Hell Yea The CIA Is Running A Secret Drone Campaign Against ISIS, Sniping Its Leadership From The Sky

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One of the biggest complaints coming from Republicans campaigning for their party’s presidential nomination is that Barack Obama isn’t doing enough to stop the spread of the Islamic State.

“We must kill the ISIS immediately and faster and better,” they all shout, insinuating that our Kenyan Muslim leader is actually secretly satisfied to see the Islamic caliphate spread across the Middle East.

It is true that the White House has adamantly refused to send ground troops back to Iraq and into Syria, and it does often seem to be publicly futzing and fussing about what to do, but that does not mean the collective firepower of the United States is sitting grounded with its thumb up its own butt, content to stay there, enjoying its thumb in its butt.

Nah, it’s been droning the dick outta ISIS leaders in secret.

The Washington Post has the scoop on a secret drone campaign run by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command, targeting leaders of ISIS.

The CIA and U.S. special operations forces have launched a secret campaign to hunt terrorism suspects in Syria as part of a targeted killing program that is run separately from the broader U.S. military offensive against the Islamic State, U.S. officials said.

The CIA and the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command are both flying armed drones over Syria in a collaboration responsible for several recent strikes against senior Islamic State operatives, the officials said. Among those killed was a British militant believed to be an architect of the terror group’s effort to use social media to incite attacks in the United States, the officials said.

WORD BOOM. Drone death from above. That’s how we roll these days. Though spokespeople declined to comment, The Post had a number of officials speak off the record about the effort. It is different, they say, from the general U.S.-led airstrikes. Instead, this is focused explicitly on leaders in ISIS. The strikes are a coordinated action between the CIA and special forces, with the military taking the lead in the actual death part, partially because Obama has, in recent years, pledged to roll back the CIA’s drone program.

Faced with those obstacles, administration officials now see the hybrid approach in Syria as a possible way to salvage at least part of Obama’s plan.

The agency will remain deeply involved in “finding and fixing” terrorism targets in collaboration with JSOC but will leave the “finish” to the military, at least in Syria, officials said, using insider terms for the strike sequence.

The spooks tag ’em, then the troops kill ’em. Perfectly legal. Nothing to see here. Move along. Still, the administration is cognizant that doing this is kind of the exact opposite of what they promised, but … well … whatever, basically. Desperate times or something.

The U.S. move complicates one of Obama’s remaining counterterrorism policy goals of gradually reversing the CIA’s evolution from spy service to paramilitary force. President Obama last year signaled his intent to have the agency cede control of drone strikes to the Department of Defense, and return the spy service’s focus to more traditional categories of espionage.

Instead, Syria is a new front in a spreading campaign of secret operations and drone strikes that already encompasses Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and parts of North Africa.

Well, maybe after he finishes off IS, then he’ll get back to rolling back the CIA’s authority. In the mean time, they stress that these killings are very infrequent.

The officials said that the program accounts for only a handful of strikes so far, a tiny fraction of the more than 2,450 conducted in Iraq and Syria over the past year. That broader U.S.-led assault has relied on conventional bombs to dislodge the Islamic State from territory it has seized.

The CIA and JSOC program is more narrow in scope, officials said, aimed primarily at leadership figures in the Islamic State as well as operatives suspected of being involved in efforts to build a terror network beyond the borders of its declared caliphate.

Yea why wouldn’t we try and kill those people? You can read the article here.