An online publication called The Intercept has received a cache of secret documents from a whistleblower within the U.S. military about the intense “assassination program” carried out by drones. It’s a Snowden-esque leak that has the military community scrambling.
The title of the piece containing the leaked documents is “The Drone Papers” and gives an unprecedented and never before seen look at what is going on in Obama’s drone wars including how people are put on the “assassination list”. We are sure that this whistleblower will be pursued with intense aggressiveness by all federal authorities.
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The assassinations are said to be taking place in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. However, the focus of the documents and their layout on the website is to document how people wind up on the kill list and how it is all carried out.
This has the potential to pose hard questions to the Obama administration which has chose the drone as their weapon of choice.
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From The Intercept:
From his first days as commander in chief, the drone has been President Barack Obama’s weapon of choice, used by the military and the CIA to hunt down and kill the people his administration has deemed — through secretive processes, without indictment or trial — worthy of execution. There has been intense focus on the technology of remote killing, but that often serves as a surrogate for what should be a broader examination of the state’s power over life and death.
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.”
When the Obama administration has discussed drone strikes publicly, it has offered assurances that such operations are a more precise alternative to boots on the ground and are authorized only when an “imminent” threat is present and there is “near certainty” that the intended target will be eliminated. Those terms, however, appear to have been bluntly redefined to bear almost no resemblance to their commonly understood meanings.
Do you agree with this sort of targeted killing? Let us know in the comments below!
