Friday, November 06, 2015
‘Drone Papers’ Revelations Are a
Cry for Ending the Slaughter
The newly released documents are a clarion call to us all to
demand that our government stop the killing.
These secret documents demonstrate that the administration kills
innumerable civilians due to its reliance on “signals intelligence” in
undeclared war zones, following cellphones or computers that may or may not be
carried by suspected terrorists. (Photo: The Intercept)
A new whistleblower has joined the ranks of Edward Snowden,
Chelsea Manning, John Kiriakou and other courageous individuals. The unnamed
person, who chose to remain anonymous because of the Obama administration’s
vigorous prosecution of whistleblowers, is a member of the intelligence
community.
In the belief that the American public has the right to know
about the “fundamentally” and “morally” flawed U.S. drone program, this source
provided The Intercept with a treasure trove of secret
military documents and slides that shine a critical light on the country’s
killer drone program. These files confirm that the Obama administration’s
policy and practice of assassination using armed drones and other methods
violate the law.
The documents reveal the “kill chain” that decides who will be
targeted. As the source said, “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.”
These secret documents demonstrate that the administration kills
innumerable civilians due to its reliance on “signals intelligence” in
undeclared war zones, following cellphones or computers that may or may not be
carried by suspected terrorists. The documents show that more than half the
intelligence used to locate potential targets in Somalia and Yemen was based on
this method.
“
It isn’t a surefire method,” the source observed. “You’re
relying on the fact that you do have all these powerful machines, capable of
collecting extraordinary amounts of data and intelligence,” which can cause
those involved to think they possess “godlike powers.”
“It’s stunning the number of instances when selectors are
misattributed to certain people,” the source noted, characterizing a missile
fired at a target in a group of people as a “leap of faith.”
The Obama administration has never provided accurate civilian
casualty counts. In fact, CIA director and former counterterrorism adviser John
Brennan falsely claimed in 2011 that no civilians had been killed in drone
strikes in nearly a year. In actuality, many people who are not the intended
targets of the strikes are killed. “The Drone Papers” tell us the
administration labels unidentified persons who are killed in a drone attack
“enemies killed in action,” unless there is evidence posthumously proving them
innocent. That “is insane,” the source said. “But [the intelligence community
has] made ourselves comfortable with that.” The source added, “They made the
numbers themselves so they can get away with writing off most of the kills as
legitimate.”
The administration’s practice of minimizing the civilian
casualties is “exaggerating at best, if not outright lies,” according to the
source.
Since the U.S. is involved in armed conflict in Iraq and
Afghanistan, international humanitarian law—namely, the Geneva Conventions—must
be applied to assess the legality of targeted killing. The Geneva Conventions
provide that only combatants may be targeted.
From January 2012 to February 2013, a campaign dubbed Operation
Haymaker was carried out in the Afghan provinces of Kunar and Nuristan.
According to “The Drone Papers,” during a five-month period almost 90 percent
of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. This campaign
paralleled an increase in drone attacks and civilian casualties throughout
Afghanistan. What’s more, the campaign did not significantly degrade al-Qaida’s
operations there.
The U.S. is violating the right to life enshrined in the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Because the U.S. ratified
this treaty, it constitutes binding domestic law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, which states,
“Treaties shall be the supreme law of the land.”
Under international humanitarian law, an “armed conflict”
requires the existence of organized armed groups engaged in fighting of certain
intensity. The groups must have a command structure, be governed by rules,
provide military training and have organized acquisition of weapons, as well as
communications infrastructure. Legal scholars, including University of
Cambridge professor Christine Gray, have concluded that “the ‘war against
Al-Qaeda’ does not meet the threshold of intensity of a non-international armed
conflict, and Al-Qaeda does not meet the threshold of an organized armed
group.”
The U.S. is not involved in “armed conflict” in Pakistan, Yemen
and Somalia. Thus, the law enforcement model must be applied to assess the
legality of actions in those countries. This model limits the use of lethal
force to situations where there is an imminent threat to life and nonlethal
measures would be inadequate.
In 2013, as President Obama gave a speech at the National
Defense University, the administration released a fact sheet that said the
target must pose a “continuing, imminent threat to US persons” before lethal
force may be used. But Obama has waived the imminence requirement in Pakistan.
Although a spokesperson for the National Security Council told
The Intercept that “those guidelines remain in effect today,” “The Drone Papers”
state that the target need only present “a threat to US interest or personnel.”
This is a far cry from an imminence requirement. And once the president signs
off on a target, U.S. forces have 60 days to execute the strike. A 60-day
period flies in the face of the imminence mandate for the use of lethal force
off the battlefield.
Philip Alston, United Nations special rapporteur on
extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, affirms that a targeted killing
is lawful only if required to protect life and no other means—such as capture
or nonlethal incapacitation—is available to protect life.
Besides being illegal, Obama’s preference for killing instead of
apprehension prevents the administration from gathering crucial intelligence.
Obama stated in 2013, “America does not take strikes when we have the ability
to capture individual terrorists; our preference is always to detain,
interrogate, and prosecute.” But Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense
Intelligence Agency, told The Intercept, “We don’t capture people anymore.”
Slides provided by “The Drone Papers” source cite a 2013 study by the
Pentagon’s Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Task Force that said
“kill operations significantly reduce the intelligence available from detainees
and captured material.” The task force recommended capture and interrogation
rather than killing in drone strikes.
The American public is largely unaware of the high number of
civilian casualties from drone strikes. A study conducted by American
University professor Jeff Bachman concluded that both The New York Times and
The Washington Post “substantially underrepresented the number of civilians
killed in drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, failed to correct the public
record when evidence emerged that their reporting was wrong and ignored the
importance of international law.”
Gregory McNeal, an expert on national security and drones at
Pepperdine School of Law, wrote that in Afghanistan and Iraq, “when collateral
damage [civilian casualties] did occur, 70 percent of the time it was
attributable to failed—that is, mistaken—identification.”
“Anyone caught in the vicinity is guilty by association,” “The
Drone Papers” source notes. If “a drone attack kills more than one person,
there is no guarantee that those persons deserved their fate. … So it’s a
phenomenal gamble.”
Drones are Obama’s weapon of choice because they don’t result in
U.S. casualties. “It is the politically advantageous thing to do—low cost, no
U.S. casualties, gives the appearance of toughness,” according to former
Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair. “It plays well domestically, and
it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national
interest only shows up over the long term.” Part of the damage, as Flynn
pointed out, is that drones make the fallen into martyrs. They create “a new
reason to fight us even harder,” he said.
The United Nations charter’s mandate for peaceful resolution of
disputes and prohibition of military force except in self-defense is not a pipe
dream. A study by the Rand Corp.concluded that between 1968 and
2006, 43 percent of incidents involving terrorist groups ended by a “peaceful
political resolution with their government,” 40 percent “were penetrated and
eliminated by local police and intelligence agencies,” and only 7 percent were
ended by the use of military force. Nevertheless, The Wall Street Journal reported that the
military plans to increase drone flights by 50 percent by 2019.
In describing how the special operations community views the
prospective targets for assassination by drone, “The Drone Papers” source said,
“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 results in “dehumanizing the people
before you’ve even encountered the moral question of ‘is this a legitimate kill
or not?’ ”
The American Civil Liberties Union has filed three lawsuits seeking information about the
government’s use of lethal drones. Rep. Keith Ellison, co-chair of the
Congressional Progressive Caucus, is calling for increased transparency and
congressional oversight of the drone program. “The report makes it clear,” he
noted, that “the U.S. drone program operates on highly questionable legal
ground and offends our principles of justice.”
Drone pilots operate thousands of miles from their targets. But
many of them suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Some are refusing to
fly the drones. In September, the Air Force Times ran a historic ad—paid for by
54 U.S. veterans and vets’ organizations—urging Air Force drone operators and
other military personnel to refuse orders to fly drone surveillance and attack
missions.
“The Drone Papers” source implores us to take action to stop
this travesty. “We’re allowing this to happen,” the source said. “And by ‘we,’
I mean every American citizen who has access to this information now, but
continues to do nothing about it.”
The newly released documents are a clarion call to us all to
demand that our government stop the killing. It is illegal, it is immoral, and
it makes us more vulnerable to terrorism.
© 2015 TruthDig
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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