Hostages’ deaths raise wider questions
‘Fog of war’ cited as American dies in drone attack
WASHINGTON — After weeks of aerial surveillance, CIA analysts reached two conclusions about a compound to be targeted in a January drone strike: that it was used by al-Qaida militants, and, in the moment before it was hit, that it had exactly four occupants.
But as six bodies were removed from the rubble, the drone feeds that continued streaming back to CIA headquarters carried with them a new set of troubling questions, including who the other two victims were, and how the agency’s pre-strike assessments could have been so flawed.
In his grim statement on Thursday, President Barack Obama described the deaths of two Western hostages held by al-Qaida as unfortunate but not necessarily a result of negligence. He cited the “fog of
war” and said that preliminary assessments indicate the strike “was fully consistent with the guidelines under which we conduct counterterrorism efforts.”
But current and former U.S. counterterrorism officials said that Thursday’s disclosures undercut years of U.S. claims about the accuracy of the drone program and provided new ammunition for skeptics of administration policies that are supposed to require “near certainty” that no civilians will be harmed.
Despite Obama’s equanimity in public, officials said that his reaction behind closed doors was considerably harsher. Obama’s advisers have for years told him that “this would never happen, and now it did,” said a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It is going to be a big deal.”
The disclosures Thursday went beyond the deaths of the two hostages — Warren Weinstein, an American held by al-Qaida since 2011, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian who was kidnapped in 2012.
The administration also revealed that Weinstein was one of three Americans killed in a pair of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan in January.
The others, Ahmed Farouq and Adam Gadahn, were members of al-Qaida. Even so, the CIA appears not to have known that the two men were present at the sites it targeted. As a result, the operations that killed them didn’t adhere to rules that Obama imposed, requiring a Justice Department review and other measures before Americans are targeted in counterterrorism operations overseas.
Their deaths, while not deemed civilian casualties, add to an increasingly dismal set of statistics on U.S. citizens. Since 2002, at least eight Americans have been killed in U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen. Only one — Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric later accused of serving as a senior al-Qaida operative in Yemen — was targeted intentionally.
Human rights groups lashed out at the White House for acknowledging the deaths of two Western hostages while continuing to withhold information about the broader civilian toll of the drone campaign.
Weinstein and Lo Porto “are far from the first innocents to die by our drones, and in no other case has the U.S. apologized for its mistake,” said Alka Pradhan, an attorney for Reprieve U.S., an organization that has represented civilian victims in drone cases. “Inconsistencies like this are seen around the world as hypocritical, and do the United States’ image real harm.”
Obama said that he has ordered a “full review” of the strikes disclosed Thursday, and White House officials signaled that the administration is already considering whether the guidelines that govern such operations go far enough in eliminating the prospect of such errors.
“It raises additional questions about whether additional changes” are needed in the guidelines, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.