U.S. citizen Warren Weinstein and Italian national Giovanni Lo Porto were hostages of al Qaeda — unlike the terrorists usually in the crosshairs of armed U.S. drones — and their inadvertent deaths have revived the debate over whether such killings are good policy.
President Obama and congressional leaders promised to investigate how the two kidnapped aid workers died. But what’s already known about the attack, which occurred in January but was only disclosed on Thursday, was enough to raise new questions about the administration’s heavy reliance on drone strikes to fight Islamist terrorists.
The White House also disclosed Thursday that two other U.S. citizens who also were wanted al Qaeda terrorists were killed in January. Ahmed Farouq was killed in the same strike that killed Weinstein and Lo Porto; Adam Gadahn, the first American indicted for treason since World War II, died in a separate strike.
Those deaths bring to seven the total number of U.S. citizens killed in drone strikes aimed at suspected terrorists since Sept. 30, 2011, when al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in Yemen. In addition to Yemen, U.S. drones have targeted suspected terrorists in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Syria.
Obama is sensitive to the criticism about his administration’s policy on drone strikes, having won election in 2008 in part by attacking the legality of George W. Bush’s counterterrorist policies. He defended its legality and effectiveness in a March 23, 2013, speech outlining his approach, saying “by narrowly targeting our action against those who want to kill us and not the people they hide among, we are choosing the course of action least likely to result in the loss of innocent life.”
The approach requires that targeted killings only be carried out against those who pose an imminent threat when they cannot be captured or otherwise neutralized and when there is a “near certainty” that innocent people will not be injured or killed.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest insisted Thursday that as far as officials knew those guidelines were followed, though Obama did not personally authorize the operations, as he did with the killing of Awlaki. In a statement earlier, Obama said officials did not know the two kidnapped aid workers were at the al Qaeda compound targeted in the strike.
“The president did not specifically sign off on these two operations. There are policies and protocols in place for our counterterrorism professionals to make decisions about carrying out these kinds of operations based on a wide variety of things, including an assessment of near certainty that the target is an al Qaeda target and that civilians would not be harmed if the operation were carried out,” he said. “And … that is a policy that the president and his team have put in place that was, as far we know, followed by our counterterrorism professionals.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a potential GOP presidential candidate, defended the killing of suspected terrorists such as Farouq and Gadahn, and said al Qaeda is ultimately responsible for the deaths of the two hostages.
“Any American citizen who joins al Qaeda or affiliated terrorist groups are subject to being killed under the law of war,” he said. “A decision to join groups like al Qaeda or affiliated terrorist organizations is made at one’s own peril.”
But civil liberties advocates accused the administration of violating its own rules in the strike.
“These and other recent strikes in which civilians were killed make clear that there is a significant gap between the relatively stringent standards the government says it’s using and the standards that are actually being used,” American Civil Liberties Union deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer said.
“It would of course be easier to assess this gap if the government routinely released information about individual drone strikes. Unfortunately, the president’s stated commitment to transparency can’t be squared with the secrecy that still shrouds virtually every aspect of the government’s drone program.”
A key problem for the administration in this case is a lack of transparency, combined with anonymous leaks of information not officially acknowledged, Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith wrote Friday on his Lawfare blog.
“It’s a terribly messy situation,” he wrote. “Because the application and efficacy and integrity of [the president’s] rules is now in question, many are ramping up demands to know much more about the factual and legal and policy and procedural and organizational underpinnings of drone strikes. The administration will now face very hard questions about why it cannot reveal more, much more, about these topics.”
