Hostage deaths renew US debate on drone strikes

Hours after the White House revealed that an American and an Italian hostage had been killed in a January drone strike, US officials said the administration may consider revising the intelligence requirements for launching strikes overseas.US officials announced Thursday that January drone strikes targeting an al Qaeda base in Pakistan had killed 73-year-old US aid worker Warren Weinstein, held by al Qaeda since 2011, and Giovanni Lo Porto, 39, an Italian NGO worker who went missing in 2012. A US official said they had not been able to confirm that the hostages had been killed until a few days ago.

“I profoundly regret what happened. On behalf of the United States government, I offer our deepest apologies to the families,” Obama said Thursday, speaking from the White House.

Another American, suspected al Qaeda member Ahmed Farouq, was also killed in the strikes.

A second American member of al Qaeda, Adam Gadahn, was likely killed in a separate operation in Pakistan that same month. The White House said Farouq and Gadahn were not “specifically targeted, and we did not have information indicating their presence at the sites of these operations”.

The use of drones has long been controversial for causing civilian deaths and because US citizens who have joined militant groups have been killed without the benefit of judicial process. Rules imposed by the Obama administration require a Justice Department review before US citizens can be targeted as part of an overseas counterterrorism operation.

The programme’s defenders contrast the relative precision of drones to the more scattershot approach of conventional airpower, or the risks and drawbacks of dispatching commando teams.

The CIA has launched more than 400 drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen since 2002, killing thousands of people, both militants and civilians, according to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism. At least eight US citizens have reportedly been killed in such strikes since 2002, although only Anwar al-Awlaki — a US national who became known as al Qaeda’s “YouTube preacher” from his base in Yemen — was targeted with Justice Department approval.

US analysts believed there were only four people at the targeted compound and became aware of the error when they witnessed six bodies being recovered as they remotely monitored the area following the strike.

Agencies then picked up “chatter about Westerners” from al Qaeda, according to the Washington Post, prompting the investigation that led authorities to conclude this week that the hostages had been killed.

‘Full review’

Obama said preliminary reports indicated that the strike that killed the hostages “was fully consistent with the guidelines under which we conduct counterterrorism efforts”.

Hundreds of hours of video had been assembled as part of efforts to ensure there were no civilians at the compound, Obama said. The reality on the ground had nevertheless been obscured in the “fog of war”.

“We believed that this was an al Qaeda compound, that no civilians were present, and that capturing these terrorists was not possible,” Obama said. “What we did not know, tragically, is that al Qaeda was hiding the presence of Warren and Giovanni in this same compound.”

The Obama administration’s own rules call for deploying drones only against targets that pose a “continuing, imminent threat” to the United States and only when avoiding civilian deaths is a “near certainty”.

“Unfortunately, that ‘near certainty’ assessment was wrong” in this case, said White House press secretary Josh Earnest.

White House officials indicated that the administration is considering revising the guidelines for drone strikes in light of the latest intelligence failures. Obama said he had ordered a “full review” of the operation in question.

Republican House Speaker John Boehner called an independent review “entirely appropriate”. “We need all the facts,” he said.

Obama had a much harsher reaction away from the glare of the press, the Washington Post reported. Obama advisers had assured him that “this would never happen, and now it did”, a former senior US counterterrorism official told the paper. “It is going to be a big deal.”