Hi there,

There has never been a more urgent time for courageous, daily, independent news. Media is essential to the functioning of a democratic society. Can you support Democracy Now! with $15 donation today? With your contribution, we can continue to go to where the silence is, to bring you the voices of the silenced majority – those calling for peace in a time of war, demanding action on the climate catastrophe and advocating for racial and economic justice. Every dollar makes a difference. Thank you so much!

Democracy Now!
Amy Goodman

Non-commercial news needs your support.

We rely on contributions from you, our viewers and listeners to do our work. If you visit us daily or weekly or even just once a month, now is a great time to make your monthly contribution.

Please do your part today.

Donate

A New Snowden? Whistleblower Leaks Trove of Documents on Drones & Obama’s Assassination Program

Listen
Media Options
Listen

Newly leaked government documents have provided an unprecedented window into the secret U.S. drone assassination program across the globe. In “The Drone Papers,” The Intercept reveals drone strikes have resulted from unreliable intelligence, stemming in large part from electronic communications data, or “signals intelligence,” that officials acknowledge is insufficient. The documents also undermine government claims that the drone strikes have been precise. In Afghanistan, strikes on 35 direct targets killed at least 219 other people. Among other revelations, they also suggest the strikes have hurt intelligence gathering and that unknown male victims have been labeled as “enemies killed in action” unless evidence later proves otherwise. The documents were leaked to The Intercept by an unnamed U.S. intelligence source.

Related Story

StoryNov 20, 2015From Console to Trigger: How Pentagon “Exploits” Video Game Culture to Wire Youth for War
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Newly leaked government documents have provided an unprecedented window into the secret U.S. drone assassination program across the globe. In “The Drone Papers,” the website The Intercept reveals drone strikes have resulted from unreliable intelligence, stemming in large part from electronic communications data, or “signals intelligence,” that officials acknowledge is insufficient. The documents also undermine government claims that the drone strikes have been precise. In Afghanistan, strikes on 35 direct targets killed at least 219 other people.

This is Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept, which just published an eight-part series on the leaked documents.

JEREMY SCAHILL: But the fact that this is the first time that primary source documents have been published that detail the chain of command for assassinating people around the globe. The banality of the bureaucracy of assassination is so clear in these documents—the cold corporate words that they use to describe killing people. The “basics of manhunting” is one of the terms that they use. The “tyranny of distance” is another term that they use. “Arab features,” you know, to describe people that they’re looking at from thousands of feet above. The corporate coldness of the way that these documents reflect what is actually a process of systematically hunting down and assassinating human beings should send chills through the spine of people who care about democracy in this society.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s The Intercept's Jeremy Scahill. The documents were leaked to The Intercept by an unnamed U.S. intelligence source. The source told The Intercept, quote, “It's stunning the number of instances when I’ve come across intelligence that was faulty, when sources of information used to finish targets were misattributed to people. And it isn’t until several months or years later that you realize that the entire time you thought you were going after this target, it was his mother’s phone the whole time. Anyone caught in the vicinity is guilty by association—it’s a phenomenal gamble,” the source said. We will link to The Intercept’s exposé on “The Drone Papers” on our website.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Next story from this daily show

Breaking Silence, Wife of Jailed CIA Whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling Seeks Presidential Pardon

Non-commercial news needs your support

We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work.
Please do your part today.
Make a donation
Top