Drone War Exposed: Jeremy Scahill on U.S. Kill Program's Secrets & the Whistleblower Who Leaked Them
Drone War Exposed: Jeremy Scahill on U.S. Kill Program's Secrets & the Whistleblower Who Leaked Them
Democracy Now!
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: One of the most secretive military campaigns in U.S. history is under the microscope like never before. In a major exposé based on leaked government documents, The Intercept has published the most in-depth look at the U.S. drone assassination program to date. "The Drone Papers" exposed the inner workings of how the drone war is waged, from how targets are identified to who decides to kill. They reveal a number of flaws, including that strikes have resulted in large part from electronic communications data, or "signals intelligence," that officials acknowledge is unreliable. The documents also undermine government claims that the drone strikes have been precise. During one five-month period of an operation in Afghanistan, nine out of 10 casualties were not the intended target. And among other revelations, the documents also corroborate previous reports that all foreign males in a target zone have been treated as militants—unless they are proven innocent after death.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Oh, yeah. I mean, look, and this—you know, really, we know so much more about this because of the Edward Snowden leaks, but so much of the entire intelligence-industrial complex in the—you know, sort of in the U.S. empire is dependent upon intercepting people’s emails, their text messages, their phone calls. And, you know, signals intelligence can be reliable. I mean, if I’m talking to you, Juan, they can do our voice recognition. They can say, "OK, we know that Jeremy Scahill is talking to Juan González." But when you talk to people who really worked in that world—Cora Currier and I interviewed Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who was the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the top official running all of the Pentagon spy operations around the world, and he was Stanley McChrystal’s top intelligence guy at JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command. When Cora and I spoke to him, he said, "Look, I can record my voice on a phone and give it to a courier. The courier can go somewhere else, then call a number, and they can play that, and someone’s going to die over there, and they’ll think that they’ve eliminated this target, but they didn’t." And so, you know, it’s—and he said, signals intelligence is very easy to fool.
= new reply since forum marked as read
