Documents Expose the Inner Workings of Obama's Drone Wars

An anonymous reader writes: A little over two years ago, Edward Snowden leaked a giant batch of NSA documents. Chelsea Manning handed Wikileaks a pile of government secrets in 2010, and now another source has leaked an equally impressive cache of papers focusing on Obama's drone program. The Intercept published the documents covering the U.S.'s use of drones to kill targets. Perhaps most eye-opening is the disclosure that as much as 90% of attacks over a five-month period hit the wrong targets. According to The Intercept: "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."

Comments

Re:Candidate Obama

[Anonymous Coward]

The statement from the article is, "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.", not that 90 percent of strikes did not kill the intended target.

Re:Candidate Obama

[bjwest]

It"s also good to note that terrorists are not standing alone out a field waiting for a drone strike on them. They're usually surrounded by an entourage of their cronies. I'm not saying that 100% of that 90% were not civilian/innocents, but I'm sure a good portion of them were connected to the terrorist network in some way that they could be considered enemy combatants.

TLDR: Not all of those 90% were innocent bystanders. These numbers are meaningless without knowing the full statistics.

Re:They are used to getting away with it.

[Halo1]

The USAF was not out to bomb that hospital. It was a horrible mistake.

They've said it was collateral damage, then a horrible mistake, then because the Afghani army asked for it, then because there was a Pakistani agent who was coordinating Taliban attacks from the hospital, ... And just yesterday the US army rammed the gate of the hospital with a tank to "investigate" things.

Whatever it was, it looks like everything but a "horrible mistake".