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The New York Times reports that President Obama has offered an emotional apology for the accidental killing of two hostages held by Al Qaeda, one of them American, in a United States government counterterrorism operation in January, saying he takes “full responsibility” for their deaths. “As president and as commander in chief, I take full responsibility for all our counterterrorism operations,” including the one that inadvertently took the lives of the two captives, a grim-faced Obama said in a statement to reporters in the White House briefing room.
The White House earlier released an extraordinary statement revealing that intelligence officials had confirmed that Warren Weinstein, an American held by Al Qaeda since 2011, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian held since 2012, died during the operation. Gunmen abducted Warren Weinstein in 2011 from his home in Lahore, Pakistan. They posed as neighbors, offered food and then pistol-whipped the American aid worker and tied up his guards, according to his daughter Alisa Weinstein.
The White House did not explain why it has taken three months to disclose the episode. Obama said that the operation was conducted after hundreds of hours of surveillance had convinced American officials that they were targeting an Al Qaeda compound where no civilians were present, and that “capturing these terrorists was not possible.” The White House said the operation that killed the two hostages “was lawful and conducted consistent with our counterterrorism policies” but nonetheless the government is conducting a “thorough independent review” to determine what happened and how such casualties could be avoided in the future.
(Score: 3, Informative) by rts008 on Friday April 24 2015, @12:06PM
These types of casualities can be avoided by not using the drone strikes.
What happens when the 'terrorists' learn to avoid getting 'droned', and capture becomes too unlikely? Will this be the excuse to step up bombing, or invasion, nukes maybe?
Fasce it, at this stage all we are accomplishing over there is creating even more potential 'terrorists'.
Maybe we need to try a different strategy than just bomb/kill everyone.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jcross on Friday April 24 2015, @12:28PM
Yeah, it seems pretty unavoidable to me if you're going to hit a compound like that with airstrikes, and the fact that the planes were remotely operated instead of piloted seems irrelevant. The ability to do complete surveillance inside the compound would likely mean you could take it with ground troops, so I'm guessing they were mostly watching from the outside. Hostages almost by definition don't come and go, and even an informant who could get in might never see whatever hole they've been thrown in. Until we have something like a swarm of really smart micro-drones that can fly indoors and are very hard to kill, air power is going to come with a whole lot of imprecision, even with a pilot inside. I guess drones kind of seem more impersonal and cowardly because the pilots aren't there, but really it's not that different from dropping bombs or guided missiles from 10,000 feet or whatever, which we've been doing for ages. They both take a lot of innocent lives.