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

It all goes back to ... karma

[Taco Cowboy]

Had we not interject ourselves when the Russians were attacking Afghanistan, we wouldn't have the messy mixed up with Pakistan and the mujahideen which morphed into the Taliban, and the super powerful bin laden family

Had we not invade Iraq under false pretense we wouldn't have thousands of our sons and daughters killed / maimed in Iraq - and Islamic State wouldn't have a chance to come into fruition either

Had we not 'leading from the back' in overthrowing the Qaddafi regime of Libya the number of foot soldiers for islamic terrorist network wouldn't be so numerous

Re:It all goes back to ... karma

[DoofusOfDeath]

Your points seem quite plausible, but I'd like to make a distinction about the word "we" in this context.

I as an individual did not support those choices. They were enacted by political elites who rule the land in which I was born.

Re:It all goes back to ... karma

[gtall]

The Mujahideen were already the Taliban, all the U.S. did was hasten Russia's retreat. They've have left eventually anyhow. The Taliban then proceeded to abuse the pop. When Al Qaeda came along, they gratefully accepted them and used them as shock troops to empty out a hamlet so they could populate with their own Pashtun crazies.

The Islamo-Fascists were already infiltrating Saddam's military. Left alone, they'd have taken Iraqi state with its armed forces intact. They had the support of the rest of the Mid-East money brokers, who also had plenty for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. The U.S. gave Iraq back to the Iraqis and they proceeded to make an Allah-Awful mess figuring what they really hated was each other.

Qaddafi was busy slaughtering his people. What the people the U.S. helped send him to the hereafter. What the Libyans did with their freedom afterward was entirely their own fault.

Your problem is that you believe in a Bunny World where indigenous people all happily got along were it not for the U.S. However, the only reason they looked stable from the outside is because that is what the ruling bastards projected. If you were a minority inside, your life was hell. Now that the ruling clans are reaping the fruits of their previous labor, it is somehow worse than what they were doing internally all along. Bullshit.

Candidate Obama

[Kunedog]

He is now a man of a different conviction, who has gone a full 180 on the promises he campaigned on, ending up running the politics he campaigned against. I liked Senator Obama. President Obama, not so much.

No, you liked Candidate Obama.

In mid-2008, he voted to grant the telecoms immunity from prosecution for warrantless (i.e. illegal) wiretapping. The red flags were already there if you paid attention to his actions rather than his words.

A Response to the âoeDrone Papersâ

[daveschroeder]

A Response to the âoeDrone Papersâ: AUMF Targeting is a Deliberate Process with Robust Political Accountability

By Adam Klein Thursday, October 15, 2015, 5:40 PM

The Interceptâ(TM)s âoeDrone Papersâ leaker âoebelieves the public has a right to know how the U.S. government decides to assassinate people.â Maybe soâ"or maybe public safety and the need for secrecy trump the publicâ(TM)s curiosity. Unfortunately, the leaker has unilaterally decided for all of us. One person with a thumb drive again trumps the democratic process.

Tant pis; the âoeDrone Papersâ are out there (the name suggests a massive archive; in fact, there are only four documents, one of which is a shorter version of another). So what do they tell us about how the U.S. Government is targeting terrorist leaders in Somalia and Yemen for drone strikesâ"or, as The Intercept would have it, âoedecid[ing] how to assassinate peopleâ? Unsurprisingly, The Intercept is out to convict; its focus is on the âoeshortcomings and flawsâ of the program, as supposedly exemplified by its ingenuous account of the life and death of al Qaeda commander Bilal el-Berjawi.

But the documents themselves are hardly as damning as the breathless tone of the reporting suggests. In fact, for those concerned about oversight and accountability in the targeting process for AUMF-based strikes, the documents should reassure rather than unsettle. The overall impression is of thorough, individualized review, at the highest levels of government, that meaningfully constrains those developing and carrying out these operations.

The key documents, two DOD slide decks on âoeISR support to small footprint CT operationsâ in Somalia and Yemen (a full deck and an executive summary) include these details:

- The âoeaverage approval timeâ for a proposed strike under the AUMF process was 79 days. Even excluding the single longest approval, presumably an unrepresentative outlier, the average was 58 days. The fastest approval was 27 days.

- These approvals were preceded by lengthy periods of gathering and analyzing intelligence on the targetsâ"an average of six years.

- Four out of 24 proposed concepts of operations covered by the study were disapproved under the AUMF review process.

- Each proposed operation must be approved by a lengthy sequence of high-ranking officials, culminating in the President.

- The process for approving strikes under the AUMF âoerequires significant intel/ISR to justify (and maintain) approvals.â âoeRelatively few, high-level terrorists meet criteria for targetingâ under this process. (Note that this isnâ(TM)t a press release touting the programâ(TM)s robust oversight; itâ(TM)s an internal DOD assessment, written from the perspective of operators for whom a laborious approval process is an obstacle rather than a virtue.)

- These âoe[p]olitical constraintsâ make these operations âoechallengingâ and âoefundamentally different from what weâ(TM)ve experienced in Afghanistan and Iraq.â

These slides do not suggest operators run amok, âoeassassinat[ing]â targets with little forethought or oversight. To the contrary, the âoeDrone Papersâ suggest that these operations go forward only after a deliberate, individualized process. They confirm that senior political decisionmakers, including the President, review and approve each individual operation. And they reveal that operators view this review process as a significant constraintâ"a constraint that distinguishes these operations from the (presumably more liberal) operating environments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There may be other flaws in the program, as the accompanying articles urgeâ"unintended victims, truncated intelligence collecti

Soft on crime, soft on terrorists, no backbone

[Overzeetop]

So the president who has been lambasted by congress for being soft on terrorists and has no backbone for attacking people who we hate has been found to have been picking people off a dozen at a time right under our noses.

The question to ask, then, is whether the Republicans who are decrying Obamas lack of any action in the middle east are

(1) Wrong, because they didn't know he was actually doing something (and, by the report, quite a lot)
  or
(2) Liars, because they all had the security briefing - apparently every.fucking.week - that we were taking out hostile targets and decided to capitalize on the fact that the president couldn't defend himself from their political attacks without exposing the program

"Precision"

[Nidi62]

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"

We might have been targeting the wrong car, but we still took the car out! Successful mission!.

At least when you have boots on the ground locals have an opportunity to interact with you and possibly set up a dialogue. Random bombings from the air by a robot is just going to piss people off. The only thing that can beat extremism is moderation, and you have a hard time finding moderates when you are blowing up weddings and funerals (bonus points for bombing the funeral of people you killed in an earlier bombing). This is the problem with increased automation in warfare: it removes the political pressure. Because honestly, people don't really care when people from "over there" get killed. But when they see the bodies of their own start piling up they start putting pressure on the government to end the fighting. War needs to have a human cost because that is the only way to have a political cost. Without that political cost it becomes way too attractive a tool.

Re:"Precision"

[dotancohen]

Thank you for the well-informed response. You'll find that I agree with almost everything that you say!

In the case of Gaza, you also have 13 year old boys getting shot dead for throwing a rock at a truck

No, you don't. You have 13 year old boys throwing rocks at trucks, and you have 13 year old boys getting shot, but you do not have 13 year old boys (or anyone else) getting shot for throwing rocks at a truck. The times that I know of people getting shot for attacking a truck were when using slingshots (The Muslims call this "throwing" but it adds an order of magnitude more energy to the projectile than does a normal hand throw, in Hebrew as in English we have a distinct word for it), or when throwing from an altitude, such as from a cliff or building. In both cases there is real danger of harming the occupants of the vehicle. Of course, that is the intention. People who "just throw rocks at trucks" are usually welcome to throw rocks at trucks all day long. The rocks do some damage (mostly to the glass - armored glass is rather fragile) but that is no reason to go hurt somebody.

armed Jewish settlers burning down Palestinian houses with the families still inside

The incident that you are referring to was one of the most disgusting incidents of violence that I recall in recent time. A group of Jews entered a Muslim village and burned a house, killing a baby and I believe another family member died from wounds sustained in the fire late. As an Israeli, I am ashamed to have to say that my fellow countrymen would even think of burning someones house, someone they do not know even, because that "other person" belongs to "that group" of whatever. There is no excuse, this incident will stand out for decades as a black mark on our history, as it should.

by the way, these Palestinians are not allowed to own guns but the settlers are armed to the teeth and they want to loosen gun restrictions even further, and the settlers have military training due to mandatory service

You are correct that the Muslim citizens of the West Bank are not allowed to own guns, but the Jewish citizens are. Don't think for a minute that this means that they are unarmed, though. Many Muslim families have a firearm, usually an old Kalachnikov or Kalach copy that has only been fired at weddings, and ammunition is scarce. But the weapons do exist and there really isn't anything that we could do about it. Note that many Muslim citizens outside the West Bank do have firearms. That is part of their culture just like it is part of American culture to possess a firearm. A lot of them work in the fields, a lot of them work in security, and a lot of them have other reasons for owning a firearm. These are mostly hand pistols, though, not rifles. They have _too_much_ ammunition, at every wedding they fire without regard for when the bullet lands, though injuries are rare.

and tearing down of people's homes and sources of income when a member of their family commits a crime.

This is a terrific point of contention. Like you, I also feel that entire families should not be punished for what a single family member has done. I know for a fact that most terrorists are _not_ supported by their families and that their families condone the actions. That said, the threat of having the house torn down is demonstrably preventing attacks. I hate the practice, but I've come to accept it. Just as the family of the murdered victim suffers due to the loss of the family member, this practice threatens suffering on the family of the would-be attacker. I wish that other methods would work, really I do, but this is an effective method for _preventing_further_attacks_.

the whole Israel/Palestine situation is effectively an occupation, whether right or wrong

I know that the anti-Israel side likes to use the term occupation, but the situation is more complicated that an occupation such as that done