If you blinked, you may have missed the Drone Papers report that was just released. I’m sure this won’t be the last we hear of the investigative report by the crew over at The Intercept and their anonymous source who leaked classified material. The nutshell version: those drones that do so much heavy lifting for United States foreign policy are not as neat and effective as you’d like to think. (Which we all pretty much knew already, now it’s just doubly, awfully confirmed.)
Imagine if the policy of “targeted killings” was carried out by some other means other than those marvelous high tech drone contraptions. (Remember, “drones” aren’t the policy, “assassination” is the policy.) What would we think of a policy that killed people who weren’t the intended targets about 90% of the time? We’re not talking about missiles going off course, we’re talking about intelligence failures and by extension foreign policy failures. We hit what we aim at, unfortunately, much of the time we just tend to aim at the wrong people.
Even though the Obama Administration says that targeted killing is only used when there is an “imminent threat” and there is “near certainty” that all will go just peachy, this is basically a global execution program without due process or transparency. Be sure to read the stories behind this cartoon and dive into the strange world of watch lists, kill lists and interagency warfare.