Classified documents, leaked to investigative news website The Intercept, have revealed the inner workings of the secret US drone program in the Middle East and Central Asia.
A source from within the US intelligence community leaked the documents which appear to undermine American claims that drone strikes have been precise.
The files describe in detail how many people are consulted before President Obama signs off on the order.
The whistleblower, who has already been labelled as the new 'Edward Snowden' on social media, said the public has the right to know about the process by which people are placed on 'kill lists' and "ultimately assassinated on orders from the highest echelons of the US government."
Since taking office in 2009, Obama has expanded the drone program, authorising many more strikes than his predecessor, George W Bush.
The source told The Intercept: "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 leaked papers appear to show that drone strikes were often carried out based on insufficient and unreliable intelligence and when executed, often compromise further gathering of intelligence.
