WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama tightened rules for the U.S. drone program in 2013, but he secretly approved a waiver giving the Central Intelligence Agency more flexibility in Pakistan than anywhere else to strike suspected militants, according to current and former U.S. officials.
The rules were designed to reduce the risk of civilian casualties. Mr. Obama also required that proposed targets pose an imminent threat to the U.S.—but the waiver exempted the CIA from this standard in Pakistan, Wall Street Journal said in a report.
Last week, the U.S. officials disclosed that two Western hostages, U.S. and Italian aid workers Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto, were killed on Jan. 15 by a U.S. drone strike aimed at al Qaeda militants in Pakistan. If the exemption had not been in place for Pakistan, the CIA might have been required to gather more intelligence before that strike.
And though support for the drone program remains strong across the U.S. government, the killings have renewed a debate within the administration over whether the CIA should now be reined in or meet the tighter standards that apply to drone programs outside of Pakistan.
The Jan. 15 strike that killed Messrs. Weinstein and Lo Porto was a signature strike.
Under a classified addendum to the directive approved by Mr. Obama, however, the CIA’s drone program in Pakistan was exempted from the “imminent threat” requirement, at least until U.S. forces completed their pullout from Afghanistan.
The exemption in the case of Pakistan means that the CIA can do signature strikes and more targeted drone attacks on militant leaders who have been identified without collecting specific evidence that the target poses an imminent threat to the U.S. Being part of the al Qaeda core in Pakistan is justification enough in the Obama administration’s eyes.
The CIA still has to meet the near-certainty requirement to avoid civilian casualties in Pakistan, as it does everywhere else it operates.
The waiver gave the CIA more flexibility in Pakistan than anywhere else, including Yemen where both the CIA and the U.S. military conduct drone strikes, and Somalia, where the military has its own targeted killing campaign.
When the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan was extended, so too was the “imminent threat” waiver, officials said. The administration had initially thought the waiver would expire at the end of 2014 with the withdrawal of most U.S. forces, but Mr. Obama decided to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan for longer.
Building a case that a militant poses an “imminent threat” in Pakistan could have required the CIA to undertake additional surveillance before launching a strike, officials said. That could have affected the Jan. 15 operation, these officials said, though it is unclear whether it would have reduced the chances of the hostages being killed.
In the weeks before the Jan. 15 strike that killed Messrs. Weinstein and Lo Porto, CIA drones hovering overhead observed a total of five militants. Drone operators zeroed in on one particular militant whom the CIA concluded was an al Qaeda leader whose identity wasn’t known, according to U.S. officials briefed on the operation.
Just before the Jan. 15 strike, the CIA saw one of the lower-ranking militants leaving. Three were visible just outside the compound while the al Qaeda leader remained hidden from view inside.
To track the al Qaeda leader’s movements, and to make sure nobody else was hiding inside the compound, the CIA used the drone’s heat sensors, which can detect the unique heat signature of a human body. These sensors and others are typically used to meet the “near-certainty” standard.
The only heat signature inside the compound detected before the Jan. 15 strike was of the al Qaeda leader, the officials said.
After the compound was destroyed, drones overhead watched as six bodies were pulled from the rubble. The heat sensors and other intelligence had showed only four. They didn’t see any evidence at the time to suggest who the two additional bodies were, but didn’t think they were Westerners based on how the bodies were treated after the strike.
In early February, the U.S. intercepted communications by militants saying two Western hostages had been killed. CIA officials brushed aside suggestions the deaths came from a drone strike, pointing instead to the possibility that a Pakistan military operation might have been the responsible.
INP