As promised in March, the White House released a report Friday on the death toll from airstrikes in areas outside of recognized war zones. The report was a product of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Charlie Savage and Scott Shane write:
Partially lifting the secrecy that has cloaked one of the United States’s most contentious tactics for fighting terrorists, the Obama administration on Friday said that it believed that airstrikes it has conducted outside conventional war zones like Afghanistan have killed 64 to 116 civilian bystanders and about 2,500 members of terrorist groups.
The official civilian death count is hundreds lower than most estimates compiled by independent organizations that try to track what the government calls targeted killings in chaotic places like tribal Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya. Most of the strikes have been carried out by drones, though a small number have involved traditional aircraft or cruise missiles.
The United States has only acknowledged responsibility for two drone-caused killing of civilians, those of two aid workers in Pakistan in 2015.
President Obama also issued an executive order Friday that calls for minimizing civilian deaths via “best practices” in airstrike operations and calling for the report on civilian deaths to be an annual thing. A future president could overrule that.
In a “fact sheet” issued by the administration, it was acknowledged that some non-governmental organizations have expressed skepticism about the administration’s previous counts:
Second, to help address challenges associated with assessing the credibility of reports of civilian casualties in non-permissive environments, the Executive Order emphasizes the U.S. Government’s consideration of credible reporting provided by non-governmental organizations in its post-strike reviews, including drawing on existing information-sharing arrangements to ensure the availability of such reporting to those conducting post-strike analyses.
One of those NGOs is the UK-based international human rights organization Reprieve. A day before the release of the airstrike report, it released its own report, Opaque Transparency:
What little the Obama Administration has previously said on the record about the drone program has been shown by the facts on the ground, and even the US Government’s own internal documents, to be false. Any claim of low numbers of civilian casualties will therefore have to be read against the more rigorous work of organisations such as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), which estimates a low of 492 civilian casualties across Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and a high of potentially 1138. Amongst these are somewhere between 180 and 227 children.
Indeed, every independent organisation which tracks drone strikes has estimated civilian casualties to be higher than off-record Administration estimates by a factor of anything from four to twenty. The lowest estimate, provided by the Long War Journal, puts the civilian death toll at a minimum of 263 for Yemen and Pakistan, while New America (NA) suggests a low of 373 for Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, with a high of 448 (excluding ‘unknowns,’ which could take the total up to 797).
But more importantly, it has to be asked what bare numbers will mean if they omit even basic details such as the names of those killed and the areas, even the countries, they live in. Equally, the numbers without the definitions to back up how the Administration is defining its targets is useless, especially given reports the Obama Administration has shifted the goalposts on what counts as a ‘civilian’ to such an extent that any estimate may be far removed from reality. In US drone operations, reports suggest all “military aged males” and potentially even women and children are considered “enemies killed in action” unless they can “posthumously” and “conclusively” prove their innocence.
At Just Security, an on-line forum on national security, Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote in an extensive blog post Monday:
The value of the new executive order and the casualty statistics will depend largely on the granularity of the information the administration discloses now, and the granularity of the information it commits to disclosing in the future. Unfortunately, there is reason to doubt that the government will provide the kind of specificity that would actually be useful to journalists, human rights researchers, and the general public. [...]
The release of more specific information is crucial because each of the independent groups that tracks drone-related civilian casualties has reported far higher numbers than those government officials have cited in the past, and far higher numbers than those the government is expected to disclose now. Without the release of data about specific strikes, it will be difficult to check the government’s data against that of independent groups.
To allow for meaningful public oversight, the government should release information about every strike — the date of the strike, the location, the numbers of those killed or injured, and the civilian or combatant status of those casualties.