Drone revelations

The last week has brought the US drone programme under scrutiny once again, with another person in the US intelligence community choosing to break rank – ala Snowden. The target of this whistleblower was the US drone programme which has often been questioned by human rights activists around the world. By providing a secret cache of documents from 2011 to 2013 regarding the US drone programme’s operations in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Somalia to the online news website, The Intercept, the whistleblower has helped confirm a number of explosive revelations about the US drone programme’s legality and so-called ‘accuracy’.The reports have confirmed that 9 out of ten times, drone strikes hit the wrong target. This is due to excessive reliance on what is known as ‘signals intelligence’ – the tracking of phone usage, email data etc. Signals intelligence is known amongst the intelligence community to be a low accuracy method, especially in guerrilla warfare environments where phones and SIMs are dumped on short notice. Moreover, even worse is that the documents confirm the use of racist stereotypes in selecting targets. One of the examples we have been made privy to is of a man targeted in a drone strike for being an ‘Arab’ because he was ‘tall’. Turns out he was a normal sized man standing with children.
Some US journalists have aptly labelled the US drone programme the ‘assassination programme’, arguing that drones are a mere tool in the Obama administration’s policy of using assassinations as an instrument of policy. According to the documents, a number of targets were killed by drone strikes despite it being possible to arrest them in the battlefield. The documents have also revealed more details about the secretive chain of command and procedure followed before authorising a drone strike. Drone strike targets are identified by troops on the ground, who then move the details of a target up the chain of command as a sort of ‘baseball card’ which goes up all the way to the White House where it is examined by senior Obama administration officials and top cabinet heads before they give a go-ahead on specific targets. Once a particular target has been approved, operatives have a 60-day window to take a strike against the target, based usually on signals intelligence. It is not clear if President Obama directly signs off on each strike. Moreover, the leaked documents have confirmed that under the drone programme, all military aged men in war zones such as Fata are labeled enemy combatants until proven otherwise. Since it is unclear in most instances who is being killed, the reports confirm that the 2013 promise of high standards of choosing targets is not being kept. There has been no response from either the White House or the Pentagon on the reports, despite questions now being raised. The reports have resulted in calls for a congressional inquiry into the US drone programme. However, there is a case to be made of gross war crimes committed under the Obama administration under the umbrella of the drone programme. Will anyone dare raise that internationally?