Fear and War

"Beyond the political consequences, the drone program also imposes severe bureaucratic costs. Within the U.S. Intelligence Community, various lethal targeting programs are heavily classified, compartmented, and SAPed — meaning, they are mostly closed off from each other. This is one reason why the CIA and JSOC maintain separate, non-overlapping kill lists in Yemen. It also means it is practically impossible for anyone, in any position including the top of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to exercise proper oversight over the program. In other words, we have created an unaccountable killing machine operating at an industrial scale, to borrow CNAS President John Nagl’s phrasing."

—

Joshua Foust on our drone program

Really good article. He also mentions how contractors have a financial incentive to review as many people for killing as possible. We’ve incentivized death. He also raises the possibility that the drone program is so destabilizing Yemen it may end up going like Iran, as in the president is kicked out and a hostile to the US government takes its place.

‘Saleh Played Us’: US Sees 2010 Attack as Trick to Assassinate Rival

With long-time Yemeni dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh headed to the US for medical treatment, top US military officials are coming forward with claims that they “got played” by Saleh in the 2010 assassination of an up-and-coming political rival.

The attack, launched in late May of 2010, killed Deputy Governor Jaber al-Shabwani, a member of one of the most powerful tribes in central Yemen, was initially called a Yemeni strike but later revealed to be a US missile attack.

The central government had ordered Shabwani to the site ahead of the attack, supposedly to meet a member of an al-Qaeda auxiliary to negotiate a surrender. The US strike killed him and three of his traveling companions.

And according to US officials, the attack was conducted entirely on the basis of Saleh’s say-so, with the Yemeni government providing all the intelligence on the ground claiming the site was a large clandestine al-Qaeda meeting.