New whistleblower steps forward: The Drone Papers
By the Chelsea Manning Support Network. October 16, 2015
“I waited 40 years for Chelsea. Three more for Snowden. And so it’s wonderful that somebody is telling the truth about this series of crimes. I’m very glad to see it,” noted Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg today regarding the Drone Papers.
Yesterday, the Intercept released The Drone Papers, a series of secret documents providing previously unknown insights on the inner workings of drone warfare courtesy of a single, currently anonymous source.
Click here to read the complete Drone Papers from the Intercept
As WIRED magazine notes, “It’s been just over two years since Edward Snowden leaked a massive trove of NSA documents, and more than five since Chelsea Manning gave WikiLeaks a megacache of military and diplomatic secrets. Now there appears to be a new source on that scale of classified leaks—this time with a focus on drones.”Similar to Chelsea Manning, this whistleblower was moved to act by their conscience, and a belief that the American public has the right to know what the military is doing in our name:
“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 source tells the Intercept. “We’re allowing this to happen. And by ‘we,’ I mean every American citizen who has access to this information now, but continues to do nothing about it.”
Among the leaked info is the startling revelation that, “nearly 90% of people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets.”
Edward Snowden weighs in via his twitter account
“It comes down to this. Hundreds could have done what I did, literally. And should have. Hundreds of people could and should have done what Edward Snowden did. And hundreds of people could and should have done what Chelsea Manning did. They did the right thing. The others were wrong to keep those secrets.”
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