An apparatus of official secrecy, built over decades and zealously enforced by Obama, prevents meaningful open scrutiny of ‘signature strikes’

Of all the reactions to the deaths of two hostages from a missile fired from a US drone, Congressman Adam Schiff provided the deepest insight into the logic underpinning the endless, secret US campaign of global killing.



“To demand a higher standard of proof than they had here could be the end of these types of counter-terrorism operations,” said Schiff, a California Democrat and one of the most senior legislators overseeing those operations.

The standard of proof in the January strike in tribal Pakistan was outlined by the White House press secretary in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s admission about the deaths. An agency that went formally unnamed – likely the CIA, though the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) also conducts drone strikes – identified what Josh Earnest called an “al-Qaida compound” and marked the building, rather than particular terrorists, for destruction.

Thanks to Obama’s rare admission on Thursday, the realities of what are commonly known as “signature strikes” are belatedly and partially on display. Signature strikes, a key aspect for years of what the administration likes to call its “targeted killing” program, permit the CIA and JSOC to kill without requiring them to know who they kill.

The “signatures” at issue are indicators that intelligence analysts associate with terrorist behavior – in practice, a gathering of men, teenaged to middle-aged, traveling in convoys or carrying weapons. In 2012, an unnamed senior official memorably quipped that the CIA considers “three guys doing jumping jacks” a signature of terrorist training.

Civilian deaths in signature strikes, accordingly, are not accidental. They are, as Schiff framed it, more like a cost of doing business – only the real cost is shielded from the public.

An apparatus of official secrecy, built over decades and zealously enforced by Obama, prevents meaningful open scrutiny of the strikes. No one outside the administration knows how many drone strikes are signature strikes. There is no requirement that the CIA or JSOC account for their strikes, nor to provide an estimate of how many people they kill, nor even how they define legally critical terms like “combatant”, terrorist “affiliate” or “leader”. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is suing an obstinate administration to compel disclosure of some of the most basic information there is about a program that has killed thousands of people.

The National Security Agency has a complementary term to describe the effects of its mass surveillance on the world’s emails, texts, phone records, webcams, gaming and all other forms of communication: “incidental collection”. Incidental collection is all of the untold trillions of communications data NSA and its partners hoover up that have nothing to do with terrorism or espionage. That collection may not be, strictly speaking, intentional – those communications are not NSA’s “targets” – but it is neither accidental nor, by the logic of bulk surveillance, avoidable.

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Similarly, civilian deaths in signature strikes do not operate quite like the “collateral damage” familiar from earlier wars. It is one thing for US bombs and missiles to miss their targets or to hit facilities that, at the time of the strike, no longer have their targets in them. It is another for them to hit targets absent prior confirmation that the target is an enemy as a matter of policy.

“It is a different kind of use of the drone, and it raises issues that are important,” said Glenn Carle, a former CIA interrogator, who added that he is not categorically opposed to drone strikes.

“I know how the institution [the CIA] functions. For all the errors I’ve spoken about, people are as responsible and serious as humans can be.”

Yet the secrecy around the strikes permits self-interested officials to misrepresent them.

“By targeting an individual terrorist or a small number of terrorists with ordnance that can be adapted to avoid harming others in the immediate vicinity, it is hard to imagine a tool that can better minimize the risk to civilians than remotely piloted aircraft,” John Brennan, who is now director of the CIA, said in a landmark 2012 speech.

But the disclosure of the hostage deaths in January demonstrates that neither an individual terrorist nor a small number of terrorists are necessarily the target of any given strike. Instead, the target can be a facility, transport or other proxy associated with suspected terrorists. (For that matter, the size of the ordnance is relatively small – Hellfire missiles weigh about 100lb – because Predator and Reaper drones are designed to be disposable airframes that can’t hold large payloads.) “Targeted”, in the drone context, is a term that conceals more than it explains.

Schiff’s reaction condensed the root argument of the administration’s drone advocates: it’s this or nothing. The Obama administration considers the real alternatives to drone strikes to be the unpalatable options of grueling ground wars or passive acceptance of terrorism. Then it congratulates itself for picking the wise, ethical and responsible choice of killing people without knowing who they are.

The proposed intelligence budget of the US for the next year is $53.9bn. The NSA and CIA argue that as much of the world’s communications as possible must be collected and clandestine killing operations must be subsequently conducted, or else Americans will die. But according to one of the lead congressional overseers of the drone strikes, expecting the US not to kill people until it knows that they are in fact US enemies – the expectation every platoon leader and sergeant places on every private and corporal – would represent “the end of these types of counterterrorism operations”.

Schiff is hardly alone within intelligence oversight circles. The default position of congressional overseers, a small slice of Congress empanelled to see secret evidence, is to defend the people they nominally review, even when faced with examples of official duplicity.

During Brennan’s February 2013 confirmation hearing, the Senate intelligence committee laced into the nominee with complaints of how the CIA he sought to lead was lying and obstructing the panel’s investigation into agency torture. Yet then-chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, added a defense of drone strikes predicated on how the CIA had assured her in private briefings that the strikes were now so precise they only killed “single digits”-worth of civilians annually.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Senator Dianne Feinstein on Capitol Hill. Photograph: Joshua Roberts/Reuters

After the hearing, a reporter asked Feinstein why she believed the CIA would lie to her about torture and not about drone strikes.

“That’s a good question, actually,” she responded, after a pause.

A solemn White House pledged on Thursday to review its drone strike rules. Yet its record casts doubt on anything changing. Obama declared two years ago that he would launch drone strikes only when he had “near certainty” that the “terrorist target is present” and civilians were not. That did not stop the January signature strike that killed Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto.

No Obama official involved in drone strikes has ever been disciplined: not only are Brennan and director of national intelligence James Clapper entrenched in their jobs, David Barron, one of the lawyers who told Obama he could kill a US citizen without trial as a first resort, now has a federal judgeship.

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Beyond the question of when the US ought to launch drone strikes lie deeper geostrategic concerns. Obama’s overwhelming focus on counter-terrorism, inherited and embraced from his predecessor, subordinated all other considerations for the drone battlefield of Yemen, which he described as a model for future efforts.

The result is the total collapse of the US Yemeni proxy, a regional war Obama appears powerless to influence, the abandonment of US citizens trapped in Yemen and the likely expansion of al-Qaida’s local affiliate. A generation of Yemeni civilians, meanwhile, is growing up afraid of the machines loitering overhead that might kill them without notice.

“One can make a very strong argument that the costs outweigh the benefits. But it’s not simple,” said Glenn Carle.

The view through the soda-straw camera carried in the drone’s belly obscures much of the real picture.