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<h1 class="SquirrelDetailHead-head-title"
data-reactid=".ti.1.0.0.1.1.0.0.1.0"><span
data-reactid=".ti.1.0.0.1.1.0.0.1.0.1">The Assassination
Complex</span></h1>
<h2 class="SquirrelDetailHead-head-subhead"
data-reactid=".ti.1.0.0.1.1.0.0.1.1">Secret military
documents expose the inner workings of Obama’s drone wars</h2>
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<a class="SquirrelDetailHead-landing-promo"
href="https://theintercept.com/drone-papers"
data-reactid=".ti.1.0.0.3.0.0.0"><span
class="SquirrelDetailHead-landing-promo-subhead"
data-reactid=".ti.1.0.0.3.0.0.0.0">Article №1 of 8</span><span
class="SquirrelDetailHead-landing-promo-title"
data-reactid=".ti.1.0.0.3.0.0.0.1">The Drone Papers</span></a>
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<div class="PostByline-names"
data-reactid=".ti.1.0.0.3.0.0.1.0.2"><a
class="PostByline-link"
href="https://theintercept.com/staff/jeremy-scahill/"
data-reactid=".ti.1.0.0.3.0.0.1.0.2.$9">Jeremy Scahill</a><br>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-assassination-complex/">https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-assassination-complex/</a></small></small></b><br>
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<br data-reactid=".ti.1.0.0.3.0.0.1.0.3">
<span class="PostByline-date"
data-reactid=".ti.1.0.0.3.0.0.1.0.4">Oct. 15 2015,
4:57 a.m.</span></div>
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<p class="SquirrelDetailHead-intro"
data-reactid=".ti.1.0.0.3.0.0.2">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.</p>
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<p class="SquirrelDetailHead-intro" data-reactid=".ti.1.0.0.3.0.0.2">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.</p>
<p><u><span class="dropcap">D</span>RONES ARE A TOOL,</u> 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 <a href="http://fas.org/irp/crs/RS21037.pdf">defining</a>
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.”</p>
<p>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 <a
href="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">redefined</a>
to bear almost no resemblance to their commonly understood
meanings.</p>
<p>The first drone strike outside of a declared war zone was
conducted more than <a
href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2402479.stm">12 years ago</a>,
yet it was not until May 2013 that the White House released a <a
href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/uploads/2013.05.23_fact_sheet_on_ppg.pdf">set
of standards and procedures</a> 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 <a
href="https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-comment-presidents-national-security-speech">internal
process</a> 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 <em>trust,
but don’t verify</em>.<a class="sq-article-link"
href="https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/14/operation-haymaker"><br>
<br>
</a><em>The Intercept</em> 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. <em>The
Intercept</em> 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.”</p>
<p>The source said he decided to provide these documents to <em>The
Intercept</em> 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.</p>
<blockquote class="stylized pull-none">“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.”</blockquote>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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
<a href="https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/find-fix-finish/">internal
turf war</a> 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.</p>
<p><a
href="https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/15/operation-haymaker/#page-1">Additional
documents</a> on high-value kill/capture operations in
Afghanistan buttress <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?_r=0">previous
accounts</a> 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 <a
href="https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/manhunting-in-the-hindu-kush">paint
a picture</a> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The <a
href="https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/firing-blind/">costs
to intelligence</a> 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.</p>
<p>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
<a
href="http://intelligence.house.gov/sites/intelligence.house.gov/files/documents/ISRPerformanceAudit%20Final.pdf">viewed
by key lawmakers</a> as an advocate for more surveillance
platforms like drones.</p>
<p>The ISR study also reveals <a
href="https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-life-and-death-of-objective-peckham/">new
details</a> 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 <a
href="https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/14/small-footprint-operations-2-13/#page-22">killed
him in Somalia</a>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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