Pierluigi Paganini
October 20, 2015
Many USA government documents were leaked in the past years, Chelsea Manning, WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden showed the world that activists were behind. They are responsible for the disclosure of inconvenient truth. Governments always denied them, things that shocked us, and helped to shape the current world, but it looks like that more leaks are ongoing, provided by a new source. This time let speak about drone on this time, drones are on the spot.
The Intercept released a collection of documents revealing the involvement of drones in the killing of foreign targets in countries ranging such Afghanistan to Yemen.
“The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The documents, provided by a whistleblower, offer an unprecedented glimpse into Obama’s drone wars.” states the Intercept.
“The revelations about the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command actions include primary source evidence that as many as 90 percent of US drone killings in one five month period weren’t the intended target, that a former British citizen was killed in a drone strike despite repeated opportunities to capture him instead, and details of the grisly process by which the American government chooses who will die, down to the “baseball cards” of profile information created for individual targets, and the chain of authorization that goes up directly to the president.” Reported Wired.
According to The intercept, it looks like these leaked documents came from the same source, an anonymous whistleblower, but this time, in opposition to what happened with WikiLeaks and Snowden, this anonymous whistleblower released statements on the leaked information:
“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,” “We’re allowing this to happen. And by ‘we,’ I mean every American citizen who has access to this information now, but continues to do nothing about it.”
Laura Poitras the director of the movie Citizenfour (also co-founder of The Intercept) shows in the movie Glenn Greenwald (also co-founder of The Intercept) talking with Snowden about a new source holding information relatedtoh the drone program.
In the same scene it can be seen Greenwald drawing a “diagram of the authorization chain for drone strikes that ends with the president” where Snowden tells “It’s really risky,”, “That person is incredibly bold.”, where Greenwald replies, “The boldness of it is shocking, ”But it was obviously motivated by what you did.”
This scene looks to hold up to the newly released documents that can be found in the Intercept website.
Still talking about the movie, Greenwald shows to Snowden the tools used to communicate with the source (written in a piece of paper). This probably means that they found a way to communicate without raising alerts.
Before we got leaks from NSA and their program, and we started to understand how this part of the government works, this time we will start knowing a new part of the government we didn’t, like Greewald said: “People are going to see what’s being hidden by a totally different part of the government.”
I was impressed by the content of the documents on the drone wars, in particular, let me suggest the reading of article titled “Find,Fix,Finish,” which explain what happened soon after Obama was elected president. Obama was strongly urged by Michael Hayden, the outgoing CIA director, and his new top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, to adopt the way of the scalpel, targeted and surgical killing operations conducted with drone strikes.
“In one briefing, Hayden bluntly told Obama that covert action was the only way to confront al Qaeda and other terrorist groups plotting attacks against the U.S.” states the post.
About the Author Elsio Pinto
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(Security Affairs – drone wars, military)
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