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

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.

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

[Rei]

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.

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:Candidate Obama

[PopeRatzo]

Strangely, I am reminded of the mashup of pedobear and some rap/hip hop song.

Now THAT'S how you start a comment. You younger Slashdot users should take note.

Re:Candidate Obama

[Muros]

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.

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

Drones aren't the real story

[GrumpySteen]

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.

They are used to getting away with it.

[Nyder]

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.

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".

"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.