The United States has inadvertently killed between 64 and 116 noncombatant civilians in drone and other lethal attacks against terrorism suspects in places not considered active war zones, the Obama administration said Friday.
The unintentional deaths came in a total of 473 CIA and military counterterrorism strikes up to the end of 2015 that the administration said have taken between 2,372 and 2,581 militants permanently off the battlefield in countries where the United States is not at war, which would include Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya.
The release was accompanied by an executive order, signed by President Obama, designed to give added weight to existing administration standards and procedures governing the use of lethal force and for limiting civilian casualties.
The casualty disclosures are part of an attempt to live up to Obama’s repeated promises of greater transparency about his administration’s extraordinary reliance on armed drones in the targeted killings of terrorism suspects.
In releasing only aggregate figures that do not include when or where the strikes occurred, the administration sought to bolster government assertions about the accuracy and effectiveness of the program.
Independent research groups that track drone strikes have produced significantly higher estimates of non-combatant deaths. The New America Foundation and the Long War Journal each put the number of civilians killed at about 250. A third group, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, believes the number is far higher, estimating that as many as 358 civilians have died in U.S. counterterrorism operations since Obama took office.
The newly released figures were cast as a rebuke to those claims, which U.S. officials have said are often inflated by erroneous press reports or even efforts by Pakistan and Yemen to pass off their own military miscues as U.S. drone strikes.