Snowden, The Drone Papers: ...a cache of secret documents...

[presence]

https://theintercept.com/drone-papers


The Drone Papers


The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The documents, provided by a whistleblower, offer an unprecedented glimpse into Obama’s drone wars.˅


Illustration by The Intercept



01.https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/10/SQ01_TheAssassinationComplex01-promo.jpg
The Assassination Complex

Jeremy Scahill
The whistleblower who leaked the drone papers believes the public is entitled to know how people are placed on kill lists and assassinated on orders from the president.



(https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-assassination-complex/)
02.https://prod01-cdn04.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/10/SQ02_AVisualGlossary01-promo.jpg
A Visual Glossary

Josh Begley
Decoding the language of covert warfare.



(https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/a-visual-glossary/)
03.https://prod01-cdn04.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/10/KC_HeadsRedacted01-promo.jpg
The Kill Chain

Cora Currier
New details about the secret criteria for drone strikes and how the White House approves targets.



(https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-kill-chain/)
04.https://prod01-cdn04.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/10/SQ03_FindFixFinish-Getty159308578-1-promo.jpg
Find, Fix, Finish

Jeremy Scahill
The tip of the spear in the Obama administration’s ramped up wars in Somalia and Yemen was a special operations task force called TF 48-4.



(https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/find-fix-finish/)
05.https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/10/GettyImages-107990394-promo.jpg
Manhunting in the Hindu Kush

Ryan Devereaux
Leaked documents detailing a multi-year U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan reveal the strategic limits and startling human costs of drone warfare.



(https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/manhunting-in-the-hindu-kush/)
06.https://prod01-cdn04.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/10/firing-blind-promo.jpg
Firing Blind

Cora Currier, Peter Maass
A secret Pentagon study highlights the chronic flaws in intelligence used for drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia.



(https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/firing-blind/)
07.https://prod01-cdn04.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/10/Testa.London.006-promo.jpg
The Life and Death of Objective Peckham

Ryan Gallagher
For years Bilal el-Berjawi traveled freely from the U.K. to Somalia under the watchful eyes of intelligence services. Then the U.S. killed him with a drone strike.



(https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-life-and-death-of-objective-peckham/)
08.https://prod01-cdn06.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/10/SQ08_TargetAftica01-promo.jpg
Target Africa

Nick Turse
To reduce the “tyranny of distance,” drones fly from bases in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Navy ships.



(https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/target-africa/)
09.Glossary

The Alphabet of Assassination

A guide to the acronyms, abbreviations, and initialisms used in The Drone Papers.
(https://theintercept.com/drone-papers-alphabet-of-assassination)
10.Documents

Small Footprint Operations 2/13

(https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/15/small-footprint-operations-2-13/)Small Footprint Operations 5/13

(https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/15/small-footprint-operations-5-13/)Operation Haymaker

(https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/15/operation-haymaker/)Geolocation Watchlist

(https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/15/geolocation-watchlist/)

Editor-in-Chief: Betsy Reed. Series Editor: Roger Hodge. Additional Editing: Peter Maass, Charlotte Greensit, Andrea Jones. Research: Alleen Brown, John Thomason, Margot Williams, Spencer Woodman. Art Direction: Stephane Elbaz and Philipp Hubert. Development: Tom Conroy and Raby Yuson.

[presence]

EKIA (https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/14/operation-haymaker/#page-2) Over a five-month period, U.S. forces used drones and other aircraft to kill 155 people in northeastern Afghanistan. They achieved 19 jackpots. Along the way, they killed at least 136 other people, all of whom were classified as EKIA, or enemies killed in action.
https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/10/hay.png
Note the “%” column. It is the number of jackpots (JPs) divided by the number of operations. A 70 percent success rate. But it ignores well over a hundred other people killed along the way.
This means that almost nine out of 10 people killed in these strikes were not the intended targets.
https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/10/ekia-grid.png


nice, seems par for a government job

[presence]

dup

[presence]

Touchdown Hellfire missiles—the explosives fired from drones—are not always fired at people. In fact,


most drone strikes are aimed at phones.


The SIM card provides a person’s location—when turned on, a phone can become a deadly proxy for the individual being hunted. When a night raid or drone strike successfully neutralizes a target’s phone, operators call that a “touchdown.”


fuck abuncha cell phones

[Todd]

bump. spread it far and wide.

[EBounding]

Is this what the cliffhanger was about at the end of Citizenfour?

[Anti Federalist]

bump. spread it far and wide.

Pffft...nobody gives a shit and Rand says he should go to jail.

[twomp]

The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The documents, provided by a whistleblower, offer an unprecedented glimpse into Obama’s drone wars.

The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret slides that provides a window into the inner workings of the U.S. military’s kill/capture operations at a key time in the evolution of the drone wars — between 2011 and 2013. The documents, which also outline the internal views of special operations forces on the shortcomings and flaws of the drone program, were provided by a source within the intelligence community who worked on the types of operations and programs described in the slides. The Intercept granted the source’s request for anonymity because the materials are classified and because the U.S. government has engaged in aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers. The stories in this series will refer to the source as “the source.”

The source said he decided to provide these documents to The Intercept because he believes the public has a right to understand the process by which people are placed on kill lists and ultimately assassinated on orders from the highest echelons of the U.S. government. “This outrageous explosion of watchlisting — of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield — it was, from the very first instance, wrong,” the source said.



It's a long read. See the whole thing here:

https://theintercept.com/drone-papers

[twomp]

An exerpt:


In undeclared war zones, the U.S. military has become overly reliant on signals intelligence, or SIGINT, to identify and ultimately hunt down and kill people. The documents acknowledge that using metadata from phones and computers, as well as communications intercepts, is an inferior method of finding and finishing targeted people. They described SIGINT capabilities in these unconventional battlefields as “poor” and “limited.” Yet such collection, much of it provided by foreign partners, accounted for more than half the intelligence used to track potential kills in Yemen and Somalia. The ISR study characterized these failings as a technical hindrance to efficient operations, omitting the fact that faulty intelligence has led to the killing of innocent people, including U.S. citizens, in drone strikes.

The source underscored the unreliability of metadata, most often from phone and computer communications intercepts. These sources of information, identified by so-called selectors such as a phone number or email address, are the primary tools used by the military to find, fix, and finish its targets. “It requires an enormous amount of faith in the technology that you’re using,” the source said. “There’s countless instances where I’ve come across intelligence that was faulty.” This, he said, is a primary factor in the killing of civilians. “It’s stunning the number of instances when selectors are misattributed to certain people. And it isn’t until several months or years later that you all of a sudden realize that the entire time you thought you were going after this really hot target, you wind up realizing it was his mother’s phone the whole time.”

Within the special operations community, the source said, the internal view of the people being hunted by the U.S. for possible death by drone strike is: “They have no rights. They have no dignity. They have no humanity to themselves. They’re just a ‘selector’ to an analyst. You eventually get to a point in the target’s life cycle that you are following them, you don’t even refer to them by their actual name.” This practice, he said, contributes to “dehumanizing the people before you’ve even encountered the moral question of ‘is this a legitimate kill or not?’”

By the ISR study’s own admission, killing suspected terrorists, even if they are “legitimate” targets, further hampers intelligence gathering. The secret study states bluntly: “Kill operations significantly reduce the intelligence available.” A chart shows that special operations actions in the Horn of Africa resulted in captures just 25 percent of the time, indicating a heavy tilt toward lethal strikes.

The White House and Pentagon boast that the targeted killing program is precise and that civilian deaths are minimal. However, documents detailing a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. 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. In Yemen and Somalia, where the U.S. has far more limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are the intended targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse.

“Anyone caught in the vicinity is guilty by association,” the source said. When “a drone strike kills more than one person, there is no guarantee that those persons deserved their fate. … So it’s a phenomenal gamble.”

90%!!

[LibertyClick]

http://www.libertyclick.org/drones-a-visual-glossary/

[jmdrake]

In undeclared war zones, the U.S. military has become overly reliant on signals intelligence, or SIGINT, to identify and ultimately hunt down and kill people. The documents acknowledge that using metadata from phones and computers, as well as communications intercepts, is an inferior method of finding and finishing targeted people. They described SIGINT capabilities in these unconventional battlefields as “poor” and “limited.” Yet such collection, much of it provided by foreign partners, accounted for more than half the intelligence used to track potential kills in Yemen and Somalia. The ISR study characterized these failings as a technical hindrance to efficient operations, omitting the fact that faulty intelligence has led to the killing of innocent people, including U.S. citizens, in drone strikes.

Let's see. The apologists for the illegal NSA spying program kept saying "But we only collect the metadata."

[presence]

"But we only collect the metadata."

but they're only oops wrong house swat teams, not predator drones... what could go wrong?

[enhanced_deficit]

His presentation would be even more informative if he adds these children's photos (http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?483234-Doctors-Without-Borders-airstrike-US-alters-story-for-fourth-time-in-four-days&p=6008560&viewfull=1#post6008560) too.