US spy chiefs hunt The Intercept who revealed how Obama authorizies drone strikes

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Cache of top-secret security documents published by The Intercept
The same team leaked files from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden
The new cache of 'slides' details how President Obama clears a pilot-less drone assassination
The source who leaked them described the process as 'outrageous'
He or she has not been named, fearing a Snowden-like backlash
The documents reveal that in one operation where 219 people were killed, only 35 - 15 percent - were intended targets
The CIA and Pentagon officials are investigating the leak

Published: 13:25 EST, 15 October 2015 | Updated: 14:52 EST, 15 October 2015

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Intelligence chiefs are hunting for a new Edward Snowden-style whistleblower who has leaked classified details about America’s drone assassination program.

CIA and Pentagon bosses are investigating after the publication of ‘The Drone Papers’ which includes Top Secret slides on how President Obama authorizes a kill.

The disclosure raises the prospect of a second Snowden-like figure, especially as the leak was published by the same journalists who worked with him before.

But unlike Snowden the single, anonymous source has already spoken out and expresses intense moral outrage over the drone strikes on theintercept.com.

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High-classified: CIA and Pentagon bosses are investigating after the publication of ‘The Drone Papers’, a cache of classified documents obtained by the same team of journalists who worked with Edward Snowden. Seen above is one of dozens of slides published by The Intercept

The Intercept said it has obtained and published a cache of secret slides 'that provides a window into the inner workings of the U.S. military’s kill/capture operations'. Pictured here is one of the slides, which are used by special operations officials to authorize drone assassination

Pilot-less: The US government began to use drones for assassinations after the September 11 2001 attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but their use has since spread around the world. Seen here is a MQ-1 Predator drone operating in Tikrit, Iraq, in September 2009

He is quoted as saying that the program is ‘outrageous’ and ‘from very first instance, wrong’.

The Intercept is run by Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who worked with Snowden on his disclosures about mass surveillance by the National Security Agency.

He has not identified the source citing the harsh treatment of Snowden, who remains in exile in Russia, and Chelsea Manning, the Army Private who is serving 25 years in jail for leaking intelligence documents to Wikileaks.

The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill, who wrote the story, writes: ‘Taken together, the secret documents lead to the conclusion that Washington’s 14-year high-value targeting campaign suffers from an over-reliance on signals intelligence, an apparently incalculable civilian toll, and - due to a preference for assassination rather than capture - an inability to extract potentially valuable intelligence from terror suspects’.

The US government began to use drones for assassinations after the September 11 2001 attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but their use has since spread around the world.

The release of the top-secret slides, above, raises the prospect of a second Snowden-like whistelblower figure, especially as the leak was published by The Intercept, the same journalists who worked with him before

In CIA speak, drone killings are a way to ‘find, fix and finish’ its targets, according to leaked slides.

The information shows that during Operation Haymaker, a campaign in northeastern Afghanistan which ran between January 2012 and February 2013, some 219 people were killed by drones.

But just 35 were the intended targets, a mere 15 per cent.

During one five-month stretch of the operation, a staggering 90 per cent of those killed were not the intended target.

Despite this all the deaths were labelled EKIA, or ‘enemy killed in action’.

The source told The Intercept that anyone caught near the strike was ‘guilty by association’ and that there was ‘no guarantee that those persons deserved their fate’.

The papers also reveal that President Obama is given ‘baseball cards’ which have a suspect’s portrait and the key allegations against them on them to help him make up his mind.

The President takes on average 58 days to sign off on a kill and from there the US military has 60 days to carry it out.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden (pictured left in 2013) remains in exile in Russia. The new leak of documents details how President Obama authorizes a drone-strike kill using 'baseball cards' of targets

The documents lay out in detail how many people are consulted before President Obama signs off on the order, and who is involved in the process.

The source said: ‘This outrageous explosion of watchlisting — of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield — it was, from the very first instance, wrong’.

The Intercept declined to reveal who the source was, but at the end of Citizenfour, the documentary about Snowden’s decision to come forward, Greenwald talks about a new source who is speaking to Scahill.

Greenwald even draws a diagram of a chain of command for drone strikes which looks similar to the graphic in The Drone Papers.

In the scene Snowden tells Greenwald: ‘That person is incredibly bold’.

Nobody from the The Pentagon, White House, and Special Operations Command was available for comment.

A Defence Department spokesperson said: ‘We don’t comment on the details of classified reports’.

The military is facing ‘critical shortfalls’ in Somalia and Yemen and has called using phone data alone a ‘limited’ way of guaranteeing a kill.

A MQ-1 Predator drone craft performs for media and guests in Lielvarde, Latvia, on September 8, 2015. The US has used the same drones over Pakistan

The source said that in some cases operatives tailed phones for seven months only to find out they belonged to the suspect’s mother.

The source is quoted as saying: ‘They (the targets) have no rights. They have no dignity. They have no humanity to themselves.

‘They’re just a ‘selector’ to an analyst. You eventually get to a point in the target’s life cycle that you are following them, you don’t even refer to them by their actual name.’.

The source also said that the military doesn’t want to change because the drones are ‘making their lives easier’.

The source said: ‘And this certainly is, in their eyes, a very quick, clean way of doing things. It’s a very slick, efficient way to conduct the war, without having to have the massive ground invasion mistakes of Iraq and Afghanistan.

‘But at this point, they have become so addicted to this machine, to this way of doing business, that it seems like it’s going to become harder and harder to pull them away from it the longer they’re allowed to continue operating in this way.’

Whilst the documents appear to have come from a single source, The Intercept acknowledges they have published them amid a fight between the CIA and the US military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) over who controls the drone program.