Yet U.S. officials who've supported America's drone war for President Obama's entire tenure are reacting to the January strike as if it raised uniquely troubling questions. The Obama administration is said to be conducting two reviews of the incident. Senator John McCain urged "all possible steps to prevent this kind of tragedy from happening again," adding, "Congress should play an active role in this oversight." Said Senator Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democratic member of the Senate intelligence committee, "I now intend to review that operation in greater detail."

House Majority Leader John Boehner said, "We need all the facts for the families and so we can make sure nothing like this ever happens again in our efforts to keep Americans safe."

These reactions are farcical.

Obama, McCain, Feinstein, and Boehner all know that U.S. drone strikes have killed many hundreds of innocent people, often in circumstances far less defensible than this.

They know about the wedding convoy that U.S. Hellfire missiles turned into a macabre funeral. They know dozens were once killed at a tribal meeting held to settle a mining dispute. They know a Pakistani teenager sat in the United States capitol building and recounted how her grandmother was killed by a drone as she picked okra. And they know that in many so-called "signature strikes," the CIA doesn't know the names of those it kills and designates all dead males of military age "militants." So when these leaders react to this drone strike as if it raises new questions, offers new data, or ought to be of special concern relative to other lethal strikes carried out by the United States, their positions verge into incoherence.

This is partly a matter of playing to the ignorant.

Members of the public who still regard American drone strikes as "surgical" operations that virtually never cause collateral damage might well be alarmed by deaths of hostages that highlight how much the CIA can fail to know about its targets. To them, perhaps it makes sense that Obama, McCain, Feinstein, and Boehner picked now to tut-tut about the need to ensure no mistake like this is ever made again. But informed observers of the U.S. drone war recall that these politicians didn't just support lethal strikes knowing a tragedy like the one in January could happen—they championed the drone war even after dozens of bigger tragedies did happen. Many of those tragedies reflected far worse on the CIA and its trustworthiness.

They nevertheless garnered less attention.

Much of the public only pays attention when Western innocents are killed. So pols who've long believed that many hundreds of collateral deaths are an acceptable price in the drone war conspicuously express extraordinary concern about a strike from which there is relatively little to learn, largely in the hope that doing so will avert a political backlash. They ought to acknowledge the morally fraught choices that they've made in the war on terrorism. Instead they obfuscate and mislead. Yes, the United States is averse to killing innocents and takes measures to safeguard against doing so. But the Obama administration is also less careful than the American public is led to believe. "Obama tightened rules for the U.S. drone program in 2013," The Wall Street Journal reports, "but he secretly approved a waiver giving the CIA more flexibility in Pakistan than anywhere else to strike suspected militants."