A computer network that the US Central Intelligence Agency began using a decade ago to conduct the kidnap and torture of terrorist suspects has become an integral part of the system now operating drone strikes in the Middle East and Africa.
The means to send ‘above top secret’ intelligence communications around the globe without exposure empowered the CIA’s Rendition and Detention Program to snatch and interrogate suspects in the US ‘war on terror’. The same network system became the principal mechanism behind the intelligence-led “targeted killing” of suspected enemies using drone strikes today.
The technological link between the two sinister programmes, signposted in passing detail by the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program last week, further confirms that a US military network routed via the UK carried intelligence vital to the US targeted killing programme, and presents evidence that may sway officials deciding whether contractor British Telecommunications Plc should be held to account for building a part of the network used to transmit drone targeting intelligence since 2012.
In both programmes, secure global comms gave the CIA unprecedented, computer-driven power to collate, combine and analyse information about individual suspected people, and to pursue their subjection or assassination in other countries rapidly, with dreadfully focused vigilance.
Now having been pulled up for torturing the ‘wrong’ people, for assassinating the ‘wrong’ people, and for straying beyond the scope of international law, its newfound intelligence powers have been exposed as a grotesque.