Airmen
assemble an MQ-1 Predator drone after returning from Afghanistan, 2008.
Each of the six stencils represent a Hellfire missile it fired in the
warzone. Photo: U.S. Air Force
The government says you can’t know how many people U.S. drone strikes
have killed, because that’s a state secret. But one of the most hawkish
members of the U.S. Senate just said the strikes have killed 4,700
people. And his math raises questions.
That’s what Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) approvingly told
an Easley, South Carolina, Rotary Club on Tuesday afternoon. It’s the
first public death toll provided by a U.S. government official for the
signature method of killing in the U.S.’ sprawling, global
counterterrorism campaign.
“
We’ve killed 4,700,”
Graham said, according to an Easley website. “Sometimes you hit
innocent people, and I hate that, but we’re at war, and we’ve taken out
some very senior members of al-Qaida.” Graham did not evidently offer an
estimate of how many innocent people the drones have killed.
Graham staffers did not return voicemails and e-mails seeking elaboration. (We’ll update if they do.) But that’s a
very
high figure — at least as it pertains to the CIA’s drone strikes,
outside the declared battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, which is what
the context of Graham’s remarks make it seem like he’s referring to. As
Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations
blogs, that’s on the highest end of the drone-death estimate
compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism
from publicly available news reports. Zenko’s compilation of the
averages of non-governmental organizations’ guesstimates for drone
casualties is about 1,700 people lower.
The CIA declined to comment about whether Graham revealed classified information. Counting the death toll from drones is a
notoriously imprecise, murky business.
Graham’s death count would raise questions about the much-vaunted
precision of the strikes. Using the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s
count, the U.S. has launched between 416 and 439 drone strikes in
Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia since the U.S. first successfully weaponized
an MQ-1 Predator a decade ago. If Graham’s right, each strike would
have to kill more than 10 people. It’s certainly
possible — the
100-pound Hellfire missile carried by the drones is capable of it — but
U.S. counterterrorism officials typically describe the drones as
a tool geared for the targeting of a specific terrorist at a time, with minimal
civilian casualties. (That isn’t necessarily the case: Sometimes the CIA kills people with drones
without knowing who exactly they are.)
Yet Graham’s count is simultaneously
low. Judging from the context of his remarks, he’s evidently not counting the
U.S. military’s
drone strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan. So the real number of deaths
from the strikes between the covert CIA drone program and the U.S.
military’s still rarely acknowledged efforts is likely even higher.
It wouldn’t be the first time that a U.S. senator has offhandedly
revealed specific and unacknowledged information about the drones. In
2009, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), the chairwoman of the Senate
intelligence committee, blabbed that the
Pakistani government was hosting CIA drones for strikes on Pakistanis.
But Graham’s disclosure underscores the extraordinary secrecy around
the centerpiece of U.S. counterterrorism efforts — a military action in
all but name, operated by an agency that need not explain to the public
how it carries out the program. Even Feinstein, a big advocate of the
CIA and its drones, acknowledged to Danger Room earlier this month that
the CIA has a history of being deceitful with Congress about its
other
highly valued programs. And even after the CIA’s likely next director,
John Brennan, acknowledged that the CIA performs such lethal strikes,
the Justice Department still maintains that
even the existence of its drone program is a state secret,
so that it need not disclosure information about it in court. Whatever
Graham’s intentions in stating a death toll — regardless of its accuracy
— that secrecy is the most prominent, visible fact about the drones.
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