Washington: The Obama administration is nearing completion of a detailed counterterrorism manual that is designed to establish clear rules for targeted-killing operations but leaves open a major exemption for the CIA’s campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan, U.S. officials said.
The Washington Post reported Saturday that the carve-out would allow the CIA to continue bombing suspected militants for a year or more before the agency is forced to comply with more stringent rules spelled out in a classified document that officials have described as a counterterrorism “playbook.”
Pakistani sources say U.S. drone strikes have killed nearly 3,000 civilians since 2004. They say the strikes could have only targeted less than 200 militants over the period.
The document is expected to be submitted to President Obama for final approval within weeks, the Post said.
A senior U.S. official involved in drafting the document said that a few issues remain unresolved but described them as minor. The senior U.S. official said the playbook “will be done shortly.”
Among the subjects covered in the playbook are the process for adding names to kill lists, the legal principles that govern when U.S. citizens can be targeted overseas and the sequence of approvals required when the CIA or U.S. military conduct drone strikes outside war zones, according to the newspaper.
A recent study by human rights experts at Stanford Law School and the New York University School of Law found that the number of innocent civilians killed by US drone strikes is much higher than what the U.S. government has reported: approximately 700 since 2004, including almost 200 children.
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