[Infowarrior] - CIA Didn't Always Know Who It Was Killing In Drone Strikes

[Richard Forno]

http://openchannel.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/05/18781930-exclusive-cia-didnt-always-know-who-it-was-killing-in-drone-strikes-classified-documents-show

NBCNews.com
June 5, 2013

Exclusive: CIA Didn't Always Know Who It Was Killing In Drone Strikes,
Classified Documents Show

By Richard Engel and Robert Windrem, NBC News

The CIA did not always know who it was targeting and killing in drone
strikes in Pakistan over a 14-month period, an NBC News review of classified
intelligence reports shows.

About one of every four of those killed by drones in Pakistan between Sept.
3, 2010, and Oct. 30, 2011, were classified as "other militants,² the
documents detail. The ³other militants² label was used when the CIA could
not determine the affiliation of those killed, prompting questions about how
the agency could conclude they were a threat to U.S. national security.

The uncertainty appears to arise from the use of so-called ³signature²
strikes to eliminate suspected terrorists -- picking targets based in part
on their behavior and associates. A former White House official said the
U.S. sometimes executes people based on ³circumstantial evidence.²

Three former senior Obama administration officials also told NBC News that
some White House officials were worried that the CIA had painted too rosy a
picture of its success and likely ignored or missed mistakes when tallying
death totals.

NBC News has reviewed two sets of classified documents that describe 114
drone strikes over 14 months in Pakistan and Afghanistan, starting in
September 2010. The documents list locations, death and injury tolls,
alleged terrorist affiliations, and whether the killed and injured were
deemed combatants or non-combatants.

Though the Obama administration has previously said it targets al Qaeda
leaders and senior Taliban officials plotting attacks against the U.S. and
U.S. troops, officials are sometimes unsure of the targets¹ affiliations.
About half of the targets in the documents are described as al Qaeda. But in
26 of the attacks, accounting for about a quarter of the fatalities, those
killed are described only as ³other militants.² In four others, the dead are
described as ³foreign fighters.²

In some cases, U.S. officials also seem unsure how many people died. One
entry says that a drone attack killed seven to 10 people, while another says
that an attack killed 20 to 22.

Yet officials seem certain that however many people died, and whoever they
were, none of them were non-combatants. In fact, of the approximately 600
people listed as killed in the documents, only one is described as a
civilian. The individual was identified to NBC News as the wife or
girlfriend of an al Qaeda leader.

Micah Zenko, a former State Department policy advisor who is now a drone
expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said it was ³incredible² to
state that only one non-combatant was killed. ³It¹s just not believable,² he
said. ³Anyone who knows anything about how airpower is used and deployed,
civilians die, and individuals who are engaged in the operations know this.²
The CIA declined to comment, and the White House did not immediately respond
to calls and emails requesting comment.

A senior White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity, said, ³In
the past, and currently, force protection is a big part of the rationale for
taking action in the Afghan theater of operations.²

Separately, on background, the official noted that as President Barack Obama
said in an address last month, as the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan
declines, so will the number of strikes.

The CIA uses two basic methods to target people for killing, according to
current and former U.S. officials.

The first is called a ³personality² strike. These strikes target known
terrorists, whose identities have been firmly established through
intelligence, including visual surveillance and electronic and human
intelligence. In other words, the CIA knows who it is killing.

In so-called ³signature² strikes, intelligence officers and drone operators
kill suspects based on their patterns of behavior -- but without positive
identification. With signature strikes, the CIA doesn¹t necessarily know who
it is killing. One former senior intelligence official said that at the
height of the drone program in Pakistan in 2009 and 2010, as many as half of
the strikes were classified as signature strikes.

Analysts use a variety of intelligence methods and technologies that they
say give them reasonable certainty that the ³signature² target is a
terrorist. Part of the analysis involves crunching data to make connections
between the unidentified suspects and other known terrorists and militants.
The agency can watch, for example, as an unknown person frequents places,
meets individuals, makes phone calls, and sends emails, and then match those
against other people linked to the same calls, emails and meetings.

A half dozen former and current U.S. counter-terrorism officials told NBC
News that signature strikes do generally kill combatants, but acknowledge
that intelligence officials doesn¹t always know who those combatants are.
Some of the officials said the moral and legal aspects of the signature
strikes were often discussed, but without any significant change in policy.

Ret. Adm. Dennis Blair, who was Director of National Intelligence from Jan.
2009 to May 2010, declined to discuss the specifics of signature strikes,
but said ³to use lethal force there has to be a high degree of knowledge of
an individual tied to activities, tied to connections.²

He also defended the precision of drone strikes in general. ³In Afghanistan
and Iraq and places where you have troops in combat,² said Blair, ³you know
better with drones who you¹re killing than you do when you¹re calling in
artillery fire from a spotter [or] calling in an airplane strike.²

Said Blair, ³This is no different from decisions that are made on the
battlefield all the time by soldiers and Marines who are being shot at, not
knowing who fired the shot, having to make judgments on shooting back or
not. This is the nature of warfare.²

Once a target has been killed, according to current and former U.S.
officials, the CIA does not take someone out of the combatant category and
put them in the non-combatant category unless, after the strike, a
preponderance of evidence is produced showing the person killed was a
civilian.

A 2012 AP investigation reported that in 10 drone attacks from the preceding
18 months, Pakistani villagers said that about 70 percent of those killed
were militants, while the rest of the dead were either civilians or tribal
police. The AP report notes that Pakistani officials and villagers claimed
that 38 non-combatants were killed in a single strike on March 17, 2011.

According to the AP, U.S. officials said the group hit by the strike was
heavily armed and behaved in ³a manner consistent with al Qaeda-linked
militants.² Villagers and Pakistani officials said the gathering was a
³jirga,² or community meeting, in which locals were negotiating with a small
group of militants over mining rights.

U.S. officials listed 20 to 22 dead in the strike, according to the
documents obtained by NBC News, and described them as ³other militants.² A
former U.S. official told NBC News the drone attack was a ³signature²
strike, while a U.S. human rights advocate who has interviewed local
villagers ­ and is skeptical of Pakistani claims of widespread civilian
casualties from drone strikes -- supported the Pakistani description of the
meeting as a jirga and most of the victims as non-combatants.

In a speech at the National Defense University in May, President Obama
defended his administration¹s use of targeted killings. He acknowledged that
there had been civilian casualties, and that drone technology raised
³profound questions² about ³who is targeted and why,² but he also said the
CIA¹s drone program was ³legal,² ³lethal,² ³effective,² and the most humane
option for counterterrorism. He said the U.S. had a ³high threshold ... for
taking lethal action,² and that the drawdown of forces in Afghanistan and
successful action against al Qaeda would likely ³reduce the need for
unmanned strikes² in 2014.

On the same day, the White House released a fact sheet stating its standards
for using force outside of the U.S. and war zones. It stated that there had
to be a legal basis for using lethal force, and that ³the United States will
use lethal force only against a target that poses a continuing, imminent
threat to U.S. persons.²

Richard Engel is NBC News' chief foreign correspondent; Robert Windrem is a
senior investigative producer for NBC News.

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