[News] The Assassination Complex - Secret military documents expose the inner workings of Obama’s drone wars

[Anti-Imperialist News]

  The Assassination Complex


    Secret military documents expose the inner workings of Obama’s drone
    wars

Article №1 of 8The Drone Papers <https://theintercept.com/drone-papers>
Jeremy Scahill <https://theintercept.com/staff/jeremy-scahill/>
*https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-assassination-complex/*

Oct. 15 2015, 4:57 a.m.

 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.

>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 <http://fas.org/irp/crs/RS21037.pdf> 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 
<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> 
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 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2402479.stm>, yet it was 
not until May 2013 that the White House released a set of standards and 
procedures 
<https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/uploads/2013.05.23_fact_sheet_on_ppg.pdf> 
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 
<https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-comment-presidents-national-security-speech> 
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/.

<https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/14/operation-haymaker>/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 <https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/find-fix-finish/> 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 
<https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/15/operation-haymaker/#page-1> on 
high-value kill/capture operations in Afghanistan buttress previous 
accounts 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?_r=0> 
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 
<https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/manhunting-in-the-hindu-kush> 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 
<https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/firing-blind/> 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 
<http://intelligence.house.gov/sites/intelligence.house.gov/files/documents/ISRPerformanceAudit%20Final.pdf> 
as an advocate for more surveillance platforms like drones.

The ISR study also reveals new details 
<https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-life-and-death-of-objective-peckham/> 
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 
<https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/14/small-footprint-operations-2-13/#page-22>.

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.


-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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