The Daily Beast separately noted earlier this month that the White House’s expected estimate of 100 collateral deaths is approximately one-tenth of the real number, which most independent advocacy groups put at 1,000.
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The United States on Friday lifted the lid on President Barack Obama’s secretive counter-terrorism campaign, detailing for the first time the number of fighters and civilians killed in air strikes in countries like Pakistan and Libya.
Drone technology, Earnest said, “is a tool that this administration, and this president, has used frequently, in a way that has had a devastating impact on the ability of terrorists to establish a safe haven” and plot against the United States.
The order also lays out what the administration calls its list of best practices, including minimizing civilian casualties and how to respond to cases in which those casualties occur.
The U.S. government has released the numbers for civilians killed by counterterrorism strikes outside combat zones during President Obama’s tenure.
Administration officials expressed confidence that Obama’s successor would uphold his order.
Critics have long said USA drone strikes kill far more civilians than the administration claims, and Friday’s release is unlikely to change that narrative.
The report, released on Friday, shed light on the USA government’s closely monitored and highly controversial drone program, which has been frequently accused of killing civilians in the Middle East and Asia.
“The government continues to hide the identities of people it has killed, the specific definitions it uses to decide who can legitimately be targeted and its investigations into credibly alleged wrongful killings”, Shamsi said.
“The American public can’t be confident that the government is using lethal force legally and wisely”.
The government’s report acknowledged that official numbers would vary from outside estimates.
A lawyer at human rights organisation Reprieve, Jennifer Gibson, said: “For three years now, President Obama has been promising to shed light on the CIA’s covert drone programme”.
But distinguishing between militants and civilians is often hard and has caused discrepancies.
As Reprieve notes, internal CIA documents leaked in 2013 show that the agency itself recorded a civilian death just two months before Brennan’s comments, while the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and other independent investigators found that dozens of local elders were killed in a strike in March 2011.
Neither estimate includes Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria.
In releasing these figures, the U.S. Government acknowledges that there are differences between U.S. Government assessments and reporting from non-governmental organizations… “The U.S. Government uses post-strike methodologies that have been refined and honed over the years and that use information that is generally unavailable to non-governmental organizations”, itnoted.
But that hasn’t done much to quiet the outrage from human rights groups, who say Obama has expanded a legally questionable killing regime.
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The administration said the estimate of civilian deaths is lower than figures often given by non-governmental organizations, and attributed the discrepancies to varying definitions of who is a combatant and difficulty in getting accurate information in some of the target areas.
