U.S. to reveal drones’ civilian toll
WASHINGTON – Not long after a U.S. drone strike killed his brother-in-law and a nephew in a village in central Yemen, Faisal bin Ali Jaber received a phone call from a Yemeni government official.
The man invited the engineer to Sanaa, the capital, to discuss why a drone had targeted and killed five men meeting under a palm tree in Khashamir after dark on Aug. 29, 2012.
Jaber appeared at the government building, but he was given no explanation or apology. Instead he was handed a plastic bag with $100,000 in sequentially marked $100 bills, he said – a relative fortune in the Arab world’s poorest country.
“They told me, ‘We are not authorized to tell you where this money came from, but take it,’ ” Jaber, 58, said via an Arabic interpreter in a phone interview from Montreal, where he now lives. “I knew it must be the American government, so I wondered, ‘Why they would do this? Why would they pay this blood money in secret?’ ”
President Barack Obama is expected to disclose as early as Friday that U.S. military and CIA drone strikes inadvertently have killed about 100 civilians since 2009 in countries where the United States is not officially at war, according to U.S. officials who were not authorized to speak publicly.
The long-awaited report focuses on the so-called shadow wars in Yemen, Pakistan, Libya and Somalia and only during Obama’s tenure. It covers about 500 drone attacks in all.
The tally does not include civilian casualties for Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, where U.S. forces have launched thousands of air attacks as part of wars and where the Pentagon formally investigates allegations of civilian deaths.
Obama plans to issue an executive order that would call on his successor to annually disclose the number of civilians killed in drone strikes, officials said, a goal he announced in 2013 but met only in his last year in office.
He also is expected to disclose parts of the classified legal framework behind the drone program. Known as the Presidential Policy Guidance, it sets legal standards for deciding whom to kill, where and under what circumstances.
“It has been a long road to get this information out there,” one U.S. official said. “There have been concerns from nearly every agency within the government on what to reveal and fears about revealing too much.”
The official tally is far lower than the death toll claimed by human rights and other groups that monitor America’s growing use of combat drones. Their estimates range from 200 to more than 1,000.