Thanks to Reliance on "Signature" Drone Strikes, US Military Doesn't Know Who It's Killing

Tuesday, 04 August 2015
By Adam Hudson, Truthout 

A "signature strike" takes place when a drone hits a target based on a target's patterns of behavior - but without knowing the target's identity. (Image: Predator drone via Shutterstock)

 Last month, on June 9, the United States launched a drone strike that killed Nasir al-Wuhayshi, a high-ranking leader in the Islamic militant group al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). What makes the strike notable is that it was a coincidence: The CIA - the agency that pulled the trigger - had no idea al-Wuhayshi was among the group of suspected militants it targeted. Al-Wuhayshi's death at the hands of a US drone reveals that the United States continues to fire drone missiles at people whose identities it does not know.

Government officials confirmed the June 9 strike was a "signature strike" to The Washington Post. A signature strike takes place when a drone hits a target based on a target's patterns of behavior, but without knowing that target's identity. Thus, a US drone, in a signature strike, will target an area the government believes is filled with militant activity but will not know who exactly they are killing. While signature strikes have been happening for a while in the global war on terror, they signify a serious shift in US war-making. American warfare is increasingly placing a greater emphasis on big data, advanced computing, unmanned systems and cyberwarfare. While this approach may seem "cleaner" and more precise than previous tactics (particularly in contrast the drawn-out and bloody occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan), it is not. High-tech militarism is far from "accurate." Even more importantly, it inflicts serious human suffering and perpetuates the US permanent-war machine. 

Signature Strikes
Signature strikes began during the Bush years, in January 2008, as the US intensified drone strikes in Pakistan. When Obama entered office in 2009, his administration picked up where Bush left off and exponentially increased the number of drone strikes. During his eight years in office, Bush launched 51 drone strikes in Pakistan and killed between 410 and 595 people. Obama, so far, has launched 419 drone strikes in Pakistan, alone, and killed over 4,500 people in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia since 2009.

When a drone strike takes place, the US government "counts all military-aged males in a strike zone as combatant" unless posthumous intelligence proves them innocent, according to a May 2012 New York Times report. A White House fact sheet says this is "not the case." However, that contradicts what government officials leaked to the media outlets like The New York Times and ProPublica. As the Times report notes, "Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: People in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good."

In fact, US drone strikes have killed teenagers in countries like Pakistan and Yemen. One example is 16-year-old US citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki (son of Islamic militant preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, also a US citizen killed in a US drone strike) in 2011. Then-Attorney General Eric Holder said Abdulrahman was not ''specifically targeted.'' Another is Mohammed Tuaiman, a 13-year-old Yemeni boy who was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen last February. Drones had killed his brother and father beforehand.

Some State Department officials complained to the White House that the CIA's criteria for signature strikes was "too lax," according to The New York Times report. "The joke was that when the C.I.A. sees 'three guys doing jumping jacks,' the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said one senior official. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bomb makers - but they might also be farmers, skeptics argued," the report says. 

Drone strikes are launched by the CIA and the US military's Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), an elite military unit that carries out specialized, risky missions - or "special operations" - such as manhunts, "targeted killings" and rescues. Underneath JSOC's umbrella are special mission units that directly perform the operations. Those units include the Army's Delta Force, the Air Force's 24th Special Tactics Squadron and the Navy's SEAL Team Six, which killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.

The CIA has a similar paramilitary unit, known as the Special Operations Group (SOG). SOG operates under the CIA's Special Activities Division - the division that carries out covert operations - and often selects operatives from JSOC. JSOC's activities are distinct from conventional troops in the US Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps. The US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) oversees JSOC and all special operations units within every military branch. JSOC also answers directly to the executive branch, with little to no oversight from Congress. Its missions are secret. The CIA is subject to some congressional oversight but still largely answers to the executive branch. This means JSOC and the CIA's paramilitary unit are virtually the president's private armies. 

The CIA has no drone bases in Yemen, but flies drones out of bases in Saudi Arabia and Djibouti. Last year, the United States signed a new, 20-year lease on its military base in Djibouti, Camp Lemonnier, which is a key hub in the US's counterterrorism wars in the Horn of Africa. The US flies surveillance and armed drones out of Camp Lemonnier to spy on and kill militant groups in Somalia and Yemen. Recently, Foreign Policy magazine reported that the US has two military bases in Somalia, from which JSOC operates. The bases are used to carry out counterterrorism operations and surveillance, as well as lethal drone missions.

In order to know where to launch a drone strike or other lethal operation, the US needs intelligence. For drone strikes, the main source for that intelligence is electronic - it's known as "signals intelligence," as it is the result of monitoring anything with an electronic signal. Targeting for US drone strikes and other extrajudicial operations is based on a complex analysis of metadata and tracking of cellphone SIM cards.

Metadata is data about data - such as who called whom at what time, what day, and for how long - rather than the data's actual content. Analyzing electronic intelligence can help analysts connect the dots and map a person's activity, though often not the purpose or substance of that activity. In an earlier email interview, former CIA case officer Robert Steele explained, "Signals intelligence has always relied primarily on seeing the dots and connecting the dots, not on knowing what the dots are saying. When combined with a history of the dots, and particularly the dots coming together in meetings, or a black (anonymous) cellphone residing next to a white (known) cellphone, such that the black acquires the white identity by extension, it becomes possible to 'map' human activity in relation to weapons caches, mosques, meetings, etcetera."

According to The Intercept, "Rather than confirming a target's identity with operatives or informants on the ground, the CIA or the U.S. military then orders a strike based on the activity and location of the mobile phone a person is believed to be using." The NSA will typically pinpoint the location of a suspected terrorist's cellphone or handset SIM card and feed that information to the CIA or JSOC, which will either launch a lethal drone strike or conduct a raid. JSOC used a similar approach when it conducted raids in Iraq and Afghanistan. To capture or kill militants in Iraq and Afghanistan, JSOC analyzed insurgent networks through surveillance drone imagery and the tracking of cellphone numbers.

However, that approach often leads to killing the wrong people. Because the US government is targeting cellphone SIM cards that are supposedly linked to individuals, rather than the individuals themselves, innocent people are regularly killed. Sometimes Taliban leaders in Pakistan - aware of the US government's tracking methods - will randomly distribute SIM cards among their fighters to confuse trackers. People who are unaware their phones are being tracked will often "lend their phone, with the SIM card in it, to friends, children, spouses and family members," according to The Intercept. 

Lethal Impacts
The use of signature strikes poses serious legal, strategic and moral questions. The recent Houthi rebellion in Yemen overthrew the US-backed Yemeni government, which the United States relied on to help wage its covert counterterrorism war in the country. As a result, the US has fewer operatives and on-the-ground intelligence sources in Yemen. According to Reuters, the US "will now be forced to rely more on surveillance drones, spy satellites and electronic eavesdropping, as well as their own 'human intelligence' sources on the ground." Thus, the government will defend drone strikes and signature strikes on the basis of convenience and efficacy. The Washington Post reported that "CIA officials have staunchly defended the targeting approach [of signature strikes], saying that analysts poring over drone footage and other surveillance have become adept at detecting patterns - such as the composition and movement of a security detail - associated with senior al-Qaeda operatives." The government also claims that signature strikes have killed many high-value al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan.

So far this year, there have been between 14 to 15 confirmed US drone strikes in Yemen, which have killed 46 to 69 people, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's (TBIJ) figures. In 2014, there were 13 to 15 confirmed US drone strikes in the country, killing between 82 to 118 people, along with 3 additional US attacks that killed 21 to 22 people. TBIJ's figures don't differentiate between who was and was not a "militant," however; that is hard to determine since many drone strike victims are unknown people. The US government largely does not know who it is killing in drone strikes.

Overall, US drone strikes and other counterterrorism operations have, so far, killed between 3,155 and 5,285 people, including around 563 to 1,213 civilians, in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, according to TBIJ's numbers. A report by the human rights organization Reprieve found that US drone strikes kill 28 unknown people for each intended target. Only 2 percent of those killed by drone strikes in Pakistan are top-level al-Qaeda leaders. The rest of those killed are either lower-level fighters who pose little existential threat to the US, or else they are simply civilians or other unknown individuals.

There's more...read the whole original article here at Truth-out.org

Adam Hudson
Adam Hudson is a reporting fellow at Truthout. He typically covers national security issues, Guantánamo, human rights, gentrification and policing. For fun, he likes to play drums in a Bay Area alternative rock band called Sunata. Follow him on Twitter @adamhudson5.

Tomgram: Pratap Chatterjee, No Lone Rangers in Drone Warfare

Intro by Tom:
Since November 2002, when a CIA drone strike destroyed the SUV of “al-Qaeda's chief operative in Yemen,” Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi (“U.S. kills al-Qaeda suspects in Yemen”), it’s been almost 13 years of unending repeat headlines. Here are a few recent ones: “U.S. drone strike kills a senior Islamic State militant in Syria,” “Drone kills ISIL operative linked to Benghazi,” “Drone kills four Qaeda suspects in Yemen,” “U.S. drone strike kills Yemen al-Qaida leader Nasir al-Wuhayshi,” “U.S. drone strikes target Islamic State fighters along Afghanistan-Pakistan border.” Those last strikes in Eastern Afghanistan reportedly killed 49 “militants.”  (Sometimes they are called “terror suspects.”) And there’s no question that, from Somalia to Pakistan, Libya to Syria, Yemen to Iraq, various al-Qaeda or Islamic State leaders and “lieutenants” have bitten the dust along with significant numbers of terror grunts and hundreds of the collaterally damaged, including women and children.

These repetitive headlines should signal the kind of victory that Washington would celebrate for years to come. A muscular American technology is knocking off the enemy in significant numbers without a single casualty to us. Think of it as a real-life version of Arnold Schwarzenegger's heroic machine in certain of the Terminator movies. If the programs that have launched hundreds of drone strikes in the backlands of the planet over these years remain “covert,” they have nonetheless been a point of pride for a White House that regularly uses a "kill list" to send robot assassins into the field. From Washington's point of view, its drone wars remain, as a former CIA director once bragged, “the only game in town” when it comes to al-Qaeda (and its affiliates, wannabes, and competitors).

As it happens, almost 13 years later, there are just one or two little problems with this scenario of American techno-wizardry pummeling terrorism into the dust of history. One is that, despite the many individuals bumped off, the dust cloud of terrorism keeps on growing. Across much of the Greater Middle East and northern Africa, the drone assassination program continues to act like a recruitment poster for a bevy of terror outfits. In every country (with the possible exception of Somalia) where U.S. drone strikes have been repeatedly employed, the situation is far worse today than in 2001.  In the two countries where it all began, Afghanistan and Yemen, it’s significantly -- in the case of Yemen, infinitely -- worse.

Even the idea of war without casualties (for us, that is) hasn’t quite panned out as planned, not if, as TomDispatch regular Pratap Chatterjee reports today, you count the spread of post-traumatic stress disorder among the drone operators.  In fact, given how humdrum headlines about the droning of terror leaders have become in our world, and the visible futility and failure that goes with them, you might think that someone in Washington would reconsider the efficacy of drones -- of, that is, an assassination machine that has proven anything but a victory weapon. In any world but ours, it might even seem logical to ground our terminators for a while and reconsider their use. In Washington, there's not a chance in hell of that, not unless, as Chatterjee suggests, both resistance and casualties in the drone program grow to such a degree that a grounding comes from the bottom, not the top. It turns out that -- remember your Terminator films here -- if a future John Connor is to stop Washington’s robotic killing operations, he or she is likely to be found within the drone program itself. Tom

Killing by Committee in the Global Wild West
The Perpetrators Become the Victims of Drone Warfare 

By Pratap Chatterjee  July 12, 2015

The myth of the lone drone warrior is now well established and threatens to become as enduring as that of the lone lawman with a white horse and a silver bullet who rode out into the Wild West to find the bad guys. In a similar fashion, the unsung hero of Washington’s modern War on Terror in the wild backlands of the planet is sometimes portrayed as a mysterious Central Intelligence Agency officer.  Via modern technology, he prowls Central Asian or Middle Eastern skies with his unmanned Predator drone, dispatching carefully placed Hellfire missiles to kill top al-Qaeda terrorists in their remote hideouts.

So much for the myth. In reality, there’s nothing “lone” about drone warfare. Think of the structure for carrying out Washington’s drone killing program as a multidimensional pyramid populated with hundreds of personnel and so complex that just about no one involved really grasps the full picture. Cian Westmoreland, a U.S. Air Force veteran who helped set up the drone data communications system over southeastern Afghanistan back in 2009, puts the matter bluntly: “There are so many people in the chain of actions that it has become increasingly difficult to understand the true impact of what we do. The diffusion of responsibility distances people from the moral weight of their decisions.”

In addition, it’s a program under pressure, killing continually, and losing its own personnel at a startling and possibly unsustainable rate due to “wounds” that no one ever imagined as part of this war. There are, in fact, two groups feeling the greatest impact from Washington’s ongoing air campaigns: lowly drone intelligence “analysts,” often fresh out of high school, and women and children living in poverty on the other side of the world.

A Hyper-Manned Killing Machine
Here, then, as best it can be understood, is how the Air Force version of unmanned aerial warfare really works -- and keep in mind that the CIA’s drone war operations are deeply integrated into this system.

The heart of drone war operations does indeed consist of a single pilot and a sensor (camera) operator, typically seated next to each other thousands of miles from the action at an Air Force base like Creech in Nevada or Cannon in New Mexico.  There, they operate Predator or Reaper drones over countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, or Yemen. Either of them might have control over the onboard Hellfire missiles, but it would be wrong to assume that they are the modern day equivalent of the Lone Ranger and his sidekick, Tonto.

In fact a typical “combat air patrol” may have as many as 186 individuals working on it. To begin with, while the pilot and the sensor operator make up the central “mission-control element,” they need a “launch-and-recovery element” on the other side of the world to physically deploy the drones and bring them back to bases in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. As with so much that the U.S. military now does, this work is contracted out to companies like Raytheon of Massachusetts.
And don’t forget another key group: the imagery and intelligence analysts who watch the video footage the drones are beaming from their potential target areas. They are typically at other bases in the U.S.

Each member of the flight crew has an Air Force designation that specifies his or her task. The pilots are known as 18Xs, the sensor operators are 1Us, and the imagery analysts are 1N1s. The launch and recovery personnel are often former drone pilots who have quit the Air Force because they can make twice as much money working overseas for private contractors.

In charge of the flight operators are a flight operations supervisor and a mission intelligence coordinator who report to a joint force air and space component commander. In addition, there are “safety” observers and judge advocates (military-speak for lawyers) who are supposed to ensure that any decision to launch a missile is made in accordance with officially issued “rules of engagement” and so results in a minimum number of civilian deaths. They are often situated at the Combined Air and Space Operations Center at al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

But Predators and Reapers don’t fly solo. They typically roam in packs of four aircraft known as “combat air patrols.” Three of them are expected to be in the air at any given time, leaving one on the ground for refueling and maintenance. A fully staffed patrol should have 59 individuals in the field doing launch and recovery, 45 doing mission control, and 82 working on the data gathered.

Bear in mind that the Air Force is currently staffing 65 such combat air patrols around the clock, and the Central Intelligence Agency may well be operating quite a few more. (It is possible that the two fly all missions jointly, but we have no way of knowing if this is so.) In other words, toss away the idea of the lone drone pilot and try to take in the vast size and complexity (as well as the pressures) of drone warfare today.

This, by the way, is why Air Force officials hate the popular industry term for drone aircraft: “unmanned aerial vehicle.” The military notes correctly that drones are in every meaningful sense manned. If anything, of course, they are hyper-manned, when compared to, say, a traditional F-16 fighter jet. (In fact, the preferred military term is “remotely piloted aircraft.”)

How PTSD Hits the Drone Program
In covering Washington’s drone wars, the media has tended to zero in on the top of the kill chain: President Obama, who every Tuesday reviews a “kill list” of individuals to be taken out by drone strikes; the CIA general counsel who has to sign off on each decision (John Rizzo did this, for example); and Michael D’Andrea, the CIA staffer who oversaw the list of those to be killed until he was replaced by Chris Wood last year.

In reality, these decision-makers at the top of the drone pyramid see next to nothing of what happens on the ground. The people who understand just how drone war actually works are the lowly 1N1 imagery analysts. While the pilots are jockeying to keep their planes stable in air currents that they cannot physically feel and sensor operators are manipulating cameras to follow multiple individuals moving around on the ground, the full picture is only obvious to the imagery and intelligence analysts. They are steadily reviewing both real time and past drone footage and comparing surveillance data to see if they can spot potential terrorists.

Many of them are in their teens or slightly older with perhaps a year of formal military training. They are outranked by drone pilots, officers with degrees and years of training at the Air Force Academy, who will typically pull the trigger on a Hellfire missile.

Add to this picture one more fact: the Air Force is desperately short of people to do such work and losing them faster than it can train new recruits.  As a result, Washington’s drone wars are operating at perhaps two-thirds of what the Air Force would consider ideal staffing levels. This means that drone personnel are now expected to work double- and triple-duty shifts. As one drone commander explained to an Air Force historian: “Your work schedule was 12-hour shifts, six days a week. You were supposed to get three days off after that, but people often got only one day off. You couldn’t even take your 30 days of annual leave -- you were lucky to get 10. When you have mainly a non-vol[unteer] community, what do you expect? It’s not going to be a happy place.”

These overworked, under-trained, underpaid, very young drone personnel are now starting to experience psychological trauma from exposure to endless killing missions. They are the ones who see and have to live with the grim scenes of what is so bloodlessly called “collateral damage.”

“They are often involved in operations where they witness and make decisions that lead to the destruction of enemy combatants and assets,” Dr. Wayne Chappelle, an Air Force psychologist, wrote in the August 2013 issue of Military Medicine. “They can still become attached to people they track, experience grief from the loss of allied members on the ground, and experience grief/remorse when missions create collateral damage or cause fratricide. It is possible there are drone operators who perceive the deployment of weapons and exposure to live video feed of combat as highly stressful events.”

Chappelle’s studies have already shown an increased level of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among these personnel. He is now working on new studies aimed at focusing on exactly which of them are most affected, at what point in the decision-making, and why. The Air Force hopes that Chappelle can help them reduce the incidence of PTSD -- from which they are losing personnel -- by offering advice on just how psychologists and chaplains working alongside drone operators might counsel them on their ongoing traumatic experiences.  Otherwise it faces the problem of staffing its missions, fulfilling a growing demand for ever more drone strikes in ever more countries, and a new phenomenon as well: growing criticism and resistance to its killing machine from within.

Cian Westmoreland, who was not even involved in active targeting work, is nonetheless typical.  He says that he is experiencing nightmares about the 200 or so “kills” that he was credited as having supported. As he wrote recently, “I started having dreams about bombs. I once dreamt I saw a small girl crying over a body on the ground. I looked down and it was a woman. I looked at the girl and told her I was sorry. I looked at my hands and I was wearing my [battle dress uniform]. They were covered in her mother’s blood."

Westmoreland's nightmares pushed him to speak out -- and he is just one of a growing number of Air Force veterans who have chosen to do so. An imagery analyst I recemtly interviewed told me that junior personnel were deeply affected when they saw civilians, including women and children, in the line of fire.

“If the pilot really wants to, they can ignore us and push the button without us agreeing,” the analyst added. “We are often completely helpless because airmen are terrified of officers. It is an unbalanced chain of command.”

What’s striking is the whistleblowers coming forward are not pilots and officers but the lowest ranked personnel in the drone teams.

PTSD in the Global Wild West
The trauma of desktop warfare comes mostly from the voyeurism of watching death thousands of miles distant and can, in some cases, be tuned out and eventually turned off. The same cannot be said for the experiences of targeted communities.

Washington experts regularly claim that the surgical elimination of top al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan and Yemen has reduced terror in these communities, but actual studies on the ground suggest that the very opposite is true.

Last month, Alkarama (the name means “dignity”) -- a Geneva based human rights organization that specializes in the Arab world -- published “Traumatizing Skies,” a special report on the impact of drones in Yemen. One hundred participants were interviewed from the villages of Qawl and al-Sirin between July and September last year and evaluated using the same American Psychiatric Association standards for PTSD that Chappelle’s team used on drone analysts.

“An overwhelming majority of adult respondents are seen to be suffering from numerous drone-inflicted symptoms of PTSD, which are even more prevalent amongst children,” writes Radidja Nemar, Alkarama's regional legal officer for the Gulf countries. “The situation has transcended the question about whether or not an individual has lost a family member to a drone attack, simply because trauma has become pervasive in a society living constantly under the fear of drones.”

Their situation differs from that of the pilots or analysts who can and do quit their jobs when they begin to suffer. The victims have no such options. They can’t escape the drones regularly buzzing overhead. “The common denominator in most of the cases is the feeling that life has no value and that death could happen at any moment and without apparent reason,” wrote one of the Yemeni survey researchers. “This shared feeling hinders most everyday activities in the villages and results in constant anxiety and fear. The deterioration of the living conditions in general, as added to the lack of healthcare services and the mental suffering of the populations, are aggravating their general feeling of hopelessness, frustration, and anxiety.”

The most distressed respondents were women, partly because they felt the drones violated their modesty. Girls reported the highest percentage of sleeplessness and nightmares. Not least was the impact on women’s daily lives, already far more restricted than those of men. Atiqa, a 55-year-old mother of three, for instance, explained that her blood pressure problems had become more severe, forcing her to stay in bed for several days at a time. Fatima, a 40-year-old mother of five, reported that women like her were unable to enjoy the few opportunities where they could meet other women, like weddings, for fear that such gatherings would act like drone magnets.

Similar reports have emerged from Pakistan, says Dr. Mukhtar-ul-Haq, the head of the psychiatry department at Peshawar’s Lady Reading Hospital.  He has studied the impact of the drone war on Waziristan, a tribal borderland near Afghanistan. “The vast majority of people report being perpetually scared of drone attacks day and night,” Dr. Haq said in a video conference call held by Alkarama to mark the release of its Yemen report. “The constant noise makes them experience bouts of emotional trauma and symptoms of anxiety. They often manifest themselves in the form of physical illness, heart attacks, and even suicide.”

Joining the Alkarama conference call was Brandon Bryant, a former Air Force sensor operator, who has experienced PTSD, thanks to his work with drones. He has become one of the most outspoken critics of Washington’s killing program. “The leadership only looks at this program as a numbers-based thing… how many people were killed,” says Bryant whose unit took part in 2,300 kills. He estimates that he personally killed 13 people with Hellfire missiles. “They don’t care about the human beings doing the job or the human beings affected by the job.”

Although they never served together, Bryant and Westmoreland recently discovered each other’s work at a screening of the film Drone by Norwegian filmmaker Tonje Schei. The two Air Force veterans have now joined forces to seek justice for affected communities.  They have set up an online organization of national security whistleblowers and their supporters, giving it the symbolically bloody name of Project Red Hand.  Through it they are calling for others from the drone program to join them in speaking out.

“Many of us are people who looked down one day to see our hands painted red,” they write in the organization’s mission statement. “To those [to] whom we direct our words, we are not your adversaries. We are only a mirror. Through our crimson hands we only seek to show you your reflection. We believe that truth deserves its own narrative. We hope that people like you will also stand up and join us in our efforts. We are also living proof that there is life after this, and if you trust us, we will show you a better world.”

In bucking the military system and Washington’s cherished drone war program, perhaps Bryant and Westmoreland are themselves the ones who are taking on the classic Wild West roles of the Lone Ranger and Tonto. They have ridden into the badlands of the national security state to challenge the injustice of an outlaw system of killing that extends across significant parts of the planet. In the face of such an implacable program, one can only hope that they will find their silver bullets.

Pratap Chatterjee, a TomDispatch regular, is executive director of CorpWatch. He is the author of Halliburton's Army: How A Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War. His next book, Verax, a graphic novel about whistleblowers and mass surveillance co-authored by Khalil Bendib, will be published by Metropolitan Books in 2016. 

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join him on Facebook.

Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2015 Pratap Chatterjee

 Read article on TomDispatch

 

 

Drone Strikes: United States Terrorism

Activists protested and spoke out against the use of drones at Creech Air Force Base this spring. Hear the words of people speaking out for peace and justice from Veterans for Peace, CodePink, Nevada Desert Experience, Catholic Worker and other Anti-Drone organizations and activists. Produced by Mauro Martins de Oliveira.

Six Facts from “Sudden Justice,” A New History of the Drone War

By Cora Currier  on The Intercept posted June 11, 2015

Sudden Justice: America’s Secret Drone Wars, a new book by London-based investigative journalist Chris Woods, traces the intertwined technological, legal and political history of drones as they evolved on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the covert U.S. targeted killing campaign.

Woods is especially thorough on the issue of civilian casualties, arguing that in pursuit of the short-term goal of eliminating suspected terrorists or militants on the battlefield, both the military and CIA were slow to grasp the strategic damage done by civilian deaths. Woods also argues that the controversy over the number of civilians killed by drones stemmed from the United States’ elastic definition of who could be targeted, an issue not just in the CIA’s secret strikes, but also across the military.

U.S. drones have now fired on Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya and Syria, and are a feature of war that is here to stay. Their global use by the United States has set precedents “pushing hard at the boundaries of international law,” and the challenge, Woods writes, will be in “convincing others not to follow Washington’s own recent rulebook.”

The book is densely informative and includes interviews with drone operators and intelligence officials, a notable number of them on the record. Here are six new details that Woods unearthed in his reporting:

1. No one is exactly sure who ordered the very first drone strike in Afghanistan, in October 2001. The failed attempt to kill Taliban leader Mullah Omar was a collision of orders between the CIA, Air Force, Central Command and the White House. Retired Air Force Lieutenant General Dave Deptula says that when he saw the drone’s missile hit, he exclaimed, “Who the fuck did that?” (The book’s description of the first drone strike was recently excerpted in The Atlantic.)

2. There was a secret presidential order in 2002 signed by President George W. Bush that explicitly related to targeted killings by drone, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told Woods. “It was loosening the [Executive Order] 12333 against assassinations,” Armitage said. It has long been understood that a September 2001 memo signed by George Bush had paved the way for the CIA’s terrorist assassination campaign, with authorities bolstered by the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by Congress that same month. But Armitage recalls a subsequent “draft executive order or a finding.”

3. “Could have been us,” a senior U.S. intelligence official said of a reported drone strike that killed up to 80 civilians in 2006. The Pakistani military originally claimed responsibility for the bombing, but then later insisted it was Washington. The United States never confirmed or denied a role in the attack, in keeping with how it would handle almost all future drone strikes.

4. The CIA generally runs the drone war in Pakistan, but there have been longstanding questions about the role played by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Woods’ sources tell him that in fact, “much of the mundane surveillance for CIA targets in Pakistan” was carried out by JSOC, because the CIA’s regular Air Force pilots were overwhelmed. Those missions were so sensitive that one of Woods’ sources told him that he had “no intention of wearing an orange jumpsuit for the next 20 years by talking about this.” The missions provided essential intelligence for the CIA’s “signature strikes,” which killed people based on their behaviors without necessarily knowing their identities.

5. As the CIA began its most intense bombing campaigns between 2008 and 2010 in Pakistan, it ignored lessons about minimizing civilian casualties that were becoming critical parts of counterinsurgency doctrine during the same period in Afghanistan. A WikiLeaks cable unearthed by Woods notes that U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke waved off concerns about drone strikes in Pakistan, as “drones were more targeted than bombs.” It took until 2012 for the number of civilian deaths documented by outside groups to dip significantly.

6. Bored drone pilots sometimes smuggled simple computer games onto the drone operating systems — chess, solitaire, Battleship. That stopped in 2011, after a computer virus got into the drones’ operating systems, likely from the games, former pilots told Woods.

Sudden Justice is the latest in a slew of books about the drone war published in the past year. To round out your drone war bookshelf we’d also recommend Predator, by Richard Whittle — a detailed look at the military contracting and technology behind the most iconic drone — and Kill Chain, by Andrew Cockburn, which focuses on how high-tech killing evolved from Vietnam to the drug war to drones. Earlier books on the drone war include The Way of the Knife by Mark Mazzetti, Kill or Capture by Daniel Klaidman and Dirty Wars by The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill.

Photo: Sebastiano Tomada/Sipa/AP

(This post is from our blog: Unofficial Sources.)
Email the author: cora.currier@theintercept.com

Note from Ground All Drones Blogger - Other reviews of the book found here.