Signature strikes
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Signature strikes are the drone-targeting doctrine, exposed by Daniel Hale's leak in The Drone Papers, under which the United States kills people based on patterns of behavior or association rather than confirmed identity. John Kiriakou says the "signature of a terrorist" could be as little as doing "jumping jacks" or carrying "a bag of something over their shoulder." He says operators are explicit that "any male over the age of 12 is a legitimate target" on the theory that "any male over the age of 12 can pick up an AK-47 and shoot an American soldier", "not that they have the gun, but that they could pick up a gun." Kiriakou compares the practice to "the Gestapo rounding up all the people that they want to murder in the center of town." He adds that when officers radioed asking permission to launch, superiors told them it was "just a formality, you're supposed to say launch."

Kiriakou has cited a similar Obama-era Defense Department standard elsewhere: any male over the age of 14 was considered an enemy combatant by default. He contrasts the scale of drone killing at the end of each administration, two people killed by drone strike in George W. Bush's last month as president, versus 424 people killed by drone strikes in Barack Obama's last month. Kiriakou says he uses a phone app called Metadata that tracks drone strikes, which shows him how frequently strikes occur, including civilian and child casualties, and how often they go unreported. He says U.S. drone operators repeatedly struck wedding parties in Yemen, roughly half a dozen times, because a "tall Arab-looking guy" at the party was mistakenly thought to be Osama bin Laden. He has described the same pattern elsewhere, bombing weddings because a tall man dressed in white was assumed to be bin Laden, and in some cases bombing the funeral afterward as well.

Kiriakou says that when he was stationed in Pakistan, he led raids that captured dozens of alleged al-Qaeda "fighters", most of whom, he found, were actually teenage boys from isolated, illiterate, jobless villages who had been recruited with the promise of $500 a month, plus a martyrdom payment to their families if killed. He says he has become increasingly vocal against drone strikes that kill American citizens without ever charging them with a crime, calling it the next major civil-liberties battleground.

See also

- Daniel Hale
- The Drone Papers
- Tuesday morning kill list
