New Whistleblower Leak Exposes Classified Details Of Obamas Drone Use The leaker, or whistleblower as The Intercept calls him or her, is being hailed as A Second Snowden. Someone who is willing to risk charges of treason and espionage to get word out to the public about what the American government is up to. Edward Snowdens big release had to do with the government spying on everyone and everything inside and outside the nation. The new leaker who remains anonymous at the hour of this writing is all about drones. On Thursday morning, The Intercept published online (this means that like a diamond, the story is forever) an multi-page outline of the USAs vaunted drone program titled The Drone Papers. In this expose, readers can find out all sorts of things about drones in the age of Obama: the terminology, how objectives are chosen, the number of people killed with them, information from studies that were obviously supposed to remain classified including Power Point slides marked Secret on developing and authorizing a target, the turf war between the Pentagon and the CIA over operations in Afghanistan, realities about depending on foreign governments for intelligence information, and much more. According to the report, before Barack Obama occupied the Oval Office, the United States had actually launched only one drone strike in November of 2002. During Obamas tenure over 490 people have been killed by our drone strikes, and at one point in Yemen there was a strike every six days. The drone campaign right now really is only about killing. When you hear the phrase capture/kill, capture is actually a misnomer. In the drone strategy that we have, capture is a lower case c. We dont capture people anymore, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told The Intercept. Our entire Middle East policy seems to be based on firing drones. Thats what this administration decided to do in its counterterrorism campaign. Theyre enamored by the ability of special operations and the CIA to find a guy in the middle of the desert in some shitty little village and drop a bomb on his head and kill him. For quite a while rumors have circulated that Obama has a thing for drones and would sit and watch the footage like it was a video game or sports. There is little mention of that in this expose, but this leak confirms that at the beginning of his administration, Obama learned about drones from the CIA, and was persuaded to use them as a primary tool in the fight against Al Qaeda. (Interesting that George W. Bush resisted.) Rather than capturing targets, and interrogating them to find out more information about the network and get intelligence as airtight as possible, the Obama Administration is hell bent on just taking out the target and they are willing to create collateral damage that could be avoided to do it. This happens not just in Afghanistan, and Iraq, but Somalia, Yemen, and a number of other countries that are a stretch for our military to reach from the continuous 48 even with extra fuel as drones are based on this side of the globe. One of the most disturbing allegations in The Intercepts writings is that drone strikes are undertaken with intelligence that really isnt adequate, and the reality made perfectly clear in this report is that intelligence could be improved by not outright killing the targets without anyone on the ground to collect more information. As well, intelligence is never completely airtight, but it should be more than flimsy. And it certainly shouldnt depend on cell phone intercepts, as is charged in section six of the expose. Those [intelligence] shortfalls stemfrom the remote geography of Yemen and Somalia and the limited American presence there. As a result, the U.S. military has been overly reliant on signals intelligence from computers and cellphones, and the quality of those intercepts has been limited by constraints on surveillance flights in the region. Then there is the matter of fighting a war via remote control assassination rather than going to a location and actually shooting. Technically speaking, assassination is not allowed in American war theaters without cause, and is really a lazy way to conduct a conflict. But, this report intimates that this is the path the Obama Administration chose to take. The full report is illuminating and does not give away TOO many state secrets, but the revelations do confirm the worst fears of those who saw the U.S. drone program as presented by the Obama Adminstration as a means to an end just too disturbing. Its a short-cut to real war, and in the end an expensive, borderline immoral and slapdash one at that. The full report, The Drone Papers, is worth reading and can be found at The Intercept. It begins: From his first days as commander in chief, the drone has been President Barack Obamas weapon of choice, used by the military and the CIA to hunt down and kill the people his administration has deemed through secretive processes, without indictment or trial worthy of execution. There has been intense focus on the technology of remote killing, but that often serves as a surrogate for what should be a broader examination of the states power over life and death. 