Drones, Continued

[Content Note: Drones; war; violence.]

They hate us for our freedom, part wev in an endless series about the garbage disaster that is US foreign policy:

Contrary to assurances it has deployed U.S. drones only against known senior leaders of al Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified "other" militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan's rugged tribal area, classified U.S. intelligence reports show.

The administration has said that strikes by the CIA's missile-firing Predator and Reaper drones are authorized only against "specific senior operational leaders of al Qaida and associated forces" involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks who are plotting "imminent" violent attacks on Americans.

"It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative," President Barack Obama said in a Sept. 6, 2012, interview with CNN. "It has to be a situation in which we can't capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States."

Copies of the top-secret U.S. intelligence reports reviewed by McClatchy, however, show that drone strikes in Pakistan over a four-year period didn't adhere to those standards.

Which is to say nothing of the quality of those standards in the first place. I am not a military expert ("No shit"—everyone, ever), but I am dubious about the claim that anyone currently located in "Pakistan's rugged tribal area" has the individual capacity to execute an imminent operational plot against the United States. Are there routinely people in the US in position to launch an attack who immediately abandon those plans when the senior operative on whose orders they're acting is droned out of existence?

That's a serious question. I'm not being flip. I know there are real threats. But these are reasonable questions USians need to be asking of our government, when their justifications for warfare make no fucking sense.

The documents also show that drone operators weren't always certain who they were killing despite the administration's guarantees of the accuracy of the CIA's targeting intelligence and its assertions that civilian casualties have been "exceedingly rare."

The lies about civilian casualties are well-known and documented, and yet these lies continue.

The administration has declined to reveal other details of the program, such as the intelligence used to select targets and how much evidence is required for an individual to be placed on a CIA "kill list." The administration also hasn't even acknowledged the existence of so-called signature strikes [in which unidentified individuals are killed after surveillance shows behavior the U.S. government associates with terrorists, such as visiting compounds linked to al Qaida leaders or carrying weapons], let alone discussed the legal and procedural foundations of the attacks.

Leaders of the Senate and House intelligence committees say they maintain robust oversight over the program. ...But until last month, Obama had rebuffed lawmakers' repeated requests to see all of the classified Justice Department legal opinions on the program, giving them access to only two dealing with the president's powers to order targeted killings. It then allowed the Senate committee access to all opinions pertaining to the killing of U.S. citizens to clear the way for the panel's March 7 confirmation of John Brennan, the former White House counterterrorism chief and the key architect of the targeted killings program, as the new CIA director. But it continues to deny access to other opinions on the grounds that they are privileged legal advice to the president.

The President is running a drone war without meaningful oversight, transparency, or accountability. Congress is rubberstamping it. The US people barely know about it. I beg you to read the whole McClatchy piece about this grave national shame.