Long cloaked in secrecy, leaks of military documents provides more information about how the Obama administration uses drones to kill persons considered dangerous to U.S. security interests. A series of articles by The Intercept, called The Drone Papers, cover the following: how the president authorizes assassinations; that the strikes rest on unreliable intelligence; that the strikes hurt intelligence efforts; that the strikes kill many more innocent civilians than claimed; that the military labels the innocent as “enemies killed in action”; that the number targeted for strikes have been under reported; that strikes are made more quickly in Afghanistan and Iraq compared to those in Somalia and Yemen; that the administration policy of only targeting those of “continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons” is rarely cited in making strikes. (The Intercept, October 15, 2015, by Jeremy Scahill)
The administration selects targets without legal proceedings and with little transparency. “The system included creating a portrait of a potential target in a condensed format known as a ‘Baseball Card,’ which are given to the White House for approval, while individual drone strikes were often authorized by other officials,” writes Nadia Propis, for OpEdNews, October 17, 2015.
The ACLU has filed three lawsuits to ascertain basic facts and statistics and the legal basis for the drone killings. It claims the government “continues to stonewall” even as information emerges about the program. (American Civil Liberties Union, October 15, 2015, by Brett Max Kaufman)