The Obama administration has become "over-reliant" on using unmanned military drones in killing suspected terrorists, with the military officers and pilots guiding the drones seeing themselves as having "godlike powers,'' according to new classified documents uncovered and published by the Intercept recently.
The documents, which detailed among others the death of 200 people in Afghanistan airstrikes between January 2012 and February 2013, provide details on how innocent civilians became casualties of US military drone strikes. Of the reported deaths, it was found out that only 35 people were the intended targets, WND said.
Citing a source, WND said because of the Obama administration's "over-reliance" on killing suspected terrorists instead of capturing them, many innocent civilian lives have been lost in drone strikes.
"You're relying on the fact that you do have all these very powerful machines, capable of collecting extraordinary amounts of data and information, which can lead personnel involved in targeted killings to believe they have "godlike powers," the source said. "Anyone caught in the vicinity is guilty by association.''
One of the drone strikes that successfully hit its target was the one tasked to kill Anwar al-Awlaki, the American cleric who rose to prominence with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, according to WND. He was killed during a drone strike using Hellfire missile after he and his associates were done eating breakfast northeast of Sana'a on Sept. 30, 2011.
The source also said the death of innocent civilians in drone strikes are often a result of "unreliable signals intelligence or SIGINT.''
"It's stunning the number of instances when selectors are misattributed to certain people. And it isn't until several months or years later that you all of a sudden realise that the entire time you thought you were going after this really hot target, you wind up realising it was his mother's phone the whole time," the source added, according to WND.
Intercept's source described how the drone teams often enjoy utilising the machine and believing this made things easier to kill people.
"The military is easily capable of adapting to change, but they don't like to stop anything they feel is making their lives easier, or is to their benefit,'' the source said.
"And this certainly is, in their eyes, a very quick, clean way of doing things. It's a very slick, efficient way to conduct the war, without having to have the massive ground invasion mistakes of Iraq and Afghanistan. But at this point, they have become so addicted to this machine, to this way of doing business, that it seems like it's going to become harder and harder to pull them away from it the longer they're allowed to continue operating in this way," the source said.
The Pentagon, White House, and Special Operations Command all declined to comment about the new documents, WND said.
