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Thursday March 28, 2024

Obama gave CIA flexibility for drone strikes in Pakistan

NEW YORK: President Barack Obama “secretly” approved a waiver to the rules for the US drone programme that gave the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) more flexibility in Pakistan than anywhere else to strike suspected militants, a major American newspaper reported on Monday.Citing current and former US officials, The Wall Street

By our correspondents
April 28, 2015
NEW YORK: President Barack Obama “secretly” approved a waiver to the rules for the US drone programme that gave the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) more flexibility in Pakistan than anywhere else to strike suspected militants, a major American newspaper reported on Monday.
Citing current and former US officials, The Wall Street Journal said the rules — tightened in 2013 — were designed to reduce the risk of civilian casualties. “Mr. Obama also required that proposed targets pose an imminent threat to the US “but the waiver exempted the CIA from this standard in Pakistan,” the report said.
Last week, the US officials disclosed that two Western hostages, US and Italian aid workers Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto, were killed on Jan. 15 by a US 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,” the Journal said.
According to the report, support for the drone programme remains strong across the US government, but 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 programmes outside of Pakistan. Last week, President Obama apologised for the killings and took personal responsibility for the mistake.
He called the operation, “fully consistent with the guidelines under which we conduct counter terrorism efforts in the region’ without specifying what those guidelines are or how they differed from those applied in the rest of the world.”
He also announced a review to ensure that such mistakes aren’t repeated. Current and former officials say many of the changes he called for in 2013 haven’t been implemented or remain works in progress.
Officials said the directive also included language aimed at curbing and eventually eliminating a particular type of drone strike in which the US believes an individual is a militant, but doesn’t know his identity.
These so-called “signature” strikes have been responsible for killing more al Qaeda leadership targets than strikes directly targeting high-value leaders, especially in Pakistan, the Journal said, citing current and former US officials. The Jan. 15 strike that killed Messrs. Weinstein and Lo Porto was a signature strike.
Under a classified addendum to the directive approved by President Obama, however, the CIA’s drone programme in Pakistan was exempted from the “imminent threat” requirement, at least until US forces completed their pullout from Afghanistan, according to the report. But a CIA spokesman declined to comment, the paper said. 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.