6 Unanswered Questions About Obama's Drone War

[G_j]

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/02/6-unanswered-questions-obama-drones

—By H.H. Bhojani| Tue Feb. 4, 2014 3:01 AM GMT

On January 23, 2009, President Barack Obama authorized his first drone strike. The attack, launched against a compound in northwestern Pakistan, killed between 7 and 15 people—but missed the Taliban hideout the Central Intelligence Agency thought it was targeting. Over the next five years, the CIA carried out more than 390 known drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. (The agency carried out 51 drone strikes between 2004 and 2009, during the Bush administration.)

Obama made a brief reference to the drone campaign in last week's State of the Union address, assuring Congress that "I've imposed prudent limits on the use of drones." This wasn't the first time the president had acknowledged the need for a clear drone policy. Last May, Obama remarked at the National Defense University, "This new technology raises profound questions—about who is targeted, and why." Yet the answers the administration has provided to these profound questions and the prudent limits it has put in place remain vague.

Here are six major questions about the US drone program that remain unanswered a decade after the first strike:

1. Who's being targeted?
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2. What constitutes an "imminent threat"?
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3. What about signature strikes?
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4. Does Congress really know what's going on?
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5. How are civilian casualties avoided—and counted?

The Presidential Policy Guidance states that lethal strikes may be carried out only with "near certainty that non-combatants will not be injured or killed." However, the Obama administration counts all military-age males killed by drones as militants. That explains why official counts of civilian deaths vary widely from independent counts. While in Sen. Feinstein stated last year that annual civilian casualties from drones fall in the "single digits", the Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that total civilian casualties since 2004 in Pakistan alone have ranged from 416 to 951.

6. How does the administration justify the targeting of American citizens?
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