http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...-faulty-intelligence-and-civilian-deaths.htmlInside America's secretive drone project: faulty intelligence and civilian deaths
Countless civilians have been killed in Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia by US drone programmes based on thinly gathered intelligence, leaked classified military documents reveal
Almost all of the victims of American drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan during a five-month period were civilians, according to a leaked trove of classified intelligence documents.
Passed to The Intercept, an investigative journalism website, the never before seen cache of secret slides provide disturbing insight into the drone programme that now lies at the heart of President Barack Obama’s counter-terrorism strategy.
Covering a period from 2011 to 2013, the documents reveal the decision-making process involved in the drone strikes, from the first selection of a target to the final authorisation by the president.
The authors of the investigative report include award-winning journalists Jeremy Scahill, who has long focused on America’s military-industrial complex, and Glenn Greenwald, who helped reveal the breadth of US and Britain surveillance programmes, using documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
Their findings are based on files leaked by a US military source, whose identity The Intercept said it had chosen to protect because the US government’s aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers.
The source said he had chosen to come forward because the public had a right to know about the "assassinations" that are continuing to take place:
“This outrageous explosion of watch listing - 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," he 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 documents show how drone strikes are often based on thin intelligence, and have an incalculable civilian toll. Accidental victims are then labelled “enemies killed in action”, even if there is no immediate evidence of to suggest that they were hostile to the US government.
Details of a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, drone stikes killed more than 200 people, of which only 35 were intended.
During one five-month period of the operation, the documents show, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets.
In Yemen and Somalia, where the US has much more limited intelligence gathering capabilities, those running the drone programme are often unable confirm the identities of the people killed by it.
“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.”
Part of the information in The Intercept report - named the ‘Drone Papers’ - is based on a chart from a classified study conducted by the Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Task Force (ISR) - a branch of the Pentagon – that detail the process by which a human being becomes a target for a drone attack.
US intelligence agents use information from government watch lists and other military agencies to begin tracking potential targets. The leaked documents show that those thought eligible for the kill list are then profiled, with their information then crammed onto a small document “known as a baseball card” according to the source.
More “operational information” is added, before the file goes into a “target information folder” that is passed up the chain of command. The president must then sign off on chosen targets.
The process by which people are considered eligible for a baseball card is a complex and nebulous method.
“You’re relying on the fact that you do have all these very powerful machines, capable of collecting extraordinary amounts of data and information,” sometimes giving personnel “godlike powers” the source said.
Moreover, according to a separate investigative report, many of the people helping compile this information are private contractors, who may not be bound by the same rules or accountability structure as members of the United States military.
Earlier this year, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that one in 10 people involved in the effort to process data captured by drones and spy planes was estimated to be non-military.
When the drone strikes go wrong, killing an unintended person then the US military automatically labeled the victim “enemy killed in action” (EKIA), the source added.
The label is only removed if evidence emerges after the killing that proves that the person killed was not an “unlawful enemy combatant”.
However the source described official US government statements minimizing the number of civilian casualties inflicted by drone strikes as “exaggerating at best, if not outright lies”.
Amnesty International urged the US Congress to launch an "immediate independent inquiry" into the Obama administration’s drone strikes overseas.
“These documents raise serious concerns about whether the USA has systematically violated international law, including by classifying unidentified people as ‘combatants’ to justify their killings," said Naureen Shah, Director of Amnesty USA's security with human rights programme.
“These revelations are further damning evidence that the Obama administration is continuing the Bush-era project of treating the world as a global battlefield while evading public accountability.”
The Intercept said the Pentagon, White House, and Special Operations Command all declined to comment on the leaked documents. A Defence Department spokesperson said, “We don’t comment on the details of classified reports.”
In response published report yesterday, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said: "The president has obviously made a policy decision to try to be as transparent as possible about our counterterrorism operations all around the world.”
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