The Assassination Complex; Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016. First Simon & Schuster Hardcover Edition [stated]. First printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xviii, [1], 234, [1] pages. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Documents. Glossary. Index. Decorative endpapers. Foreword by Edward Snowden. Afterword by Glenn Greenwald. Jeremy Scahill (born 1974) is an American investigative journalist, writer, a founding editor of the online news publication The Intercept, and author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, which won the George Polk Book Award. His book Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield was published by Nation Books on April 23, 2013. On June 8, 2013, the documentary film of the same name, produced, narrated and co-written by Scahill, was released. It premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Scahill is a Fellow at the Type Media Center. Scahill learned journalism and started his career on the independently syndicated daily news show Democracy Now!. The Intercept is an online American nonprofit news organization that publishes articles and podcasts. The Intercept has published in English since its founding in 2014, and in Portuguese since the 2016 launch of the Brazilian edition staffed by a local team of Brazilian journalists. The Intercept was founded by Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and Laura Poitras. It was launched in 2014 by First Look Media with funding by co-founder Pierre Omidyar. The publication reported on documents released by Edward Snowden. Co-founders Greenwald and Poitras subsequently left amid public disagreements about the leadership and direction of the organization. In January 2023 it spun off from the First Look Institute as an independent nonprofit organization. Major revelations about the US government's drone program, bestselling author Jeremy Scahill and his colleagues at the investigative website The Intercept expose stunning new details about America's secret assassination policy. When the US government discusses drone strikes publicly, it offers assurances that such operations are a more precise alternative to troops on the ground and are authorized only when an imminent threat is present and there is near certainty that the intended target will be killed. The implicit message on drone strikes from the Obama administration has been trust, but don't verify. The online magazine The Intercept exploded this secrecy when it obtained a cache of secret slides that provide a window into the inner workings of the US military's kill/capture operations in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Whether through the use of drones, night raids, or new platforms yet to be employed, these documents show assassination to be central to US counterterrorism policy. The classified documents reveal that Washington's fourteen-year targeted killing campaign suffers from an over reliance on flawed signals intelligence, an apparently incalculable civilian toll, and an inability to extract potentially valuable intelligence from terror suspects. This campaign, carried out by two presidents through four presidential terms, has been deliberately obscured from the public and insulated from democratic debate. The Assassination Complex allows us to understand at last the circumstances under which the US government grants itself the right to sentence individuals to death without the established checks and balances of arrest, trial, and appeal. The book will include original contributions from Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden. Derived from a Kirkus review: In this angry but well-documented work, journalist Scahill and his colleagues at the Intercept add to a growing genre that denounces our leaders' fascination with a seemingly risk-free way to kill terrorists. Benefitting from a number of leaks, secret documents, and interviews with officials on the promise of anonymity, this collection of articles from 2014-2015 describes how the American government tracks suspected terrorists, builds a kill list, rates the priority of the target, and plans and executes the attack. It's a clunky process entirely dependent on informers, secondhand intelligence, and electronic eavesdropping, since drone cameras cannot identify individuals. No one gets off the hook, but the authors reserve special disdain for President Barack Obama, who, ignoring his admirable 2008 campaign rhetoric, has enthusiastically adopted "the defining essence of the Bush-Cheney template—that the U.S. is fighting an endless war against terror suspects who have no due process of any kind." The missiles kill terrorists if they happen to be present, but that is not always the case. It's increasingly dangerous to be a terrorist, but since when has danger discouraged angry, disaffected young men? The Islamic State group and al-Qaida have no shortage of recruits. Furthermore, as Edward Snowden writes in the foreword, "a single act of whistle blowing doesn't change the reality that there are significant portions of the government that operate below the waterline, beneath the visibility of the public. Those secret activities will continue, despite reforms." Unlikely to influence U.S. leaders because the electorate largely approves of drone warfare.