for identifying a terrorist “signature” were too lax. But some State Department officials have complained to the White House that the criteria used by the C.I.A. Obama had approved not only “personality” strikes aimed at named, high-value terrorists, but “signature” strikes that targeted training camps and suspicious compounds in areas controlled by militants. As the newspaper put it on May 29, 2012, in a major investigative article: Yet reporting by The New York Times suggests that Obama was directly complicit all along in efforts to obscure the true costs of drone strikes to innocents. That more checks and balances were needed from day one was a no-brainer. The CIA then got carried away with the power to kill in secret in multiple countries. That should have been obvious to a former senator and constitutional-law expert who knew, among other things, that the CIA had recently run an illegal torture program. Those choices made more unjust killings predictable and inevitable. In any case, Obama chose to allow the CIA, a secretive entity with a long history of unjust killings, to carry out strikes he chose to keep the very fact of drone killings classified, deliberately invoking the state-secrets privilege in a way guaranteed to stymie oversight, public debate, and legal accountability and he chose to permit killings outside the greater Afghanistan war zone, in countries with which the U.S. It is impossible to know exactly when Obama recognized the need to get the drone program “in a box” and to introduce “checks and balances,” as he put it, or how he ever imagined the earlier status quo could end in anything but excessive killings.
As the Bureau of Investigative Journalism later reported in its retrospective timeline, “2010 was to be the bloodiest year of drone strikes in Pakistan.”
outpost in Afghanistan that killed multiple CIA officers, prompting an unnamed official to tell The Guardian, “This attack will be avenged through successful, aggressive counterterrorism operations.” Many were cross-border drone strikes targeting the Taliban. The following year, a significant escalation in the drone war occurred not because “this technology really began to take off,” to repeat Obama’s construction, which seems to assign responsibility for targeted killings to drones themselves, but in part because of a deliberate response to a suicide attack on a U.S. By the end of 2009 the CIA had already conducted its 100th drone strike in Pakistan. The strike missed its target, and Newsweek reported that Obama was made aware almost immediately that innocents died in the attack. President Obama presided over a drone strike for the first time shortly after taking office, on January 22, 2009. Shortly before Obama took office, leaving his job as a United States senator, a CIA drone strike on a funeral in Pakistan killed as many as 41 civilians, an incident that apparently wasn’t enough to cause him to rethink the wisdom of the U.S. That narrative gets at least one thing right: The Obama administration’s approach to drone killings was much worse early on than after his concerted efforts to reform it. And so we initiated this big process to try to get it in a box, and checks and balances, and much higher standards about when they’re used.” “And it wasn’t until about a year, year and a half in where I began to realize that the Pentagon and our national-security apparatus and the CIA were all getting too comfortable with the technology as a tool to fight terrorism, and not being mindful enough about how that technology is being used and the dangers of a form of warfare that is so detached from what is actually happening on the ground. “The truth is that this technology really began to take off right at the beginning of my presidency,” he began. That’s when he brought up critics of lethal drone strikes. “Sometimes it’s useful for activists just to be out there to keep you mindful and not get complacent,” the president concluded, “even if ultimately you think some of their criticism is misguided.” Obama had already spoken about the strengths and weaknesses of Black Lives Matter, LGBT activists, and activists objecting to the deportation of undocumented immigrants, remarks I suggest reading in full. When my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates interviewed President Obama for his recent article, “ My President Was Black,” the discussion briefly turned to lethal drone strikes.
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