Documents Leaked from Inside Obama’s Murderous Drone Program

The investigative-reporting website The Intercept, founded by Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and others, today posted “The Drone Papers” — eight articles concerning America’s use of drone attacks in its post-9/11 wars, based in part on a leak of document-packages of PowerPoint-type slideshows, plus four of the document-packages. The documents, Scahill says in the first of the articles, “were provided by a source within the intelligence community who worked on the types of operations and programs described in the slides.”

In a second article, “Find, Fix, Finish,” Scahill outlines the known history of the drone program, and includes quotes to The Intercept by Gen. Michael Flynn, former Director of the DIA and a former commander of Joint Special Operations Command, criticizing the program. Flynn said,

A case-study based on the leaked documents is in the article, “Manhunting in the Hindu Kush; Civilian Casualties and Strategic Failures in America’s Longest War” by Ryan Devereaux, which centers on a 2011-2013 campaign, Operation Haymaker, in northeast Afghanistan. The article states its conclusion at the outset,”… the military’s own analysis demonstrates that the Haymaker campaign was in many respects a failure. The vast majority of those killed in airstrikes were not the direct targets. Nor did the campaign succeed in significantly degrading al Qaeda’s operations in the region.”

The document-source confirmed that military reporting on drone strikes assumes that individuals killed along with the actual target are also terrorists, and they’re designated in the records as “enemy killed in action,” (EKIA). Though missiles can also be fired from conventional aircraft, 9 times out of 10 they’re from drones. “Firing a missile at a target in a group of people, the source said, requires ‘an even greater leap of faith’ — a leap that he believes often treats physical proximity as evidence.”

The only one of the leaked documents which mentions civilian casualties is an annotated bar graph which shows mission statistics from September 2011 through September 2012, a total of more than 1,800 “night ops” with a total of 14 civilian casualty “events” for the year. “‘The 14 civilian casualties is highly suspect,’ said the source. `I know the actual number is much higher,’ he added. `But they make the numbers themselves so they can get away with writing off most of the kills as legitimate.'”