Slashdot Mirror
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."
If I were forced to trust either a used car salesmen or Obama - of course I wouldn't trust either, - but if I _were_ forced to trust one of the two, I would place my trust on the used car salesmen in an instance
I rather be bitten by the most poisonous snakes ever existed than trust any of the words that came out of Obama's mouth
It has nothing to do with race, gender, or party affiliation, it has everything to do with the way Obama has behaved, even before he became the POTUS
Furthermore, the 'leading from behind' event regarding the overthrowing of Gaddafi regime of Libya, Obama was already in charge
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
True enough. Him giving back his peace prize would be an honest gesture.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
He is now a man of a different conviction
He is now a murderer and a war criminal.
But then, so are many other Nobel Peace Prize recipients.
Drones don't miss 90% of the time. Most of the time, the missile hits what the drone operator has targeted. The problem is how often the target has been misidentified.
The real story here is the willingness of the military to take poor, inconclusive intelligence and use that to make decisions that kill people.
If you look at the fact that the USA/Obama Admin didn't care about how much they missed their target, and you look at the Doctors without Borders Hospital bombing. The USA knew, didn't care because they have been getting away with bombing the wrong targets for the last decade. Only problem now is the truth is coming out and it's looking bad for the Obama Admin.
Be seeing you...
Except that that's not actually what the documents state. As usual, whenever anything can make the US look bad, people play a game of telephone and the claim gets worse and worse every time.
The report does NOT state that 90% of the victims were civilians. It says that during a 5 month period of Operation Haymaker, there were 56 kinetic strikes with 219 "EKIA" and 35 "JP". JP = Jackpot = primary target. EKIA = "Enemy killed in action". Only 10% were "primary targets". The rest are registered as "enemies killed in action". There is no estimate of civilians killed in the document.
Now, the process for determining EKIA is questioned by the Intercept - if they're a military-age male at the same location of a JP, then they're considered EKIA, not civilian. There's no attempt to research if they *actually* were associated with the JP, or just happened to be at the same place at the same time (for example, in the same vehicle that was struck). One would expect that in many if not most cases they probably actually are EKIA, not civilian. But hardly exclusively.
The success ratio of hitting JPs can be deduced by the above figures. 56 strikes and 35 JPs killed, assuming one JP targeted per strike (one assumes they don't get many opportunities to hit several at once - and the documents say that they were targeted one at a time), would be 62.5%. If they ever did manage to take out multiple at once, the ratio would be slightly less than that.
Again, there is no estimate of civilian casualties in the documents. So we have no way to assess from this how many are killed, although we know there surely exist.
Lastly: This isn't just about drone strikes. This is about Operation Haymaker strikes as a whole. Most of the Haymaker strikes were indeed from drones, but not all of them.
Why did I take the time to look up what the documents actually say? Because I've learned over the years whenever one sees this sort of "America Is Working For The Greater Purposes Of Evil!" article, 90% of the time when you look into it, the claims are heavily distorted, if not outright BS.
This is not "outright BS" - merely distorted. There is some legitimate criticism of the drone program here, in that ground raids - while more dangerous to the troops - seem to be significantly less lethal. They capture or kill targets at about the same rate (59,5% according to the document), but no shots are fired in 91,7% of cases. They actually have a civilian casualty events (CIVCAS) in there, and it's 14. That's not 14 civilians - there could be multiple civilians per event - and the Intercept's source says that's "highly suspect" and "I know the actual number is much higher" because they "write off most of the kills as legitimate". But even taking that into account, ground forces look to be a "cleaner" option. The documents *are* a strong argument that drones are over-relied-upon and ground forces should be used more often. Unfortunately, politics often hinders that.
BTW, I recommend checking out the documents, it gives a really interesting look into the thought process that goes behind each strike, analyzing the pros and cons of targeting each individual - aka, how much military benefit they think it will give them versus how much blowback they expect, if any, from the local population. They then define how much risk they're willing to take for the given target - risk of getting the wrong person or collateral damage - and track their confidence level on whether the person who they're tracking is who they think they are. So in a number of ways, they show a well thought out, reasoned approach. But they also show a significant willingness - whether out of cover-your-arse thinking, or a genuine belief - to consider (and subsequently label) every attack a success and every military-age male killed an enemy.
The War of 1812... the good 'ol days when the federal government actually tried to save New Orleans.
The problem is without intelligence on the ground the rests is useless. You can only tell so much from survelleince. Smart targets of regular vehicles coming and going from their bases, and use those to move in and out with.
So you need people on the ground to determine which vehicle the target is in
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
It's worth pointing out that the way the military classifies people differs dramatically from how everyone else would. To the military, any male 12 or older is an enemy combatant. Age and plumbing. No other criteria.
You can't just say "I didn't vote for this" and absolve yourself from responsibility. Your tax dollars are paying for this and there is something that you can do about it:
That would take 1-4 minutes depending upon which state you live in and how many representatives you have.
Not all of those 90% were innocent bystanders. These numbers are meaningless without knowing the full statistics.
We should check the court records to see how many were convicted before being blown up.