The Assassination Complex

May 2, 2016
According to this scattershot exposé from the Intercept, the drone strikes conducted by the U.S. military and CIA in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia are a fiasco marred by targeting mistakes, heavy civilian casualties, and infringements of civil liberties. Relying on leaked intelligence documents and interviews with a drone operator and other informants, Scahill, Glenn Greenwald, and other Intercept journalists (plus whistle-blower Edward Snowden, who contributes a foreword) paint the drone program as a contradictory mix of all-seeing surveillance, blinkered error, and indiscriminate killing. Drones track cell phones and SIM cards based on often vague or mistaken information that the people carrying them are terrorists, and the ensuing Hellfire missiles usually kill peopleâhundreds of them, altogetherâother than intended targets. Meanwhile, the authors argue, cell phone surveillance and promiscuous terrorist watch lists have spilled over into domestic American policing. The authors provide a fragmented rundown of the drone strike "kill chain" of command up to the Oval OfficeâGreenwald denounces President Obama for betraying liberal principles by expanding drone strikesâand include vignettes about innocents killed by drones. There's nothing revelatory hereâthe drone assassinations and their problems are well-knownâbut this pointillistic portrait provides illuminating new detail and insight. Photos. Agent: Anthony Arnove, Roam Agency.

May 15, 2016

"Drones are a tool, not a policy. The policy is assassination." With this hard-hitting line, Scahill (Blackwater) and the staff of The Intercept confront the Obama presidency's escalation of drone strikes to kill supposed terrorists, including American and British citizens. According to Scahill, the drone campaigns are unconstitutional and counterproductive, as the strikes destroy valuable human intelligence, inflict civilian casualties, and make enemies of local Yemenis and Afghans. Chapters are based on the Drone Papers, a trove of U.S. intelligence documents leaked to The Intercept in 2015. These documents demonstrate that attacks target supposed terrorists' cell phone signals, commonly inflicting "death by unreliable metadata." Elegant data visualizations illustrate these revelations, also accompanied by striking design elements such as stylized pairs of eyes that peep whimsically from the margins of pages about the surveillance state. Whistle-blower Edward Snowden wrote the foreword and journalist Glenn Greenwald the afterword--need we say more? VERDICT While very much a work of the moment, this account delivers a searing, facts-driven indictment of America's drone wars and their implications for U.S. democracy and foreign policy. A must-read for concerned citizens.--Michael Rodriguez, Hodges Univ. Lib., Naples, FL

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