OOPS

McClatchy has been able to access some of our top-secret intelligence reports.  They seem to belie Obama's assertion last year, “It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative,”  The reports show that the drones killed alleged Afghan insurgents whose organization wasn’t on the U.S. list of terrorist groups at the time of the 9/11 strikes; suspected members of a Pakistani extremist group that didn’t exist at the time of 9/11; and unidentified individuals described as “other militants” and “foreign fighters.”  Naturally, the administration says that the missile strikes are aimed at al Qaida and associated forces. Which to me seems a pretty weak response.

The reports covered the period 2006-2011, except for 2009. During the year ending September 2011, the reports estimated that the drones killed 482 people. However, more than half of the casualties were not senior al Qaida leaders but instead were “assessed” as Afghan, Pakistani and unknown extremists. Drones killed only six top al Qaida leaders in those months, according to news media accounts.  It would be interesting to know who did the "assessments" and on what evidence they were based, as the drone operators weren’t always certain who they were killing despite the administration’s guarantees of the accuracy of the CIA’s targeting intelligence and its assertions that civilian casualties have been “exceedingly rare.”