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The Drone Debate: Do US Drone Strikes Create More Terrorists Than They Kill?
In the wake of the war in Iraq and the ground incursion the US launched in Afghanistan after 9/11, the phrase “boots on the ground’ has become something of an obscenity among the American public.
Putting American lives at stake by sending soldiers into battle against extremist groups operating in the Mid-East is now viewed by many as the ultimate foreign policy blunder, which helps to explain why Washington has resorted increasingly to i) training and supplying proxy armies, and ii) executing “targets” from the stratosphere via drone strikes.
We’ve spent more than enough time of late analyzing the flaws inherent in a strategy that involves providing covert support to those fighting regimes the US deems unfriendly and recalcitrant, but it’s important to remember that the CIA habitually uses unmanned drones to target suspected “terrorists” with virtually no regard for the “collateral damage” that can and does occur when Washington relies on shaky “intelligence” to spot “targets” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen.
A few weeks back, The Intercept was provided with what it calls “a cache of secret slides that provides a window into the inner workings of the U.S. military’s kill/capture operations at a key time in the evolution of the drone wars — between 2011 and 2013.”
We profiled The Intercept's report earlier this month (see here) and for anyone who missed it we've provided some notable excerpts, but the point in raising the issue again is to highlight a debate between Glenn Greenwald, co-founder of The Intercept, and Georgetown University Associate Professor Christine Fair. The video clip is linked below.
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The documents, which also outline the internal views of special operations forces on the shortcomings and flaws of the drone program, were provided by a source within the intelligence community who worked on the types of operations and programs described in the slides.
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.
Documents on high-value kill/capture operations in Afghanistan buttress previous accounts of how the Obama administration masks the true number of civilians killed in drone strikes by categorizing unidentified people killed in a strike as enemies, even if they were not the intended targets. The slides also paint a picture of a campaign in Afghanistan aimed not only at eliminating al Qaeda and Taliban operatives, but also at taking out members of other local armed groups.
Taken together, the secret documents lead to the conclusion that Washington’s 14-year high-value targeting campaign suffers from an overreliance on signals intelligence, an apparently incalculable civilian toll, and — due to a preference for assassination rather than capture — an inability to extract potentially valuable intelligence from terror suspects. They also highlight the futility of the war in Afghanistan by showing how the U.S. has poured vast resources into killing local insurgents, in the process exacerbating the very threat the U.S. is seeking to confront.
These secret slides help provide historical context to Washington’s ongoing wars, and are especially relevant today as the U.S. military intensifies its drone strikes and covert actions against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Those campaigns, like the ones detailed in these documents, are unconventional wars that employ special operations forces at the tip of the spear.
The “find, fix, finish” doctrine that has fueled America’s post-9/11 borderless war is being refined and institutionalized. Whether through the use of drones, night raids, or new platforms yet to be unleashed, these documents lay bare the normalization of assassination as a central component of U.S. counterterrorism policy.
U.S. intelligence personnel collect information on potential targets, as The Intercept has previously reported, drawn from government watchlists and the work of intelligence, military, and law enforcement agencies. At the time of the study, when someone was destined for the kill list, intelligence analysts created a portrait of a suspect and the threat that person posed, pulling it together “in a condensed format known as a ‘baseball card.’” That information was then bundled with operational information and packaged in a “target information folder” to be “staffed up to higher echelons” for action. On average, it took 58 days for the president to sign off on a target,one slide indicates. At that point, U.S. forces had 60 days to carry out the strike. The documents include two case studies that are partially based on information detailed on baseball cards.
The system for creating baseball cards and targeting packages, according to the source, depends largely on intelligence intercepts and a multi-layered system of fallible, human interpretation. “It isn’t a surefire method,” he said. “You’re relying on the fact that you do have all these very powerful machines, capable of collecting extraordinary amounts of data and information,” which can lead personnel involved in targeted killings to believe they have “godlike powers.”
The White House and Pentagon boast that the targeted killing program is precise and that civilian deaths are minimal. However, documents detailing a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets.
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. In Yemen and Somalia, where the U.S. has far more limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are the intended targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse.
“Anyone caught in the vicinity is guilty by association,” the source said. When “a drone strike kills more than one person, there is no guarantee that those persons deserved their fate. … So it’s a phenomenal gamble.”
The documents show that the military designated people it killed in targeted strikes as EKIA — “enemy killed in action” — even if they were not the intended targets of the strike. Unless evidence posthumously emerged to prove the males killed were not terrorists or “unlawful enemy combatants,” EKIA remained their designation, according to the source. That process, he said, “is insane. But we’ve made ourselves comfortable with that. The intelligence community, JSOC, the CIA, and everybody that helps support and prop up these programs, they’re comfortable with that idea.”
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And there's much, much more available at "The Drone Papers."
While what you'll read there is deplorable and on a certain level, shocking, those who follow US foreign policy will not be surprised. Essentially, Washington relies on faulty intelligence on the way to bombing targets from the stratosphere and almost everyone who ends up dead isn't a "terrorist." In order to conceal that fact, the CIA and the Pentagon classify anyone who was killed as an "enemy", and this egregious practice has become so commonplace as to be embedded in the drone workflow.
Make no mistake, this is nothing short of a travesty and only serves to underscore the notion that Washington's Mid-East policy is beset by a toxic combination of corruption, buffoonery, and, if The Intercept is correct, murder.
Click on the image below, watch the debate, and draw your own conclusions.
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dont drone me bro.
Imagine the response if some entity that is disgruntled with US drone assassination policy were to use the same tools over Brussels or Washington to pick off anyone they deem as a "threat"... It only seems fair in a world where equality for all is being jammed down our throats at every turn...
...McCain himself gonna get droned soon enough
Anyone with two brain cells can see that the drones programs only exist to create a constant stream of terrorists and the keep these countries in a state of instability.
Imagine if the town you lived in was subjected to hellfire missiles raining down from the sky every 4 or 5 months.
Not targeting you mind, but landing a few blocks away in your neighbourhood.
How would you feel if these missiles were being fired by a foreign country, one that you could never protest, a foreign country on the otherwise of the world that saw fit to bomb your hometown because this country saw itself as exceptional and your hometown had bad guys in it.
Imagine some people you went to school with got killed at a wedding by such a missle, or imagine if these bombs destroyed your local hospital.
How would you feel?
Liberated?
Or majorly pissed off.
How do you determine how many future terrorists you've killed by bombing weddings? Surely those marriages would have produced at least 8 kids a piece, and since the U.S. considers everyone with brown skin to be a terrorist....
When drone is carry special deployment fertility weapon, maybe is create many more terrorist. To speak in general, incendiary or explosive ordnance is kill more terrorist.
Imagine when you were 9 years old. You have your whole life ahead of you and the only thing you are thinking about is what time school lets out so you can get home to play with your friends.
Finally the bell rings and you race off to enjoy a game of soccer with your pals. In a small field not far from your home, you are running down a missed shot on goal, when suddenly you hear the dreadful whine of an air raid siren. As you look up you see a shining blur in the sky, and seconds later an entire row of houses on your block is obliterated in a flash of light and heat.
An expanding wall of pressure knocks you down, and as you get back up you see your childhood home is engulfed in flames and dust. While trying to make your way towards the house, you remember your mom was preparing dinner in the kitchen, as your baby sister was sleeping in the family room.
Sorrow and anger fills your young heart as tears roll down your face and your body trembles uncontrollably. At that tragic moment in your young life you swear vengeance on those responsible.
You'd feel arab.
"Any person that runs is a VC, anyone that stands still is a well disciplined VC"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S06nIz4scvI
I just saw my companies new health insurance offering (they used to call it "a benefit"...lol) for next year.
I have been financially droned.
Need more drone strike data coming to really know. Too sparse a data set. Anyway young men over there have a lot to be angry about. I mean, look, they're Arabs or anyway mostly Muslims. That's a whole lot of fail.
I knew that. Terrorists hatch from drones eggs.
http://thesaker.is/week-three-of-the-russian-intervention-in-syria-the-r...
Like Rome needed Hannibal
We're in more of a Nero scenario with Buckaroo Obozo at the helm...
I'm near Pax River.
Drones around all the time.
Eurasia is just practice.
Personally I don't mind so much the use of drones for survelliance - but then I don't see the difference with satellites. But I detest the use of drones to send in destructive devices etc. Especially if the drone is operated by some person in Oklahoma or such.
You've got it all wrong. you see drones neither kill nor create, terrorists. America funds terroriss, then use drones for suveillance in order to help the terrorists in their mission to ovethrow legitimate governments. Also drones are used in the indescriminate killing of civilians to help further the narrative against the terrorists. In order to continue their proxy war against a fake terrorists threat and covert proxy coup. Or something....
File under: if they can get you to ask the wrong question they needn't worry about the answer.
Which question was that?
'Do drones create more terrorists than they kill?'
S/be, who created "terrorists" and why are we really there?
Thankfully this sort of intellectual heavy lifting is far above my prole pay grade; better left to my superior elected officals of officaldom.
Me too, thankfully we have deep-thinking neocons to take our hands and walk us to school.
Framing the question, "Do drones create more terrorists than they kill?" creates the impression that their users would have wanted it otherwise, and would somehow be surprised by this outcome. a bit like asking, "Do bartenders serve more drinks than they consume?"
Of course drones are used to create new enemies. That's what they're for. ISIS wasn't big and scary enough yet. It needed more recruits. Those Soviets left some big jackboots to fill.
A bit of an anachronism now that Obama has handed Syria, Iraq and now Jordan to Russia on a silver platter.
Yes.
Next question?
Of course. More "terrorists" necessitate MOAR WAR. Drone strikes are a 'force multiplier,' if you will.
What is so F*CKING HARD about not blowing innocent people away with a drone attack based on "shaky intelligence"?
Any non-devil would not follow through with it.
doesn't mean anything in the ages old sunni vs shiite conflict. Seppos support sunni cocksuckers in SA= terrorists.
Ask Barry, he seems to enjoy it...
Drones create Terrorists so does.........
Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, suggested Sunday that the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which removed Saddam Hussein from power, helped give rise to the Islamic State, even as he said it was “hard to apologize for removing Saddam.”
Hey why not.
GOD has a good idea. Let the Americans take credit for Russia's work in Syria then blame Russia for all US drone strikes.
I have to admit. Thats one of the best ideas you've had in a while, god. brilliaint....
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2208307/Americas-deadly-double-t...
US downplays civilian drone deaths, secret files showPresident Barack Obama's administration has underrepresented the true number of civilians killed in drone strikes, a news site said in citing a cache of secret files it published.
On Thursday, the news site The Intercept unveiled documents leaked by a whistleblower about America's use of unmanned aerial vehicles to kill terrorist targets in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Since taking office in 2009 Obama has vastly expanded the drone program, authorizing many more strikes than his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-3275541/US-underplays-civil...
Doesn't seem to be working very well in Iraq or Syria now is it. Meanwhile the Russian have been in Syria a few weeks and their not bothering to use drones to target individuals. Their doing it the right way. Laying hell to all the savages they find. War is hell. As Patton said, "The object of war is not to die for your country, but let the other bastards die for theirs."
Drone strikes inspire and focus the hatred of our alleged opponents.
The program keeps the corporate welfare flowing. Disgusting.
Why are there drone strikes?
Its a very efficient way to help the spread of managed democracy.
Drones are Obama's way of limiting civilian casualties. Imagine if there were drones when Japan invaded Pearl harbor. Would we have sent a few drones over tokyo so we didn't kill many civilians. When your in a war you use everything you have to defeat your enemy. But to Obama, these Muslim savages are not really his enemy. We have lost many young brave men due to the crazy rules of engagement that Obama has put in place. How many times have our soldiers called for air support but were denied due to the possibility of killing civilians. War is hell. Nobody worried about civilian casualties when we nuked Japan. Then it was all about saving thousands of American soldiers lives if we had launched an invasion of Japan.
We are in danger and I want you to please get out of my way.
Just wait pretty soon every jerk will have some little killing things. Wont that be fun? Even that crazy X.
It’s important to remember that the CIA habitually uses unmanned drones to target suspected “terrorists” with virtually no regard for the “collateral damage” that can and does occur when Washington relies on shaky “intelligence” to spot “targets” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen.
So--- If the Russians nuke Gitmo, the CIA guards and interrogators were guilty by association.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. At least the rules are in plain view.
Honestly, Inquisition was a bunch of amateurs compared to these guys. I guess nowadays they are more industrious, Wholesale Inquisition Inc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_burning
From the seventeenth century, Europeans were shocked at the tales of how brutal and extensive the activities of the Inquisition were. What modern scholars have established, is that some 4,046 individuals in the time 1560–1773 received some sort of punishment from the Portuguese Inquisition, whereof 121 persons were condemned to be burned alive, of those 57 who actually suffered that fate, while the rest escaped it, and were burnt in effigy, instead.[42] For the Portuguese Inquisition in total, not just at Goa, modern estimates of persons actually executed on its behest is about 1,200, whether burnt alive or not.[43]
Several years ago, "Jamaican Yardie" criminal gangs in New York were notorious for this tactic. They did drive-by machine-gunnings of people waiting in lines at McDonald's restaurants, in order to kill one of the people in the lines. They didn't care how many innocents died in the gunfire. I guess that's where the US armed forces got the idea from. The morality is exactly the same.
http://barlowscayman.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-right-to-kill.html
Does a bear shit in the woods?
Is the Pope Catholic?
Is a frog's asshole water tight?
Does a one legged duck swim in circles?
Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back?
Killing innocent people USED to be called murder....
If drones are outlawed, the only ones with outlaws will be drones.
All through that video I was imagining pea-sized meteorite smashing through the studio ceiling and exploding that big-mouthed biddy's head. Because I'm a bad person.
yes.
https://thinkpatriot.wordpress.com/2015/10/27/ignoring-the-absolutely-in...
https://thinkpatriot.wordpress.com/2015/10/27/military-priorities/
A friend asked me how small would a drone need to be to be nonlethal. My answer. You cant.
Drones are going to be great tools for killing anybody you want. Perfect for fire bugs too. Stalkers. All kinds of bad ways to use these things. It will be so much fun.
Just because you can do a thing does not mean you should.
Answer: Yes. And that's the plan. Because it's good for the drone business.
Think of them as a kind of 'Droney Terrorseed'
Don't worry ..we have everything under control
[img]http://i275.photobucket.com/albums/jj317/ZETAR1957/george%20c%20scott%20monkey%20chew%20gif.gif[/img]
reverse the situation, and suppose some other political entity was able to drone Americans THEY consdered to be terrorists from the comforts of their home. Would that produce enemies amongst Americans?
But of course that can't/won't happen because in order to do evil bullying things like drone killings and waging proxy wars, you have to be the biggest bully on the block and KNOW that the dronees are unable to retaliate, or at least not retaliate against the so-called 'leaders' ordering the droning. That's the ONLY thing that keeps these 'humanitarians' and PEACE PRIZE WINNERS from nuking each other - MAD, but there is no drone MAD. at least not yet
Duh. if you have to ask.
Life insurance policies may include a Drone attack exclusion clause
It must be investigated how many innocents have lost their lives and a case be initiated against Satan America & CabalA$$LickerObama . His igNobel prize given by parrots & poodles euroPeons , should be confiscated, thrown into jail where he gets a$$ raped daily (ha ha he will enjoy it as his heaven)
If my wife or children were 'collateral damage' due to a drone strike, I would stop at nothing to end the country that launched the drone. Seems to me so would most others, I'm sure some of those could be engineers who understand the Teller-Ullam design far better than I do...
This focus on civilian casaulties loses wars and ends up causing massive casaulties. The point that should be focused upon winning the war.
Yes of course, but only *moderate* terrorists, who we can trust to kill our enemies on any battle front. This is why we supply them with our weapon systems.
Edit:
if I need to sarc tag this, I'm going to staple bologna to my face and stick my head in a bowl full of pirrina.