New information on the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) campaign of drone strikes in northwest Pakistan directly contradicts the image the Barack Obama administration and the CIA have sought to establish in the news media of a program based on highly accurate targeting that is effective in 'disrupting al-Qaeda's plots' against the United States.
A new report on civilian casualties in the war in Pakistan has revealed direct evidence that a house was targeted for a drone attack merely because it had been visited by a group of Taliban fighters.
The report came shortly after publication of the results of a survey of opinion within the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan showing overwhelming popular opposition to the drone strikes and majority support for 'suicide' attacks on US forces under some circumstances.
The new report published by the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC) last week offers the first glimpse of the drone strikes based on actual interviews with civilian victims of the strikes.
In an interview with a researcher for CIVIC, a civilian victim of a drone strike in North Waziristan carried out during the Obama administration recounted how his home had been visited by Taliban fighters asking for lunch.
The very next day, he recalled, the house was destroyed by a missile from a drone, killing his only son.
The CIVIC researcher, Christopher Rogers, investigated nine of the 139 drone strikes carried out since the beginning of 2009 and found that a total of 30 civilians had been killed in those strikes, including 14 women and children.
Hundreds of civilians killed
If that average rate of 3.33 civilian casualties for each drone bombing is typical of all the strikes since the rules for the strikes were loosened in early 2008, it would suggest that roughly 460 civilians have been killed in the drone campaign during that period.
The total number of deaths from the drone war in Pakistan since early 2008 is unknown, but has been estimated by Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann of the New America Foundation at between 1,109 and 1,734.
Only 66 leading officials in anti-US groups have been killed in the bombings. Reports on the bombings have listed the vast majority of the victims as "militants", without further explanation.
The victim's account of a drone attack based on the flimsiest rationale is consistent with the revelation in New York Times reporter David Sanger's book "The Inheritance" that the CIA was given much greater freedom in early 2008 to hit targets that might well involve killing innocent civilians.
But in January 2008 the CIA persuaded President George W. Bush to approve a set of "permissions" proposed by the CIA that same month which allowed the agency to target locations rather than identified leaders if those locations were linked to a "signature" – a pattern of behavior on the part of al Qaeda officials that had been observed over time.
That meant the CIA could now bomb a motorcade or a house if it was believed to be linked to al-Qaeda, without identifying any particular individual target.
A high-ranking Bush administration national security official told Sanger that Bush later authorized even further widening of the power of the CIA's operations directorate to make life or death decisions based on inferences rather than hard evidence. The official acknowledged that giving the CIA so much latitude was "risky", because "you can make more mistakes - you can hit the wrong house, or misidentify the motorcade."
PHOTO CAPTION
A US Predator unmanned drone armed with a missile stands on the tarmac of Kandahar military airport.
Source: Aljazeera.net