A senior White House aide has pledged to release how many terrorism suspects and civilian casualties the US has killed in its drone strikes since 2009, the first-ever disclosure surrounding the US’s most controversial lethal operations.
Lisa Monaco, Barack Obama’s counter-terrorism and homeland security adviser, said in a Washington speech on Monday that the expanded transparency would bolster public support for drone strikes and other counter-terrorism practices that she indicated would last “for years to come”.
The long-desired disclosure will cover strikes in undeclared US battlefields, such as Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and elsewhere, rather than the active war theaters of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. There was no specific date set for release, White House officials said, though Monaco said it will occur in the “coming weeks”.
“Not only is greater transparency the right thing to do, it is the best way to maintain the legitimacy of our counter-terrorism actions and the broad support of our allies,” Monaco told the Council on Foreign Relations on Monday.
As Monaco spoke, the Pentagon confirmed it had conducted a massive airstrike in Somalia that left 150 people dead, one the largest casualty totals in a US military attack of the post-9/11 era.
Monaco said the administration intends the disclosure to occur annually, though she and her colleagues have less than a year remaining in office and it is unclear if their successors will institutionalize the disclosure of what Obama aides have for years suggested was a highly classified assessment. A key congressional leader argued on Monday for codifying the disclosure in law.
Cori Crider, an attorney for drone strike victims at Reprieve, said that though this was a step in the right direction, “it doesn’t go nearly far enough”.
“In every region where we have pursued an aggressive, secret drone policy, militancy has gotten stronger. It’s not enough to tally up the drones’ body count – we need a thorough reassessment of the program itself.”
Human rights groups have for years called upon the administration to release hard data about its lethal counter-terrorism strikes and interpreted the administration’s reluctance as an indication that the strikes kill vastly more people than US officials – who rarely speak for the record – acknowledge.
In February 2013, Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican on the armed services committee, stated that drone strikes had killed approximately 4,700 people. Administration officials have over the years obfuscated whether the CIA and the US military have compiled data on how many people – including civilians – their overlapping strikes have killed, particularly considering that the CIA’s so-called “signature strikes” kill people without prior knowledge of their identities if they fit presumed terrorist behavioral criteria.
A senior senator on the intelligence committee, Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California, said in 2013 that the CIA’s drone strikes were killing “single digits” of civilians each year, a claim made earlier by the CIA director, John Brennan. That figure has come into question, as Feinstein has accused the CIA of lying to her on an unrelated inquiry, and documents published by the Intercept last year indicated that the US military retroactively defines people killed in drone strikes as combatants.
Monaco indicated the casualty assessments will reflect “the latest in intelligence across all sources” and might take into account the informal tallies compiled by non-government organizations, the vast majority of which rely on media reports.
While the administration claims its drone strikes are the state of the art in precision, some of those outside accounts call the unverified claims into question. An analysis by the group Reprieve in 2014 found that the US killed 1,147 people in Pakistan and Yemen in the course of targeting only 41 men.
Peter Cook, the Pentagon spokesman, confirmed on Monday the US military strike, which occurred on Saturday targeting what he described as an al-Shabaab camp in Somalia. The strike, using drones as well as piloted warplanes, has killed a reported 150 people, although Cook said the military was still “assess[ing] the results of the operation”.
Cook said the strike, yielding one of the largest-ever casualty totals of the war on terrorism, was intended to thwart “fighters who were scheduled to depart the camp [and who] posed an imminent threat to US and African Union Mission in Somalia (Amisom) forces in Somalia”.
Monaco’s address came days after the Justice Department agreed to disclose additional information about how the administration conducts lethal drone strikes.
Late on Friday, in response to a transparency lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, US attorney Preet Bharara and a senior department official, Benjamin Mizer, agreed to release “a much more detailed explanation of the standards and procedures employed in both capture and lethal targeting counter-terrorism operations”, according to a letter the officials sent to US federal judge Colleen McMahon.
It is unclear when the documents – authored by the Justice Department’s powerful office of legal counsel and the Defense Department – will be released, as disclosure will follow a review to excise classified information. A February ruling from McMahon indicated that the judge wished to reach a resolution “by the end of March”.
But the ACLU hailed the acquiescence as a victory for additional transparency around the drone strikes, beyond a 2013 overview provided to Congress.
The main document, known as the Presidential Policy Guidance, is “long overdue”, said Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal director, who also challenged the administration to disclose further material.
“We hope that the administration’s decision to release this critical document reflects a broader commitment to make the lethal drone program more transparent. In that spirit, the administration should also release the legal memos that are the foundation for the program, basic information about those killed in past drone strikes, and detailed investigative files relating to strikes that killed bystanders”, Jaffer said.
Representative Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, praised the forthcoming casualty assessment as a method to combat “propaganda” about drones and indicated that Congress ought to require the disclosure by law.
“There is still value in considering a statutory requirement to make this executive action permanent, ensuring that our commitment to transparency extends beyond the term of the current administration,” Schiff said.