More than two years back former CIA contractor Edward Snowden leaked a treasure trove of top secret documents that detailed the electronic spying programs of the National Security Agency. The massive leaks changed the way we view online privacy today and while the discussion still continues about whether or not these programs should be allowed to continue, there has been another leak of top secret documents possibly at the same scale as the Snowden leak. The latest leak revolves around the country’s drone program which is routinely used to eliminate targets in countries ranging from Afghanistan to Yemen.
The Intercept has published a collection from these leaked documents that it has received from an unnamed source, these documents shed light on the country’s use of drones to kill foreign targets in other countries.
Evidence from the source also reveals the extent of collaboration between the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command on the drone program, and that during one five month period up to 90 percent of all deaths in U.S. drone killings weren’t the intended target to begin with. Apparently “baseball cards” of profile information are created on intended targets with the chain of authorization reportedly going as far up as the president himself.
The Intercept’s source describes all of it as an outrageous explosion of watchlisting and monitoring people till they’re racked and stacked on lists with numbers assigned to them. The aforementioned baseball cars are effectively death warrants because once authorized it doesn’t take long to send in a drone to eliminate the target. “We’re allowing this to happen. And by ‘we,’ I mean every American citizen who has access to this information now, but continues to do nothing about it,” the unnamed source is quoted as saying.
The full cache of leaked documents, titled Drone Papers, are now available on The Intercept’s website.
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