Courtesy of Mish.
Last October, Glenn Greenwald (who broke the NSA spy story on the Guardian), Jeremy Scahill, and Laura Poitras announced plans to setup an independent news agency.
Part of their rationale for creating an independent news agency is the ongoing war on journalists (See 4th and 1st Amendments Under Fire; “Everyone Spies” a Favorite Cry of US Apologists; War Against Journalists; “We Hit the Jackpot”)
Today I am pleased to report their website, The Intercept is now up and running. As their first article, Greenwald, Scahill, and Poitras say Welcome to The Intercept.
Their central mission is to hold the most powerful governmental and corporate factions accountable.
The second Intercept article, NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program by Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald documents the NSA’s use of highly unreliable methods to target individuals around the world for assassinations by drone, resulting in the deaths of innocent people.
Here are a some snips from the lengthy, well-written article.
The National Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes – an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people.
According to a former drone operator for the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) who also worked with the NSA, the agency often identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and cell-phone tracking technologies. Rather than confirming a target’s identity with operatives or informants on the ground, the CIA or the U.S. military then orders a strike based on the activity and location of the mobile phone a person is believed to be using.
The drone operator, who agreed to discuss the top-secret programs on the condition of anonymity, was a member of JSOC’s High Value Targeting task force, which is charged with identifying, capturing or killing terrorist suspects in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Some top Taliban leaders, knowing of the NSA’s targeting method, have purposely and randomly distributed SIM cards among their units in order to elude their trackers. “They would do things like go to meetings, take all their SIM cards out, put them in a bag, mix them up, and everybody gets a different SIM card when they leave,” the former drone operator says. “That’s how they confuse us.”
“Once the bomb lands or a night raid happens, you know that phone is there,” he [the drone operator] says. “But we don’t know who’s behind it, who’s holding it. It’s of course assumed that the phone belongs to a human being who is nefarious and considered an ‘unlawful enemy combatant.’ This is where it gets very shady.”
The former drone operator also says that he personally participated in drone strikes where the identity of the target was known, but other unknown people nearby were also killed.
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