Drone-Strike Rules Under Review After Hostages Mistakenly Killed

[Purveyor]

By the time missiles slammed into an al-Qaeda hideout in Pakistan, the site had been under surveillance by U.S. drones and satellites for hundreds of hours.

Confidence that the compound was a meeting place for senior al-Qaeda officials was based on intelligence that turned out to be tragically incomplete, as President Barack Obama publicly acknowledged on Thursday. The U.S. was unaware of the presence of two hostages, American aid worker Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian national, when the compound was hit by a drone strike in January.

The White House is reviewing the operation to find out what went wrong and led to the unintended deaths, Obama said Thursday. Others called for a more sweeping review of the entire drone-strike policy and whether intelligence gathered meets the bar of being ``nearly certain'' that no civilians or hostages will be harmed.

“What is our intelligence capability in terms of confirming that no one is there?” Representative John Delaney, a Maryland Democrat, who was Weinstein’s congressman, told CNN in an interview Friday. “Are we doing enough? Do we have to recalibrate that standard, in terms of how we think about it? And what’s the burden of proof?”

Obama said the review ``will identify the lessons that can be learned from this tragedy, and any changes that should be made. We will do our utmost to ensure it is not repeated.”

more...

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-04-23/hostage-deaths-show-risks-of-u-s-intelligence-gaps-on-al-qaeda

[Comrade Grumpy]

1. How about you have to actually know who you're targeting?

[Maedhros]

2. How about we don't kill people without a declared state of war? [n/t]

[RGinNJ]

3. +1000!

[gratuitous]

4. Now, now, let's not rush into anything

After all, what's the downside here? Sure, lots of people are being terrorized by sudden death raining down from above, and some of those are being "radicalized" against the United States. But it's really for no good reason at all. I've been reliably informed (even on this very website) that if people didn't want to get blown to bits without warning, they shouldn't live where they do. See, that's because the U.S. might decide - at any time and totally rightly so - that their home or neighborhood poses such an existential threat to the United States and all its citizens that our military has no alternative but to blow them sky high. Which serves them right. Because of freedom, which they hate anyway. They should just be thankful we let them go for as long as we did.

More appropriations for the military. Now. Because our country is in grave danger from all the people we've blown up. So we have to blow more people up. Any other course of action is too dangerous, too expensive, and takes too long.

[geek tragedy]

5. some bitter irony that this happens only when first world victims die. nt