On September 19, 2001, CIA officers collected cardboard boxes filled with $3 million in nonsequential $100 bills to buy off Afghan warlords, beginning America’s martial response to the 9/11 attacks. A day later, President George W. Bush stood before Congress and declared a “war on terror” that would “not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”

Over the next 20-plus years, the tab on that conflict, which began in Afghanistan but spread across the globe to Burkina Faso, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Niger, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen, has ballooned to more than $6 trillion. The payoff has been dismal: To date, the war has killed around 900,000 people, including more than 350,000 civilians; displaced as many as 60 million; and led to humanitarian catastrophes and the worst U.S. military defeat since the Vietnam War. American cash has built armies that have collapsed or evaporated when challenged; meanwhile, the number of foreign terrorist groups around the world has more than doubled from 32 to 69.

“Counterterrorism strategies which address the root causes of terrorism, rather than the organizations and people that commit it, might end the waves of terrorist violence.”

It didn’t have to be this way, according to a new study of counterterrorism approaches from Brown University’s Costs of War Project. “Terrorism is a political phenomenon,” writes researcher Jennifer Walkup Jayes in “Beyond the War Paradigm: What History Tells Us About How Terror Campaigns End,” which was shared exclusively with The Intercept ahead of its release on Tuesday. “Counterterrorism strategies which address the root causes of terrorism, rather than the organizations and people that commit it, might end the waves of terrorist violence.”

Sophisticated statistical analyses have demonstrated that there are proven, effective methods to hasten the demise of terrorist organizations, according to Walkup Jayes’s report. But the “war paradigm,” which was a departure from America’s previous law enforcement approach to counterterrorism, is not one of them.

One innovative study of 648 militant groups cited by Walkup Jayes notes that only 7 percent of terrorist groups were defeated through military efforts. What bleeding-heart, leftist, ivory tower eggheads came to this conclusion? The 2008 study was conducted by the RAND Corporation, the military’s go-to think tank, when the cost of the war on terror was still a paltry $752 billion.

“In Iraq and Afghanistan,” Bush said that same year, “we set a clear definition of success: Success will come when Al Qaeda has no safe haven in those countries and the people can protect themselves from terror. Success will come when Iraq and Afghanistan are economically viable. Success will come when Iraq and Afghanistan are democracies that govern themselves effectively and respond to the will of their people. Success will come when Iraq and Afghanistan are strong and capable allies on the war on terror.”

Today, Al Qaeda is still present in Afghanistan. Its successor, the Islamic State, is active in Afghanistan and Iraq. And neither of those nations is a democracy or economically viable, as Afghanistan now teeters on the brink of economic collapse and is ruled by the very regime that Bush deposed in 2001.

Experts say this cascade of failures could have been largely avoided. “You can envision a scenario, after 9/11, in which the terrorist attacks were treated primarily as a criminal justice problem,” said Stephanie Savell, co-director of the Costs of War Project, noting that the FBI and the CIA could have led the effort with a goal of arresting, prosecuting, and imprisoning Osama bin Laden and others who planned the attacks.

While noting that the Costs of War report highlights drawbacks to this approach, Savell told The Intercept that it would have been transformational. “You wouldn’t have seen 20 years of conflict and this incredible waste of resources,” she said. “The U.S. response wouldn’t have led to this spiral of escalation, of war and violence begetting more war and violence.”

The money spent on the war paradigm could instead have been allocated to more serious national security concerns. Walkup Jayes draws attention to the perils of the global climate crisis, the fact that a lack of health insurance kills more than 45,000 people a year, and the Covid-19 pandemic which has not only led to the deaths of close to 1 million Americans but also laid bare the sorry state of U.S. health care. “The reality is that poverty, racism, and other structural inequalities pose far greater threats to human lives than do terror attacks,” she observes. “These threats are far more dangerous to far more people than are militant groups who use terror tactics, and there are feasible policies to address them.”

It all raises the question of what might have been if the budget for the war on terror had been repurposed. “If the U.S. government had used even a portion of the $8 trillion spent and obligated on the post-9/11 wars on other domestic policies to promote societal health and well-being or mitigate the effects of climate change, that would have resulted in far more meaningful human security in this country,” Savell told The Intercept.

“Beyond the War Paradigm” lays out 10 distinct, though sometimes overlapping, counterterrorism alternatives to America’s militarized approach. These include the law enforcement model, which relies on policing and the judicial system; using public messaging and media campaigns to blunt radical ideologies; addressing the root causes of terrorism by funding development projects and aid groups; and an even more holistic “human security” model, which “aims to empower disenfranchised groups politically and economically … making terrorism a less compelling tactic for changemaking.”

An infographic from “Beyond the War Paradigm,” a new study of counterterrorism approaches from Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

Image: Courtesy of Brown University’s Costs of War Project

Heather Brandon-Smith, the legislative director for militarism and human rights for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker group, says “Beyond the War Paradigm” is crucial to educating members of Congress, many of whom entered government after 9/11, about the alternatives to America’s ineffective but long-standing strategy. “We’ve had 20 years of counterterrorism being seen through the lens of war,” she told The Intercept. “This new report presents different options and demonstrates that long-term, non-military solutions are the most effective. To have the research and evidence laid out in such a clear way is extremely important. It provides the information necessary to have the conversation with Congress and the Biden administration about how to properly resource these non-military tools, which are critical to successful counterterrorism.”

One year ago, the White House imposed temporary limits on drone strikes and commando raids outside of conventional war zones. The administration launched a review of such missions and began writing a new “playbook” to govern counterterrorism operations. That policy, which was reportedly slated to be released around the 20th anniversary of 9/11, has been delayed as the White House has dealt with the fallout of the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan and a final “righteous” drone strike in the country that the Pentagon was forced to admit killed only civilians, most of them children.

The White House would not provide even basic information about the state of the counterterrorism review and when — or whether — the administration might reveal its new policies. “We continuously assess our counterterrorism posture around the world and make adjustments as needed,” a senior administration official told The Intercept.

Recently, Reps. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and Barbara Lee, D-Calif., called for far more than “adjustments.” “The greatest threats to America’s security — pandemics, climate change, economic inequality, authoritarianism — cannot be defeated at the barrel of a gun. It’s time to stop relying on the same old playbook and instead forge a foreign policy that works for everyday people,” they wrote in an article announcing a Congressional resolution they introduced. “Today’s greatest security challenges cannot be solved through military adventurism. International cooperation, diplomacy, development, and peacebuilding — not bombs — must be the foreign-policy tools the country reaches for first.”

Other experts have called for a hybrid policy that maintains existing military capabilities but puts greater emphasis on alternative methods. Luke Hartig, a senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council in the Obama White House and now a fellow in New America’s International Security program, called for an “all tools approach to counterterrorism” that combines law enforcement, border security, intelligence, the targeting of terrorist financing, foreign partnerships, and countering extremist ideologies, as well as military operations.

“We have over-resourced our military responses and under-resourced our civilian programs.”

“We have over-resourced our military responses and under-resourced our civilian programs,” he told The Intercept. “I don’t think ending the forever war means ending all military operations against terrorist groups, but it does mean shifting to a civilian-led paradigm. That means investing more in things like countering violent extremism and institution building. It means deploying savvy diplomacy to advance counterterrorism objectives. And it means being willing to rely on our defenses to protect the country rather than lethally targeting every threat we see in the world.”

“Beyond the War Paradigm” is packed with intriguing findings from studies of militancy, such as the link between an imbalanced sex ratio among young adults and terrorism and the fact that education in the humanities “may offer inoculation against violent ideologies, particularly those which target others on the grounds of ethnicity or religion,” as well as suggestions about how such research might be employed to achieve real-world counterterrorism results. Altogether, it reinforces a seemingly self-evident finding from the World Bank’s 2011 World Development report, highlighted by Walkup Jayes, that nonetheless appears to have escaped four presidential administrations and hundreds of lawmakers over more than 20 years: State violence in the form of invasion, occupation, and repression is central to the rationale of terrorist groups.

“We would be in a very different place if we had prosecuted the 9/11 attacks as criminal acts and called it a day,” Walkup Jayes told The Intercept. “The war paradigm has caused more people to take up arms against the United States and broadened support for the terrorist groups that the war aimed to eliminate. So if your goal is to truly prevent terrorism, your best bet is to help foster security and human rights, and guarantee people have access to the resources that they need.”

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A hawkish gaggle of former U.S. national security officials, lawmakers, and diplomats has launched a public campaign to pressure the Biden administration into militarily threatening Iran. The statement, headlined by former CIA chiefs Leon Panetta and retired Gen. David Petraeus as well as former Obama-era senior Pentagon official Michèle Flournoy asserts that “it is vital to restore Iran’s fear that its current nuclear path will trigger the use of force against it by the United States.”

The statement — which was also signed by former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman and Democratic diplomatic heavyweight Dennis Ross, and published by the Washington Institute, a militarist think tank — argues that the Biden administration must “take steps that lead Iran to believe that persisting in its current behavior and rejecting a reasonable diplomatic resolution will put to risk its entire nuclear infrastructure, one built painstakingly over the last three decades.” They suggest that President Joe Biden consider “orchestrating high-profile military exercises by the U.S. Central Command, potentially in concert with allies and partners, that simulate what would be involved in such a significant operation, including rehearsing air-to-ground attacks on hardened targets and the suppression of Iranian missile batteries.”

Iran analyst Hooman Majd, author of “The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran,” said the letter from the former U.S. officials “is just plain silly.” He told The Intercept, “There’s no ‘restoring’ Iran’s fear — the last time it feared a U.S. military strike or war was in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq invasion when it looked like the easy victory there and in Afghanistan would indeed perhaps lead to ‘real men going to Tehran.’” Majd points out that despite repeated U.S. and Israeli threats of military action, Iran has steadily “beefed up” its military capabilities. “So I’d say that Iran doesn’t fear U.S. military action against it now,” he added. “All of the Israeli bluster about preparing for war with Iran hasn’t changed their calculus — and they know Israel is probably more likely to attack their facilities than the U.S. is — so why would any U.S. bluster or ‘preparations’ for war do so?”

Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, blasted the statement, telling The Intercept: “The exaggerated faith in the miracles that U.S. military threats can deliver are not limited to any one party in the United States, but is intrinsic to the establishment religion that American security is achieved through global military hegemony.”

The former U.S. officials argued that their strategy is aimed at forcing Iran to the negotiating table and to compel it to reverse any efforts to develop nuclear weapons made in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s abandonment of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. “While the United States has recognized Iran’s right to civilian nuclear power, Iran’s behavior continues to indicate that it not only wants to preserve a nuclear weapons option but is actively moving toward developing that capability,” they wrote. While advocating for potential military action — and openly calling on Biden to make explicit military threats — the authors of the letter claim their intent is to support diplomatic efforts. “[W]e are not urging the Biden Administration to threaten ‘regime change’ or to advocate for a ‘regime change’ strategy under cover of non-proliferation,” they wrote. “This is not about hostility toward Iran or its people.”

Parsi, an Iranian American analyst and author of “Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy,” added, “Rather than being the solution to the crisis, the military threat the U.S. poses to Iran is a key reason why the Iranian nuclear program has expanded. The more a country is faced with military threats, the more it will demand a nuclear deterrence.”

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden repeatedly criticized Trump’s abandonment of the nuclear deal and his assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani in Baghdad on January 3. But nearly a year into his presidency, Biden has taken no action to return to the deal and has staked out an increasingly hostile stance toward Tehran. In late August, Biden appeared to be placing military options on the table. During a press gaggle with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett at the White House, Biden said, “If diplomacy fails” with Iran, “we’re ready to turn to other options.” The Biden administration has maintained and, in some cases, expanded U.S. economic sanctions against Iran, which has spurred allegations from Tehran that the U.S. is already waging a nonmilitary war against Iranian civilians. Iran is demanding a cessation of sanctions as a precondition to return to negotiations.

“Iran has every reason to want to restore the JCPOA — at least in terms of getting the most onerous sanctions against it lifted. But it hardly is going to engage because it thinks the U.S. will go to war with it if it doesn’t,” said Majd.

“Donald Trump’s military threats and broad economic sanctions are precisely why we are in this mess right now. To believe that more Trumpian conduct by the United States will break the nuclear deadlock bewilders the mind,” says Parsi. “Trump’s exit from the deal and the lack of confidence that the United States will stay in the deal beyond 2024 has profoundly undermined the value of American promises of sanctions relief. The Iranians are hesitating largely because they do not believe that the economic benefits the U.S. promises will be forthcoming. No amount of military threats will change that fundamental weakness in the U.S. negotiating position.”

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Over the past year, the number of reported U.S. drone strikes has plummeted. President Joe Biden did not authorize a single known strike for the first six months of his presidency before breaking his streak with a series of drone attacks against al-Shabab in Somalia in July. Despite the notable reduction, at least two of the strikes conducted under Biden have killed civilians, including the now-infamous August 29 attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed 10 civilians, seven of them children. While Biden’s drone strike dataset is tiny, the outcome of his known strikes presents a ghastly civilian death rate. In the case of the Afghanistan hit, 100 percent of the victims were civilians.

So what is happening? Why has Biden apparently decided to pump the breaks on a tool of war that he and President Barack Obama embraced so enthusiastically? For nearly a year, the Biden administration has been engaged in a comprehensive review of the use of drone strikes as part of a broader evaluation of “counterterrorism” policy that is expected to be completed later this year or at some point in early 2022. “I think the White House is appropriately wary about drone strikes,” said Rosa Brooks, a former Obama administration official who worked for the Pentagon as counselor to the undersecretary of defense for policy from 2009 to 2011. “My sense is that they’re serious about the review and are trying to minimize drone strikes at least until there is complete clarity on internal policies.”

Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, did away with most of the “rules” the Obama administration had crafted in what Obama characterized as an effort to increase transparency, reduce civilian deaths, and establish guidelines that could give some sense of legitimacy to what was, in reality, an assassination program. Biden could have stopped at rescinding Trump’s reversals and then resumed a course of regular drone strikes according to the rules developed primarily in Obama’s second term. But he didn’t. Instead, on the day of Biden’s inauguration, his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, “quietly” issued an order to roll back Trump’s loosening of rules surrounding drone strikes, specifically one that bestowed on military commanders the power to authorize such strikes in undeclared war zones, like Somalia and Yemen, without direct permission from the White House. The Biden administration has not yet indicated whether it will revert to the Obama-era guidance for strikes or craft a new policy with more robust rules, particularly surrounding the issue of civilian deaths.

“Across almost all active U.S. conflicts, we’ve seen a sharp fall in declared U.S. military actions under Joe Biden, including by drone — in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and Libya,” said Chris Woods, director of the British nongovernmental organization Airwars, which tracks U.S. airstrikes and civilian deaths in many nations where the U.S. is engaged militarily. Woods notes that strikes were already declining in the latter half of Trump’s presidency and that Biden’s early moratorium on strikes and his decision thus far to limit their use have greatly reduced civilian deaths at the hands of U.S. forces in several countries. “What we don’t yet know is if these trends will sustain. Publicly, the administration has yet to articulate its strategy,” he said. “Privately, we’re hearing of the emergence of a hybrid Trump-Obama approach, which, if true, could mean less protections in place for civilians than during the latter part of Obama. That’s a worry.” A spokesperson for the National Security Council did not respond to requests for comment.

For years, a core group of mostly progressive members of Congress have steadily sought to find legislative solutions to the excessive secrecy surrounding drone strikes and to make laws requiring more transparency from the Pentagon on civilian “casualties.” These efforts, which began during Obama’s tenure, intensified under Trump, who made clear that he did not care about civilian deaths and, on the campaign trail in 2016, actively encouraged the killing of families of suspected terrorists. They were also a response to a renewed surge, beginning in 2018, in civilian deaths in Afghanistan. “In 2019, as the Trump administration tried to force the Taliban to the negotiating table, we saw the all-time high of civilian deaths” — some 700 as a result of U.S. strikes — “and more bombs were dropped that year than in any year prior,” said Marc Garlasco, the former chief of high-value targeting at the Pentagon and now the military adviser for PAX, a Dutch civilian protection organization.

In 2019, the National Defense Authorization Act established a requirement that a senior civilian within the Department of Defense be empowered “to develop, coordinate, and oversee compliance with the policy of the Department relating to civilian casualties resulting from United States military operations.” Among the duties of this officer would be to develop and disseminate “best practices” for reducing civilian deaths; to establish a public, internet-based mechanism for people to submit allegations of civilian harm; to ensure that standardized policies were in place for the Pentagon to acknowledge responsibility for deaths caused by U.S. military operations; and to decide whether to give “ex gratia” payments to the families of civilians killed as well as to those injured by U.S. operations. The Trump administration slow-rolled the system’s creation and never effectively implemented it.

Even before taking office, the Biden campaign had pledged to review the use of drone strikes as part of its counterterrorism approach. “During the last year, a consortium of NGOs (including PAX) advised the DoD on what steps they needed to take to improve the targeting system, create a DoD office on civilian harm, again conduct investigations, and provide amends to those harmed,” Garlasco told The Intercept via email. He and others in the human rights and civilian protection community expected an announcement to come last summer from the undersecretary of defense for policy, Colin Kahl, but it was delayed when the horrifying results of the August 29 drone strike in Kabul were brought to public light. “It has now languished on his desk as the community waits,” Garlasco said. The defense spending bill passed by the Senate on Wednesday does contain a provision to continue the practice of making paltry payments to civilian victims and victims’ families. Garlasco cautions that while he does not expect such a framework for addressing civilian deaths and injuries “to solve all of the problems in the targeting system, I see it as a needed first step in addressing the issue of civilian harm.” But he and others in the civilian protection NGO community “are concerned it will not go far enough,” he told The Intercept, “considering the recent spate of civilian casualty incidents.”

While Garlasco and others in the legal and NGO community agitate to bring more accountability to drone operations, longtime anti-war and anti-drone activists do not hold out hope that tinkering with the system, as happened under Obama, will fundamentally change anything. “Drones in particular are an inherently indiscriminate weapon. They have no place in our world,” said Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the activist group Code Pink, who has regularly traveled to countries targeted in drone strikes. “The U.S. should discontinue the use of armed drones and work through the U.N. for a multilateral treaty to banish them from the face of the Earth, in full recognition of U.S. responsibility for unleashing this terror on humanity. There is a campaign to abolish autonomous weapons, but this doesn’t go far enough. All drone warfare should be banned.”

At a minimum, Benjamin said, “the Biden administration should immediately restart publishing the monthly Airpower Summaries discontinued by Trump and in fact expand them from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria to include all U.S. ‘weapons releases’ in all countries. They should also be more comprehensive, to include all types of aircraft, including helicopters, all branches of the U.S. military, and the CIA and other agencies.” While Benjamin and other activists have consistently focused on drones, they also recognize that drone strikes represent a small number of total U.S. airstrikes. She points to the latest statistics from Airwars, which indicate that since Biden took office, there have been 25 U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and 14 in Syria, most of them conducted by conventional aircraft, not drones. In Somalia, according to Airwars, Biden’s 16 strikes to date have already outpaced Obama’s average of 7.5 per year, though they lag far behind Trump’s annual average of 69. “So Biden already seems to be conducting twice as many strikes as Obama did in that country, a pattern that very likely holds in other parts of Africa too,” Benjamin asserted.

Woods points out that despite the continuation of strikes, “civilian casualties are also majorly down under Biden, with none likely so far in … Libya, Yemen, or Somalia since he took office.” The exception, he says, has been Afghanistan. Woods charges that U.S. Central Command and the Air Force “continue to hide the actual numbers” of civilian deaths from U.S. strikes in Afghanistan under Biden. “There was a well-reported surge in U.S. strikes in 2021 as the Taliban made lightning advances across the country,” he said. “Many of those were close-air support actions trying to bolster [Afghan National Army] allies on the ground — which always carry higher risks to civilians. The notorious Kabul strike in August may sadly have been part of a broader recent trend.”

Mohammed Ali Abdallah al-Ameri holds a picture of his 12-year-old son, who was killed, along with his nephew, in a U.S. airstrike in 2012, in Sanaa, Yemen, on Jan. 15, 2014. Ameri suffered shrapnel wounds in a separate drone strike on a relative’s wedding convoy.

Photo: Abigail Hauslohner/The Washington Post via Getty Images

That August 29 drone attack was a terrifying flashback to Obama-era cases of weddings and funerals being struck. Some analysts believe that the withdrawal of U.S. ground forces in Afghanistan may have played a role. “Drone operators did not have the benefit of intel from ground forces they had had before,” said Hugh Gusterson, a professor of anthropology and drone expert at the University of British Columbia. “U.S. drones were forced to fly longer distances from distant air bases, which reduced the amount of fuel and time they had to engage in aerial reconnaissance before striking.” Gusterson says that this will be a factor to monitor in light of Biden’s pledge to continue such “over-the-horizon” operations in Afghanistan. “One obvious reason why there are fewer drone strikes now, I would guess, is that the U.S. has withdrawn from Afghanistan. At one point under Obama, a half of all U.S. drone strikes were in Afghanistan,” he added. “One can only think the withdrawal of U.S. ground forces in Afghanistan and the ceding of the country to the Taliban would reduce the number greatly now — even granted the U.S. interest in hitting ISIS in Afghanistan.”

Garlasco, the former Pentagon high-value targeting specialist, says that it is important to understand differences between the two main types of U.S. airstrikes: deliberate and dynamic. “Deliberate strikes are planned long in advance, have numerous checks such as a deep and structured collateral damage analysis, use a pattern of life analysis to determine if civilians are present, and have a relatively low incidence of civilian casualties,” he said. “Dynamic strikes, such as time sensitive targeting, are conducted when the attacker has a small window of opportunity to engage a mobile target of high value.” Garlasco says that the highest-casualty strikes have resulted from “dynamic” operations that rely not on confirmed intelligence but on speculation about the movements and relationships of potential targets or, in some cases, the make and model of a car. “In a dynamic strike there is rarely time for a pattern of life analysis, structured collateral damage analysis, and all the checks that normally occur. Additionally, dynamic strikes often suffer from confirmation bias as seen in the Kabul strike. They were looking for a white Toyota and found one and so all the actions taken by the driver fit their desired outcome. When you are looking for a target, you tend to find one.”

On Monday, the Pentagon announced that no military personnel would face disciplinary action for the Kabul drone strike. “What we saw here was a breakdown in process and execution in procedural events, not the result of negligence, not the result of misconduct, not the result of poor leadership,” said retired Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesperson. “I do not anticipate there being issues of personal accountability to be had with respect to the August 29 airstrike.”

The handling of the Kabul drone strike is an ominous sign that while Biden has pledged to review the efficacy and impact of drone strikes, a long-standing mechanism for self-exoneration remains entrenched, Garlasco noted. “There is no accountability for U.S. actions,” he said. “The sheer number of dead civilians from U.S. attacks without anything beyond a slap on the wrist reinforces the perception of impunity. … How can we see a family destroyed by a drone strike in Kabul and keep saying there was no negligence?” Garlasco said. “It is negligent to keep killing civilians after 20 years without any reforms. The long list of dead families is a damning indictment of America’s commitment to protect civilians. Without sanctions for actions that lead to civilian deaths it is difficult to see how things will get better.”

Kathy Kelly, founder of the anti-war group Voices for Creative Nonviolence, said that she welcomes the reduction in drone strikes in the broader Middle East, but she fears that it may be an artificial lull induced by other emerging Pentagon priorities. “With Pentagon officials, military contractors, and war profiteers increasingly interested in U.S. capacity to compete with China, U.S. drone attacks in Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and other war zones may seem like an unwelcome distraction, particularly if the international media covers the slaughter of innocents, including children,” she told The Intercept. Kelly, who has been traveling to U.S. war zones since the 1991 Gulf War in solidarity with victims of American bombings, is also a co-coordinator of the group Ban Killer Drones. She is calling on the administration to head off the potential spread of asymmetric warfare through diplomacy. “I think the Biden administration should seek cooperation and collaboration with China to tackle the greatest threats we all face: the terrors of climate catastrophe and pandemics,” she said. “The U.S. should take the lead in pursuing an international treaty to prohibit weaponized drones. It should acknowledge accountability for every U.S. drone attack which has killed civilians, disclosing all details about circumstances and victims of each attack.”

“How can we see a family destroyed by a drone strike in Kabul and keep saying there was no negligence?”

Another co-coordinator at Ban Killer Drones, Nick Mottern, dismissed the notion that the drop in drone strikes is linked to any questions about morality or concern about the proliferation of armed drones. “I see no evidence that there is a pause or any fundamental appraisal of whether this program should be continued, which, of course, it should not. This talk of pause seems to be window dressing, period,” Mottern told The Intercept. He said he is concerned that during a period of relatively few drone strikes, the administration is moving forward with long-standing plans to increase the use of artificial intelligence to facilitate drone strike targeting based on patterns of life and other automated threat determinations. “It appears that Biden is carrying forward with development of a variety of drone aircraft that will be more and more guided by AI until we cross the threshold into full AI-controlled attacks. This process has to be stopped, and the only way to stop it is to ban weaponized drones,” he said. “The military and the politicians will never acknowledge the degree to which the control of drones has been turned over to” artificial intelligence. “China appears to be the only nation with the human and dollar resources to compete with the U.S. in this sphere,” Mottern added, “which makes these weapons even more threatening, given the U.S. compulsion to challenge China militarily.”

Independent journalist Spencer Ackerman, author of “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump,” has argued that the recent reduction in drone strikes contradicts the long-standing U.S. claim that such strikes make Americans safer. “Doesn’t the quasi-pause demonstrate the hollowness of any U.S. claim that national security requires drone strikes? It turns out bombing random people halfway around the world doesn’t actually prevent mass American deaths,” Ackerman wrote. “[T]he Biden counterterrorism review will either take a monumental step toward actually ending the Forever Wars, or it will squander the opportunity. For all his reductions in drone strikes, Biden, particularly during the Afghanistan withdrawal, committed the typical liberal mistake of portraying drone strikes as a hedge against — that is, an alternative to — a wider war.”

Brooks, the former Obama-era Pentagon official, maintains that the Biden administration should establish an independent entity outside the executive branch to review drone strikes in countries with which the U.S. is not officially at war. “The review should be after the fact,” Brooks said, adding that such a body should take a more comprehensive “ex ante” approach to assessing potential civilian consequences of such strikes in the future. “The reviewing body, whether judicial, congressional, or some sort of congressionally appointed body, should issue public reports,” she said. “Right now, there is still little transparency and less accountability when things go wrong, and from my perspective, that’s unacceptable.”

Garlasco agrees that an independent body needs to be established to oversee the use of drones, particularly on the question of civilian deaths. If “civilian harm” were a priority of the Biden administration, the U.S. “would conduct meaningful investigations that do not rely solely on U.S. intelligence that validates its own strikes; it would welcome reports and information from NGOs and the United Nations instead of casting aspersions on them,” he said. “It would transparently report on airstrikes and other military actions that lead to harm; it would work to learn from its past mistakes and the clear patterns of prior strikes that have led to civilian harm and implement systemic changes to the targeting process.” Garlasco added, “Unfortunately, the U.S. is not prioritizing civilian harm.”

“The U.S. is not prioritizing civilian harm.”

Kelly and Mottern say that establishing an independent body to review strikes would not go far enough and may offer a flimsy veneer of accountability. “Congress should undertake an investigation into the numbers and identities of those killed by U.S. drones since 2001 and make adequate reparations,” said Mottern. He argued that the starting point for financial compensation for victims of strikes should be the $3 million paid to the family of an Italian aid worker accidentally killed in a January 2015 U.S. drone strike. In recent years, such payments to victims of American strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan have been minimal — in 2019, they ranged from $131 to $35,000 per incident. “The U.S. Congress earmarks $3 million annually for ex gratia payments for war victims,” said Garlasco. “In 2020 not a single dollar went to civilians harmed by the U.S. When you don’t even dole out any of a paltry $3 million set aside for victims to a single victim, that speaks volumes. The actions of the Department of Defense tell victims your life doesn’t matter to us.” Kelly says that the process for accountability must extend beyond condolence payments to victims and their families. “The U.S. should make reparations not only through financial compensation but also in the form of dismantling the military systems causing so much suffering, displacement, and havoc,” she said.

Gusterson, author of “Drone: Remote Control Warfare,” draws a distinction between “pure” and “mixed” drone warfare. “Mixed drone warfare occurs when U.S. troops are on the ground in a declared war and drones are in the mix as one of many war-fighting technologies,” he said. “Pure drone warfare — what we see in Somalia — is when the U.S. has not declared hostilities against a country but its drones attack targets in that country out of the blue in over-the-horizon strikes.” He points out that legal experts seem to agree that “mixed” drone warfare is more defensible under international law. “I’m an anthropologist, not a lawyer, but to me it looks very much like terrorism when you blow people up on the ground in a country you claim not to be at war with,” he told The Intercept. “I would like the Biden administration to affirm that it has decided pure drone warfare — strikes out of the blue against countries one is not at war with — is illegal under international law, and the U.S. will no longer engage in such strikes. Well, one can always dream, right?”

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The U.S. government has won its appeal of a British court ruling barring Julian Assange’s extradition on Espionage Act charges, setting the stage for the WikiLeaks founder to be sent to the U.S. to face trial. The decision handed down Friday morning reverses a previous conclusion that Assange would face unacceptable risks to his safety if held in the United States. A lower-court judge ruled in January that Assange would be at risk of suicide or other harm if held in American custody. But following reassurances by U.S. authorities that he would be held in the most strict confinement, a judge found that Assange can be extradited on the charges related to his publishing of classified State Department documents.

Assange can still appeal the verdict, but the judgment by the court puts him at greater risk than ever of finding himself standing trial on charges that have alarmed press freedom advocates. In a statement given after the ruling, Assange’s fiancée Stella Moris said that the ruling was “dangerous and misguided” and that U.S. assurances about the conditions of Assange’s confinement once stateside could not be considered reliable. Doctors have testified that Assange suffers from severe depression and other mental illnesses triggered by the years he has spent on the run from the U.S. government, and that he would be at grave risk of suicide if extradited to the U.S. The U.S. government has said that it might allow Assange to serve any future sentence in Australia, where he would face less restrictive confinement, but these assurances have been criticized by his supporters as vague and unreliable.

The Biden administration has continued to press ahead with Assange’s indictment over his alleged role in assisting whistleblower Chelsea Manning to release thousands of State Department cables and other classified information in 2010 and 2011. The classified disclosures included thousands of documents outlining U.S. perceptions of foreign regimes and helped trigger major unrest in countries like Tunisia, where the 2011 revolution was spurred in part by revelations of domestic corruption outlined in the documents. WikiLeaks also helped uncover evidence of civilian killings carried out by U.S. troops during the war in Iraq, including shocking video footage of the crew of an Apache helicopter killing Reuters journalists and others during a 2007 attack in Baghdad.

In later years, Assange became a controversial figure in U.S. domestic politics due to his perceived support of Donald Trump and allegations that later WikiLeaks disclosures were aimed at helping ensure his victory in the 2016 election. But the Espionage Act charges he now faces stem from Manning’s classified disclosures, which provided a rich resource for journalists and activists around the world. The potential criminalization of a standard journalistic practice — the publication of classified documents provided by a source — has alarmed press freedom advocates.

“That United States prosecutors continued to push for this outcome is a betrayal of the journalistic principles the Biden administration has taken credit for celebrating,” Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said in a statement decrying Friday’s verdict. “As brave whistleblowers have explained for decades, this kind of abuse of the Espionage Act against sources — and now journalists and publishers — is an embarrassment to basic ideals of justice and to core First Amendment values.”

The change from the Trump to Biden administration does not seem to have engendered any greater concern for the possible implications of Assange’s prosecution for acts of journalism. Assange’s fate remains unsettled, as his supporters, many of whom gathered in protest outside of the court following the verdict, have already indicated that he plans to appeal the decision. But the Biden administration appears set on continuing the persecution of Assange that has gone on for roughly a decade.

“Julian’s life is once more under grave threat, and so is the right of journalists to publish material that governments and corporations find inconvenient,” WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson said. “This is about the right of a free press to publish without being threatened by a bullying superpower.”

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This weekend, “60 Minutes” aired the first TV interview given by Reality Winner since she was released from prison this summer. In 2017, Winner leaked a top-secret National Security Agency analysis of Russia’s attempt to penetrate U.S. election systems around the country; she ended up serving the longest sentence ever doled out to a civilian whistleblower. She pleaded guilty at trial and was sentenced to five years and three months in prison.

Winner’s case is unique, and because of how tribal our politics have become, she’s a person without a political home. Despite the sacrifices she made, she largely gets ignored as a result.

Of course, from a Trumpworld perspective, which fully rejected any claims of Russian interference, what she leaked was too inconvenient to discuss. The left, for its part, was heavily critical of the Democratic focus on the Trump-Russia scandal, arguing that it was an effort by establishment Democrats to escape necessary responsibility, so did not rally to her cause. Among resistance liberals, Winner had a hard time gaining traction. At the time of her arrest, mainline Democrats were closely allied with the public faces of the intelligence world who were avidly fueling Trump-Russia theories, but by leaking, Winner had betrayed the intelligence community, and the deep-state talking heads had no interest in taking up her cause on CNN or MSNBC.

The document she leaked didn’t contain evidence of collusion between then-presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russia. It said that Russia had penetrated our election system but not that it had done anything to manipulate the voter rolls or the votes. The leak exposed flaws in the system while showing that Russia was keeping its options for meddling open — just as they’ve done in other countries, and just as we’ve done in almost every country on the planet.

The Intercept published the document in question along with a story about its significance on June 5, 2017. The Press Freedom Defense Fund, which is part of First Look Institute, The Intercept’s parent company, supported Winner’s legal defense.

At the time of her arrest, Winner, an Air Force veteran, was serving as a contractor for the NSA. While Winner is now out of prison, she’s still on supervised release for the next three years, with onerous conditions. In the interview, she talks about her motivation for the leak and the psychological impact of the government’s assault on her. As she explains, she felt like she was seeing double, watching Trump publicly claim that Russia had behaved entirely innocently throughout the 2016 election while knowing that his own intelligence service had concluded differently.

“I knew it was secret, but I also knew that I had pledged service to the American people, and at that point in time, it felt like they were being led astray,” she said.

Even the federal commission in charge of election security had no idea what had happened. “What prosecutors called ‘grave damage’ was a bombshell of truth to the federal Election Assistance Commission, which helps secure the vote,” Scott Pelley reported on “60 Minutes,” adding that election officials took significant actions in response to Winner’s revelations. Two sources told CBS that Winner’s leak helped make the 2018 election more secure, confirming previous Intercept reporting.

At trial, Winner wasn’t able to talk about the document or why she leaked it, but in her interview, she pushed back against the idea that she had ever done anything to put the country at risk. Quite the opposite, she said: “I thought this was the truth but also did not betray our sources and methods, did not cause damage, did not put lives on the line. It only filled in a question mark that was tearing our county in half in May 2017. … I meant no harm.”

One way that the government managed to deny her bail was by suggesting that her language abilities — abilities she had been trained in by the military — meant that she might defect to the Taliban. That charge, that she was some kind of traitor, shook her to her core and haunted her throughout her time in confinement.

In prison, Winner went to a dark place. Her mother had moved from Texas to Georgia so that she could see her regularly. “There would just be times when it almost wasn’t worth it to see the end of this,” she said. “I started to plan my suicide, and I would do practice runs. The only thing that was stopping me was my mom because she was still in Augusta. My dad had gone back to Texas to go to work, and I just refused to let her hear that news by herself, so I would get on the phone and try to talk around it and say, ‘Hey, there’s no reason to stick around, visitation’s not worth it, just go back to Texas, just go.’”

But her mother refused to go. She learned of the depth of her daughter’s despair the same time that “60 Minutes” did. “There were some very dark days, but they would be followed by a better day,” her mother told Pelley. “I just knew when I was in Georgia I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t leave her.”

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Daniel Hale, the former U.S. Air Force intelligence analyst currently imprisoned for releasing top-secret documents on the government’s drone program, was given an international award for whistleblowing Wednesday. Blueprint for Free Speech, a nonprofit charity based in Australia, gave Hale its international prize, stating that his actions “prompted greater openness from the Obama administration about their drone policy, and greater demands for ongoing accountability to the public.”

Hale was sentenced to 45 months in prison in July after pleading guilty to violating a single count of the Espionage Act, a controversial 1917 law often used against individuals who share national security information with the press. Originally intended for foreign spies, the law bars the accused from using their motivations for leaking as a defense. The judge, Liam O’Grady of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, dismissed four other charges against Hale with prejudice.

During Hale’s prosecution, government lawyers, who compared Hale to a heroin dealer and urged the court to deliver the harshest possible sentence, 11 years in prison, strongly implied that Hale was the source of The Intercept’s 2015 series “The Drone Papers.” As a matter of policy, The Intercept does not comment on the identity of its confidential sources.

Prior to his sentencing, Hale submitted a handwritten letter to the court in which he detailed his involvement in drone operations in Afghanistan and Yemen — in addition to the Air Force, Hale was also employed as an intelligence contractor. He wrote that he observed the military routinely label all “military age males” killed in drone strikes as “enemies killed in action,” regardless of what they were doing or whether the government knew their identities.

U.S. drone operations abroad have killed between 9,000 and 17,000 people since 2004, according to an estimate from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, including as many as 2,200 children and multiple U.S. citizens. The organization puts the overall civilian casualty estimate from U.S. strikes worldwide at between 910 and 2,200 individuals.

Hale told the court that he leaked documents on the drone program out of a sense of moral duty. “I am here because I stole something that was never mine to take — precious human life,” he said at his sentencing. “I couldn’t keep living in a world in which people pretend that things weren’t happening that were. Please, your honor, forgive me for taking papers instead of human lives.”

Betsy Reed, editor-in-chief of The Intercept, said in a statement at the time of Hale’s sentencing that the documents Hale was accused of leaking “revealed the truth about the U.S. government’s secretive, murderous drone war, including that the killing of civilians was far more widespread than previously acknowledged.”

Among the Blueprint for Free Speech’s previous award recipients are other past targets of U.S. national security leak prosecutions, including Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner.

Hale, who has personally rejected the “whistleblower” label, is currently incarcerated at USP Marion, a federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, where he has been held in a “Communications Management Unit” since October. Commonly known as CMUs, the highly restrictive units are ostensibly meant to house the most dangerous of individuals and by design cut off virtually all access to the outside world. According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, “being sent to a CMU is uniquely stigmatizing because it is described publicly as a terrorist unit.” In October, journalist Kevin Gosztola reported that Hale is “the first person convicted for an unauthorized disclosure of information to the press to be incarcerated in a CMU.”

Last month, Hale’s network of supporters reported that he was poring over a large batch of letters and books and that he was eager to receive “articles and news about anything that’s not foreign policy.” The support group has created a GoFundMe page to “help alleviate the financial duress caused by a decade’s long criminal investigation, prosecution and now, incarceration.” Hale’s expected release date is July, 5, 2024.

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Erik Prince, founder of the private security firm Blackwater, filed a defamation lawsuit against The Intercept last month over an article published in 2020 that examined his efforts to sell military services to a sanctioned Russian mercenary company.

The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York after an earlier suit brought in Wyoming was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds. In the complaint, Prince claimed that The Intercept published “false or misleading statements about him and his business” and accused him of “being a criminal and a traitor.”

The lawsuit alleges that The Intercept published false and defamatory statements “that Mr. Prince ‘met with a top official of Russia’s Wagner Group and offered his mercenary forces to support the firm’s operation in Libya and Mozambique.’” The story included a denial by Prince’s attorney. It also cited three unnamed sources saying that Wagner did not do business with Prince.

The Wagner Group is a Russian semi-private military force that often operates at the behest of the Russian Ministry of Defense. Wagner’s fighters have been deployed to conflicts around the world in recent years, including in Syria, where dozens of them were killed in a U.S. military operation in 2018. Sean McFate, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and former military contractor, described the Wagner Group in the story as an “instrument of Russian policy.” Because the Trump administration had sanctioned the group in 2017 over its role in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, any business dealings with Wagner could have exposed Prince to legal liability, the story noted.

In his complaint, Prince described the story as “entirely fictional.” He denied meeting with the Wagner official or offering his services to the group. He accused the reporters of acting with “malice” for publishing the story after Prince’s lawyer had denied it. He also accused The Intercept, which has reported extensively on Prince’s business and political activities, of engaging in a “crusade” to discredit him and of a “history of false reporting” about him. Prince has not sued The Intercept in connection to any other stories.

In a statement, The Intercept said that the story is accurate. “Erik Prince’s lawsuit against The Intercept is without merit and is a bald attempt to intimidate us and discourage us from reporting on his mercenary activities,” wrote Betsy Reed, The Intercept’s editor-in-chief. “We will continue to report on his newsworthy ventures as a peddler of private military services around the world. This case is about press freedom and we will fight to defend our right to report on abuses of power by wealthy, well-connected individuals like Erik Prince. We stand by our reporting.”

Prince filed the earlier defamation suit in connection to the same story last year, but a federal judge in Wyoming dismissed it because none of the defendants had ties to the state, where Prince owns a home. In his order to dismiss, U.S. District Court Judge Alan Johnson noted that The Intercept, which is incorporated in Delaware, primarily operates from New York.

“The subject matter is national security and international relations, which are clearly issues of concern to a national and worldwide audience, not a Wyoming audience specifically,” Johnson wrote. He added that Prince may have difficulties “proving the merits of his claims” in other courts.

Prince’s attorneys also criticized The Intercept for attributing the story to unnamed sources, a relatively common practice in investigative journalism. In the complaint, Prince’s attorneys cast doubt about the story’s sourcing and accused The Intercept of basing the story on the “unsubstantiated claims of anonymous sources — if those anonymous sources even exist.”

In court filings in Wyoming, The Intercept argued that Prince’s “real motive in bringing this lawsuit” was to uncover the identities of the story’s anonymous sources. The Intercept’s attorneys told the court that none of the sources were based in Wyoming.

Blackwater changed names twice before merging with other private security groups to form Constellis Holdings in 2014. As Blackwater, it became an emblem of the abuses of private security firms after some of its contractors killed 17 civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007. Four Blackwater guards were ultimately convicted for 14 of the killings, but former President Donald Trump pardoned them shortly before leaving office.

Prince, a former Navy SEAL, was a vocal Trump supporter and an informal adviser to his administration. During Trump’s presidency, Prince seized on his connections to him to make a comeback — pitching his mercenary services to a host of private and state-connected potential clients around the world. Prince has denied advising the White House.

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“No military in the world works as hard as we do to avoid civilian casualties,” Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said recently.

Experts say that isn’t true.

“There was a time I could have said that,” Larry Lewis, who spent a decade analyzing military operations for the U.S. government under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, told The Intercept. “But that’s not what I’m seeing of late. Civilian protection is not prioritized. We’re not the best because we’re choosing not to be the best.”

The hard sell from the Pentagon comes in the wake of a New York Times investigation of a 2019 airstrike in Baghuz, Syria, that killed up to 64 noncombatants and was obscured through a multilayered coverup. It also follows intense media coverage of an August drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, that the Pentagon initially insisted was a “righteous strike” before admitting that it killed 10 civilians, seven of them children.

Revelations about these attacks have raised calls for increased scrutiny of U.S. military strikes. On Tuesday, the Yemen-based group Mwatana for Human Rights and the Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic asked Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to open new investigations of past U.S. attacks in Yemen, apologize for the deaths of civilians whom the U.S. has already acknowledged killing, and provide compensation to their families.

“The Department of Defense should do more to show it takes the prospect of accountability for civilian deaths and injuries with the seriousness it deserves,” wrote Radhya Al-Mutawakel, the chair of Mwatana, and Priyanka Motaparthy of Columbia in a letter sent to Austin and shared exclusively with The Intercept. “The recent New York Times report on civilian deaths in Baghuz, Syria indicates serious gaps in how the Department has ensured accountability. These events have raised serious concerns that there may be significant shortcomings in how the military responded to reports of civilian harm from Yemen, as well.”

A report by Mwatana released earlier this year examined 12 U.S. attacks in Yemen, 10 of them so-called counterterrorism airstrikes, between January 2017 and January 2019. The authors found that at least 38 Yemeni civilians — 19 men, six women, and 13 children — were killed and seven others injured in the attacks.

A June Pentagon report on civilian casualties acknowledged one of those incidents, the death of a civilian in Al-Bayda, Yemen, on January 22, 2019. Mwatana’s investigation found that the attack killed Saleh Ahmed Mohamed Al Qaisi, a 67-year-old farmer who locals said had no terrorist affiliations. The U.S. had previously acknowledged four to 12 civilian deaths in another incident chronicled by Mwatana, a raid by Navy SEALs on January 29, 2017, that was first exposed by The Intercept. Both Mwatana and The Intercept reported a higher death toll. Regarding the remaining allegations, Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, told Mwatana in an April 2021 letter: “USCENTCOM is confident that each airstrike hit its intended Al Qaeda targets and nothing else.”

But the Pentagon gives short shrift to investigations of civilian harm. Mwatana’s 156-page analysis of the 12 incidents was based on four years of investigations, often including site visits soon after attacks, by researchers who conducted nearly 70 interviews. It also drew on government documents, medical records, photographs, and videos. In 2017, however, there were reportedly just two full-time staff members at CENTCOM responsible for assessing reports of civilian harm caused by U.S. strikes in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq. A 2020 analysis of 228 U.S. military investigations of civilian casualty incidents found that site inspections were carried out in just 16 percent of those investigations.

“The U.S. military continues to refuse to conduct investigations of civilian harm where it can, and it never talks to victims and witnesses,” said Marc Garlasco, once the chief of high-value targeting at the Pentagon and now the military adviser for PAX, a Dutch civilian protection organization.

In their letter to Austin, Al-Mutawakel and Motaparthy pointed out that investigations by news outlets disproved initial reports that the August strike in Kabul killed only an Islamic State target. “Only after a subsequent review of these detailed facts from the ground did the Department of Defense acknowledge its error,” they wrote. “Similarly, we believe there is a need to open new investigations into the civilian harm reports we provided, based on Mwatana’s detailed investigations in Yemen.”

“The U.S. military continues to refuse to conduct investigations of civilian harm where it can, and it never talks to victims and witnesses.”

Exposés by journalists and NGOs have routinely been necessary to push the Department of Defense to investigate attacks and admit to killing civilians. For example, CENTCOM reported that between August 2014 and March 2017, at least 352 civilians were killed in U.S. attacks in Iraq and Syria. But a 2017 investigation by journalists Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal of nearly 150 U.S.-led coalition airstrikes targeting ISIS in Iraq found that 1 in 5 of the coalition strikes resulted in civilian death, a rate more than 31 times that acknowledged by the coalition. A 2019 investigation by Amnesty International and Airwars, a U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group, revealed that while U.S.-led forces took responsibility for 159 civilian deaths in Raqqa, Syria, more than 1,600 civilians were actually killed in air and artillery strikes. The U.S. now acknowledges that 1,417 civilians were slain in U.S. attacks in Iraq and Syria.

As the war against ISIS in Syria came to a close in March 2019, U.S. aircraft dropped three bombs on a field in Baghuz, where women, children, and possibly a small number of ISIS fighters were sheltering, leading to a death toll that an Air Force lawyer in charge of determining the legality of strikes, Lt. Col. Dean W. Korsak, called “shockingly high.”

The military had determined in 2019 that at least four civilians were slain in the Baghuz strike, but those deaths did not appear in the Pentagon’s 2019, 2020, or 2021 civilian casualty reports to Congress. CENTCOM only admitted that civilians had been killed after the Times contacted the command with its findings. In an email Korsak shared with the Senate Armed Services Committee, a major with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations said that agents generally looked into civilian casualty reports only when there was a “potential for high media attention, concern with outcry from local community/government, concern sensitive images may get out.”

The circumstances surrounding the Baghuz attack offer additional reasons for skepticism of U.S. claims about civilian casualties. While the death toll was “almost immediately apparent” and Korsak flagged it as a possible war crime, the Times reported, “at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike. The death toll was downplayed. Reports were delayed, sanitized and classified. United States-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site.” On Monday, Austin ordered a high-level inquiry into the strike and earlier investigations of it.

“CENTCOM has never conceded a civilian death or injury from its actions in Yemen without either a journalist or NGO having already extensively reported on the case.”

Lewis, who authored the 2013 report “Reducing and Mitigating Civilian Casualties: Enduring Lessons” for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says it’s imperative for the Pentagon to create an independent review process for civilian harm. “It’s feasible because I’ve done it in Afghanistan,” he told The Intercept. “You need to know that someone is looking at your homework. If not, it’s easy to give it a half-effort — or worse. And this is what we saw in Iraq and Syria. We saw the same thing later in Afghanistan and in Somalia and Yemen too.”

“CENTCOM has never conceded a civilian death or injury from its actions in Yemen without either a journalist or NGO having already extensively reported on the case,” said Chris Woods, the director of Airwars. Its admissions only followed the reports of deaths by The Intercept and Mwatana and an Airwars investigation of a strike that the Pentagon later said wounded two civilians.

Over four years, the Trump administration conducted at least 181 attacks in Yemen, nearly the same number that Obama carried out during his eight years in office. Attacks under Trump resulted in up to 154 civilian deaths, according to Airwars. The Pentagon, however, claims that as few as five civilians were killed by the U.S. during that four-year span.

There have been four alleged U.S. airstrikes in Yemen during the Biden administration, including two earlier this month, according to data provided by Airwars to The Intercept. Central Command denies involvement. “CENTCOM conducted its last counterterror strike in Yemen on June 24, 2019,” the command told The Intercept by email. “CENTCOM has not conducted any new counterterror strikes in Yemen since.” The CIA did not respond prior to publication to questions about agency strikes in Yemen this year.

Like Al-Mutawakel and Motaparthy, Lewis says that the United States should reinvestigate civilian casualty allegations in Yemen. But he doesn’t think that the Pentagon should stop there. “We need an independent review for Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, and, yes, Yemen,” he told The Intercept.

PAX’s Garlasco went even further, calling for outside assessments of both targeting processes and civilian harm. “Only a complete and thorough review of U.S. airstrikes by an independent body can provide the proper distance and recommendations to improve civilian protection,” he said.

“DOD has $700 billion, but how much of it does it devote to civilian harm? Practically nothing.”

Conducting reviews and reducing civilian casualties in U.S. military operations will take more engaged leadership — on the part of the Pentagon or Congress — and dedicated funding, experts say. “One reason that this is such a mess is because this is not resourced,” said Lewis. “Civilian harm is a vast, complex, and challenging problem. DOD has $700 billion, but how much of it does it devote to civilian harm? Practically nothing.”

Despite acknowledging, for example, that it killed or injured 33 civilians in 2020 and having more than $3 million set aside for casualties resulting from U.S. attacks, the Pentagon failed to make any “ex gratia” payments to survivors. Motaparthy noted that despite the Pentagon’s immense budget, the military routinely claims that it lacks the resources to quickly respond to civilian casualty reports.

“The U.S. military should open new investigations into civilian harm we have reported and make a serious effort to understand the civilian impact of U.S. operations,” said Mwatana’s Al-Mutawakel. “All civilians killed or harmed by the U.S. military deserve acknowledgment, amends or reparations, and accountability for wrongs.”

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Defense lawyers for the men accused of planning and carrying out the September 11 attacks say that journalists and other members of the public have gotten more information about the torture their clients experienced in CIA black sites than the attorneys representing them.

The lawyers, including one representing accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, told a war court in Guantánamo Bay this month that the sanitized summaries of CIA cables provided to defense attorneys for the five alleged attackers do not contain critical details such as dates and which torture techniques were used. Meanwhile, journalists for The Intercept and other publications, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union, have received fuller access to the cables by requesting them directly from the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act.

“We have a distinct difference between what’s available to the defendants in this capital case in discovery on the one hand and to the general public under FOIA in another,” David Nevin, an attorney for Mohammed, told the court. “And apparently there are situations in which security-cleared lawyers defending people in this capital case on trial for their life are entitled to less information than is available to the general public.”

The omissions – the result of a numbing bureaucratic process by which government prosecutors essentially rewrite the cables before sharing them with lawyers for the accused, leaving out material they view as overly sensitive or unimportant – are the latest sign of the government’s failures to ensure a robust defense for the men charged in the attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people more than 20 years ago.

The CIA cables documenting the interrogation and torture of Mohammed and the other defendants are redacted before being released, meaning that some information is blacked out, with indications of the legal justification, which can include concerns about national security, personal privacy, or that the release could compromise trade secrets. But even those redacted documents often include more detail than the sanitized summaries produced by the prosecution in the 9/11 case.

This cable to CIA headquarters from interrogators at a black site obtained via the Freedom of Information Act was shown in the Guantánamo military court on Nov. 4, 2021. Although heavily redacted, it contains information that defense attorneys were not given in the discovery process, in particular the date of this interrogation, March 17, 2003.

Screenshot: FOIA obtained by The Intercept

For example, summaries provided to the defense about the CIA’s interrogations of Mohammed at black sites between his capture on March 1 and March 22, 2003 — a critical three-week interval — include no dates. Yet independent journalist and Intercept contributor Daniel DeFraia used FOIA to obtain more than 50 CIA documents related to Mohammed’s questioning and torture with dates prior to March 22. The cables provided under FOIA also include details and original narratives in the words of the CIA interrogation teams; in the sanitized summaries, those words have been rephrased by the prosecution. In 2019, The Intercept published cables from DeFraia’s trove containing information that is still not available to defense lawyers in the military commission case charging Mohammed and his four alleged accomplices with plotting the September 11 attacks.

“Inconsistent redactions demonstrate that the government is not taking real care to redact only what is necessary, and it’s in fact very clearly over-redacting things that are public,” Dror Ladin, staff attorney at the ACLU National Security Project, told The Intercept.

“What they are withholding is less about national security and more about protecting information that could prove to be embarrassing to the agency.”

The omissions are particularly important in the 9/11 case because the defendants could face the death penalty if convicted. Their sentence could depend in large part on what U.S. intelligence agencies did to them, Ladin said.

“For the defense counsel to fully investigate that question, they need a full picture of what was done to them. When the CIA obstructs the dates, the locations, the people who were involved, the people responsible, it becomes very, very difficult to make that a really concrete picture,” Ladin said. “It’s one thing to just throw around the words ‘torture’ or ‘degrading treatment.’ It’s another thing to really walk through what it was like every day for a person who is being waterboarded over and over and over, or being starved, or being hung from his hands.”

James Connell, lead attorney for 9/11 defendant Ammar al-Baluchi, has used documents provided to the public under FOIA and other declassification orders to supplement the court-regulated discovery and challenge gaps in the information he received from prosecutors.

“Sometimes [the cables released under FOIA] have information in them that the government has invoked national security privilege over,” Connell told The Intercept. “In those situations, the public gets more access to once-classified information than the defense does.”

So why is the government withholding this information, under the eyes of attorneys and judges, in a high-profile capital case?

James Connell III, lead counsel for Ammar al-Baluchi, stands inside “Camp Justice” on Jan. 23, 2017.

Photo: Michelle Shephard/Toronto Star via Getty Images

“The records ultimately show the bad acts of the government,” said Jason Leopold, the BuzzFeed News reporter whose FOIA lawsuits have led to the release of thousands of redacted pages of CIA documents related to the Senate torture report. “What they are withholding is less about national security and more about protecting information that could prove to be embarrassing to the agency.”

In Guantánamo earlier this month, pretrial hearings in the 9/11 case focused on efforts to discover more information about coordination among government agencies in the interrogation and torture of the five men being tried jointly.

“If documents turn up after a representation that there’s nothing there, it wouldn’t be the first time,” said David Bruck, lead attorney for Ramzi bin al-Shibh. “It wouldn’t be the 50th time in the course of these proceedings, as near as I’ve been able to reconstruct.”

The defense teams have been seeking documents and witnesses from the prosecution since the pretrial hearings began in 2012. The prosecution has turned over more than a half-million pages, including 23,000 relating to the CIA’s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation, or RDI, program. But discovery litigation continues into its ninth year, as the government controls what the defense will see. The issue of national security classification further restricts access to the full record of events that took place in the black sites and later. Arguments over what can be produced are frequently heard in closed sessions, which neither the defendants nor the public may attend, and the filings are not available on the docket.

Over the 20 years since the attacks, documents and information on the 9/11 plots and the CIA rendition program in the hunt for Al Qaeda have been publicly released in government reports like the 2005 9/11 Commission Report and the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program. They have also entered the public record as evidence in criminal and civil trials; through FOIA requests by journalists, human rights organizations, and citizens; through declassification requests to government agencies; and in records maintained at the National Archives and books published by members of the intelligence community, like CIA contract psychologist James E. Mitchell’s “Enhanced Interrogation.”

Just this September, President Joe Biden signed an executive order directing the Department of Justice to oversee the declassification of documents related to the FBI’s September 11 investigations. Among the documents posted on the agency’s web site in response was an FBI intelligence requirements document that has come up previously in the 9/11 military commission testimony. According to Connell, Baluchi’s attorney, the newly released version differs from the one he was able to use in court in October 2019.

“The FBI intelligence requirement released under the Executive Order includes more than a dozen elements redacted from the version provided by the prosecution in discovery, including what appears to be the code name of the investigation,” Connell told The Intercept this month.

Getting any documents at all is often a long and exhausting process for the 9/11 defendants. Defense lawyers file motions to compel the government to give them information, which are then argued in court for months before a judge decides. And then, as heard in court this month, the documents may not be provided after all.

“The government is taking the approach that they’re not going to turn over discovery unless we fight everything document by document with motions to compel and document requests,” Sean M. Gleason, attorney for Mustafa al-Hawsawi, told Col. Matthew N. McCall, who was appointed in August and is the fourth judge to preside over the case. “If that is their tact, Your Honor, we’re going to be trying this case forever.”

When the hearings resumed this September, at the 20th anniversary of the attacks, McCall faced a trial record with more than 10,500 filings on the docket. This month’s hearings, which adjourned on November 19 at Guantánamo Bay, are the 43rd pretrial session since the five defendants were arraigned in May 2012.

In January 2020, before the proceedings came to a halt due to the pandemic, the psychologists who designed the CIA’s torture techniques, Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, testified as the defendants watched just yards away, and 9/11 victim family members and reporters viewed from a glass-walled gallery. The methods, including waterboarding, were designed to “condition” prisoners to provide information to interrogators and debriefers.

Any statements and confessions the defendants made while they were in the black sites from 2002 to September 2006 have already been suppressed from the trial record. Now the defense is seeking to suppress statements the accused made in January 2007, when a so-called clean team from the FBI restarted the interrogation process in Guantanamo. The court learned this month that FBI agents were detailed to the CIA’s RDI program, a fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee that produced the 2014 torture report apparently did not know.

Defense attorneys told the court that the FBI interrogations should be thrown out, arguing that statements the accused made at Guantánamo were not voluntary because of the profound impact of their prior torture. The prosecution’s stance is that the men’s statements to the FBI should be allowed because four months passed between the end of their black site torture and their reinterrogation at Guantánamo.

Connell is pursuing his own FOIA lawsuits to produce documents he has been denied in discovery. On October 18, in a U.S. District Court filing in Washington, D.C., the CIA stated it had identified 765 responsive documents, representing 3,125 pages of material that it will process and release to Connell on a quarterly basis starting in January 2022.

In the Guantánamo courtroom, lead prosecutor Clayton G. Trivett Jr. volunteered to review classified CIA documents previously provided to the defense. “In no circumstance should the public be getting more information about the same topic than a capital defendant does,” he stated. “We are in violent agreement on that.”

Daniel DeFraia contributed reporting.

The post Lawyers For Accused 9/11 Plotters Say Public Knows More About the Men’s Torture Than They Do appeared first on The Intercept.

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“I did what I had to do to survive.”

That’s what Tareena Shakil, the first British woman to be prosecuted and convicted for joining the Islamic State, tells filmmaker Abigail Carr in Shakil’s first interview since a British jury convicted her of joining ISIS and encouraging terrorism in 2016. Shakil’s interview was part of “Tareena: Return from ISIS,” a one-hour film that aired Sunday in the United Kingdom on ITV’s current affairs program “Exposure.”

I’d been waiting a long time to hear Shakil tell her story. I spent much of the last three years working on a podcast about the man to whom Shakil was briefly married during her time in Syria: Russell Dennison, an American convert to Islam who joined ISIS as a fighter. Dennison is the subject of “American ISIS,” an eight-part Audible Original documentary podcast released in July from The Intercept and Topic Studios. Dennison secretly communicated with me for months from ISIS-controlled Syria, sending more than 30 hours of recordings about his life and his time with ISIS, until he died in an airstrike in eastern Syria as the so-called caliphate was collapsing.

Dennison was remarkably candid in his recordings, but there was one subject he was reluctant to discuss in detail: his first wife in Syria. Dennison had been shot in the leg during an ISIS battle, leaving him with a pronounced limp. The injury prevented him from being an effective fighter, so in 2014 he settled down in Raqqa and visited a matchmaker in a house filled with dozens of single women waiting to be married. Dennison wanted a Syrian wife, but the ISIS matchmaker preferred to arrange marriages between foreign men and foreign women. He suggested to Dennison a young British woman who’d come to Syria with her 1-year-old son.

“We sit down. I talked to her maybe 15 minutes,” Dennison told me, in a story that’s described in the sixth episode of the podcast. “After that, the person says, ‘I’m busy. You have to go.’ He takes you outside. He asks you, ‘What’s it gonna be? Yes or no?’ Just like that. You see the woman’s face for maybe 10 seconds. You talk to her maybe 20 minutes, and then they ask you if you want to marry. You don’t know who this woman is, where she is from, what her background is — you don’t know anything. So I did this interview twice, and then we just accepted to get married.”

But Dennison told me the marriage didn’t last. “This girl, she just rushed into coming to Syria. When she came, she missed her mother, and she wanted to go back to Britain,” he explained. “And you know, some of these sisters, they do that — they talk to men online. They get excited. They see these Islamic State videos, and they just leave everything, and then they come, they see there’s bombings, there’s killing, there’s war, and they can never go back. So this woman ended up returning back to Britain. There’s nothing else really to say about her.”

Dennison, who later married a Syrian woman and had two daughters with her, never told me the name of his previous wife. After his death, I met with one of his family members in the United States. She asked me not to use her name since she didn’t want to be associated publicly with Dennison. She said the FBI had interviewed her, and agents told her the name of Dennison’s first wife in Syria: Tareena Shakil. Through additional reporting, I was able to confirm that information.

Shakil wasn’t a little-known woman who’d quietly gone to Syria and returned to the U.K. without fanfare. She had become one of the world’s best-known ISIS brides, and now she’s talking for the first time.

Russell Dennison, at a time when he was dying his red beard black, looks on, with ISIS-controlled Syria in the background.

Photo: Obtained by The Intercept

Journey to ISIS

Early in “Tareena: Return from ISIS,” Shakil and her social worker, Mike Jervis, are in an apartment in Birmingham, England. Shakil’s dark brown hair is long and uncovered, and she’s wearing a black shirt that exposes her neck and collarbones. Jervis shows Shakil a photograph of her, taken in Syria, wearing a burqa and posing next to an AK-47 assault rifle. It was an image that had been printed in newspapers and splashed across screens throughout the United Kingdom.

“So who was that woman?” Jervis asks Shakil.

“Right there, that is someone who’s just lost her way in life, found a very wrong, like, wrong path, and is someone who just needs help,” Shakil answers.

This appears to be the reason Shakil cooperated with the British filmmakers — to make the case to Britons that she’s now a different person from the one who joined ISIS and posed for that photograph. But Shakil still isn’t willing to take full responsibility for what happened. When the filmmakers confront her with conflicting information, she deflects or provides disappointingly vague answers.

Shakil explains that her journey to ISIS started as a result of her first husband, a conservative Muslim who expected her to dress modestly and refrain from using social media. “It wasn’t a particularly happy marriage,” Shakil says.

Shortly after their son’s birth, Shakil’s husband traveled to Yemen. He allegedly threatened to stay there, marry another woman, and establish a new life. Shakil started communicating on Facebook with a handsome Portuguese man named Fábio Poças, who was an ISIS fighter in Syria. “Yeah, he was attractive,” Shakil admits. Within weeks of meeting Poças online, Shakil posted an ISIS flag on her Twitter and Facebook profiles. She then traveled with her toddler son to Turkey. After arriving at a city near the Syrian border, she called a phone number Poças had given her. A van took her and her son to a deserted patch of land along the border. She was told to run to a white truck waiting on the Syrian side. “That was the first time that I’d seen, in real life, the black flag,” Shakil remembers.

Shakil admits that before crossing into Syria, she was aware of ISIS’s brutality and the group’s propaganda videos showing the beheadings of American journalists and British aid workers. “It’s not something I’m happy about now, looking back,” she explains. “But at the time, the only thing I can say is that, you know, I was far from the best version of myself at that time.”

In Syria, Shakil texted her family and told them that she’d joined ISIS. Her family went to the police. Soon Shakil’s picture was on the front page of The Sun, a British tabloid. “The Only Way Is ISIS,” a large headline read. Overnight, Shakil had become infamous.

Shakil has long maintained — and argued at her criminal trial — that she did not go to Syria expecting to join ISIS or marry a fighter. But evidence uncovered by British investigators suggests otherwise. Among the material she read before leaving for Syria was a blog written by a Scottish ISIS bride who described how single women arriving in Syria would be expected to marry jihadis.

In Raqqa, Shakil told the filmmakers, she was taken to a house for single women that was run by a Saudi couple. “I’m here until I get married,” Shakil wrote in a text message to a family member in England. “I had a meeting yesterday with an American, so we will see.”

Tareena Shakil poses for a photograph while filming the new documentary “Tareena: Return from ISIS.”

Still: Courtesy of Uplands Television

An “Arrangement”

In another text message to a relative in England, Shakil described the American she’d met through the Saudi matchmaker. “He walks with a limp,” she told the relative at the time.

In the recordings he sent to me, Dennison described how ISIS officials provided him and Shakil with a new apartment after they married. Although Shakil did not admit at trial or in her interview with ITV that she lived with Dennison, she sent text messages from Syria in December 2014 that suggested she did.

“I have my own house now,” she wrote in one message.

“I’m so happy now,” she texted in another message. “My new house is lovely.”

When I was reporting “American ISIS,” I contacted Shakil. She declined to talk to me due to parole terms at the time that prohibited her from speaking to journalists. (Shakil served three years in prison and three years of parole.) I provided photographs of Dennison to someone who could show them to Shakil. That person confirmed that Dennison was the American Shakil described in her text messages from Syria and confirmed a detail only Shakil could have known: that Dennison, who had a long red beard, was dying his beard black when she knew him in Raqqa.

From that confirmation, I revealed in “American ISIS” that Shakil had been married to Dennison. In her trial, and in a previous interview she did with the ITV filmmakers in 2018, Shakil suggested that she had never married or lived with an ISIS fighter in Raqqa and did not name Dennison. The ITV filmmakers contacted me in September, and I told them what Dennison had said about his relationship with Shakil and how I’d confirmed that Shakil was Dennison’s first wife in Syria.

The filmmakers then asked Shakil about Dennison and my reporting.

“The only thing that I will say — I don’t want to go into too much — but I will say … I know who this guy is,” Shakil told the filmmakers, referring to Dennison. “There was an arrangement in place. And I don’t want to say anything more than that. But what I will say is that a lot of things that may have happened in Syria were not of my own choice or were not things that I wanted to do. And there’s many things that happened that were not what I wanted to have happened.”

Shakil was only in ISIS-controlled Syria for a few months, and she now says that everything she did there was in an effort to stay alive. She told the filmmakers she escaped Syria by taking a bus with her son out of Raqqa, then a taxi to a spot close to the border, where she ran, with her son in her arms, to Turkish soldiers on the other side. “You need to help me,” she told the soldiers.

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The August 29 attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed Zemari Ahmadi, an innocent aid worker, and his family has become one of the most notorious drone strikes of the war on terror. It is also rapidly becoming one of the most revealing, forcing the U.S. government to disclose more about how it makes decisions about killing people in foreign countries by remote control, using aircraft high in the sky. The Kabul attack generated intense scrutiny from the moment it was launched, after journalists on the ground quickly contradicted the government narrative about who had been killed. What is now being revealed is that the evidence that can be used to carry out fatal strikes — like the one that killed Ahmadi and his family — is often razor thin.

A one-page summary of the findings of an internal investigation of the strike, led by Air Force Inspector General Lt. Gen. Sami D. Said, claimed that no violations of the laws of war had been committed and did not recommend that anyone be criminally disciplined for the killing of Ahmadi and his family. Said’s report concluded that the fatal strike was executed due to a mixture of “confirmation bias and communications breakdowns” — errors that occurred during an eight-hour period when Ahmadi was under aerial surveillance. Said did not share specific intelligence that had put Ahmadi into the sights of U.S. drones but suggested that certain actions — like picking up a laptop bag and driving a Toyota Corolla, common on the roads of Afghanistan — were enough for drone operators to justify pulling the trigger and killing him and his family in front of their home.

The U.S. military has not released its own video footage of the attack, which it insisted initially showed a successful strike that had hit a car carrying a suicide bomber. Officials also claimed at first that their footage showed secondary explosions pointing to a “substantial amount of explosive material” in the car that they had hit. These claims turned out to be false. A combination of reporting from the ground, made easier by Kabul’s status as a hub for international media and open-source intelligence work carried out by foreign reporters, established that not only were claims of major secondary explosions implausible, but the U.S. had also killed a man who was a longtime aid worker for a U.S.-based NGO, just as his children were rushing to his car to greet him.

During a press briefing Thursday, Said was asked about reports that U.S. forces were looking for a white Toyota Corolla, considered the most common vehicle on the roads of Afghanistan, which led them to attack Ahmadi. “We actually never ended up tracking the actual Toyota Corolla,” Said said. “It certainly wasn’t the one we did track and struck. We just didn’t pick up the Toyota Corolla that we believe we should have picked up that might have been involved in something that’s worth knowing.” Said also described the strike as “unique” in comparison to the thousands of other strikes that the U.S. has carried out, citing the context of a deadly suicide bombing at the Kabul airport that had occurred days before, in the heat of a messy U.S. withdrawal, and statements from President Joe Biden at the time that another attack was believed to be imminent.

Analysts who track these strikes say that there were aspects to it that made it different from other attacks, in which drone operators have time to carry out extended “pattern-of-life” analysis on subjects to confirm their identities.

“The backdrop of this strike was that there was intelligence gathered to suggest that ISIS was threatening the airport, there was an attack there previously, and the president himself was saying that we expect another attack to take place imminently,” said Micah Zenko, a political scientist and expert on the U.S. drone program. “It created a condition where external pressures are going to lead people to think a certain way — everyone is primed to look for another car bomb. Once you prime people like that, and you reduce the timeframe to make a judgement, it can lead to all types of mental shortcuts.”

“That’s what makes it so hard to assess, because it deals with the part of the process that they will never talk about: the intelligence.”

The summary report issued by Said laid out several recommendations for avoiding future such incidents, including taking steps to reduce confirmation bias in targeting, improving situational awareness through communication, and reviewing pre-strike procedures to protect civilians. Zenko says that these recommendations have been made many times before after similar incidents. The real issue — faulty intelligence and policy decisions that lead to such killings taking place — remain unaddressed.

“They never look at the big picture,” said Zenko. “It’s never a weaponeering problem and is almost always an intelligence assessment problem that leads to these incidents. That’s what makes it so hard to assess, because it deals with the part of the process that they will never talk about: the intelligence.”

The U.S. government has been militant about protecting the drone program from scrutiny, making accurate assessments about intelligence failures hard to confirm. When information has leaked, such as the classified 2015 disclosures from the program published by The Intercept, it has shown a program that is far less discriminating and targeted than has been advertised. One leaked document showed that during a five-month stretch of a U.S. operation in Afghanistan, nearly nine out of 10 people who died in airstrikes were not the intended targets of the attacks.

The Kabul attack was initially celebrated by the military as a successful operation, with the term “righteous strike” used repeatedly by military officials. The fallout that came when outside investigators determined what really happened, however, has once again raised serious questions about who is being killed in U.S. military operations conducted from the skies.

“This is not what a three-star general is commissioned to study, but the most interesting question about this strike regarded what happened after. How did senior leaders get it so wrong and only adjust course when diligent investigative journalists and NGOs uncovered that the story that they were selling about this strike was completely incorrect?” said Zenko. “There have probably been between 350 to 400 of these kinds of strikes in Pakistan alone, of which we have no documentary evidence. In this case the military only adjusted its narrative because independent third-party investigators were able to dig deeper than they did.”

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