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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."
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
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
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: 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
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.
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
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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...
That sounds so cute. Much better than murder.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
The drone program is a killing machine that creates it's own targets by itself. One of the basic things you learn about government agencies and programs is that they can't be stopped or reduced. You can only slow down their growth. Fortunately, this isn't 100% true for the US, but generally, people like to keep their jobs and positions. And they will go to any length to do this. They will keep finding reasons why their work should continue to exist.
Once you set something up, it is very, very difficult to tear it down.
Why should the drone program be any different? Target lists are secret. As well as the reasons given for people being targeted. If you were to reduce the target list, you would need less drones, less people and less money. Is there any sane reason why this should ever happen when there is no oversight over target lists?
Anything we have heard about the drone program confirms this. They are now down to shooting kids that made suspicious posts in online forums.
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.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
"No one tries harder than the US military to avoid taking innocent life"
Bullshit. Vietnam is a perfect example to counteract your lies.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
These numbers are meaningless without knowing the full statistics.
Read the article. You have NO way of knowing the full statistics, because anyone not targeted who happens to be killed in a drone strike is automatically identified as an enemy, by default. As the article notes, this is insane. Everyone's an enemy by default if they get killed, and statistics are released on this basis. The logic is basically: if we kill them, they're bad guys. So unless somebody miraculously proves otherwise, how would one know?