The anonymous whistleblower, who has already been labelled as the new ‘Edward Snowden’ on social media, said he/she is leaking the information to the public as they have a right to know about the process by which people are placed on ‘kill lists’ and “ultimately assassinated on orders from the highest echelons of the US government.” The whistleblower has leaked confidential information about the US drone program and its targets to the investigative news website The Intercept. The leaked information reveals the inner workings of the secret US drone program in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. The whistleblower told The Intercept: “This outrageous explosion of watchlisting — of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield — it was, from the very first instance, wrong.” The leaked papers which have been published by The Intercept show how the US military carried out drone strikes even if there was insufficient and unreliable intelligence about the same. The documents reveal that in Afghanistan, US drone strikes on 35 targets killed at least 219 unidentified civilians. “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. 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 documents, slides and analysis were posted on the website on Thursday as ‘The Drone Papers‘.
