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.”
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THE DOCUMENTS COME FROM a Pentagon study, circulated in early 2013, evaluating the intelligence and surveillance technology behind the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) killing campaign in Yemen and Somalia in 2011 and 2012.
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This is a labyrinth with 12 entrances and no exit. It is built on a cache of documents provided to The Intercept by a source within the intelligence community.
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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.
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Much of what is seen by a drone’s camera [...] appears without context on the ground. Some drone operators describe watching targets as “looking through a soda straw.”
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For many years, lawyers and human rights advocates have wondered about the chain of command. How are non-battlefield assassinations authorized? Does it fall within the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), or through some other authority?
The documents we have are not comprehensive, but they suggest a linear chain—all the way up to the president of the United States (POTUS).
The Intercept
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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