Human Rights Group Disputes Obama Drone Deaths

Thomas Murray | July 12, 2016
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Earlier this month, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released a report giving the official number of drone strikes the U.S. had conducted outside “areas of active hostilities," along with the number of deaths, both civilian and militant, that the drones had caused.

But these official numbers are only a fraction of the casualties that other independent human rights groups have claimed.

Clapper reports that there have been a total of 473 drone strikes between Jan. 20, 2009 (the day Obama was first sworn into office), and Dec. 31, 2015. During those strikes, a reported maximum of 2,581 combatants were killed, along with a maximum of 116 non-combatants.

According to the report, this information was gathered using “post-strike methodologies," which involve conducting “detailed battle damage assessments, and separat[ing] reliable reporting from terrorist propaganda or from media reports that may be based on inaccurate information.” The report noted that estimates from non-government organizations tend to be higher for a number of reasons, including the fact that the U.S. may consider some persons to be cambatants, while hman rights groups would count them as civilians.

But the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a London-based group that tracks U.S. drone attacks, estimates that since 2009, there have been at least 257 civilians killed by CIA drone strikes in Pakistan alone. In Yemen, the group reports at least another 65 were killed.

In total, the BIJ believes that there has been at least 380 civilian casualties due to drone strikes outside of “areas of active hostilities” during President Obama’s two terms. That total, they add, could be as high as 801.

On the same day that the report was released, Obama released on executive order mandating that an updated public report be released every year detailing the “number of strikes undertaken by the U.S. government against terrorist targets outside areas of active hostilities and the assessed range of combatant and non-combatant deaths resulting from those strikes.”

Countries covered by the report include Yemen, Libya, Pakistan and Somalia. The report doesn't cover “areas of active hostilities" such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

There have been some accusations in the past that the U.S. government has downplayed the number of non-combatants killed in drone strikes.

In the report, U.S. officials seek to explain the disparity between their results and those of some non-government organizations by saying that the non-government organizations do not always have enough data to be able to accurately determine whether someone is actually a non-combatant. The report also raised the objection that non-government organizations may have their results inflated due to the “deliberate spread of misinformation by some actors, including terrorist organizations, in local media reports on which some non-governmental estimates rely.”

The use of drones has escalated under President Obama as a way to keep American troops off of the ground while still being able to combat terrorist organizations.  

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