28 April 2015

Are We Winning the Drone War?

Doyle McManus
April 25, 2015

Almost two years ago, President Obama announced that he was tightening the rules under which the CIA carries out drone strikes against suspected terrorists in Pakistan, Yemen and other countries. “Before any strike is taken, there must be a near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured — the highest standard we can set,” he said.

Afterward, civilian casualties did, in fact, fall significantly, according to independent monitoring groups. One of those groups, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, says four civilian deaths have been reported in Pakistan in the 16 months since the end of 2013, down dramatically from a high of 197 in 2010.

But Obama’s higher standard wasn’t enough to avoid the unintended killing of two civilian hostages, one American and one Italian, in a Jan. 15 drone strike in Pakistan. As the White House acknowledged this week, the CIA didn’t know that Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto were being held at the target site.Nor did the new rules protect two other U.S. citizens who had joined Al Qaeda from being killed the same week, even though they weren’t specifically targeted for elimination. If they had been targeted, the two Americans’ cases would have received high-level review — another Obama reform. But the CIA didn’t know that Adam Gadahn and Ahmed Farouq were in its crosshairs, because those strikes weren’t aimed at specific individuals; they were aimed at sites where suspicious activity was going on. The CIA calls these “signature strikes,” because they’re based on troubling patterns that would seem to indicate Al Qaeda’s presence.

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