- 01.THE
ASSASSINATION COMPLEX
- 02.A
VISUAL GLOSSARY
- 03.THE KILL
CHAIN
- 04.FIND,
FIX, FINISH
- 05.MANHUNTING
IN THE HINDU KUSH
- 06.FIRING BLIND
- 07.THE LIFE AND DEATH OF
OBJECTIVE PECKHAM
- 08.TARGET
AFRICA
Oct. 15 2015, 12:57 p.m.
From his
first days as commander in chief, the drone has been President Barack Obama’s
weapon of choice, used by the military and the CIA to hunt down and kill the
people his administration has deemed — through secretive processes, without
indictment or trial — worthy of execution. There has been intense focus on the
technology of remote killing, but that often serves as a surrogate for what
should be a broader examination of the state’s power over life and death.
DRONES
ARE A TOOL, not a policy. The policy is assassination. While
every president since Gerald Ford has upheld an executive order banning
assassinations by U.S. personnel, Congress has avoided legislating the issue or
even defining the word “assassination.” This has allowed
proponents of the drone wars to rebrand assassinations with more palatable
characterizations, such as the term du jour, “targeted killings.”
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.
The
first drone strike outside of a declared war zone was conducted more than 12 years ago, yet it was not
until May 2013 that the White House released a set of standards and procedures for
conducting such strikes. Those guidelines offered little specificity, asserting
that the U.S. would only conduct a lethal strike outside of an “area of active
hostilities” if a target represents a “continuing, imminent threat to U.S.
persons,” without providing any sense of the internal process used
to determine whether a suspect should be killed without being indicted or
tried. The implicit message on drone strikes from the Obama administration has
been one of trust, but don’t verify.
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.
“We’re
allowing this to happen. And by ‘we,’ I mean every American citizen who has
access to this information now, but continues to do nothing about it.”
The
Pentagon, White House, and Special Operations Command all declined to comment.
A Defense Department spokesperson said, “We don’t comment on the details of
classified reports.”
The CIA
and the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) operate
parallel drone-based assassination programs, and the secret documents should be
viewed in the context of an intense internal turf warover
which entity should have supremacy in those operations. Two sets of slides
focus on the military’s high-value targeting campaign in Somalia and Yemen as
it existed between 2011 and 2013, specifically the operations of a secretive
unit, Task Force 48-4.
Additional documents on
high-value kill/capture operations in Afghanistan buttress previous accounts of
how the Obama administration masks the true number of civilians killed in drone
strikes by categorizing unidentified people killed in a strike as enemies, even
if they were not the intended targets. The slides also paint a picture of
a campaign in Afghanistan aimed not only at eliminating al Qaeda and Taliban
operatives, but also at taking out members of other local armed groups.
One
top-secret document shows how the terror “watchlist” appears in the terminals
of personnel conducting drone operations, linking unique codes associated with
cellphone SIM cards and handsets to specific individuals in order to geolocate
them.
A
top-secret document shows how the watchlist looks on internal systems used by
drone operators.
The costs to intelligence gathering
when suspected terrorists are killed rather than captured are outlined in the
slides pertaining to Yemen and Somalia, which are part of a 2013 study
conducted by a Pentagon entity, the Intelligence, Surveillance, and
Reconnaissance Task Force. The ISR study lamented the limitations of the drone
program, arguing for more advanced drones and other surveillance aircraft and
the expanded use of naval vessels to extend the reach of surveillance
operations necessary for targeted strikes. It also contemplated the
establishment of new “politically challenging” airfields and recommended
capturing and interrogating more suspected terrorists rather than killing them
in drone strikes.
The ISR
Task Force at the time was under the control of Michael Vickers, the
undersecretary of defense for intelligence. Vickers, a fierce proponent of
drone strikes and a legendary paramilitary figure, had long pushed for a
significant increase in the military’s use of special operations forces. The
ISR Task Force is viewed by key lawmakers as
an advocate for more surveillance platforms like drones.
The ISR
study also reveals new details about
the case of a British citizen, Bilal el-Berjawi, who was stripped of his
citizenship before being killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2012. British and
American intelligence had Berjawi under surveillance for several years as he
traveled back and forth between the U.K. and East Africa, yet did not capture
him. Instead, the U.S. hunted him down and killed him in Somalia.
Taken
together, the secret documents lead to the conclusion that Washington’s 14-year
high-value targeting campaign suffers from an overreliance on signals
intelligence, an apparently incalculable civilian toll, and — due to a
preference for assassination rather than capture — an inability to extract
potentially valuable intelligence from terror suspects. They also highlight the
futility of the war in Afghanistan by showing how the U.S. has poured vast
resources into killing local insurgents, in the process exacerbating the very
threat the U.S. is seeking to confront.
These
secret slides help provide historical context to Washington’s ongoing wars, and
are especially relevant today as the U.S. military intensifies its
drone strikes and covert actions against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Those
campaigns, like the ones detailed in these documents, are unconventional wars
that employ special operations forces at the tip of the spear.
The
“find, fix, finish” doctrine that has fueled America’s post-9/11 borderless war
is being refined and institutionalized. Whether through the use of drones,
night raids, or new platforms yet to be unleashed, these documents lay bare the
normalization of assassination as a central component of U.S. counterterrorism
policy.
“The
military is easily capable of adapting to change, but they don’t like to stop
anything they feel is making their lives easier, or is to their benefit. And
this certainly is, in their eyes, a very quick, clean way of doing things. It’s
a very slick, efficient way to conduct the war, without having to have the
massive ground invasion mistakes of Iraq and Afghanistan,” the source
said. “But at this point, they have become so addicted to this
machine, to this way of doing business, that it seems like it’s going to become
harder and harder to pull them away from it the longer they’re allowed to
continue operating in this way.”
The
articles in The Drone Papers were produced by a team of
reporters and researchers from The Intercept that has spent
months analyzing the documents. The series is intended to serve as a
long-overdue public examination of the methods and outcomes of America’s
assassination program. This campaign, carried out by two presidents through
four presidential terms, has been shrouded in excessive secrecy. The public has
a right to see these documents not only to engage in an informed debate about
the future of U.S. wars, both overt and covert, but also to understand the
circumstances under which the U.S. government arrogates to itself the right to
sentence individuals to death without the established checks and balances of
arrest, trial, and appeal.
Among
the key revelations in this series:
HOW THE
PRESIDENT AUTHORIZES TARGETS FOR ASSASSINATION
It has
been widely reported that President Obama directly approves high-value targets
for inclusion on the kill list, but the secret ISR study provides new insight
into the kill chain, including a detailed chart stretching from electronic and
human intelligence gathering all the way to the president’s desk. The same
month the ISR study was circulated — May 2013 — Obama signed the policy
guidance on the use of force in counterterrorism operations overseas. A senior
administration official, who declined to comment on the classified documents,
told The Intercept that “those guidelines remain in effect
today.”
U.S.
intelligence personnel collect information on potential targets, as The
Intercept has previously reported, drawn
from government watchlists and
the work of intelligence, military, and law enforcement agencies. At the time
of the study, when someone was destined for the kill list, intelligence
analysts created a portrait of a suspect and the threat that person posed,
pulling it together “in a condensed format known as a ‘baseball card.’” That
information was then bundled with operational information and packaged in a
“target information folder” to be “staffed up to higher echelons” for action.
On average, it took 58 days for the president to sign off on a target, one slide indicates.
At that point, U.S. forces had 60 days to carry out the strike. The documents
include two case studies that are partially based on information detailed on
baseball cards.
The
system for creating baseball cards and
targeting packages, according to the source, depends largely on intelligence
intercepts and a multi-layered system of fallible, human interpretation. “It
isn’t a surefire method,” he said. “You’re relying on the fact that you do have
all these very powerful machines, capable of collecting extraordinary amounts
of data and information,” which can lead personnel involved in targeted
killings to believe they have “godlike powers.”
ASSASSINATIONS
DEPEND ON UNRELIABLE INTELLIGENCE AND HURT INTELLIGENCE GATHERING
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, includingU.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.
STRIKES
OFTEN KILL MANY MORE THAN THE INTENDED TARGET
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.”
THE
MILITARY LABELS UNKNOWN PEOPLE IT KILLS AS “ENEMIES KILLED IN ACTION”
The
documents show that the military designated people it killed in targeted
strikes as EKIA — “enemy killed in action” — even if they were not the intended
targets of the strike. Unless evidence posthumously emerged to prove the males
killed were not terrorists or “unlawful enemy combatants,” EKIA remained their
designation, according to the source. That process, he said, “is insane. But
we’ve made ourselves comfortable with that. The intelligence community, JSOC,
the CIA, and everybody that helps support and prop up these programs, they’re
comfortable with that idea.”
The
source described official U.S. government statements minimizing the number of
civilian casualties inflicted by drone strikes as “exaggerating at best, if not
outright lies.”
THE
NUMBER OF PEOPLE TARGETED FOR DRONE STRIKES AND OTHER FINISHING OPERATIONS
According
to one secret slide, as of
June 2012, there were 16 people in Yemen whom President Obama had authorized
U.S. special operations forces to assassinate. In Somalia, there were four. The
statistics contained in the documents appear to refer only to targets approved
under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, not CIA operations. In
2012 alone, according to data compiled by the Bureau of Investigative
Journalism, there were more than 200 people killed in operations in Yemen and
between four and eight in Somalia.
HOW GEOGRAPHY
SHAPES THE ASSASSINATION CAMPAIGN
In
Afghanistan and Iraq, the pace of U.S. strikes was much quicker than in Yemen
and Somalia. This appears due, in large part, to the fact that Afghanistan and
Iraq were declared war zones, and in Iraq the U.S. was able to launch attacks
from bases closer to the targeted people. By contrast, in Somalia and Yemen,
undeclared war zones where strikes were justified under tighter restrictions,
U.S. attack planners described a serpentine bureaucracy for obtaining approval
for assassination. The secret study states that the number of high-value
targeting operations in these countries was “significantly lower than
previously seen in Iraq and Afghanistan” because of these “constraining
factors.”
Even
after the president approved a target in Yemen or Somalia, the great distance
between drone bases and targets created significant challenges for U.S. forces
— a problem referred to in the documents as the “tyranny of distance.” In Iraq,
more than 80 percent of “finishing operations” were conducted within 150
kilometers of an air base. In Yemen, the average distance was about 450
kilometers and in Somalia it was more than 1,000 kilometers. On average, one
document states, it took the U.S. six years to develop a target in Somalia, but
just 8.3 months to kill the target once the president had approved his addition
to the kill list.
INCONSISTENCIES
WITH WHITE HOUSE STATEMENTS ABOUT TARGETED KILLING
The
White House’s publicly available policy standards state that lethal force will
be launched only against targets who pose a “continuing, imminent threat to
U.S. persons.” In the documents, however, there is only one explicit mention of
a specific criterion: that a person “presents a threat to U.S. interest or
personnel.” While such a rationale may make sense in the context of a declared
war in which U.S. personnel are on the ground in large numbers, such as in
Afghanistan, that standard is so vague as to be virtually meaningless in
countries like Yemen and Somalia, where very few U.S. personnel operate.
While
many of the documents provided to The Intercept contain
explicit internal recommendations for improving unconventional U.S. warfare,
the source said that what’s implicit is even more significant. The mentality
reflected in the documents on the assassination programs is: “This process can
work. We can work out the kinks. We can excuse the mistakes. And eventually we
will get it down to the point where we don’t have to continuously come back …
and explain why a bunch of innocent people got killed.”
The
architects of what amounts to a global assassination campaign do not appear
concerned with either its enduring impact or its moral implications. “All you
have to do is take a look at the world and what it’s become, and the ineptitude
of our Congress, the power grab of the executive branch over the past decade,”
the source said. “It’s never considered: Is what we’re doing going to ensure the
safety of our moral integrity? Of not just our moral integrity, but the lives
and humanity of the people that are going to have to live with this the most?”
Photo: Mohammed
Hamoud/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
CONTACT
THE AUTHOR:
/https://www.niagarafallsreview.ca/content/dam/thestar/news/canada/2021/09/25/huawei-executive-meng-wanzhou-receives-warm-welcome-upon-return-to-china/_1_meng_wanzhou_2.jpg)
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