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October 15, 2015

Documents Leaked to The Intercept Open Unprecedented Window into Drone Program 
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And newly leaked government documents have provided an unprecedented
window into the secret U.S. drone assassination program across the
globe. In "The Drone Papers," the website The Intercept reveals drone
strikes have resulted from unreliable intelligence, stemming in large
part from electronic communications data, or "signals intelligence,"
that officials acknowledge is insufficient. The documents also undermine
government claims that the drone strikes have been precise. In
Afghanistan, strikes on 35 direct targets killed at least 219 other
people. This is Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept, which just published an
eight-part series on the leaked documents.

Jeremy Scahill: "But the fact that this is the first time that primary
source documents have been published that detail the chain of command
for assassinating people around the globe. The banality of the
bureaucracy of assassination is so clear in these documents—the cold
corporate words that they use to describe killing people. The 'basics of
manhunting' is one of the terms that they use. The 'tyranny of distance'
is another term that they use. 'Arab features,' you know, to describe
people that they're looking at from thousands of feet above. The
corporate coldness of the way that these documents reflect what is
actually a process of systematically hunting down and assassinating
human beings should send chills through the spine of people who care
about democracy in this society."

The documents were leaked to The Intercept by an unnamed U.S.
intelligence source. The source told The Intercept: "It's stunning the
number of instances when I've come across intelligence that was faulty,
when sources of information used to finish targets were misattributed to
people. And it isn't until several months or years later that you
realize that the entire time you thought you were going after this
target, it was his mother's phone the whole time. Anyone caught in the
vicinity is guilty by association—it's a phenomenal gamble." We will
link to The Intercept's exposé on "The Drone Papers" on our site.

 

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