Innocents’ deaths bring calls for openness on targeted drone killings

With the revelation that a U.S. drone strike in in Pakistan in January killed two hostages, aid workers Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto, there are renewed calls for greater transparency about the strikes and their collateral damage. Human rights groups have long urged the Obama administration to disclose enough information about the drone strikes including their standards and criteria to allow for Congressional oversight and judicial review. (The Christian Science Monitor, April 25, 2015, by Brad Knickerbocker)

Ironically, the deaths of two innocent hostages caused the Obama administration to provide an unprecedented amount of information that they would not otherwise have provided of the highly classified drone killings. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in March to force the Obama administration to provide legal documents supporting the “targeted killing” program. (The Guardian, April 23, 2015, by Paul Lewis, Spencer Ackerman and Jon Boone)

ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer on the hostage killings, “These and other recent strikes in which civilians were killed make clear that there is a significant gap between the relatively stringent standards the government says it’s using and the standards that are actually being used. It would of course be easier to assess this gap if the government routinely released information about individual drone strikes. Unfortunately, the president’s stated commitment to transparency can’t be squared with the secrecy that still shrouds virtually every aspect of the government’s drone program.” (American Civil Liberties Union, April 23, 2015, press release)

– See more at: https://firstamendmentcoalition.org/2015/04/innocents-deaths-bring-calls-for-openness-on-targeted-drone-killings/#sthash.A6ZfxAUE.dpuf