Obama releases part of secret drone ‘playbook’
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration released a redacted version of its “playbook” for the lethal U.S. drone program, a booklet of presidential guidelines that sets legal standards for deciding who to kill, where and under what circumstances.
The administration quietly released the document Friday, in response to a court order in an open records lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The disclosure comes as the administration has vastly expanded the targeted-killing program but until recently has refused to acknowledge its existence or answer questions about how targets are chosen.
Most matters related to the drone program, run by the CIA and the U.S. military’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command, have been hidden from public view.
The administration had earlier released a fact sheet about the “playbook” — officially called the Presidential Policy Guidance, or PPG — following President Barack Obama’s vows to bring more accountability to the program during a speech at the National Defense University in 2013. But that disclosure lacked detail.
“The PPG should have been released three years ago, but its release now will inform an ongoing debate about the lawfulness and wisdom of the government’s counterterrorism policies,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU. “The release of the PPG and related documents is also a timely reminder of the breadth of the powers that will soon be in the hands of another president.”
The document provides a window into the shadowy drone program. It details the “nominations” process for targeting individuals to be killed or captured in countries where the U.S. has not declared war.
It also describes how the U.S. military and intelligence agencies collaborate to review the top-secret evidence against alleged militant leaders, referred to as “high value terrorists,” or HVTs, and assess the consequences of operations in what’s called “after action reports.”
It discloses that the government is not always entirely certain about who it has killed.
“The conditions precedent for any operation, which shall include at a minimum … (a) near certainty that an identified HVT or other lawful terrorist target other than an identified HVT is present,” the document said.
It requires “near certainty” that civilians will not be injured or killed; that capture is “not feasible at the time of the operation”; that foreign governmental authorities in the country where a strike is to take place “cannot or will not effectively address the threat”; and that “no other reasonable alternatives to lethal action exist.”
“(A)ppropriate members” of the National Security Council are to review drone strike proposals before they are sent to the president for a decision.
If the target is a U.S. citizen, the guidelines state, the Justice Department must weigh in to determine whether the strike is legal. At least eight Americans have been killed by drone attacks, but only one — Anwar al-Awlaki, an alQaida leader in Yemen — was specifically targeted.
“While this policy guidance appears to set an important precedent for protecting civilians and limiting killings, it is impossible to assess whether and how it’s been followed,” said Naureen Shah, director of Amnesty International USA’s Security & Human Rights Program.
The redacted release of the “playbook” comes after U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon ordered the government in February to submit the policy guidance for the court’s review.
Last month, the White House admitted that 64 to 116 civilians were wrongly killed in 473 strikes launched by the U.S. between the time Obama was inaugurated and the end of last year. The vast majority of the attacks were by drones, officials said.
The administration also said the 473 strikes have killed up to 2,581 people it called combatants.