Investigative reports and on-the-ground testimonies have made it
public knowledge that far more people than al-Qaida leaders are
killed by drone strikes. The U.K.’s Bureau of Investigative
Journalism (BIJ) estimates that in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia over
1,o00 civilians may have been killed by U.S. drone strikes. The
Obama administration has long maintained, however, that strikes are
only ever authorized to target “specific senior operational leaders
of al-Qaida and associated forces.” Documents obtained by McClatchy
newspapers suggest that these claims are false.
The top-secret intelligence reports reveal, as one expert with
the Council on Foreign Relations told McClatchy, that the
administration is “misleading the public about the scope of who can
legitimately be targeted.” It is not clear who leaked the documents
to McClatchy for review.
Via McClatchy:
The intelligence reports list killings of alleged Afghan
insurgents whose organization wasn’t on the U.S. list of
terrorist groups at the time of the 9/11 strikes; of suspected
members of a Pakistani extremist group that didn’t exist at the
time of 9/11; and of unidentified individuals described as
“other militants” and “foreign fighters.”
In a response to questions from McClatchy, the White House
defended its targeting policies, pointing to previous public
statements by senior administration officials that the missile
strikes are aimed at al Qaida and associated forces.
… The documents also show that drone operators
weren’t always certain who they were killing despite the
administration’s guarantees of the accuracy of the CIA’s
targeting intelligence and its assertions that civilian
casualties have been “exceedingly rare.”
… At least 265 of up to 482 people who the U.S.
intelligence reports estimated the CIA killed during
a 12-month period ending in September 2011 were not
senior al Qaida leaders but instead were “assessed”
as Afghan, Pakistani and unknown extremists. Drones
killed only six top al Qaida leaders in those
months, according to news media accounts.Forty-three
of 95 drone strikes reviewed for that period hit
groups other than al Qaida, including the Haqqani
network, several Pakistani Taliban factions and the
unidentified individuals described only as “foreign
fighters” and “other militants.”
Pro Publica earlier this year
drew attention to the troubling proliferation of
“signature strikes” in U.S. drone wars — attacks in
which targets are selected based not on knowledge of the
individuals’ identities, but on their “signature”
behaviors and movements fitting the general profile of a
top al-Qaida militant. Three senior Democrats on the
House Judiciary Committee, in
a letter to Attorney General Holder last May, asked
“How, for example, does the Administration ensure that
the targets are legitimate terrorist targets and not
insurgents who have no dispute with the United States?”
McClatchy’s findings suggest there is a troubling answer
to this question: The administration doesn’t ensure this
at all. Indeed, the more that we learn about the scope
of the drone strikes, the more the descriptor “targeted
killing” seems inappropriate.
As
noted earlier this week, based on reports from Mark
Mazzetti, the very first target of a CIA drone strike in
Pakistan was not an al-Qaida operative, nor an enemy of
the U.S., but “a Pakistani ally of the Taliban who led a
tribal rebellion and was marked by Pakistan as an enemy
of the state.” Mazzetti noted that “in a secret deal
[with the Pakistani military], the C.I.A. had agreed to
kill him in exchange for access to airspace it had long
sought so it could use drones to hunt down its own
enemies.” Whether Pakistani authorities still consent to
the presence of U.S. drones in their air space is not
clear, but U.N. special rapporteur Ben Emmerson Q.C.,
following a recent fact finding mission in Pakistan,
stressed that Pakistan has given the U.S. no such tacit
consent to carry out its drone wars.