The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

by Jeremy Scahill, The Staff of The Intercept

Overview

“A searing, facts-driven indictment of America’s drone wars and their implications for US democracy and foreign policy. A must-read for concerned citizens” (Library Journal, starred review) from bestselling author Jeremy Scahill and his colleagues at the investigative website The Intercept.

Drones are a tool, not a policy. The policy is assassination. But drone strikes often kill people other than the intended target. These deaths, which have included women and children, dwarf the number of actual combatants who have been assassinated by drones. They have generated anger toward the United States among foreign populations and have even become a recruiting tool for jihadists.

The first drone strike outside a declared war zone was conducted more than twelve years ago, but it was not until May 2013 that the White House released a set of standards and procedures for conducting such strikes. However, there was no explanation of the internal process used to determine whether a suspect should be killed without being indicted or tried, even if that suspect is an American citizen. The implicit message of the Obama administration has been: Trust, but don’t verify.

The Assassination Complex reveals stunning details of the government’s secretive drone warfare program based on documents supplied by a confidential source in the intelligence community. These documents make it possible to begin the long-overdue debate about the policy of drone warfare and how it is conducted. The Assassination Complex allows us to understand at last the circumstances under which the US government grants itself the right to sentence individuals to death without the established checks and balances of arrest, trial, and appeal—“readers will be left in no doubt that drone warfare affronts morality and the Constitution” (Kirkus Reviews).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501144158
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	05/03/2016
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	224,995
File size:	23 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Jeremy Scahill is one of the three founding editors of The Intercept. He is an investigative reporter, war correspondent, and author of the international bestselling books Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield and Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. Scahill has served as the national security correspondent for The Nation and Democracy Now! and was twice awarded the prestigious George Polk Award. Scahill is a producer and writer of the award-winning film Dirty Wars, which premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award.

Table of Contents

Preface Betsy Reed ix

Foreword: Elected By Circumstance Edward Snowden xi

The Drone Legacy Jeremy Scahill 1

Death and the Watchlist Jeremy Scahill Ryan Devereaux 14

Why I Leaked the Matchlist Documents Anonymous 36

Find, Fix, Finish Jeremy Scahill 40

The Kill Chain Cora Currier 54

The Heart of the Drone Haze Jereny Scahill 68

Target Africa Nick Turse 84

Death By Metadata Jereny Scahill Glenn Greenwald 94

Firing Blind Cora Currier Peter Maass 108

Stingrays at Home Jeremy Schill Margot Williams 122

The Life and Death of Objective Peckham Ryan Gallagher 134

Manhunting in the Hindu Kusn Ryan Devereaux 152

Afterword: War Without End Glenn Greenwald 179

Acknowledgments 189

The Documents 191

Notes 193

Glossary 213

Contributors 219

About the Intercept and First Look Media 221

Image Credits 223

Index 225

Editorial Reviews

05/02/2016
According to this scattershot exposé from the Intercept, the drone strikes conducted by the U.S. military and CIA in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia are a fiasco marred by targeting mistakes, heavy civilian casualties, and infringements of civil liberties. Relying on leaked intelligence documents and interviews with a drone operator and other informants, Scahill, Glenn Greenwald, and other Intercept journalists (plus whistle-blower Edward Snowden, who contributes a foreword) paint the drone program as a contradictory mix of all-seeing surveillance, blinkered error, and indiscriminate killing. Drones track cell phones and SIM cards based on often vague or mistaken information that the people carrying them are terrorists, and the ensuing Hellfire missiles usually kill people—hundreds of them, altogether—other than intended targets. Meanwhile, the authors argue, cell phone surveillance and promiscuous terrorist watch lists have spilled over into domestic American policing. The authors provide a fragmented rundown of the drone strike "kill chain" of command up to the Oval Office—Greenwald denounces President Obama for betraying liberal principles by expanding drone strikes—and include vignettes about innocents killed by drones. There's nothing revelatory here—the drone assassinations and their problems are well-known—but this pointillistic portrait provides illuminating new detail and insight. Photos. Agent: Anthony Arnove, Roam Agency. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"A searing indictment of the U.S. drone program."

Foreign Affairs - Lawrence D. Freedman

★ 05/15/2016
"Drones are a tool, not a policy. The policy is assassination." With this hard-hitting line, Scahill (Blackwater) and the staff of The Intercept confront the Obama presidency's escalation of drone strikes to kill supposed terrorists, including American and British citizens. According to Scahill, the drone campaigns are unconstitutional and counterproductive, as the strikes destroy valuable human intelligence, inflict civilian casualties, and make enemies of local Yemenis and Afghans. Chapters are based on the Drone Papers, a trove of U.S. intelligence documents leaked to The Intercept in 2015. These documents demonstrate that attacks target supposed terrorists' cell phone signals, commonly inflicting "death by unreliable metadata." Elegant data visualizations illustrate these revelations, also accompanied by striking design elements such as stylized pairs of eyes that peep whimsically from the margins of pages about the surveillance state. Whistle-blower Edward Snowden wrote the foreword and journalist Glenn Greenwald the afterword—need we say more? VERDICT While very much a work of the moment, this account delivers a searing, facts-driven indictment of America's drone wars and their implications for U.S. democracy and foreign policy. A must-read for concerned citizens.—Michael Rodriguez, Hodges Univ. Lib., Naples, FL

Library Journal

2016-04-13
In this angry but well-documented polemic, journalist Scahill (Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, 2013, etc.) and his colleagues at the Intercept add to a growing genre that denounces our leaders' fascination with a cheap, seemingly risk-free way to kill terrorists. Benefitting from an amazing number of leaks, secret documents, and interviews with officials on the promise of anonymity, this collection of articles from 2014-2015 describes how the American government tracks suspected terrorists, builds a kill list, rates the priority of the target (often literally from "1" to "4"), and plans and executes the attack. It's a spectacularly clunky process entirely dependent on informers, secondhand intelligence, and electronic eavesdropping, since drone cameras cannot identify individuals. Woe to the Afghan mother who borrows her son's cellphone. No one gets off the hook, but the authors reserve special disdain for President Barack Obama, who, ignoring his admirable 2008 campaign rhetoric, has enthusiastically adopted "the defining essence of the Bush-Cheney template—that the U.S. is fighting an endless war against terror suspects who have no due process of any kind." Readers will be left in no doubt that drone warfare affronts morality and the Constitution. The missiles kill terrorists if they happen to be present, but that is not always the case. It's increasingly dangerous to be a terrorist, but since when has danger discouraged angry, disaffected young men? The Islamic State group and al-Qaida have no shortage of recruits. Furthermore, as Edward Snowden writes in the foreword, "a single act of whistleblowing doesn't change the reality that there are significant portions of the government that operate below the waterline, beneath the visibility of the public. Those secret activities will continue, despite reforms." Convincing and damning but unlikely to influence U.S. leaders because the electorate largely approves of drone warfare. Apparently killing terrorists takes priority over legal niceties or the deaths of innocent non-Americans.

Kirkus Reviews