The
Intercept has obtained a cache of secret documents detailing the
inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in
Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The documents, provided by a
whistleblower, offer an unprecedented glimpse into Obama’s drone
wars.
A
visual glossary
Key
points:
- One hundred years later, the bombing is done by pilotless planes. They are controlled remotely, often half a world away. We have come to call them “drones.” On the inside, people call them “birds.”
- Operators can watch their targets for hours, often from air-conditioned rooms, until they receive the order to fire. When the time is right, a room full of people watch as the shot is taken.
- Most of the time, drone operators are trying to kill someone specific. They call these people—the people being hunted—“objectives.”
- Intelligence agencies watched him [Bilal el-Berjawi] for years, then the British government stripped him of his citizenship. After calling his wife, who had just given birth in a London hospital, Berjawi was killed by an American drone strike. Some people thought the call might have given away his location, but the drones already knew where he was.
- When drone operators hit their target, killing the person they intend to kill, that person is called a “jackpot.” When they miss their target and end up killing someone else, they label that person EKIA, or “enemy killed in action.”
- Over a five-month period, U.S. forces used drones and other aircraft to kill 155 people in northeastern Afghanistan. They achieved 19 jackpots. Along the way, they killed at least 136 other people, all of whom were classified as EKIA, or enemies killed in action. [...] almost 9 out of 10 people killed in these strikes [1 May - 15 Sep. 2012] were not the intended targets.
- Hellfire missiles—the explosives fired from drones—are not always fired at people. In fact, most drone strikes are aimed at phones. The SIM card provides a person’s location—when turned on, a phone can become a deadly proxy for the individual being hunted. When a night raid or drone strike successfully neutralizes a target’s phone, operators call that a “touchdown.”
- “Baseball cards” (BBCs) are the military’s method for visualizing information—they are used to display data, map relationships between people, and identify an individual’s so-called pattern of life.
- A “blink” happens when a drone has to move and there isn’t another aircraft to continue watching a target. According to classified documents, this is a major challenge facing the military, which always wants to have a “persistent stare.” The conceptual metaphor of surveillance is seeing. Perfect surveillance would be like having a lidless eye. Much of what is seen by a drone’s camera, however, appears without context on the ground. Some drone operators describe watching targets as “looking through a soda straw.”
- As of 2012, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) had bases in Djibouti, Kenya, and Ethiopia. They operated 11 Predators and five Reaper drones over the Horn of Africa and Yemen.
- For many years, lawyers and human rights advocates have wondered about the chain of command. How are non-battlefield assassinations authorized? Does it fall within the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), or through some other authority? The documents we have are not comprehensive, but they suggest a linear chain—all the way up to the president of the United States (POTUS).
- ... U.S. intelligence agencies hunt people primarily on the basis of their cellphones. Equipped with a simulated cell tower called GILGAMESH, a drone can force a target’s phone to lock onto it, and subsequently use the phone’s signals to triangulate that person’s location.
- In the end, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) is about continuing a cycle: Find a person, Fix a person, Finish them. But there are two other steps in the process: Exploit and Analyze. Colloquially referred to as “F3EA,” the cycle feeds back into itself. The whole process amounts to human hunting. As soon as a target is finished, the hunt for a new target begins.
Full
report, diagrams, maps:
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