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 two figures Kiriakou cites
Summarising the disclosure in his own voice, Kiriakou gives the statistic and the accounting rule that made it invisible. During one five-month period in 2012, “nearly 90 per cent of those people killed in drone strikes were not the intended targets but civilian bystanders.”[5]
The second half is the classification practice: innocent people killed “were classified as enemies killed in action unless proven otherwise.”[5] Between them, the two facts explain how a programme could report almost no civilian casualties while producing them at that rate.
The documents went to The Intercept, and Daniel Hale spoke about the programme again in the award-winning film National Bird.[5]