Obama Administration’s Announcement About US Drone Strike Shows It Doesn’t Know Who Drones Are Killing | The Dissenter

24.4.15

Obama Administration’s Announcement About US Drone Strike Shows It Doesn’t Know Who Drones Are Killing | The Dissenter: The same statement claims the Obama administration “had no reason to believe either hostage was present, located in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan.” But, whether the government had intelligence or not, it was certainly possible the compound could be used to hide people.

There are two key issues that deserve attention: the Orwellian-sounding phrase that neither Farouq nor Gadahn were specifically targeted, which the administration has employed before to wipe its hands clean of responsibility for the death of Americans, and whether the individuals targeted in the compound posed a continued and imminent threat to justify the drone strike that killed hostages.

As the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer reacted, “These new disclosures raise troubling questions about the reliability of the intelligence that the government is using to justify drone strikes. In each of the operations acknowledged today, the US quite literally didn’t know who it was killing.”