Rachel Maddow - Drift

The UAE meanwhile went on record saying they’d only built the airstrip. Emirati sheiks and others used it for “recreational purposes.” What “recreation” the CIA was pursuing there, the Emiratis couldn’t say. Shamsi, they assured the world, “was never operated or controlled by the UAE.”

And so we still had our drone base in Shamsi, and no skittish ally had to take the blame for having handed it over to us. Even after the bin Laden raid and the Pakistani freak-out, America stepped up the already furious pace of the drone attacks, executing twenty-one multiple-kill sorties in the next two months (as many as three in one day), though nobody in the US government would say where the unmanned flights originated. “A U.S. military official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, said there are presently no U.S. military personnel at Shamsi,” the Associated Press reported. “But he could not speak for the CIA or contractors used by any other U.S. agencies. The CIA rarely discusses the covert drone program.”

When reports surfaced that all US operatives finally packed up and left Shamsi about six months later, at the end of 2011, the official word from our government was still… no comment. “If the agency did have such a [covert drone] program,” the Obama administration’s counterterrorism czar told a forum at the president’s alma mater, Harvard Law School, in the fall of 2011, “I’m sure it would be done with the utmost care, precision, in accordance with the law and our values.” Wink-wink. The audience chortled knowingly.

“While we don’t discuss the details of our counterterrorism operations,” a CIA spokeswoman told the Washington Post , “the fact that they are a top priority and effective is precisely what the American people expect.”

By the time the weird Shamsi who’s-on-first disavowal filtered out to the public, there had already been a good bit of reporting on the CIA drones. Thanks to reporters like Jane Mayer at The New Yorker , James Risen and Mark Mazzetti at the New York Times , and Greg Miller and Julie Tate at the Washington Post , the outlines of the program were a fairly open secret. In 2011, the United States had hundreds of armed drones, a few in the air at all times, many of them attached to the CIA, and many of those based at hidden airfields, where America is not permitted by the host country to keep permanent combat troops on the ground. No problem: the drones there were guarded, maintained, and loaded with bombs by, you guessed it, private contractors from companies like the one that used to be called Blackwater, until they committed enough murder and mayhem and overbilling in America’s post-9/11 wars that they had to change their name twice , first to Xe (pronounced “ze,” but let’s all pronounce it “she,” just to annoy them) and then to the comparatively drab Academi. Blackwater ops also provided assistance on the ground with intelligence-gathering and targeting for the drone sorties.

When one of those Blackwater-armed drones takes off with a specific target location programmed into its hard drive, it is operated remotely by a CIA-paid “pilot” on-site, in a setup that looks like a rich teenager’s video-game lair: a big computer tower (a Dell, according to some reporting), a couple of keyboards, a bunch of monitors, a roller-ball mouse (gotta guard against carpal tunnel syndrome), a board of switches on a virtual flight console, and, of course, a joystick. Once the drone is airborne and on its way to the target, the local pilot turns control over to a fellow pilot at a much niftier video-game room at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The “pilot,” sitting in air-conditioned comfort in suburban Virginia, homes the drone in on its quarry somewhere in, say, North Waziristan. Watching the live video feed from the drone’s infrared heat–sensitive cameras on big to-die-for-on-Super-Bowl-Sunday flat-screen monitors, the pilot and a team of CIA analysts start to make what then CIA chief Leon Panetta liked to call “life-and-death decisions.” Maybe not sporting, but certainly effective.

The CIA’s joystick jockey and his copilots, according to Mayer, “can turn the plane, zoom in on the landscape below, and decide whether to lock on to a target. A stream of additional ‘signal’ intelligence, sent to Langley by the National Security Agency, provides electronic means of corroborating that a target has been correctly identified. The White House has delegated trigger authority to C.I.A. officials, including the head of the Counter-Terrorist Center, whose identity remains veiled from the public because the agency has placed him under cover.”

By design, everything the CIA does is at least partially occluded from public view, but there’s a bit more reportable detail about the drones we do admit to, the ones operated by the US military. The Air Force joystick operators show up at their virtual consoles in actual flight suits; they call the video feed there Death TV, and they have a name for the Pakistanis on the ground who make a run for it when they see the drone approach: “squirters.”

The military drone warriors have also insisted they adhere to strict rules of engagement. “Some people are approved for killing on sight,” Mayer wrote in The New Yorker . “For others additional permission is needed. A target’s location enters the equation, too. If a school, or hospital, or mosque is within the likely blast radius of the missile, that, too, is weighted by a computer algorithm before a lethal strike is authorized.” The algorithm apparently provides the acceptable number of innocent civilian “squirters” for any given high-value “squirter.”

The CIA’s Counterterrorism Center remains buttoned-up about its clandestine drone program. Nobody knows if their “pilots” dress themselves up in flight suits too. If they are constrained by any rules or civilian-casualty-ratio algorithms, they aren’t saying. But we do know that one out of every five CIA analysts is now assigned to the mission of hunting terrorism suspects, and that the agency has upgraded “targeting” to an official and nicely euphemistic in-house career track. The CIA’s fundamental mission is still supposedly spying—providing information about the world to the president. So it used to be when the agency missed something truly significant—like, say, the fall of the Soviet Union—there was lamentation and hand wringing about what exactly we had them for anyway, if they couldn’t see something like that coming. Now the CIA can be caught totally unaware by something like the world-transforming Arab Spring movement, and… who cares! We’re just psyched we got bin Laden.

The transformation of America’s spy service into a new, out-of-uniform (and 100 percent deniable) branch of the military is a big decision for us as a country, but for our new assassin corps—long saddled with the effete managerial identity of “the intelligence community”—it’s been like a shot of testosterone. They have trigger authority! They are the Assassins of the Air! “You’ve taken an agency that was chugging along and turned it into one hell of a killing machine,” an anonymous (they’re always anonymous) former intelligence official exclaimed to the Washington Post before thinking better of it. “Instead say, ‘one hell of an operational tool.’ ”

“We are killing these sons of bitches faster than they can grow them now,” the CIA counterterrorism chief reportedly boasted. Flight suits or no, they have become a bona fide, full-fledged, and very busy US military resource, by another name. Those Washington Post reporters summed up their investigation of the secret drone war like this: “The CIA now functions as a military force beyond the accountability that the United States has historically demanded of its armed services. The CIA doesn’t officially acknowledge the drone program, let alone provide public explanation about who shoots and who dies, and by what rules.”