The Drone Papers

Jeremy Scahill, Josh Begley, Cora Currier, Ryan Devereaux, Peter Maass, Ryan Gallagher, and Nick Turse, The Drone Papers. The Intercept, 15 October 2015. Eight-part series. “The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The documents, provided by a whistleblower, offer an unprecedented glimpse into Obama’s drone wars…. The articles in The Drone Papers were produced by a team of reporters and researchers from The Intercept that has spent months analyzing the documents. The series is intended to serve as a long-overdue public examination of the methods and outcomes of America’s assassination program. This campaign, carried out by two presidents through four presidential terms, has been shrouded in excessive secrecy. The public has a right to see these documents not only to engage in an informed debate about the future of U.S. wars, both overt and covert, but also to understand the circumstances under which the U.S. government arrogates to itself the right to sentence individuals to death without the established checks and balances of arrest, trial, and appeal.” Eight-part series. [Read more…]

The Unblinking Stare: The drone war in Pakistan

Steve Coll, The Unblinking Stare: The drone war in Pakistan. The New Yorker, 24 November 2014. “At the Pearl Continental Hotel, in Peshawar, a concrete tower enveloped by flowering gardens, the management has adopted security precautions that have become common in Pakistan’s upscale hospitality industry: razor wire, vehicle barricades, and police crouching in bunkers, fingering machine guns. In June, on a hot weekday morning, Noor Behram arrived at the gate carrying a white plastic shopping bag full of photographs. He had a four-inch black beard and wore a blue shalwar kameez and a flat Chitrali hat. He met me in the lobby. We sat down, and Behram spilled his photos onto a table. Some of the prints were curled and faded. For the past seven years, he said, he has driven around North Waziristan on a small red Honda motorcycle, visiting the sites of American drone missile strikes as soon after an attack as possible…. He has been documenting the drone attacks for the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, a Pakistani nonprofit that is seeking redress for civilian casualties…. [H]e has photographed about a hundred…sites in North Waziristan, creating a partial record of the dead, the wounded, and their detritus. Many of the faces before us were young. Behram said he learned from conversations with editors and other journalists that if a drone missile killed an innocent adult male civilian, such as a vegetable vender or a fruit seller, the victim’s long hair and beard would be enough to stereotype him as a militant. So he decided to focus on children.”

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The Black Sites: A rare look inside the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program

Jane Mayer, The Black Sites: A rare look inside the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation programThe New Yorker, 13 August 2007. After 11 September 2001 a secret C.I.A. program was started “in which terrorist suspects…were detained in ‘black sites’–secret prisons outside the United States–and subjected to unusually harsh treatment.” [Read more…]

Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Warrants

James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts. The New York Times, 16 December 2005. “Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.” James Risen and Eric Lichtblau won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for their stories on warrantless domestic eavesdropping.

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CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons

Dana Priest, CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons. The Washington Post, 2 November 2005. “Debate Is Growing Within [the CIA] About Legality and Morality of Overseas System Set Up After 9/11.” Dana Priest won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting for her stories on the CIA and the “War on Terror.”

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