“Since my relatives were killed, many more innocents have died in US drone strikes. “I was disgusted that this was being offered in place of an apology, and justice,” said the 58-year-old. His is among the families who have been given cash as compensation. “The executive order and the playbook don’t mean very much to me – both talk about targeting and ‘lawfulness’, but the bottom line is that my relatives were killed in a strike despite never having done anything wrong, and I’ve never been given an explanation as to why,” said Faisal bin Ali Jaber, whose nephew and cousin were killed when a US drone struck a wedding in 2012 in Yemen’s Khashamir village. What difference will the release of the playbook and the signing of the recent executive order – which calls for greater safeguards and oversight in drone strikes – make to people in countries such as Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia and Afghanistan, where thousands of civilians have been killed over about a decade? Clapper offers reasons for the discrepancy between his tally and those of rights groups, suggesting rights groups fall prey to “ the deliberate spread of misinformation by some actors, including terrorist organisations, in local media reports on which some non-governmental estimates rely”. It estimated that since Obama took office in 2008, between 64 and 116 civilians have been killed in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and other areas where the US is not actively engaged in war, and that there have been 2,372 to 2,581 combatant deaths in the same countries.īut anti-drone activists criticise the drone programme’s lack of precision, especially in Waziristan, the heavily targeted region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where rights groups estimate that hundreds of civilians have been killed. James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), in July released the DNI’s tally of civilian drone deaths. There have been questions about the precision of these strikes – a 2015 investigation by The Intercept news site revealed that nearly 90 percent of people killed in US drone attacks in Afghanistan alone were not the intended targets. TONER: – the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. Q : You check these things before you fire, usually, right? All I’m saying is what we’re able – I said what we’re willing to share is that it was in – TONER: I understand what – your question, Brad. Q : So you don’t know where you targeted him? You just guessed? I mean, how could you fire something out of the sky and blow something up and kill people and not know what country it’s in? Come on. These developments might, although this remains to be seen, reduce scenes such as the one at a May 23 State Department press briefing, when its spokesman Mark Toner seemed short on basic details about the strike that killed Taliban leader Mullah Mansoor: Obama’s 2013 policy guidance, released on July 31, after the American Civil Liberties Union sued for its release, had set “near certainty” that a “terrorist target is present” and that “non-combatants will not be injured or killed” as criteria for a strike. The release of President Barack Obama’s 2013 drone warfare playbook and the July 1 signing of an executive order on minimising civilian casualties has security analysts looking back at previous strikes and wondering what effect the executive order might have on future ones.
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