Disposition matrix
The disposition matrix is a list of subjects to be executed, kept by the CIA. This is kept up to date.
basis
The creation of the Disposition Matrix database is part of an effort by White House Counter Terrorism Advisor John O. Brennan to codify the targeted killing policies developed by President Barack Obama . Under the George W. Bush administration , Brennan served as the top assistant to CIA Director George Tenet , where he defended the use of extraordinary rendition, increased interrogation and torture by definition by international standards. Brennan's association with the CIA's interrogation program was controversial, forcing him to withdraw his candidacy to head the CIA or national intelligence in 2008.
According to the New York Times , Brennan was the "main coordinator" of the US murder lists. Former Obama administrator Daniel Benjamin has stated that Brennan "has probably had more power and influence over the past 20 years than anyone in a comparable position."
The creation of the database also went hand in hand with an expansion of the drone fleet, making the CIA a "paramilitary force," according to the Washington Post . It is linked to increased Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) operations in Africa and increased JSOC involvement in the formation of kill lists. The database originally has separate but overlapping kill lists maintained by both the JSOC and the CIA, and was originally proposed by Michael Leiter, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC).
scope
The disposition matrix database catalogs the biographies, locations, employees and affiliations of suspects. It also catalogs strategies for finding, capturing, killing, or subjecting suspects to extraordinary rendition. The database continues to lead US operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen and will enable expanded operations in Algeria, Egypt, Mali, Libya, Iran and all of East Africa.
A clear example of the expansion of targeted killing as managed by the database is the US military base in Djibouti City, Djibouti, near Somalia. Camp Lemonnier, originally founded by the French Foreign Legion , has quietly turned into the largest US drone base outside of Afghanistan. Approximately 3,200 US soldiers, contractors and civilians are assigned to the camp, 300 of whom are special forces.
A terrorism suspect on the Disposition Matrix is Somali national Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, who is currently held in New York.
process
The database eliminates the previous system of double (but not judicial) scrutiny by the Pentagon and the National Security Council, and instead uses a "streamlined" system in which suspects are named by multiple agencies and ultimately brought to Brennan. The Joint Chiefs of Staff , who are responsible for carrying out the orders to kill suspects on the list, no longer contribute to determining whether or not to kill them.
Instead, the National Counterterrorism Center plays a bigger role in setting the goals they generate at the request of the White House. The criteria and decisions that determine who is eligible to kill are developed in large part by John Brennan, who "wields tremendous power in making decisions about 'kill lists' and the allocation of armed drones". The targets are reviewed every three months with input from the CIA and JSOC before being forwarded to top officials at the NCTC, CIA, JSOC, the National Security Council, the Pentagon, and the State Department . Ultimately, the power to kill a suspect outside of Pakistan must be approved by the President.
The verification process also allows the killing of people whose identity is unknown but who are believed to be involved in certain activities, e.g. B. on the packaging of a vehicle with explosives.
As previously reported, US citizens can be listed as targets for killing in the database. Suspects are not formally charged with a crime or charged in their own defense. Obama administration attorneys have claimed that US citizens who are alleged to be members of Al Qaeda could be killed without trial, saying they pose an "imminent threat of violent attack" against the United States. US officials' legal rationale for this policy was communicated to NBC News in February 2013 in the form of briefing papers summarizing the legal notice dated October 2011.
advocacy
US officials have described the Disposition Matrix as legally and morally sound, and the Washington Post wrote that "internal doubts about the effectiveness of the drone campaign are almost non-existent." US President Barack Obama has described the decision to kill US citizen and terrorist suspect Anwar al-Awlaki as "easy" and shares counter-terrorism views with Brennan, the chief architect of the criteria by which suspicious targets are recorded in the database . Regarding President Obama's view of drone strikes, Brennan said, "I don't think we had a difference of opinion."
US officials speaking to the Washington Post appeared "confident that they have developed an approach that is bureaucratic, legally, and morally sound that future administrations will follow suit." Brennan, a principal architect of the Disposition Matrix, stated in April 2012 that “To ensure that our deadly force counterterrorism operations are legal, ethical, and wise, President Obama has asked us adhere to the highest possible standards and processes ”.
The Obama administration's drone program won the approval of Republican Party presidential candidate Mitt Romney during the US 2012 presidential election.
Robert M. Chesney wrote for the Lawfare blog that “It is certainly a good thing to create an information management tool that ensures that officials across agencies and departments have a thorough, real-time understanding of the options available (practical, legal , diplomatic, etc.) if certain people appear in certain places ”. He has also argued that the Washington Post article describing the program falsely implied that it was linked to a change in US counter-terrorism policy.
According to research by the RAND Corporation, "drone strikes have been linked to a decrease in both the frequency and lethality of militant attacks overall, and specifically in IED and suicide bombings."
criticism
Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik has said that 336 US drone strikes in Pakistan left over 2,300 victims, 80% of whom were innocent civilians. A 2012 poll by the Pew Research Center found that 74% of Pakistanis believe the US is "the enemy," an increase over previous years.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) condemned the database, writing in a press release that “Anyone who thought that the US targeted killing outside of armed conflict was a narrow, emergency-based exception to due process requirement before a death sentence is definitively proven wrong ”. It has also made freedom of information requests regarding the database and filed a lawsuit against its constitutionality.
Glenn Greenwald wrote that “the central role of the NCTC in determining who should be killed is quite hideous ... the NCTC runs a gigantic data mining operation that systematically monitors all kinds of information about innocent Americans , saved and analyzed ". Greenwald concludes that the Disposition Matrix “simultaneously created a surveillance state and a mysterious, unaccountable judicial agency that analyzes who you are and then decides what to do with you, how to 'dispose of' you, outside the scope of a minimal accountability or transparency ”. Former counterterrorism specialist and military intelligence officer Philip Giraldi has criticized the "day-to-day" killing of targets by the Disposition Matrix with what he calls "little or no evidence" and has made the White House "completely irresponsible." Giraldi later commented that Brennan "believes the [drone] program started as a CIA operation".
In April 2016, peace worker and tribal elder Malik Jalal, apparently affected by repeated drone attacks, was invited to the UK by Ken Macdonald to explain to the UK Houses of Parliament that his reported presence on the list put his life and that of his friends and relatives at risk is.
Criticizing the attacks organized under the aegis of the database, the World Socialist Web Site writes that “the vast majority of those killed in Pakistan were intended to resist the US occupation of neighboring Afghanistan, while in Yemen they were intended to resist that of US-backed regimes are killed there ”. Regarding the impact of the database in the United States, the site wrote that “the Obama administration has inflicted the most extreme power that can be claimed by any dictatorship by sentencing citizens to death without charge let alone prove them in court ”. They later criticized the relative silence in the media and the political establishment after the reveal.
In 2016, New York Daily News journalist Gersh Kuntzman criticized the US government's drone killing program, even suggesting that the Obama administration may have committed war crimes.
In a comment reprinted by Eurasia Review, Russia Today named attacks conducted by the database "targeted executions" and "extrajudicial killings" and rhetorically asked how the database will advance US counter-terrorism policy if it alienates its allies. Describing the criteria for killing through the database and drone program, Voice of Russia has written that “in essence, it means that, on the basis of knowledge of intelligence, the administration has the right to judge and execute without worrying about such small things Things like proper court hearings, or the right of the accused to have proper legal defense ”. She has accused the Obama administration of violating US due process principles, stating, “The fact that such operations are clearly in violation of US self-advocated principles, such as everyone's right to legal defense, seems not to disturb the government ”.
Speaking at Harvard Law School on October 25, 2012, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counterterrorism Ben Emmerson stated that he would set up "an investigative unit within the Human Rights Council's special procedures to investigate individual drone attacks." Emmerson and Christof Heyns, UN special rapporteurs on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, have labeled some US drone strikes as war crimes. Emmerson said US drone strikes may have violated international humanitarian law.
John Hudson, who writes for The Atlantic Wire, has expressed concern that the term “disposition matrix”, from a semantic point of view, disinfects and perhaps obscures the more descriptive phrase “kill list”.
The United States Senate is split over how to handle the issue if the Democrats urge the creation of a special court to review the matrix. Senate Armed Forces Committee Chairman John McCain has called for control of all armed drones to be transferred from the CIA to the Department of Defense, while Dianne Feinstein has expressed doubts that the Pentagon would exercise the same level of care to avoid collateral damage avoid.
Drone deaths
Reports of civilian victims of drone strikes in Pakistan have been compiled by a number of institutions including the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Long War Journal, New America Foundation, and researchers from Stanford University and New York University Law Schools. The New York Times reported that the Obama administration adopted a controversial civilian casualty counting method that actually counts all military-age men in a strike zone as fighters, and partially explains official claims of exceptionally low security deaths.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) reports that between 2004 and 2012, 475–885 Pakistani civilians, out of 2593–3378 people, were killed. The report finds that 176 children were killed by drone strikes and an additional 1,250 or more people were injured. The TBIJ report estimates that drone strikes in Pakistan decreased from 904 to 228 between 2010 and 2012.
TBIJ reports that 60–163 Yemeni civilians, out of a total of 362–1052 people, including 24–34 children, were killed in Yemen during the same period; 11–57 Somali civilians of 58–170 people were killed in Somalia, including 1–3 children.
The Long War Journal (LWJ), published by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, reports that 136 Pakistani civilians have been killed by drone strikes since 2006. According to the LWJ, the majority of drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004 have occurred under the Obama administration, which has ordered over 247 attacks since 2009, compared to 45 attacks by the Bush administration.
The New America Foundation (NAF) published a report entitled “Year of the Drone,” which found that between 2004 and 2012, 1618-2769 fighters between 1908-3225 were killed in Pakistan. The Foundation also found that over the same period, the number of civilian victims of drone attacks was 15–16%, falling from 60% in 2006 to 1–2% in 2012.
A report by researchers from Stanford and New York University Law Schools working at the Stanford International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic and the Global Justice Clinic evaluated the reports from TBIJ, LWJ and NAF, as well as interviews with witnesses and victims guided. The report notes that the estimates of victims received from TBIJ are "the best currently available" while finding "omissions and inconsistencies in the New America Foundation dataset" and their finding that the 2012 civilian casualty rate was low , questions. The report criticizes the reliance on anonymous officials to provide estimates of civilian casualties and the widespread media use of the term “militant” in describing non-civilian casualties. The report is in line with the report published by the NAF that the number of "high-level targets" killed by drone strikes in Pakistan represents around 2% of all drone strikes.
Meg Braun, an author of the NAF study, wrote that Stanford and New York University researchers were "not impartial," adding that "the claims made by the US government that civilian victims of drone attacks were in office Obama's single digits are obviously untrue, [there] no need to exaggerate the civilian death rate to the point that drone strikes are legally suspect and morally dangerous ”.
Intercept reported: “Between January 2012 and February 2013, more than 200 people were killed in air strikes [in northeastern Afghanistan] in US special operations. Only 35 of these were the intended goals. During a five-month period of the operation, records show that nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. "
swell
- ↑ The New Yorker: John Brennan's Kill List , accessed August 9, 2018.
- ^ Ian Cobain: Obama's secret kill list - the disposition matrix. July 14, 2013, accessed August 9, 2018 .
- ↑ How Obama Decides Your Fate If He Thinks You're a Terrorist. Retrieved August 9, 2018 .
- ↑ - The Washington Post. Retrieved August 9, 2018 .