Drone Whistleblower Reveals America's Ongoing Assassination Complex

For a country that bases its domestic and international protocols on fighting terrorism, the United States has been stooping to our enemy’s level for quite some time, under the cloak of national security, of course.

In January 2015, two Al-Qaeda hostages—one American and one Italian—were killed in a U.S. counterterrorism drone strike operation in Pakistan. You can watch the full report here:

Today, a "cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings" of Obama's drone program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia was published on The Intercept.

The multimedia masterpiece is called The Drone Papers , and it peels back the curtain on America's ongoing assassination complex, what our Military-Industrial Complex has graduated to around the world.

So where’d the facts come from?

A crafty whistleblower watched what happened to Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and John Kiriakou and learned it was wise to do the opposite by not taking credit for the disclosure.

He (or she) smartly decided to remain an anonymous source, as disclosing highly classified files to the citizens of the United States isn’t viewed as an act of patriotism by our government officials.

After going public with The Drone Papers, Jeremy Scahill, the independent journalist and co-founder of The Intercept, summed up the findings: "Drones are a tool, not a policy. The policy is assassination."

This comes at the same time as a report from the Associated Press, which puts our endless war mongering into perspective: American analysts did know the Doctors without Borders facility in Kunduz, Afghanistan was a hospital.

The Associated Press reports that we bombed a hospital, murdered innocent people (12 hospital staff members and 10 patients), all to allegedly kill one Pakistani Taliban operative, and yes, we knew what we were doing when we had our finger on the kill switch.

You know what makes that even harder to swallow? “No evidence has surfaced publicly suggesting a Pakistani died in the attack,” according to the Associated Press.

It is definitely worth reading The Drone Papers in their entirety to see how many times we get it wrong, cover it up, and get it wrong again, without any remorse. Here’s some highlights from the primary sources, all classified, now readily available to the public:

• The White House and Pentagon boast that the targeted killing program is precise and that civilian deaths are minimal. However, documents detailing a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets.

• During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets.

• According to one secret slide, as of June 2012, there were 16 people in Yemen whom President Obama had authorized U.S. special operations forces to assassinate. In Somalia, there were four. The statistics contained in the documents appear to refer only to targets approved under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, not CIA operations. In 2012 alone, according to data compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, there were more than 200 people killed in operations in Yemen and between four and eight in Somalia.

What do you think? Is bombing a hospital an act of terrorism? Is killing innocent people who are “in the way” an act of terrorism? Is the United States practicing terrorism through Obama’s Assassination Complex? Sound off below!