[Peace-discuss] News-Gazette: Guest commentary: Senate should hold public hearings on drone strikes

[Robert Naiman]

http://www.news-gazette.com/opinions/editorials/2013-02-24/guest-commentary-senate-should-hold-public-hearings-drone-strikes.htm

Guest commentary: Senate should hold public hearings on drone strikes
Sun, 02/24/2013 - 11:00am | The
News-Gazette<http://www.news-gazette.com/author/news-gazette>
 [1]

The Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to do oversight of the
Central Intelligence Agency. Since the CIA is conducting drone strikes in
Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and since this is a controversial policy, the
Senate Intelligence Committee should be doing oversight of that.

But, as the Los Angeles Times recently noted, the Senate Intelligence
Committee has never held a public hearing on CIA drone strikes. Indeed, for
the year prior to the recent confirmation hearing of John Brennan to head
the CIA, it never held a public hearing at all.

Following Brennan's confirmation hearing, Politico reported that Sen.
Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said she was
unaware of reports that U.S. officials assumed any male of fighting age
killed in a strike was a combatant — a method likely to undercount the
number of civilian deaths.

That's alarming, because the New York Times reported this in May, based on
interviews with administration officials, in a major expose on the drone
strike policy. One administration official outside the CIA called the CIA
practice "guilt by association" that has led to "deceptive" estimates of
civilian casualties. "It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so
they must all be militants," the official said. "They count the corpses and
they're not really sure who they are."

The question of whether the CIA has "counted corpses" in this way is
crucial to the question of whether statements by government officials about
low civilian casualties should be believed.

The questions of civilian casualties and who exactly is being targeted are
crucial to whether the current drone strike policy is one the public would
support. A recent YouGov poll found more Americans oppose drone strikes
than favor them if there's a risk of innocent civilians being killed, and
most Americans would only support the use of strikes against high-level
terrorist targets, not against anyone suspected of being associated with a
terrorist group. These questions are related, because if there's a risk of
civilian casualties, it matters how important the military target is.

In her opening remarks in Brennan's confirmation hearing, Sen. Feinstein
said that the number of civilian casualties caused by U.S. drone strikes
each year has "typically been in the single digits."

But, as the Washington Post and the Guardian noted, this claim is
contradicted by independent reporting of the Bureau of Investigative
Journalism in London, the Long War Journal, and the New America Foundation
in Washington.

The BIJ estimates that over the past nine years, U.S. drone strikes in
Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia have caused at least 556 civilian deaths. The
Long War Journal says U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen killed a
combined 31 civilians in 2008, 84 in 2009, 20 in 2010, 30 in 2011 and 39 in
2012. The New America Foundation says U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan alone
killed at least 25 civilians in 2008, 25 again in 2009, 14 in 2010, six in
2011 and five in 2012.

Senators have shown that they can successfully press the administration to
disclose information about the drone strike policy. On Feb. 4, a bipartisan
group of 11 senators, including Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, wrote to
President Obama "seeking the legal opinions outlining the President's
authority to authorize the killing of American citizens during the course
of counterterrorism operations," hinting in their letter that
administration failure to disclose these memos could snag Brennan's
confirmation of Brennan to head the CIA. Days later, President Obama
directed the Justice Department to grant congressional intelligence
committees access to a classified memo outlining the administration's legal
justification for targeted killing. Now Sen. Feinstein has said that the
Intelligence Committee will delay a vote until more memos are disclosed.

Other Senate committees should also hold public hearings. The Senate
Judiciary Committee, on which Sen. Durbin sits, oversees the Justice
Department, which produced the secret legal memos justifying the drone
strikes. The Armed Services Committee oversees the military, which is also
conducting drone strikes.

Before confirming Brennan to head the CIA, the Senate should attempt to
determine whether it's true that the CIA has been counting "military-age
males" as "militants" when they are killed by drone strikes, and establish
the impact of this on the claim that "civilian casualties from U.S. drone
strikes now number in the single digits annually." And it should do this in
public hearings.

*Robert Naiman, an Urbana resident, is the policy director of Just Foreign
Policy.*

-- 
Robert Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
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