The Drone Papers are the classified documents leaked by targeting analyst Daniel Hale and published by The Intercept, later collected in book form as The Assassination Complex.[1] John Kiriakou says he relied on the leak in his own book on the war in Afghanistan, Fool’s Errand.[1] The documents, he says, reveal that the drone program killed “blindly,” targeting people identified not by a cell-phone number but by association — “numbers of people who ever were associated with a cell phone that ever called another cell phone that ever called another cell phone” — then labeling all of the dead “enemies killed in action unless it’s proven otherwise, which it never is.”[2] Kiriakou notes the papers document an “infinitesimally small” rate of actually killing the intended target relative to the collateral dead.[3] He makes the same point about official “enemy killed in action” (EKIA) designations elsewhere, stating they are unreliable because casualties are presumed to be terrorism suspects or militants without follow-up investigation into their actual identities — meaning official U.S. government civilian-casualty accounts should not be trusted.[4]
The Drone Papers
The trove of classified documents leaked by Daniel Hale and published by The Intercept — later collected in book form as 'The Assassination Complex' — exposing how the U.S. drone program selected and killed targets; John Kiriakou relied on it in his own writing on the war in Afghanistan.
References
- ↑ Scott Horton, 2021-06-01 — 12:05 on YouTube · Transcript
- ↑ Scott Horton, 2021-06-01 — 12:37 on YouTube · Transcript
- ↑ Scott Horton, 2021-06-01 — 13:08 on YouTube · Transcript
- ↑ Scott Horton, 2021-08-01 — 37:05 on YouTube · Transcript
Categories: Concepts