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White House admits: we didn't know who drone strike was aiming to kill
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
Posted: May 4th, 2015
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/23/drone-strike-al...
The targets of the deadly drone strikes that killed two hostages and two suspected American members of al-Qaida were al-Qaida compounds rather than specific terrorist suspects, the White House disclosed on Thursday. The lack of specificity suggests that despite a much-publicized 2013 policy change by Barack Obama restricting drone killings by, among other things, requiring near certainty that the terrorist target is present, the US continues to launch lethal operations without the necessity of knowing who specifically it seeks to kill. Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, acknowledged that the January deaths of hostages Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto might prompt the tightening of targeting standards. Earnest [confirmed that] the two US civilians killed, longtime English-language propagandist Adam Gadahn and Ahmed Farouq of al-Qaida in the Indian subcontinent, were not high-value targets marked for death. In a May 2013 speech, Obama indicated that drone strikes were only permissible when the administration possessed near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured, the highest standard we can set. Human-rights observers see little indication, two years after Obamas speech, that the US meets its own stated standards. Reprieve, looking at US drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan, concluded last year that the US killed nearly 1,150 people while targeting 41 individuals.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about corruption in government and in the intelligence community.
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