Three key lessons from the Obama administration's drone lies!
Three key lessons from the Obama administration's drone lies
The axiom that political officials abuse their power and lie to the public when operating in the dark is proven yet again
Barack Obama, John Brennan, Chuck Hagel
Barack Obama and his new defence secretary, Chuck Hagel, left, listen to the new CIA director, John Brennan, at the White House on 7 January. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP
For years, senior Obama officials, including the president himself, have been making public claims about their drone program that have just been proven to be categorically false. The evidence of this falsity is so conclusive that even establishment sources are using unusually harsh language - including "lies" - to describe Obama's statements. McClatchy's national security reporter, Jonathan Landay, obtained top-secret intelligence documents showing that "contrary to assurances it has deployed US 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." That article quotes drone expert Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations as saying that "McClatchy's findings indicate that the administration is 'misleading the public about the scope of who can legitimately be targeted.'"
In his own must-read article at Foreign Policy about these disclosures, Zenko writes - under the headline: "Finally, proof that the United States has lied in the drone wars" - that "it turns out that the Obama administration has not been honest about who the CIA has been targeting with drones in Pakistan" and that the McClatchy article "plainly demonstrates that the claim repeatedly made by President Obama and his senior aides - that targeted killings are limited only to officials, members, and affiliates of al-Qaida who pose an imminent threat of attack on the US homeland - is false." Beyond the obvious harms of having the president and his administration continuously lie to the public about such a crucial matter, Zenko explains that these now-disproven claims may very well make the drone strikes illegal since assertions about who is being targeted were "essential to the legal foundations on which the strikes are ultimately based: the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force and the UN Charter's right to self-defense." Marcy Wheeler uses the documents to show how claims about drones from other key officials, including Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, are also unquestionably false.
Both Landay's article and Zenko's analysis should be read for the details, but I want to highlight the three key points from this:
(1) The Obama administration often has no idea who they are killing.
This has long been the most amazing aspect of the drone debate to me. Not even the CIA, let alone ordinary citizens, has any idea of the identity of many of the people they are targeting for death. Despite this central ignorance, huge numbers of people walk around in some sort of zombie-like state repeatedly spouting the mantra that "Drones are Good because We are Killing the Terrorists" - even though the CIA itself, let alone citizens defending its killings, have no clue who is even being targeted. It has long been known that Obama (like Bush before him) approved the use of so-called "signature strikes", where the identity of the target is not known but they are targeted for death anyway "based on a 'pattern of life' analysis – intelligence on their behavior suggesting that an individual is a militant" (the New York Times reported that "the joke [at the State Department] was that when the CIA sees 'three guys doing jumping jacks', the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp" and that "men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bombmakers - but they might also be farmers"
.
But these McClatchy documents make clear just how extreme this ignorance often is, even after the fact:
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.'"
Zenko adds: "even the US intelligence community does not necessarily know who it has killed; it is forced to use fuzzy categories like 'other militants' and 'foreign fighters'." Targeting people without knowing their identity is as dubious morally as it is legally, which is why, Zenko explains, "No US government official has ever openly acknowledged the practice of such 'signature strikes' because it is so clearly at odds with the bedrock principle of distinction required for using force within the laws of armed conflict." How can any minimally rational person continue to walk around defending Obama's drone kills on the ground that they are killing The Terrorists or that civilian deaths are rare when even the government, let alone these defenders, often have no clue who is being targeted and then killed?
SO MUCH MORE AT:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/11/three-lessons-obama-drone-lies
= new reply since forum marked as read
They've coded their site to make it difficult to transfer..without getting rid of the Facebook, Reddit, Goolgle whatever... Anyway I'm not a tech code person...and it was like wrangling Dragons to get the post out. Then to do my primitave DU Coding with Bold and Whatever (I'm thankful DU makes some stuff easy) .
Anyway this post doesn't look like I'd hoped...but I spent a lot of time on it in my primitive way.
Yes...to do all this work to post this...I must be "A HATER!" AYYYYYY! Whatever... I care about THINGS...and THINGS ARE GOING WRONG... I'm sorry I'm not a CODE EXPERT....
But, I understand that you were not snarking me.... but just saying what "OTHERS" might SAY! 
a kiick. It means alot.. 
really. So little attention to this from DEMOCRATS...I don't understand it. But. it's what it is.
Thanks to all who cared enough to bother to reply to this post. I still can't wrap my head around why posts about our WARS and KILLING and DETENTIONS go to Archives...but they do.
I just got on the computer for today. Under the weather a bit. Thank you for struggling to get it posted for us... I definitely appreciate your efforts. Learned allot from this article and have replied with a title so I can find it quickly in the future. Must run.. 
"That secrecy is the linchpin of abuses of government power is as central a political principle as exists. This week, WikiLeaks released a searchable catalog of millions of once-secret but now-declassified documents and highlighted an incredibly revealing transcript of a 1975 meeting between then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Turkish officials. The US Congress had just enacted an arms embargo on Turkey in response to its aggressive actions in Cyprus, and Kissinger, at this meeting, made clear that the Ford administration opposed the embargo and was committed to finding a way to get arms and other aid to Turkey. When a Turkish official suggested that Kissinger enter into a secret agreement for European countries to provide the arms, this is what was said:
"People who exercise power inevitably abuse it when they can wield it in secret. They inevitably lie about what they do when they can act in the dark. This is just basic human nature, and applies even to the most kind-hearted leaders, even ones who are charming and wonderful family men. This is what makes pervasive secrecy and a lack of oversight and accountability so dangerous. It's what makes it particularly dangerous when the powers in question are ones highly susceptible to abuse, such as the power to target people for execution.
"For that reason, it's entirely unsurprising that the Obama administration got caught making plainly false statements about its killing program. But for the same reason, it's very significant that it has been caught. In light of this evidence, any journalists that continue to rely on US government statements about its killing program are revealing themselves to be eager propagandists, willing to be lied to and help amplify those lies (the same was true of journalists who continued to rely on government statements about "militants" being killed even after they knew how Obama officials had broadened that term to the point of meaninglessness). How many times do we have to learn these same lessons before recognizing their universality?"
