Yesterday at a Press Conference about killing an American and Italian hostage in a US drone strike on Pakistan, President Obama said, “As President and Commander-in-chief, I take full responsibility for all our counter terrorism operation.” But Obama couldn’t explain: why the Central Intelligence Agency is allowed to carry out these drone strike in secrecy?
There is no details found about how the CIA screwed up the strike so profoundly, which is typical for America’s drone warfare program which has been operating covertly since its inception. The CIA’s covert action is not acknowledged by the government, so the control is given over drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan to ensure the things will stay opaque.
To classify the memos on drone protocol, there’s still a galling paucity of information available to the public about the rules for performing the strikes. For the first known American hostage death in US drone strike, the CIA’s absurdly secretive tactics are getting called out, as if the engagement rules has boiled down to striking first, and confirming the target’s identity later.
The reason of this incident:
While the Pentagon partly handles the military drone program, the CIA is still in-charge of carrying out missions in Pakistan and Afghanistan, aka the places where the bulk murder-by-drone is going down. This results in various opportunity for confusion, information leakage. The different reporting rules on drone strikes by the CIA and DOD, makes it difficult to make out the happening.
It has become a challenge for a congressional committee, or the Justice Department or the Public to know the where about of the happening.
Giving the control of the drone program to the Pentagon and halting CIA’s involvement may make the program better is naive. If instead of the two programs, we have only one program, it will be easy to determine.
Integrating the drone program to the military will unconfine the US drone program from committing future scary acts. At least transferring the program out of the CIA’s hands should make it incrementally transparent.
In Politico’s view, Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s actions made drone warfare remained under CIA control till now. Even Obama tried to transfer it to the Pentagon for greater transparency two years back but Feinstein blocked, which results in the current chaotic and clandestine drone warfare policy.
The violence of an innocent American’s death made US pay attention to the miserable imprecision of its unnamed killing machines.
