EXCLUSIVE: CIA didn't always know who it was killing in drone strikes, clas

[Zarvan]

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,” the documents detail. The “other militants” 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 “signature” 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 “circumstantial evidence.”
Advertise | AdChoices


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 targets’ 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 “other militants.” In four others, the dead are described as “foreign fighters.”
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, of the Council on Foreign Relations, says that more civilians and non-combatants have likely been killed by U.S. drone strikes than the Obama administration has claimed.
Micah Zenko, a former State Department policy advisor who is now a drone expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said it was “incredible” to state that only one non-combatant was killed. “It’s just not believable,” he said. “Anyone who knows anything about how airpower is used and deployed, civilians die, and individuals who are engaged in the operations know this.”
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, “In the past, and currently, force protection is a big part of the rationale for taking action in the Afghan theater of operations.”
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 “personality” 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 “signature” strikes, intelligence officers and drone operators kill suspects based on their patterns of behavior -- but without positive identification. With signature strikes, the CIA doesn’t 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 “signature” 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.
Advertise | AdChoices


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 doesn’t 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.

Retired Adm. Dennis Blair, former director of national intelligence, says that drone strikes can more effectively identify and target combatants than other types of airstrikes.
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 “to use lethal force there has to be a high degree of knowledge of an individual tied to activities, tied to connections.”
He also defended the precision of drone strikes in general. “In Afghanistan and Iraq and places where you have troops in combat,” said Blair, “you know better with drones who you’re killing than you do when you’re calling in artillery fire from a spotter [or] calling in an airplane strike.”
Said Blair, “This 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.”
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 “a manner consistent with al Qaeda-linked militants.” Villagers and Pakistani officials said the gathering was a “jirga,” 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 “other militants.” A former U.S. official told NBC News the drone attack was a “signature” 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.
Related story
How Predator went from eye in the sky to war on terror's weapon of choice
In a speech at the National Defense University in May, President Obama defended his administration’s use of targeted killings. He acknowledged that there had been civilian casualties, and that drone technology raised “profound questions” about “who is targeted and why,” but he also said the CIA’s drone program was “legal,” “lethal,” “effective,” and the most humane option for counterterrorism. He said the U.S. had a “high threshold ... for taking lethal action,” and that the drawdown of forces in Afghanistan and successful action against al Qaeda would likely “reduce the need for unmanned strikes” in 2014.
Advertise | AdChoices


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 “the United States will use lethal force only against a target that poses a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons.”
Richard Engel is NBC News' chief foreign correspondent; Robert Windrem is a senior investigative producer for NBC News.

More from Open Channel:
Study uses 'martyr' posts to break down 'foreign fighters' aiding Syria rebels
Ex-IRS leader urges joint congressional probe of agency's targeting
Undercover at Disneyland: 'Shameful' trick to skip lines
Follow Open Channel from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook
EXCLUSIVE: CIA didn't always know who it was killing in drone strikes, classified documents show - Open Channel
Now I would like to have comments from those who defend Drones and others too
@WebMaster @Leader @Aeronaut @nuclearpak @ANTIBODY and others

 

[Juice]

If it is an obvious insurgent center or post.....you don't need to know everyone's name. When we bombed Ploesti....do you think we would have called it off because we didn't know who one of the gate-guard's grandma was?

 

[Silverblaze]

If it is an obvious insurgent center or post.....you don't need to know everyone's name. When we bombed Ploesti....do you think we would have called it off because we didn't know who one of the gate-guard's grandma was?

Terrorism must be smashed, but this is no way. Much more civilians have been killed than intended targets.

A Pakistani reporter once commented that he interviewed a Pakistani taliban leader in the border regions and the leader said to the reporter that "People in the villages don't side with me, but when a drone attack takes place the whole village is on our side"

It is having adverse effects in Pakistan. Terrorism must be uprooted with the help of these people.

 

[DANGER-ZONE]

Now I would like to have comments from those who defend Drones and others too
@WebMaster @Leader @Aeronaut @nuclearpak @ANTIBODY and others

CRY ME A RIVER STUFF !

Zarvan, its a truth that no drone can fly in Pakistani aerospace without military's permission and Pakistan military is providing assistance to CIA for drone attacks. Drone attacks benefits no other but Pakistan military itself, rest everything is drama that they do to protest against drone attacks.

If it is an obvious insurgent center or post.....you don't need to know everyone's name. When we bombed Ploesti....do you think we would have called it off because we didn't know who one of the gate-guard's grandma was?

 

[Juice]

Where did you find that? I know a few who would pay for that image.

 

[DANGER-ZONE]

Where did you find that? I know a few who would pay for that image.

Google it ....

 

[Frogman]

Any male of military age is a legit target as far as the US is concerned when using its drones. Any collateral is regrettable as they always say but they never seem to understand how much blowback this causes.

 

[Amaa'n]

Zarvan, there is nothing left to comment on. everything is right in front of us. US /nato never bothered with the bombs they dropped off in iraq or afghanistan tosee if any civilians were were killed;i do not see the point here too.
if 5 civilians die just to kill 1 terrorist than it is not collateral damage but terrorism itself

 

[Leader]

Any male of military age is a legit target as far as the US is concerned when using its drones. Any collateral is regrettable as they always say but they never seem to understand how much blowback this causes.

that is not the whole story, often the americans deliberately target civilians to accelerate militancy against Pak army.

 

[Frogman]

that is not the whole story, often the americans deliberately target civilians to accelerate militancy against Pak army.

The Americans are simply not that interested in the region anymore. They invaded Afghan to root out Alqaeda and in were no shape or form interested in nation building as G.W Bush said. Now the invasion of Afghan and sending Alqeada and the Taliban over the border did make the situation worse but we should not forget that Pakistan has contributed to its own troubles by funding both the Taliban and harbouring Alqeada. With American focus shifting towards uranium rich countries (keep an ear to the ground in the coming years for the word Niger) it no longer needs boots on the ground and would much rather fund the Pakistani military and carry out drone strikes. Targeting civilians to accelerate militancy against Pakistan's army would be counterproductive and against the USAs interests.

 

[Argus Panoptes]

that is not the whole story, often the americans deliberately target civilians to accelerate militancy against Pak army.

So the Army operations in Swat and FATA that uprooted tens of thousands of people into camps and then the cleanup operations have no role to play in the militancy of the locals? Of course, it means that we know who we are killing with zero collateral damage, right?

The militancy growing within our country is largely our own doing, not anybody else's fault. The sooner we realize this the better we can deal with it.

 

[Argus Panoptes]

Former drone operator says he's haunted by his part in more than 1,600 deaths - Open Channel

Former drone operator says he's haunted by his part in more than 1,600 deaths
By Richard Engel, Chief Foreign Correspondent, NBC News

A former Air Force drone operator who says he participated in missions that killed more than 1,600 people remembers watching one of the first victims bleed to death.

Brandon Bryant says he was sitting in a chair at a Nevada Air Force base operating the camera when his team fired two missiles from their drone at three men walking down a road halfway around the world in Afghanistan. The missiles hit all three targets, and Bryant says he could see the aftermath on his computer screen – including thermal images of a growing puddle of hot blood.

“The guy that was running forward, he’s missing his right leg,” he recalled. “And I watch this guy bleed out and, I mean, the blood is hot.” As the man died his body grew cold, said Bryant, and his thermal image changed until he became the same color as the ground.

“I can see every little pixel,” said Bryant, who has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, “if I just close my eyes.”

Bryant, now 27, served as a drone operator from 2006 to 2011, at bases in Nevada, New Mexico and in Iraq, guiding unmanned drones over Iraq and Afghanistan and taking part in missions that he was told led to the deaths of an estimated 1,626 individuals.

In an interview with NBC News, he provided a rare first-person glimpse into what it’s like to control the controversial machines that have become central to the U.S. effort to kill terrorists.

He says that as an operator he was troubled by the physical disconnect between his daily routine and the violence and power of the faraway drones. “You don't feel the aircraft turn,” he said. “You don't feel the hum of the engine. You hear the hum of the computers, but that's definitely not the same thing.”

At the same time, the images coming back from the drones were very real and very graphic.

“People say that drone strikes are like mortar attacks,” Bryant said. “Well, artillery doesn't see this. Artillery doesn't see the results of their actions. It's really more intimate for us, because we see everything.”

A self-described “naïve” kid from a small Montana town, Bryant joined the Air Force in 2005 at age 19. After he scored well on tests, he said a recruiter told him that as a drone operator he would be like the smart guys in the control room in a James Bond movie, the ones who feed the agent the information he needs to complete his mission.

He trained for three and a half months before participating in his first drone mission. Bryant operated the drone’s cameras from his perch at Nellis Air Force base in Nevada as the drone rose into the air just north of Baghdad.

Bryant and the rest of his team were supposed to use their drone to provide support and protection to patrolling U.S. troops. But he recalls watching helplessly as insurgents buried an IED in a road and a U.S. Humvee drove over it.

“We had no way to warn the troops,” he said. He later learned that three soldiers died.

And once he had taken part in a kill, any remaining illusions about James Bond disappeared. “Like, this isn’t a videogame,” he said. “This isn’t some sort of fantasy. This is war. People die.”

Bryant said that most of the time he was an operator, he and his team and his commanding officers made a concerted effort to avoid civilian casualties.

But he began to wonder who the enemy targets on the ground were, and whether they really posed a threat. He’s still not certain whether the three men in Afghanistan were really Taliban insurgents or just men with guns in a country where many people carry guns. The men were five miles from American forces arguing with each other when the first missile hit them.

“They (didn’t) seem to be in a hurry,” he recalled. “They (were) just doing their thing. ... They were probably carrying rifles, but I wasn't convinced that they were bad guys.“ But as a 21-year-old airman, said Bryant, he didn’t think he had the standing to ask questions.

He also remembers being convinced that he had seen a child scurry onto his screen during one mission just before a missile struck, despite assurances from others that the figure he’d seen was really a dog.

After participating in hundreds of missions over the years, Bryant said he “lost respect for life” and began to feel like a sociopath. He remembers coming into work in 2010, seeing pictures of targeted individuals on the wall – Anwar al-Awlaki and other al Qaeda and Taliban leaders -- and musing, “Which one of these f_____s is going to die today?”

In 2011, as Bryant’s career as a drone operator neared its end, he said his commander presented him with what amounted to a scorecard. It showed that he had participated in missions that contributed to the deaths of 1,626 people.

“I would’ve been happy if they never even showed me the piece of paper,” he said. “I've seen American soldiers die, innocent people die, and insurgents die. And it's not pretty. It's not something that I want to have -- this diploma.”

Now that he’s out of the Air Force and back home in Montana, Bryant said he doesn’t want to think about how many people on that list might’ve been innocent: “It’s too heartbreaking.”

The Veterans Administration diagnosed him with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, for which he has undergone counseling. He says his PTSD has manifested itself as anger, sleeplessness and blackout drinking.

“I don’t feel like I can really interact with that average, everyday person,” he said. “I get too frustrated, because A) they don't realize what's going on over there. And B) they don't care.”

He’s also reluctant to tell the people in his personal life what he was doing for five years. When he told a woman he was seeing that he’d been a drone operator, and contributed to the deaths of a large number of people, she cut him off. “She looked at me like I was a monster,” he said. “And she never wanted to touch me again.”

 

[Beerbal]

Did ISI knew???

We all know many times ISI gave input to CIA...

 

[ajpirzada]

very nice article. just shows how speculative these signature strikes can be and what kind of havoc they have wrecked in our tribal areas. that example of CIA confusing a tribal gathering with those of militants by matching the behavior pattern shows the exact problem which lies with it. majority of the tribal people carry weapons. so whenever they gather together, they'll show a 'militant' like behavior. and wats even awesome is that once dubbed as combatant, you r most likely to not be taken out of this list. in other words, there is no official followup on who got killed in the supposed strike on 'combatants.' which means that there is no accountability with respect to if the 'other militants' were really militants or not.

taliban kill people because to them people depict non-believers' type behavior. and the CIA kills bec people depict taliban type behavior. infact this whole thing should be dubbed as 'signature warfare.' Awesome!!!!!

 

[Argus Panoptes]

very nice article. just shows how speculative these signature strikes can be and what kind of havoc they have wrecked in our tribal areas. that example of CIA confusing a tribal gathering with those of militants by matching the behavior pattern shows the exact problem which lies with it. majority of the tribal people carry weapons. so whenever they gather together, they'll show a 'militant' like behavior. and wats even awesome is that once dubbed as combatant, you r most likely to not be taken out of this list. in other words, there is no official followup on who got killed in the supposed strike on 'combatants.' which means that there is no accountability with respect to if the 'other militants' were really militants or not.

taliban kill people because to them people depict non-believers' type behavior. and the CIA kills bec people depict taliban type behavior. infact this whole thing should be dubbed as 'signature warfare.' Awesome!!!!!

That is a very good analysis Sir. At the same time, we should also be having such a debate over own tactics in our country presently being employed by our armed forces just as USA is having in their country over these types of tactics.