Inside the CIA’s ‘Kill List’
Inside the CIA’s ‘Kill List’
September 6, 2011, 10:34 am ET
An excerpt from Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin. Reprinted with permission from Little, Brown and Company
Targeted killings — critics call them assassinations — have been conducted by the U.S. government for a decade, and drones have played a large part in the continuation and frequency of such activities. Armed Predators and Reapers have become the weapons of choice for killing individual terrorist leaders in foreign lands. The success of weapon-carrying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) created a demand within every branch of the military and the CIA for as many of them as their corporate inventor, California-based General Atomics, could produce. It also spawned a development and production frenzy within the niche community of manufacturers experimenting with other types of unmanned aircraft, and with the many larger defense contractors whose technology is used to move a drone’s surveillance pictures and targeting information around the world — from the battlefield to the sanctuary — in a matter of seconds.
The number of drones in the U.S. arsenal has increased from sixty to more than six thousand since 9/11. Funding for drone-related projects and activities was about $350 million in 2001, when the first CIA Predator was being flown from a trailer once used as a daycare center in the parking lot of the agency’s headquarters. In ten years, spending on drones has ballooned to over $4.1 billion, and there are over twenty different types of UAVs in the government’s inventory. Most of them are used for surveillance. Some of the experimental ones are as small as a dragonfly, and disguised as one, too.