“I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day.”
At its peak Lavender marked 37,000 people as potential targets. Sources say it gets it wrong in about 10 percent of cases, and humans served as a “rubber stamp” on its picks. Officers were allowed to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians to hit one junior operative. A 10 percent error rate on 37,000 names is thousands of people, and nobody spent more than 20 seconds checking.