RSS Feed
October 16th, 2015 
Awake Goy 
Susanne Posel ,Chief Editor Occupy Corporatism | Co-Founder, Legacy Bio-Naturals
October 15, 2015
A second Snowden has come forth to the Intercept, a media organization headed by Glenn Greenwald, to expose the inner workings of the Obama administration’s drone program.
These revelations center on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) who are targeting alleged terrorists in countries such as Afghanistan and Yemen.
Documents exposed include primary sources that states:
• nearly 90% of 1 in 5 drone killings do not achieve their intended target
• a former British citizen was killed during a drone strike despite repeated opportunities to capture him
• outlines and details of the process by which the Us government decides who will live or die
• profiling on persons that are considered targets
• the decision – making chain of command that goes straight to the executive office
The whistleblower’s identity is being kept secret by the Intercept; however their statement has accompanied the documents: “This outrageous explosion of watch listing—of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield—it was, from the very first instance, wrong. We’re allowing this to happen. And by ‘we,’ I mean every American citizen who has access to this information now, but continues to do nothing about it.”
When it comes to estimates on how many drone strikes the president has launched, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BJI) http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones/”> estimates “across Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, the Obama administration has launched … eight times as many [drone strikes] as were launched in the entire Bush presidency.”
This drone program is shrouded in secrecy because there is little known about how is the decision to use a drone strike made.
In 2013, Attorney General Eric Holder explained “the government analysis starts with the question of geography” and their legal authority in that nation to conduct the drone strike.
Thanks to “the legal authorization Congress passed a week after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001”, military action has been covered by the US government.
With that, Holder said: “[The Obama administration] acts after considering whether it has the consent of the nation involved or after a determination that the nation is unable or unwilling to deal effectively with a threat to the United States.”
Using the imminent threat justification for a drone strike is tantamount to making a loophole for justifying any authorized use of predator drones.
A memo produced by the Department of Justice outlined how imminent threat “does not require the US to have clear evidence that a specific attack on US persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.”
To complement the redefinition of the words imminent threat, the US government has also changed the definitions of civilian casualties in order to foster debate as to how the words could be applied.
These documents also confirmed that after a drone strike, the US government has no way of confirming how many persons were killed, regardless of whether they were terrorists or civilians.
According to the New York University (NYU) and Stanford University (SU), the first drone strike conducted in 2002 killed 3 people.
It is suspected that “the CIA thought one of the 3 men might have been bin Laden due to his height”; however later confirmed that the man suspected to be bin Laden was a bystander “collecting scrap metal”.
Responding to this boondoggle, the Pentagon explained in a press conference they did not “know the identities of the individuals involved” and decided to strike because they “were convinced it was an appropriate target … based on information.”
And during that press conference, the Pentagon admitted they “did not know who it was” that they killed in the drone strike in question.
Journalist Scott Shane explained “there has been a dispute over the way in which civilian casualties are counted.”
Shane points out that the CIA will count young, able bodied males as militants unless it is otherwise confirmed. This practice severely inflates the number of legitimate militant extremists tied to terrorist organizations who are killed by drone strikes.
Related Posts
Source Article from http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OccupyCorporatism/~3/xBMSPEAtgmM/
Posted in 
Tags: 
