EXCLUSIVE: CIA didn't always know who it was killing in drone strikes, classified documents show

http://openchannel.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/05/18781930-exclusive-cia-didnt-always-know-who-it-was-killing-in-drone-strikes-classified-documents-show




EXCLUSIVE: CIA didn't always know who it was killing in drone strikes, classified documents show

An NBC News review of classified CIA documents for a 14 month period beginning in September 2010 lists 114 drone strikes that killed as many as 613 people. However, in some of those strikes, the CIA did not know the identity of the victims. NBC's Richard Engel reports.
By Richard Engel and Robert Windrem
NBC News
The CIA did not always know who it was targeting and killing in drone strikes in Pakistan over a 14-month period, an NBC News review of classified intelligence reports shows.
About one of every four of those killed by drones in Pakistan between Sept. 3, 2010, and Oct. 30, 2011, were classified as "other militants,” the documents detail. The “other militants” label was used when the CIA could not determine the affiliation of those killed, prompting questions about how the agency could conclude they were a threat to U.S. national security.

The uncertainty appears to arise from the use of so-called “signature” strikes to eliminate suspected terrorists -- picking targets based in part on their behavior and associates. A former White House official said the U.S. sometimes executes people based on “circumstantial evidence.”
Three former senior Obama administration officials also told NBC News that some White House officials were worried that the CIA had painted too rosy a picture of its success and likely ignored or missed mistakes when tallying death totals.


NBC News has reviewed two sets of classified documents that describe 114 drone strikes over 14 months in Pakistan and Afghanistan, starting in September 2010. The documents list locations, death and injury tolls, alleged terrorist affiliations, and whether the killed and injured were deemed combatants or non-combatants.
Though the Obama administration has previously said it targets al Qaeda leaders and senior Taliban officials plotting attacks against the U.S. and U.S. troops, officials are sometimes unsure of the targets’ affiliations. About half of the targets in the documents are described as al Qaeda. But in 26 of the attacks, accounting for about a quarter of the fatalities, those killed are described only as “other militants.” In four others, the dead are described as “foreign fighters.”

In some cases, U.S. officials also seem unsure how many people died. One entry says that a drone attack killed seven to 10 people, while another says that an attack killed 20 to 22.
Yet officials seem certain that however many people died, and whoever they were, none of them were non-combatants. In fact, of the approximately 600 people listed as killed in the documents, only one is described as a civilian. The individual was identified to NBC News as the wife or girlfriend of an al Qaeda leader.

Micah Zenko, of the Council on Foreign Relations, says that more civilians and non-combatants have likely been killed by U.S. drone strikes than the Obama administration has claimed.
Micah Zenko, a former State Department policy advisor who is now a drone expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said it was “incredible” to state that only one non-combatant was killed. “It’s just not believable,” he said. “Anyone who knows anything about how airpower is used and deployed, civilians die, and individuals who are engaged in the operations know this.”

The CIA declined to comment, and the White House did not immediately respond to calls and emails requesting comment.
A senior White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity, said, “In the past, and currently, force protection is a big part of the rationale for taking action in the Afghan theater of operations.”

Separately, on background, the official noted that as President Barack Obama said in an address last month, as the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan declines, so will the number of strikes.
The CIA uses two basic methods to target people for killing, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The first is called a “personality” strike. These strikes target known terrorists, whose identities have been firmly established through intelligence, including visual surveillance and electronic and human intelligence. In other words, the CIA knows who it is killing.
In so-called “signature” strikes, intelligence officers and drone operators kill suspects based on their patterns of behavior -- but without positive identification. With signature strikes, the CIA doesn’t necessarily know who it is killing. One former senior intelligence official said that at the height of the drone program in Pakistan in 2009 and 2010, as many as half of the strikes were classified as signature strikes.

Analysts use a variety of intelligence methods and technologies that they say give them reasonable certainty that the “signature” target is a terrorist. Part of the analysis involves crunching data to make connections between the unidentified suspects and other known terrorists and militants. The agency can watch, for example, as an unknown person frequents places, meets individuals, makes phone calls, and sends emails, and then match those against other people linked to the same calls, emails and meetings.
A half dozen former and current U.S. counter-terrorism officials told NBC News that signature strikes do generally kill combatants, but acknowledge that intelligence officials doesn’t always know who those combatants are. Some of the officials said the moral and legal aspects of the signature strikes were often discussed, but without any significant change in policy.

Retired Adm. Dennis Blair, former director of national intelligence, says that drone strikes can more effectively identify and target combatants than other types of airstrikes.
Ret. Adm. Dennis Blair, who was Director of National Intelligence from Jan. 2009 to May 2010, declined to discuss the specifics of signature strikes, but said “to use lethal force there has to be a high degree of knowledge of an individual tied to activities, tied to connections.”

He also defended the precision of drone strikes in general. “In Afghanistan and Iraq and places where you have troops in combat,” said Blair, “you know better with drones who you’re killing than you do when you’re calling in artillery fire from a spotter [or] calling in an airplane strike.”
Said Blair, “This is no different from decisions that are made on the battlefield all the time by soldiers and Marines who are being shot at, not knowing who fired the shot, having to make judgments on shooting back or not. This is the nature of warfare.”

Once a target has been killed, according to current and former U.S. officials, the CIA does not take someone out of the combatant category and put them in the non-combatant category unless, after the strike, a preponderance of evidence is produced showing the person killed was a civilian.

A 2012 AP investigation reported that in 10 drone attacks from the preceding 18 months, Pakistani villagers said that about 70 percent of those killed were militants, while the rest of the dead were either civilians or tribal police. The AP report notes that Pakistani officials and villagers claimed that 38 non-combatants were killed in a single strike on March 17, 2011.
According to the AP, U.S. officials said the group hit by the strike was heavily armed and behaved in “a manner consistent with al Qaeda-linked militants.” Villagers and Pakistani officials said the gathering was a “jirga,” or community meeting, in which locals were negotiating with a small group of militants over mining rights.

U.S. officials listed 20 to 22 dead in the strike, according to the documents obtained by NBC News, and described them as “other militants.” A former U.S. official told NBC News the drone attack was a “signature” strike, while a U.S. human rights advocate who has interviewed local villagers – and is skeptical of Pakistani claims of widespread civilian casualties from drone strikes -- supported the Pakistani description of the meeting as a jirga and most of the victims as non-combatants.
Related story

How Predator went from eye in the sky to war on terror's weapon of choice

In a speech at the National Defense University in May, President Obama defended his administration’s use of targeted killings. He acknowledged that there had been civilian casualties, and that drone technology raised “profound questions” about “who is targeted and why,” but he also said the CIA’s drone program was “legal,” “lethal,” “effective,” and the most humane option for counterterrorism. He said the U.S. had a “high threshold ... for taking lethal action,” and that the drawdown of forces in Afghanistan and successful action against al Qaeda would likely “reduce the need for unmanned strikes” in 2014.

On the same day, the White House released a fact sheet stating its standards for using force outside of the U.S. and war zones. It stated that there had to be a legal basis for using lethal force, and that “the United States will use lethal force only against a target that poses a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons.”

CIA Drone operator: Its all just like a fun video game! :

It's okay...hajj aren't real people anyway. lol.

W.Devil wrote:It's okay...hajj aren't real people anyway. lol.

Typical american mentality.

W.Devil wrote:It's okay...hajj aren't real people anyway. lol.

........

LEAVE THE DARK SIDE OF THE FORCE WHYTE AND JOIN US IN OUR BATTLE AGAINST THE EMPIRE(not the inland Empire)!

Inactive wrote:LEAVE THE DARK SIDE OF THE FORCE WHYTE AND JOIN US IN OUR BATTLE AGAINST THE EMPIRE(not the inland Empire)!

http://www.policymic.com/articles/3433/state-police-increasingly-turn-to-drones-to-monitor-u-s-citizens


State Police Increasingly Turn to Drones to Monitor U.S. Citizens


Drones quickly became the United States’ worst kept secret in 2011. From killing Anwar al-Awlaki to crashing in Iran, the use of drones has gotten more attention this past year than ever before. The use of drones in the U.S. itself, however, has received considerably less coverage. This year will prove to be a coming out party for the domestic drone. If used responsibly while remaining fully aware of potential dangers, drones could revolutionize law enforcement in the United States.

In June 2011, a sheriff in North Dakota was searching for six missing cows that were stolen. Three armed men chased the sheriff off the farm and called for the usual reinforcements in the case of an armed standoff. The difference in this situation was that a Customs and Border Patrol Predator B drone was called away from the Canadian border and aided law enforcement in arresting the three suspects.

According to the Los Angeles Times, this was the first known arrest of U.S. citizens using Predator drones on our soil. No shots were fired, a cache of weapons and the missing cows were found, and three alleged members of the Sovereign Citizens Movement were arrested. The drones at the border are primarily used for tracking illegal activity, but the 2005 bill that authorized these drones allowed them to work within “interior law enforcement support.” That small loophole may open up a can of worms as law enforcement eyes the benefits of having unmanned vehicles carry out dangerous surveillance tasks.

Drones will take significant danger away from law enforcement officials who put their lives at risk every day. Last year, a helicopter had to make an emergency landing during surveillance in Los Angeles when it was shot at. Perhaps the greatest benefit of drones in the eye of law enforcement officials is the cost benefit. Drones themselves are much cheaper than helicopters or other aircraft — and they cost much less to operate per hour than do other aircraft. Unmanned aircraft will make certain activities easier, safer, more efficient, and more cost effective. At a time when many states are saddled with enormous debt, it is clear this will be a big selling point.

This demand will likely lead the Federal Aviation Administration to review requests for unmanned vehicles for law enforcement purposes in 2012. Civil liberties experts have brought their concerns over privacy to the forefront of this debate. Although law enforcement reassures the public that these will be used where there is an ongoing police scene (Miami-Dade police have had two aircraft for seven months that they have yet to use), citizens are concerned they will be used to pry into their everyday lives.

Drones will get their first big time test monitoring crowds at the London Olympics this summer. In a city already laden with cameras, the police are looking for more “eyes in the sky.” Any police force that wishes to use these drones will have to cooperate with Civilian Aviation Authority, but the Metropolitan police have been reluctant to comment on the use of these drones.

It is clear that drones are useful for surveillance and law enforcement while creating significant concerns over privacy rights. However, we should look to the future, at how these vehicles may be used as their technology increases. A Wired article draws attention to the technological leaps that are possible when this technology is deployed for everyday use. Although it sounds like something from a Batman movie, these drones could be equipped with LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) known colloquially as a sound cannon. Unmanned vehicles could also be equipped with a “light based personnel immobilization device,” a strobe-like light used to disorient fleeing criminals and stop them in their tracks. It is even suggested that non-lethal rounds, or Tasers, could be mounted to these smaller drones to track down dangerous criminals.

In the face of ongoing protests throughout the world that shook many dictatorships in 2011, this technology will be more sought after than ever. Sound cannons used to dispel protesters could be flown in from a remote location, avoiding any clashes with the police or army. Drones are likely to be a fixture of our future in society; a tool that has to be used with caution and care no matter how impressive these advancements may be.

0ManForum wrote:

W.Devil wrote:It's okay...hajj aren't real people anyway. lol.

........

Military brainwashing 101- Dehumanize the enemy.



 

Wasteland Forum Warrior wrote:

0ManForum wrote:

W.Devil wrote:It's okay...hajj aren't real people anyway. lol.

........

Military brainwashing 101- Dehumanize the enemy.



 

Hot damn, Kokesh is back, and with a vengeance, too:

"If you're willing to kill people because your politicians said you should, well, then you're probably already one of these flag waiving, imbeciles - neanderthals, who are praising collectivism and tribalism because of a false sense of bolstering your own ego through down-ward social comparison of peoeple who aren't part of your in-group. So, if you're looking at people who live outside of U.S. borders as less-than human, it's much easier to kill them. And so there's the conditioning of "Haji", "rag-head" - just a general propaganda to justify the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. The idea is implicit: "These people are incapbale of running their own country so we have to go in there as great-noble Americans and show them how to do it."



Barbaric tribalism is what it is. Kokesh hit the nail on the head. 

0ManForum wrote: Kokesh hit the nail on the head.

 Yes he did.