President Obama defended his policy of dramatically increasing drone strikes against suspected terrorists during his tenure even though he said his growing reliance on them ‘”troubled him,” and said he considered taking Osama bin Laden out with a missile but decided against it.
Obama, in a wide-ranging interview with New York Magazine released Monday morning, said the U.S. had the “less risky option” of taking out bin Laden by “just firing a missile into that compound.”
But after further thought, Obama decided that it was “important” that U.S. authorities would be able to both identify bin Laden and protect several “innocent lives,” such as his wives and others who lived there, “depending on how you define innocents.”
The collateral damage, he said, “might have been higher than if we had just taken a shot when we knew that the compound was relatively empty.”
Obama said he has been glad that human rights groups have critiqued his use of drones, “because it ensured that you don’t have this institutional comfort and inertia with what looks like a pretty antiseptic way of disposing of enemies.”
Still, he said, his administration’s internal reforms on drone policy had less to do with what “the Left or Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International or other organizations were saying.”
Instead, he said it had “more to do with me looking at sort of the way in which the number of drone strikes was going up and the routineness with which, early in my presidency, you were seeing both [the Department of Defense] and CIA and our intelligence teams think about this.”
Overall, he said, the increase in drone strikes during his first few years in office “troubled me.”
“Because I think you could see, over the horizon, a situation in which, without Congress showing much interest in restraining actions with authorization that were written really broadly, you end up with a president who can carry on perpetual wars all over the world, and a lot of them covert, without any accountability or democratic debate.”
The pressure from the human rights groups, he said, factored into his decision to publicly release for the first time estimates of civilian casualties from the drone strikes.
In July, the Obama administration released the first civilian casualty estimates, revealing that U.S. drones strikes have killed as many as 116 civilians since the beginning of the Obama administration up until the end of 2015.
