf
[12] https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-life-and-death-of-objective-peckham/
[13] https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/14/small-footprint-operations-2-13/#page-22
[14] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/08/05/watch-commander/
[15] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/23/blacklisted/
[16] https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/15/small-footprint-operations-2-13/#page-41
[17] https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/14/small-footprint-operations-2-13/#page-23
[18] https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-kill-chain
[19] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/world/asia/drone-strikes-reveal-uncomfortable-truth-us-is-often-unsure-about-who-will-die.html
[20] http://www.wsj.com/articles/american-italian-hostages-killed-in-cia-drone-strike-in-january-1429795801
[21] https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/firing-blind
[22] https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/15/small-footprint-operations-5-13/#page-6
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