The Intercept’s Drone Papers Getting Wider Exposure

The Intercept website’s Drone Papers are now getting traction inside the United States, despite the fact that major media have so far covered up the story to protect Obama from impeachment and criminal prosecution.  Based on the evidence contained in the leaked documents and the investigation by The Intercept, President Obama, as Lyndon LaRouche has demanded, must be immediately removed from office and subjected to criminal prosecution for mass murder.  The International Court of Justice will undoubtedly, at some point, take up the issue of war crimes and crimes against humanity by Obama, based on the documentation in the leaked papers, showing he was at the head of an international assassination cabal, run out of the White House Situation Room, where he signed the kill orders.

The coverage of the Drone Papers has been picked up in Mother Jones, Wired Magazine, Small Wars Journal, and Lawfare, with British coverage in The Guardian and newspapers in Ireland.

Mother Jones headlined its coverage “A Massive National Security Leak Just Blew the Lid Off Obama’s Drone War.” It quotes The Intercept’s unnamed whistleblower, “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 story noted that Amnesty International has called for an immediate congressional investigation into the entire drone program, arguing that the newly leaked documents “raise serious concerns about whether the USA has systematically violated international law, including by classifying unidentified people as ‘combatants’ to justify their killing.”

There are now official U.S. military documents, the article noted, detailing the extent of the mass kill program (between Jan. 2012 and Feb. 2013, for example, 200 people were killed in drone strikes in northeastern Afghanistan, while only 35 people were on the kill list).

The Mother Jones story highlighted the fact that, in some instances, President Obama signed off on kill orders that did not even identify specific targets, but authorized drone attacks based on patterns of observed behavior by groups of people.

Wired Magazine headlined, “A Second Snowden Has Leaked a Mother Lode of Drone Docs,” noting that the second whistleblower had surfaced in the autumn of 2014, and had provided the wire diagram of the drone kill program, leading directly up to Obama.

The Guardian highlighted the fact that President Obama has been lying in his claims that the drone program requires “near certainty” that there will be no civilian casualties.  According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, nearly 1,000 civilians have been killed in 421 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, and an estimated 200 have been children.  Yet the drone program lists all unidentified civilians killed in combat as terrorists to cover-up the fact that, in many areas where the drone program is operating, 90 percent of the people killed are not the approved targets.

Gen. Charles Dunlap, a retired U.S. Air Force deputy judge advocate general of the U.S. Air Force and now a law professor at Duke University Law School, published in Small Wars Journal a review of the legal rationale for the program under the Obama’s War Powers claims; it is also excerpted in Lawfare.  Dunlap noted that the drone program has won significant domestic and international support, despite instances proving abuse.  He warned,

  That caveat has now been fulfilled in the Drone Papers.