Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
According to this scattershot exposé from the Intercept, the drone strikes conducted by the U.S. military and CIA in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia are a fiasco marred by targeting mistakes, heavy civilian casualties, and infringements of civil liberties. Relying on leaked intelligence documents and interviews with a drone operator and other informants, Scahill, Glenn Greenwald, and other Intercept journalists (plus whistle-blower Edward Snowden, who contributes a foreword) paint the drone program as a contradictory mix of all-seeing surveillance, blinkered error, and indiscriminate killing. Drones track cell phones and SIM cards based on often vague or mistaken information that the people carrying them are terrorists, and the ensuing Hellfire missiles usually kill people-hundreds of them, altogether-other than intended targets. Meanwhile, the authors argue, cell phone surveillance and promiscuous terrorist watch lists have spilled over into domestic American policing. The authors provide a fragmented rundown of the drone strike "kill chain" of command up to the Oval Office-Greenwald denounces President Obama for betraying liberal principles by expanding drone strikes-and include vignettes about innocents killed by drones. There's nothing revelatory here-the drone assassinations and their problems are well-known-but this pointillistic portrait provides illuminating new detail and insight. Photos. Agent: Anthony Arnove, Roam Agency. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
"Drones are a tool, not a policy. The policy is assassination." With this hard-hitting line, Scahill (Blackwater) and the staff of The Intercept confront the Obama presidency's escalation of drone strikes to kill supposed terrorists, including American and British citizens. According to Scahill, the drone campaigns are unconstitutional and counterproductive, as the strikes destroy valuable human intelligence, inflict civilian casualties, and make enemies of local Yemenis and Afghans. Chapters are based on the Drone Papers, a trove of U.S. intelligence documents leaked to The Intercept in 2015. These documents demonstrate that attacks target supposed terrorists' cell phone signals, commonly inflicting "death by unreliable metadata." Elegant data visualizations illustrate these revelations, also accompanied by striking design elements such as stylized pairs of eyes that peep whimsically from the margins of pages about the surveillance state. Whistle-blower Edward Snowden wrote the foreword and journalist Glenn Greenwald the afterword-need we say more? VERDICT While very much a work of the moment, this account delivers a searing, facts-driven indictment of America's drone wars and their implications for U.S. democracy and foreign policy. A must-read for concerned citizens.--Michael Rodriguez, Hodges Univ. Lib., Naples, FL © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In this angry but well-documented polemic, journalist Scahill (Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, 2013, etc.) and his colleagues at the Intercept add to a growing genre that denounces our leaders' fascination with a cheap, seemingly risk-free way to kill terrorists. Benefitting from an amazing number of leaks, secret documents, and interviews with officials on the promise of anonymity, this collection of articles from 2014-2015 describes how the American government tracks suspected terrorists, builds a kill list, rates the priority of the target (often literally from "1" to "4"), and plans and executes the attack. It's a spectacularly clunky process entirely dependent on informers, secondhand intelligence, and electronic eavesdropping, since drone cameras cannot identify individuals. Woe to the Afghan mother who borrows her son's cellphone. No one gets off the hook, but the authors reserve special disdain for President Barack Obama, who, ignoring his admirable 2008 campaign rhetoric, has enthusiastically adopted "the defining essence of the Bush-Cheney templatethat the U.S. is fighting an endless war against terror suspects who have no due process of any kind." Readers will be left in no doubt that drone warfare affronts morality and the Constitution. The missiles kill terrorists if they happen to be present, but that is not always the case. It's increasingly dangerous to be a terrorist, but since when has danger discouraged angry, disaffected young men? The Islamic State group and al-Qaida have no shortage of recruits. Furthermore, as Edward Snowden writes in the foreword, "a single act of whistleblowing doesn't change the reality that there are significant portions of the government that operate below the waterline, beneath the visibility of the public. Those secret activities will continue, despite reforms." Convincing and damning but unlikely to influence U.S. leaders because the electorate largely approves of drone warfare. Apparently killing terrorists takes priority over legal niceties or the deaths of innocent non-Americans. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
