Long-awaited assessment of death toll under Obama, criticized as an undercount, acknowledges government does not always know how many civilians it kills

Barack Obama has claimed that drone and other airstrikes, his favored tactics of war, have killed between 64 and 116 civilians during his administration, a tally which was criticized as undercounted even before Friday’s announcement.



The long-promised assessment acknowledged that the government itself does not always know how many civilians it kills and that it may revise its death tolls over time.

Between 2009 and 31 December 2015, the administration claimed that it launched 473 strikes, mostly with drones, that killed between what it said were 2,372 and 2,581 terrorist “combatants”.

The assessment presents the White House’s account of the death toll from a method of warfare that defines Obama’s legacy in many parts of the world. The White House released its long-awaited drones report the afternoon before the Fourth of July holiday weekend, having pledged transparency on the drones issue for years.

Yet the count is also incomplete, leaving out the civilian toll from drone strikes in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. Nor did the administration go into detail about where the strikes occur, citing what an official told reporters on Friday were “diplomatic sensitivities”, even as it presented the assessment as a significant advance in transparency. The Guardian has filed a freedom of information act request for records relating to the civilian-death assessment in the US bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria, where thus far the US military has concluded it has killed 36 civilians since summer 2015.

The upper limit of the civilian death toll from drones stands at more than 800 people in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, during the time period Obama’s drones tally covered. But that and similar accounts are imprecise, owing to both official secrecy and the difficulties of fact-finding and verifying in some of the world’s most dangerous places. In some cases, human rights groups have found that strikes intending to kill specific terrorist leaders killed many more people.

In 2013, senior Republican senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said that drone strikes had killed 4,700 people, some 2,000 more deaths than the upper limit the administration released on Friday.

Accompanying the release of the death statistics was a new executive order Obama issued to effectively codify his counterterrorism strikes for the next administration, a process his aides have debated since at least 2012.

A goal of the executive order is to “take feasible precautions in conducting attacks to reduce the likelihood of civilian casualties” through training, “technological capabilities” and holding off on strikes to limit civilian deaths. As well, each May, the office of the director of national intelligence will publish an updated annual counterterrorism death toll.

The US has killed people whose identities it does not know, for fitting into what it considers patterns of life associated with terrorism, an anonymous method of killing known as signature strikes. But despite the executive order’s emphasis on steps to “ensure military objectives and civilians are clearly distinguished”, senior administration officials indicated that Obama will permit signature strikes to continue.

“We continue to reserve the right to take action not just against individual terrorist targets but when we believe we have, for instance, a force protection issue or information to suggest a continued imminent threat,” a senior official said when asked about signature strikes.

Drone strikes outside of declared war zones are the province of the CIA and the US military’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command. The administration has treated them as an official secret, and for years would not even utter the word “drone” or any of its associated acronyms. No entity outside the administration reviews the strikes. The executive order creates an internal mechanism to review drone strikes and take into account information from non-governmental organizations like human rights groups.

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To critics, the secrecy has for years permitted Obama to conceal the damage in human lives inflicted by what he calls “targeted killing”, insulating him politically from the consequences of lethal decisions that the president has decided can occur anywhere on earth for an indefinite duration.

Another impact of the secrecy has meant policy arguments over drone strikes have accordingly occurred in an information vacuum.

The White House and the CIA, which pioneered the strikes during the George W Bush era and dramatically accelerated them during Obama’s presidency, have claimed without evidence that drone strikes are an antiseptic solution for terrorism and downplayed the civilian casualties, political destabilization and life-changing consequences described by strike survivors, witnesses, relatives and foreign officials.

John Brennan, the CIA director, and Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, have for years claimed the drone strikes kill “single digits” worth of civilians annually, though they have provided no evidence for the assertion.

To fill the information vacuum, Obama’s counter-terrorism czar promised in March that the administration would declassify casualty totals from its drone strikes, and rumored interagency disagreements about what and how much to disclose have contributed to the delay.

An additional factor in the discussions surrounding the drones disclosure has been what the administration will bequeath to its successor, and how constraining the rules it had crafted around them, unilaterally and secretly, will prove.

Human rights groups have reacted with cynicism in the intervening months, arguing that nothing prevents the CIA from grading its own work favorably and presenting unverifiable undercounts as the truth.

“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,” Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote in a blogpost on Monday.

A senior official defended the rigor of the US’s internal count but conceded “at the end of the day, this is US government information, and people can make their own judgments about how they receive it.”

Other human rights campaigners criticized the White House drone tally on arrival.

“While a sign of progress, the information to be released today fails to provide enough information to allow the public to assess the harm to civilians, the legality of individual strikes, or the overall effectiveness of the targeted killing program, especially as the data only covers airstrikes outside Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan,” Human Rights First said in a statement.



The origin of the disclosures came in 2013, during an equivocal speech on war Obama delivered at the National Defense University. In retrospect, the speech reads as the beginnings of a president, who despite pledging the year before in his re-election campaign that the “tide of war is receding”, unravelling his promise. In his speech, Obama urged the US to “define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us”, and promised additional transparency for the strikes.

An associated document, partially declassified for the speech, added restrictions on drone strikes that led to a notable drop in drone attacks by late 2013. But its major terms were left vague: strikes had to target an “imminent” threat, with a “near certainty” not to kill civilians, after capturing terror suspects was “infeasible”, all of which raised questions about internal definitions. Before the year was done, a US drone strike killed 14 celebrants at a wedding in Yemen.

That full document, known as the Policy Planning Guidance, was not declassified with the death tally, although the justice department in February told a federal judge it will declassify the document after an ACLU transparency lawsuit.

Survivors of the strikes and relatives of the dead consider drone strikes to be proof that the US is waging an indiscriminate war on their largely Muslim countries, precisely the opposite of how Obama and his surrogates prefer to view their “targeted” counter-terrorism. Several have told the Guardian that the threat of the strikes have created an ever-present fear in their countries amongst civilians while having a negligible impact on the terrorist groups they are meant to contain or destroy.

Survivors also resent the lack of official apology, acknowledgement and compensation from the US for mistaken strikes, and bitterly note that Obama was quick to take responsibility for an errant 2015 strike that killed two westerners.

Rafiq ur-Rehman, whose mother was killed and children seriously injured by a 2012 drone strike in Pakistan, told the Guardian this year: “In my opinion, America treats us worse than animals.”

Faheem Qureshi, who at 14 years old survived Obama’s very first drone strike in January 2009, told the Guardian: “If there is a list of tyrants in the world, to me, Obama will be put on that list by his drone program.”

The executive order now requires the US to “acknowledge US government responsibility for civilian casualties and offer condolences”, to include paying money for deaths it mistakenly causes. US officials could not say how much condolence money they have paid.

“Yes, we are accepting responsibility,” said a senior administration official, who would not agree to be quoted by name.