‘The Drone Papers’ Offer Even More Reasons to End Remote-Controlled Wars

(Truthdig) The recent publication by The Intercept of the “The Drone Papers” should have made an explosive splash both in the media and Washington, D.C. But the leak of classified documents has so far generated only modest media coverage (as of this writing, The New York Times has yet to cover it), and there has been no acknowledgment of it by elected officials.

The documents were provided by an anonymous source to an outlet with a strong reputation for muckraking journalism. They reveal how the CIA—an agency with no mandate to fight wars—and the Joint Special Operations Command vie for control of the remote-controlled battles fought in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. They also make clear that the U.S. is well aware of the vast civilian carnage from drones. In Afghanistan, “[d]uring 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,” wrote Jeremy Scahill, who led the reporting. Scahill further determined 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.” The intrepid journalist has spent years tracing the inner workings of U.S. drone programs, revealing the results in his 2013 book “Dirty Wars” and a documentary film of the same name.

In Afghanistan, where the U.S. military has years of familiarity with the terrain and ostensibly has cultivated reliable intelligence sources, the drone program should have been working most efficiently. The Pentagon’s plan to root out Taliban and al-Qaida rebels in the Hindu Kush is called Operation Haymaker. In the words of The Intercept’s Ryan Devereaux, “the military’s own analysis demonstrates that the Haymaker campaign was in many respects a failure. The vast majority of those killed in airstrikes were not the direct targets. Nor did the campaign succeed in significantly degrading al-Qaida’s operations in the region.” If the Afghanistan program has been a failure by the military’s own standards, the drone program is likely a bust in countries like Yemen and Somalia, too.

Even a drone operator who defended this type of war in an article on Politico.com admitted that things have gotten worse on the ground: “The military has quadrupled drone strikes over the past seven years; and now instead of hiding in Waziristan, al-Qaida is flourishing throughout the world.” ....................(more)

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_drone_papers_offer_even_more_reasons_to_end_remote-controlled_20151022