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View Full Version : "Drone On!"Streamlining targeted killing - U.S. intends to keep adding names to kill lists




Lucille
10-24-2012, 09:08 AM
What a bunch of sociopaths.

This will be Obama's most consequential legacy. We can thank the USG for the next 9/11, just like we have them to thank for the first. Rather than change our foreign policy, they have created a self-perpetuating war. Blowback is the MIC's best friend.

It's Not a Kill List. It's a "Disposition Matrix."
http://reason.com/blog/2012/10/24/its-not-a-kill-list-its-a-disposition-ma


Terrifying highlights from The Washington Post's new report on the Obama administration's drone-driven targeting killing program and the Obama-approved kill list — sorry, "disposition matrix" — that guides it:

We have a kill list with an Orwellian name: "Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the 'disposition matrix.' The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations. U.S. officials said the database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the 'disposition' of suspects beyond the reach of American drones."

The current list is intended as a starting point, and will be with us for a long time: "Although the matrix is a work in progress, the effort to create it reflects a reality setting in among the nation’s counterterrorism ranks: The United States’ conventional wars are winding down, but the government expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years."

We've killed a lot of people with drones already: "The number of militants and civilians killed in the drone campaign over the past 10 years will soon exceed 3,000 by certain estimates, surpassing the number of people al-Qaeda killed in the Sept. 11 attacks."

We don't know how to stop killing people with drones: Counterterrorism experts said the reliance on targeted killing is self-perpetuating, yielding undeniable short-term results that may obscure long-term costs. 'The problem with the drone is it’s like your lawn mower,' said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and Obama counterterrorism adviser. 'You’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back.'"

We're building a big, entrenched bureaucracy around our targeting killing operations: "Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it."

President Obama attends frightening-sounding weekly meetings to discuss terror threats: "Obama approves the criteria for lists and signs off on drone strikes outside Pakistan, where decisions on when to fire are made by the director of the CIA. But aside from Obama’s presence at 'Terror Tuesday' meetings — which generally are devoted to discussing terrorism threats and trends rather than approving targets — the president’s involvement is more indirect."

Obama also approves the names on the kill lists personally: "The lists are reviewed at regular three-month intervals during meetings at the NCTC headquarters that involve analysts from other organizations, including the CIA, the State Department and JSOC. Officials stress that these sessions don’t equate to approval for additions to kill lists, an authority that rests exclusively with the White House."

Plan for hunting terrorists signals U.S. intends to keep adding names to kill lists
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/plan-for-hunting-terrorists-signals-us-intends-to-keep-adding-names-to-kill-lists/2012/10/23/4789b2ae-18b3-11e2-a55c-39408fbe6a4b_story_4.html


Although the matrix is a work in progress, the effort to create it reflects a reality setting in among the nation’s counterterrorism ranks: The United States’ conventional wars are winding down, but the government expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years.

Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaeda continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight.

“We can’t possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us,” a senior administration official said. “It’s a necessary part of what we do. . . . We’re not going to wind up in 10 years in a world of everybody holding hands and saying, ‘We love America.’ ”

That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism. Targeting lists that were regarded as finite emergency measures after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are now fixtures of the national security apparatus. The rosters expand and contract with the pace of drone strikes but never go to zero.
[...]
Privately, officials acknowledge that the development of the matrix is part of a series of moves, in Washington and overseas, to embed counterterrorism tools into U.S. policy for the long haul.

White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan is seeking to codify the administration’s approach to generating capture/kill lists, part of a broader effort to guide future administrations through the counterterrorism processes that Obama has embraced.

CIA Director David H. Petraeus is pushing for an expansion of the agency’s fleet of armed drones, U.S. officials said. The proposal, which would need White House approval, reflects the agency’s transformation into a paramilitary force, and makes clear that it does not intend to dismantle its drone program and return to its pre-Sept. 11 focus on gathering intelligence.
[...]
Counterterrorism experts said the reliance on targeted killing is self-perpetuating, yielding undeniable short-term results that may obscure long-term costs.

“The problem with the drone is it’s like your lawn mower,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and Obama counterterrorism adviser. “You’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back.”
[...]
The result is a single, continually evolving database in which biographies, locations, known associates and affiliated organizations are all catalogued. So are strategies for taking targets down, including extradition requests, capture operations and drone patrols.

Obama’s decision to shutter the CIA’s secret prisons ended a program that had become a source of international scorn, but it also complicated the pursuit of terrorists. Unless a suspect surfaced in the sights of a drone in Pakistan or Yemen, the United States had to scramble to figure out what to do.
[...]
Streamlining targeted killing

The creation of the matrix and the institutionalization of kill/capture lists reflect a shift that is as psychological as it is strategic.
[...]
Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it.

This year, the White House scrapped a system in which the Pentagon and the National Security Council had overlapping roles in scrutinizing the names being added to U.S. target lists.

Now the system functions like a funnel, starting with input from half a dozen agencies and narrowing through layers of review until proposed revisions are laid on Brennan’s desk, and subsequently presented to the president.
[...]The criteria are classified but center on obvious questions: Who are the operational leaders? Who are the key facilitators? A typical White House request will direct the NCTC to generate a list of al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen involved in carrying out or plotting attacks against U.S. personnel in Sanaa.

The lists are reviewed at regular three-month intervals during meetings at the NCTC headquarters that involve analysts from other organizations, including the CIA, the State Department and JSOC. Officials stress that these sessions don’t equate to approval for additions to kill lists, an authority that rests exclusively with the White House.

With no objections — and officials said those have been rare — names are submitted to a panel of National Security Council officials that is chaired by Brennan and includes the deputy directors of the CIA and the FBI, as well as top officials from the State Department, the Pentagon and the NCTC.

Obama approves the criteria for lists and signs off on drone strikes outside Pakistan, where decisions on when to fire are made by the director of the CIA. But aside from Obama’s presence at “Terror Tuesday” meetings — which generally are devoted to discussing terrorism threats and trends rather than approving targets — the president’s involvement is more indirect.

“The president would never come to a deputies meeting,” a senior administration official said, although participants recalled cases in which Brennan stepped out of the situation room to get Obama’s direction on questions the group couldn’t resolve.
[...]
A model approach

For an administration that is the first to embrace targeted killing on a wide scale, officials seem confident that they have devised an approach that is so bureaucratically, legally and morally sound that future administrations will follow suit.

During Monday’s presidential debate, Republican nominee Mitt Romney made it clear that he would continue the drone campaign. “We can’t kill our way out of this,” he said, but added later that Obama was “right to up the usage” of drone strikes and that he would do the same.
[...]
The number of targets on the lists isn’t fixed, officials said, but fluctuates based on adjustments to criteria. Officials defended the arrangement even while acknowledging an erosion in the caliber of operatives placed in the drones’ cross hairs.

“Is the person currently Number 4 as good as the Number 4 seven years ago? Probably not,” said a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official involved in the process until earlier this year. “But it doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous.”

In focusing on bureaucratic refinements, the administration has largely avoided confronting more fundamental questions about the lists. Internal doubts about the effectiveness of the drone campaign are almost nonexistent. So are apparent alternatives.

“When you rely on a particular tactic, it starts to become the core of your strategy — you see the puff of smoke, and he’s gone,” said Paul Pillar, a former deputy director of the CIA’s counterterrorism center. “When we institutionalize certain things, including targeted killing, it does cross a threshold that makes it harder to cross back.”

For a decade, the dimensions of the drone campaign have been driven by short-term objectives: the degradation of al-Qaeda and the prevention of a follow-on, large-scale attack on American soil.

Side effects are more difficult to measure — including the extent to which strikes breed more enemies of the United States — but could be more consequential if the campaign continues for 10 more years.

“We are looking at something that is potentially indefinite,” Pillar said. “We have to pay particular attention, maybe more than we collectively have so far, to the longer-term pros and cons to the methods we use.”
[...]
“We didn’t want to get into the business of limitless lists,” said a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who spent years overseeing the lists. “There is this apparatus created to deal with counterterrorism. It’s still useful. The question is: When will it stop being useful? I don’t know.”

Origanalist
10-24-2012, 10:25 AM
KILL!!!! KILLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!


“We can’t possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us,”

No, but we can create a shitload more that do.

Lucille
10-24-2012, 01:35 PM
Obama Makes Unprecedented War Powers to Kill by Drone Permanent
http://antiwar.com/blog/2012/10/24/obama-makes-unprecedented-war-powers-to-kill-by-drone-permanent/


Among those with some sense of humanity, some sense of the rule of law, some sense of the precious individual liberties terminally threatened by an ever-expanding government with ever-expanding powers to use force, today’s must-read Washington Post article by Greg Miller induces nausea and fear. The Post‘s article exposes many previously unknown details about the Obama administration’s drone war, describing the targeted killing program’s dramatic expansion, terrifying innovations in the presidential kill lists which inform the targeted program, and the unprecedented willingness to violate the law to kill people by kingly presidential decree.

The article describes how kill lists have evolved into something called a “disposition matrix” which secretly collects information on targeted individuals and the efforts to kill or capture them. “Among senior Obama administration officials,” Miller writes, “there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade” which is a “timeline [that] suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism.”

There are many aspects of the troubling exposé, but the one that sticks out is the Obama administration’s achievement of making targeted killing by drone – that is, extra-judicial assassinations by unchecked Executive decree – utterly normal and routine. Miller talks about “the extent to which Obama has institutionalized the highly classified practice of targeted killing, transforming ad-hoc elements into a counterterrorism infrastructure capable of sustaining a seemingly permanent war.”

Permanent war. Obama has institutionalized a system of permanent war in order to allow an ongoing, blatantly authoritarian ‘war power’ to kill anybody he wants, anywhere, anytime without any charges or trials ever being brought. Obama has made permanent what “were regarded as finite emergency measures after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,” Miller writes, establishing what “are now fixtures of the national security apparatus.”
[...]
As Micah Zenko at the Council on Foreign Relations writes today, “Miller’s report underscores the cementing of the mindset and apparent group-think among national security policymakers that the routine and indefinite killing of suspected terrorists and nearby military-age males is ethical, moral, legal, and effective (for now).” He says “it demonstrates the increasing institutionalization…of executive branch power to use lethal force without any meaningful checks and balances.”

To demonstrate how careless and inhuman the approach to killing people, both suspects and innocents suspected of nothing, Zenko recalls a conversation with “a military official with extensive and wide-ranging experience in the special operations world, and who has had direct exposure to the targeted killing program,” in which this official told him, “It really is like swatting flies. We can do it forever easily and you feel nothing. But how often do you really think about killing a fly?”
[...]
The Obama administration’s vulgar authoritarian proclivities in making murder by Executive decree a permanent fixture of the national security state apparatus, has made actions that were considered a mere ten years ago to be outrageous, lawless overreach into standard operating procedure. “Having spoken with dozens of officials across both administrations,” Zenko writes, “I am convinced that those serving under President Bush were actually much more conscious and thoughtful about the long-term implications of targeted killings than those serving under Obama.”

Obama, unbeknownst to his hordes of “liberal-minded” supporters, is more radically lawless in his exercise of permanent war powers than Bush.

Glenn Greenwald boils this all down:


The core guarantee of western justice since the Magna Carta was codified in the US by the fifth amendment to the constitution: “No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” You simply cannot have a free society, a worthwhile political system, without that guarantee, that constraint on the ultimate abusive state power, being honored.

And yet what the Post is describing, what we have had for years, is a system of government that – without hyperbole – is the very antithesis of that liberty. It is literally impossible to imagine a more violent repudiation of the basic blueprint of the republic than the development of a secretive, totally unaccountable executive branch agency that simultaneously collects information about all citizens and then applies a “disposition matrix” to determine what punishment should be meted out.

Some say this is the part of the job Obama really loves. If that's true, then he is one sick SOB.

thoughtomator
10-24-2012, 01:43 PM
keep in mind how often the govt puts the wrong person on the Do-Not-Fly list and it becomes twice as disturbing

Lucille
10-24-2012, 01:57 PM
Related:


A reporter asked Gibbs: "Do you think that the killing of Anwar al-Alwaki's 16-year-old son, who was an American citizen, is justifiable?"

Here is Gibbs' answer:


"I'm not going to get into Anwar al-Alwaki's son … I would suggest that you have a far more responsible father if they're truly concerned about the well being of your children. I don't think becoming an al-Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business."

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/alwaki-son-yemen-16-drone-2012-10#ixzz2AFQPci49


SCARBOROUGH: "This is offensive to me, though. Because you do it with a joystick in California - and it seems so antiseptic - it seems so clean - and yet you have 4-year-old girls being blown to bits because we have a policy that now says: 'you know what? Instead of trying to go in and take the risk and get the terrorists out of hiding in a Karachi suburb, we're just going to blow up everyone around them.'

"This is what bothers me. . . . We don't detain people any more: we kill them, and we kill everyone around them. . . . I hate to sound like a Code Pink guy here. I'm telling you this quote 'collateral damage' - it seems so clean with a joystick from California - this is going to cause the US problems in the future."

KLEIN: "If it is misused, and there is a really major possibility of abuse if you have the wrong people running the government. But: the bottom line in the end is - whose 4-year-old get killed? What we're doing is limiting the possibility that 4-year-olds here will get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/23/klein-drones-morning-joe

dannno
10-24-2012, 06:45 PM
'The problem with the drone is it’s like your lawn mower,' said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and Obama counterterrorism adviser. 'You’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back.'"

sigh.

tangent4ronpaul
10-24-2012, 07:34 PM
64 Drone Bases on American Soil

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/06/64-drone-bases-on-us-soil/

Includes interactive map.

-t

tod evans
10-24-2012, 07:40 PM
Is it time to flush Washington yet?

http://www.trendir.com/archives/water-monopoly-high-tank-toilet-1.jpg

deadfish
10-25-2012, 07:20 PM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wps9Ei-uGLo

Bern
05-23-2013, 05:33 AM
Was this one posted in another thread? Posting it here for completeness:
...
The creepiest aspect of this development is the christening of a new Orwellian euphemism for due-process-free presidential assassinations: "disposition matrix". Writes Miller:
"Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the 'disposition matrix'.

"The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations. US officials said the database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the 'disposition' of suspects beyond the reach of American drones."

The "disposition matrix" has been developed and will be overseen by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). One of its purposes is "to augment" the "separate but overlapping kill lists" maintained by the CIA and the Pentagon: to serve, in other words, as the centralized clearinghouse for determining who will be executed without due process based upon how one fits into the executive branch's "matrix". As Miller describes it, it is "a single, continually evolving database" which includes "biographies, locations, known associates and affiliated organizations" as well as "strategies for taking targets down, including extradition requests, capture operations and drone patrols". This analytical system that determines people's "disposition" will undoubtedly be kept completely secret; Marcy Wheeler sardonically said that she was "looking forward to the government's arguments explaining why it won't release the disposition matrix to ACLU under FOIA".
...
The central role played by the NCTC in determining who should be killed – "It is the keeper of the criteria," says one official to the Post – is, by itself, rather odious. As Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts noted in response to this story, the ACLU has long warned that the real purpose of the NCTC – despite its nominal focus on terrorism - is the "massive, secretive data collection and mining of trillions of points of data about most people in the United States".

In particular, the NCTC operates a gigantic data-mining operation, in which all sorts of information about innocent Americans is systematically monitored, stored, and analyzed. This includes "records from law enforcement investigations, health information, employment history, travel and student records" – "literally anything the government collects would be fair game". In other words, the NCTC - now vested with the power to determine the proper "disposition" of terrorist suspects - is the same agency that is at the center of the ubiquitous, unaccountable surveillance state aimed at American citizens.
...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/24/obama-terrorism-kill-list


A few months ago, EFF warned of a secretive new surveillance tool being used by the FBI in cases around the country commonly referred to as a “Stingray.” Recently, more information on the device has come to light and it makes us even more concerned than before.

The device, which acts as a fake cell phone tower, essentially allows the government to electronically search large areas for a particular cell phone's signal—sucking down data on potentially thousands of innocent people along the way. At the same time, law enforcement has attempted use them while avoiding many of the traditional limitations set forth in the Constitution, like individualized warrants. This is why we called the tool "an unconstitutional, all-you-can-eat data buffet."

Recently, LA Weekly reported the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) got a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grant in 2006 to buy a stingray. The original grant request said it would be used for "regional terrorism investigations." Instead LAPD has been using it for just about any investigation imaginable.

In just a four month period in 2012, according to documents obtained by the First Amendment Coalition, the LAPD has used the device at least 21 times in “far more routine” criminal investigations. The LA Weekly reported Stingrays “were tapped for more than 13 percent of the 155 ‘cellular phone investigation cases’ that Los Angeles police conducted between June and September last year.” These included burglary, drug and murder cases.

Of course, we’ve seen this pattern over and over and over. The government uses “terrorism” as a catalyst to gain some powerful new surveillance tool or ability, and then turns around and uses it on ordinary citizens, severely infringing on their civil liberties in the process.

Stingrays are particularly odious given they give police dangerous “general warrant” powers, which the founding fathers specifically drafted the Fourth Amendment to prevent. In pre-revolutionary America, British soldiers used “general warrants" as authority to go house-to-house in a particular neighborhood, looking for whatever they please, without specifying an individual or place to be searched.

The Stingray is the digital equivalent of the pre-revolutionary British soldier. It allows police to point a cell phone signal into all the houses in a particular neighborhood, searching for one target while sucking up everyone else’s location along with it. With one search the police could potentially invade countless private residences at once.
...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/02/secretive-stingray-surveillance-tool-becomes-more-pervasive-questions-over-its


Back in March, the FBI was accused of hiding information from judges when seeking authorization for a clandestine cellphone tracking device called the “Stingray.” But now a judge has ruled that the feds’ use of the surveillance tool was lawful in a case that could have wider ramifications for law enforcement spy tactics.

... The judge also added that the use of the Stingray did not constitute a “severe intrusion” and ultimately held that “no Fourth Amendment violation occurred.”

The ACLU responded with dismay, stating that it believes the ruling “trivializes the intrusive nature of electronic searches and potentially opens the door to troubling government misuse of new technology.” Linda Lye, staff attorney at ACLU, wrote in a blog post that the group was particularly disgruntled that the judge appeared to dismiss the significance of the Stingray’s ability to scoop up data from innocent third parties, which the ACLU believes the feds do not fully disclose. Campbell’s approval of the Stingray in the Rigmaiden case, Lye wrote, sends the message that it is “alright to withhold information from courts about new technology, which means that the law will have an even harder time catching up.”

Incidentally, new FBI documents related to the Stingray were released by the Electronic Privacy Information Center on Wednesday. Four hundred pages of heavily redacted files, some marked “secret,” join several other batches that have been released by the rights group as part of ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation. Of particular note in the latest trove are documents that show the FBI has been imposing nondisclosure agreements on its staff in order to prevent public disclosure of any information related to the spy technology.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/05/09/stingray_imsi_catcher_judge_oks_fbi_use_of_controv ersial_tool_in_daniel.html

Anti Federalist
05-23-2013, 11:33 AM
Just warming up, Mundanes...

Just warming up.

You think we are installing this all seeing surveillance grid, just to watch you play with yourselves?

And what wretched beast, slouches toward Bethelem to be born?

Acala
05-23-2013, 11:39 AM
Y'all are missing the real benefits of this. The more you expand the list of targets, the more likely that what was once collateral damage in a given strike will include more and more listed targets just based on statistics. Eventually, when everyone is on the target list, there will be NO collateral damage! So this trend of expanding the target lists leads to less collateral damage. Everyone favors reducing collateral damage.

Anti Federalist
05-23-2013, 11:42 AM
Y'all are missing the real benefits of this. The more you expand the list of targets, the more likely that what was once collateral damage in a given strike will include more and more listed targets just based on statistics. Eventually, when everyone is on the target list, there will be NO collateral damage! So this trend of expanding the target lists leads to less collateral damage. Everyone favors reducing collateral damage.

Mind = Blown.

You really do work in government, don't you?

;)

Acala
05-23-2013, 11:48 AM
Mind = Blown.

You really do work in government, don't you?

;)

I deserve a promotion. Maybe Holder needs a speech writer.

Philhelm
05-23-2013, 11:50 AM
Y'all are missing the real benefits of this. The more you expand the list of targets, the more likely that what was once collateral damage in a given strike will include more and more listed targets just based on statistics. Eventually, when everyone is on the target list, there will be NO collateral damage! So this trend of expanding the target lists leads to less collateral damage. Everyone favors reducing collateral damage.

Also, with more documented terrorists in active operation, they can justify increased funding in order to have more drones flying overhead. For your safety.

sailingaway
05-23-2013, 11:51 AM
promoting

Warlord
05-23-2013, 12:50 PM
Liberals not happy !

WM_in_MO
05-23-2013, 12:51 PM
You lost me.

sailingaway
05-23-2013, 12:54 PM
You lost me.

Read the first posts in the thread, this is pretty indefensible.

I'd be up for getting #DroneLordObama trending if anyone wanted to set a time for it....

libertyjam
05-23-2013, 12:59 PM
KILL!!!! KILLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!



No, but we can create a shitload more that do.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=LjKF7aQthcQ#t=555s

The induction center portion, just listen at the time starts about 9:25 in...

sailingaway
05-23-2013, 01:04 PM
http://ih0.redbubble.net/image.13025819.1961/sticker,375x360.u1.png

ClydeCoulter
05-23-2013, 05:30 PM
Also, with more documented terrorists in active operation, they can justify increased funding in order to have more drones flying overhead. For your safety.

If everyone is a ter-rist, then who's safety? Alciada's?