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.[1] 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.”[2] 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.”[3][4] Kiriakou compares the practice to “the Gestapo rounding up all the people that they want to murder in the center of town.”[3] He adds that when officers radioed asking permission to launch, superiors told them it was “just a formality — you’re supposed to say launch.”[5][6]
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.[7] 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.[8] 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.[9] 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.[10]
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.[11] 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.[12]