EXPOSED! ‘New Snowden’ releases Obama’s drone program papers

The documents were provided to The Intercept by a source within the US intelligence community who wished to remain anonymous because of the government’s aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers. The documents, slides, visuals and analysis have been posted by The Intercept on Thursday as “The Drone Papers.”

He says the American public has the right to know about the process by which people are placed on kill lists and assassinated on orders from US government officials.

There’s never been a major leak of documents relating to the U.S. drone program. Until now. https://t.co/IPnqTDv5Ouhttps://t.co/Opnqg0iqCb

— The Intercept (@the_intercept) October 15, 2015

“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 whistleblower told The Intercept.

The cache contains two sets of slides detailing the US military’s drone operations in Somalia and Yemen between 2011 and 2013, by the secret Task Force 48-4.

These docs illustrate what a video game, drained of all humanity, these drone assassinations have become https://t.co/8lDXfO58pC

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 15, 2015

Additional documents on drone operations in Afghanistan show that the US government has categorized unidentified people killed in drone strikes as enemies, even if they were not the intended targets, thus masking the true extent of civilian casualties.

“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,” wrote The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill.

This is what the terror watchlist looks like at drone operators’ terminals: https://t.co/YDC3ddcdW0pic.twitter.com/EJkPuq4Gir

— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) October 15, 2015

Most of the assassinations are based on signals intelligence (SIGINT), from telephone metadata to signal intercepts. Faulty intelligence, often provided by local sources, is the primary cause of civilian casualties, says the whistleblower.

The special operations community dehumanizes the people targeted for drone strikes, making it easier to avoid asking moral questions, the source says. “They have no rights. They have no dignity. They have no humanity to themselves. They’re just a ‘selector’ to an analyst.”

Thank you @the_intercept for calling drone strikes by their correct name – assassinations https://t.co/86lpfEXVYZ

— Julia Angwin (@JuliaAngwin) October 15, 2015

Documents describing Operation Haymaker, a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, show that US airstrikes killed over 200 people between January 2012 and February 2013, but only 35 were the intended targets. The military designated everyone killed in the strikes as “enemy killed in action (EKIA),” unless evidence later emerged specifically showing the male victims were not terrorists.

US designated people killed “enemy killed in action” even if they were not intended targets: https://t.co/mpCikkQex1 pic.twitter.com/gPjl6AFqIn

— Ryan Gallagher (@rj_gallagher) October 15, 2015