Brian Williams - Predators

Former C.I.A. officials say there is a rigorous protocol for identifying militants, using video from the Predators, intercepted cell phone calls and tips from Pakistani intelligence, often originating with militants’ resentful neighbors. Operators at C.I.A. headquarters can use the drones’ video feed to study a militant’s identity and follow fighters to training areas or weapons caches, officials say. Targeters often can see where wives and children are located in a compound or wait until fighters drive away from a house or village before they are hit. 89

According to the Los Angeles Times , in some cases drones conduct surveillance for “days” to gather the “evidence that justifies firing a missile.” The report went on to say, “One former official directly involved in the program said many locations were watched so closely that the CIA could predict daily routines. ‘Is the white van there yet?’ the official said, giving an example of the degree of scrutiny. ‘Is he walking with a limp?’” 90

There are additional safeguards in place as well. First, the CIA’s Covert Action Review Group leads a debate on the “kill”; then, the target is passed to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. The CIA drones cannot fire unless their pilots receive final approval from the CIA director or his deputy. 91Describing former CIA chief Leon Panetta’s direct involvement in the strikes, one senior intelligence official said, “He asks a lot of questions about the target, the intelligence picture, potential collateral damage, women and children in the vicinity.” For his part, Panetta claimed this oversight meant that the drones were “very precise” and “very limited in terms of collateral damage.” 92Panetta also said, “You know, as a Catholic, I remember when I first became director of the C.I.A., and realized that I was making life-and-death decisions—with regards to our operations. It doesn’t come lightly…. Frankly, we made very clear that if there were any women or children that were involved that we would not take a shot. That became a rule that we abided by.” 93

In a rare discussion of the topic, President Obama similarly said, “We are very careful in terms of how it’s applied. It is very important for everybody to understand that it’s kept on a tight leash.” 94Obama further stated in September 2012, “We will not engage in operations if we think there’s going to be civilian casualties involved.” 95The Los Angeles Times reported that House and Senate intelligence committee members monitor the strikes and are informed about them. One Democrat member of the committee said of the process, “If the American people were sitting in the room, they would feel comfortable that it was being done in a responsible way.” 96Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, who has played a key and often restraining role in the drone strikes, stressed during his February 2013 hearing testimony that the drones are used only “as a last resort to save lives when there is no alternative.” 97Although Brennan has been dubbed the “assassination czar” by his critics for his involvement in the drone campaign, insiders at the CIA consider him to be “a rein, a constrainer. He is using his intimate knowledge of intelligence and the process to pick apart their arguments that might be expansionary.” 98

Other reports have said that the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan must approve drone hits to make sure there is no political fallout from a strike and that this has even led to clashes between the CIA station chief in Islamabad and the ambassador. 99In order to carry out a strike, there must be two forms of supporting intelligence, for example, a radio intercept, a report by a spy, or a visual from a drone. If these steps were not enough, CIA lawyers must also sign off on all HVTs who are on a hit list. Newsweek described a typical precision drone attack on an enemy HVT that was approved by CIA lawyer John Rizzo:

It was an ordinary-looking room located in an office building in northern Virginia. The place was filled with computer monitors, keyboards, and maps. Someone sat at a desk with his hand on a joystick. John A. Rizzo, who was serving as the CIA’s acting general counsel, hovered nearby, along with other people from the agency. Together they watched images on a screen that showed a man and his family traveling down a road thousands of miles away. The vehicle slowed down, and the man climbed out.

A moment later, an explosion filled the screen, and the man was dead. “It was very businesslike,” says Rizzo. An aerial drone had killed the man, a high-level terrorism suspect, after he had gotten out of the vehicle, while members of his family were spared. “The agency was very punctilious about this,” Rizzo says. “They tried to minimize collateral damage, especially women and children.” 100

Another official described an incident wherein a drone pilot was able to divert a guided missile from an intended target at the last minute to save civilians: “In one recent strike, an official said, after the drone operator fired a missile at militants in a car and a noncombatant suddenly appeared nearby, the operator was able to divert the missile harmlessly into open territory, hitting the car minutes later when the civilian was gone.” 101

An Esquire magazine journalist who was embedded with a drone crew in Afghanistan similarly reported,

In preparation for raids or missile strikes, crews sometimes loiter over an area for weeks, building video dossiers….

If they’re tracking an individual, as they often will for days or weeks, they know when he goes to work, where he stops for tea, and whom he talks to along the way. Though civilians do die in some of the missile strikes, this ability to linger can do much to limit unintended deaths. If women and children or the unlucky neighbor is nearby, the plane can wait, and wait, without losing sight. 102

Such safeguards have prevented civilian deaths from being higher, according to the Los Angeles Times . In an article titled “CIA May Be Avoiding Civilian Deaths,” the Los Angeles Times reported that the CIA had passed up a chance to kill Sirajuddin Haqqani, the son and heir to the notorious Afghan Taliban terrorist Jalaluddin Haqqani, in 2010 because there was an unacceptably large number of civilian women and children near him when a drone spotted him. 103

But bureaucratic safeguards and unprecedented ability to covertly monitor potential targets from afar for hours at a time using high-resolution optics are not the only explanation for the low civilian death toll. In September 2010 the Washington Post reported that the CIA had begun to run a program from bases in the border region of Pakistan from which they controlled spies in the FATA. The CIA had set up counterterrorist pursuit teams made up of Afghan and Pakistani Pashtuns who ranged beyond the borders of Afghanistan into the FATA, hunting Taliban and al Qaeda militants. 104These spies reported the whereabouts of the militants to CIA drones, which then took them out.

A Pakistani journalist quoted at the time had some interesting insights into how the CIA had begun to choose its targets with the use of local spies and surveillance: “They [the locals] see traffic coming and going from the fortress homes of tribal leaders associated with foreign elements, and they pass the information along. Some quick surveillance is done, and then someone pops a couple of hundred-pound bombs at the house.” 105

In his book Obama’s Wars , Bob Woodward wrote of the importance of these spies in his discussion of the transfer of power from Bush to Obama in 2008–2009:

But, he [President Bush] said, the real breakthrough had been with human sources. That is what President Bush wanted to protect at all costs. The drones were basically flying high-resolution video cameras armed with missiles. The only meaningful way to point a drone towards a target was to have spies on the ground telling the CIA where to look, hunt and kill. Without spies, the video feed from the Predator might as well be a blank television screen.