The Intercept has published an eight-part series on the United States’ use of drones to carry out assassinations based on documents provided by an intelligence community whistleblower. Jeremy Scahill writes that the organisation obtained a “cache of secret slides that provides a window into the inner workings of the US military’s kill/capture operations at a key time in the evolution of the drone wars — between 2011 and 2013.” The piece includes many revelations and details about the US’s so-called “targeted killing” programme, including the fact that, “During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets.”
Speculation regarding a post-Snowden leaker has endured for more than a year, with Laura Poitras’ 2014 film CITIZENFOUR confirming that a source was providing documents regarding the Obama Administration’s drone program, but it’s unclear if this source is the same.
The Intercept’s source is a whistleblower who should be lauded for his efforts to make the public aware of the government’s secret abuse of power. As Scahill relates:
The source said he decided to provide these documents to The Intercept because he believes the public has a right to understand the process by which people are placed on kill lists and ultimately assassinated on orders from the highest echelons of the U.S. government. “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 source said.
This whistleblower should be protected and celebrated as a conscientious contributor to the public record.
In response to the Intercept’s series, the ACLU’s National Security Project director Hina Shamsi said, “These eye-opening disclosures make a mockery of U.S. government claims that its lethal force operations are based on reliable intelligence and limited to lawful targets.”
Amnesty International demands that Congress launch an “urgent inquiry into Obama’s drone use.”
See the Intercept’s full series here.