Hostage deaths put CIA drone campaign on defensive
The vehicles were separated only by several car lengths when the missile struck.
The main target of the CIA drone strike in April last year was a Toyota carrying 11 armed men suspected of being part of an al-Qaida plot to attack a military outpost in central Yemen. But the shrapnel also sprayed a truck traveling a few dozen yards ahead, killing or wounding nine laborers on an early morning commute.
The Yemeni government soon acknowledged that civilians had been killed in an operation it did not attribute to the United States, and human rights researchers were able to reconstruct the incident from witness accounts. But the U.S. government has yet to admit that the strike ever occurred.
That policy of silence is under renewed pressure after President Barack Obama’s extraordinary admission Thursday that the United States had accidentally killed two Western hostages, including a U.S. citizen, in a January counterterrorism strike on a gathering of suspected al-Qaida militants in Pakistan.
The revelation has revived questions about why the White House has been unwilling to provide similar information on dozens of other strikes over the past
decade where there is abundant evidence that civilians were killed.
“These disclosures have to come every time an innocent life is lost through the drone campaign, and not just when it’s an American citizen,” said Jonathan Horowitz, a legal officer for the Open Society Justice Initiative, which issued a report this month detailing civilian casualties in a series of U.S. strikes in Yemen, including the April 2014 operation.
More broadly, Thursday’s disclosures have also complicated the administration’s ability to continue depicting the drone campaign as nearly impervious to error, dismissing independent groups’ casualty estimates as wildly overstated.
In a speech before members of the U.S. intelligence community on Friday, Mr. Obama vowed a thorough probe of the Jan. 15 strike that killed U.S. aid worker Warren Weinstein and Italian national Giovanni Lo Porto, both of whom had been held hostage by alQaida for years.
“We’re going to identify the lessons that can be learned and any improvements and changes that need to be made,” Mr. Obama said in a speech marking the 10-year anniversary of the creation of the Director of National Intelligence position, which oversees U.S. spy agencies. “We all grieve when any innocent life is taken.”
But Mr. Obama also signaled that this week’s disclosures are not likely to lead to a further lifting of the secrecy surrounding the drone program. “A lot of our work still requires that we maintain some things as classified,” he said. “We can’t always talk about all the challenges.”
In his announcement about the hostage deaths, Mr. Obama expressed regret and said the men were killed in a counterterrorism operation. But he did not acknowledge that they died in drone strikes.
The U.S. government has never publicly disclosed its own count of the number of deaths attributable to drone operations outside the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 14 years. But U.S. officials involved in the operations have often claimed that civilians account for only 1 or 2 percent of those killed.
That ratio is generally at odds with the estimates of independent organizations that have sought to track the toll of drone strikes through media reports and on-the-ground research.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, for example, has documented 415 strikes in Pakistan and Yemen since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The organization’s most recent estimates put the total number killed between 2,449 and 3,949. Of those, between 423 and 962 are believed to have been civilians.
CIA veterans scoff at such figures. The deaths of Mr. Weinstein of Maryland and Mr. Lo Porto of Italy, however, have put the CIA on the defensive over an error egregious enough to require a public admission from Mr. Obama.
U.S. officials said that the CIA program has not been suspended and that the review ordered by Mr. Obama will be carried out by the agency’s own inspector general. Still, some said the agency is in a newly vulnerable position, facing scrutiny that could expand if significant problems are uncovered.