WASHINGTON -- The United States has inadvertently killed between 64 and 116 noncombatant civilians in drone and other lethal attacks against terrorism suspects in places not considered active war zones, President Barack Obama's administration said Friday.
The unintentional deaths occurred during 473 counterterrorism strikes conducted by the CIA and military from January 2009 to the end of 2015. The administration said the strikes took between 2,372 and 2,581 militants permanently off the battlefield in countries where the United States is not at war.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, did not mention where the strikes occurred, but the Defense Department and CIA have pursued targets in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya.
The data didn't include strikes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, which the U.S. considers areas of active hostilities.
The release was accompanied by an executive order, signed by Obama, designed to give added weight to existing administration standards and procedures governing the use of lethal force and for limiting civilian casualties.
The long-awaited casualty disclosures are part of an attempt to live up to Obama's pledges of greater transparency about his administration's extraordinary reliance on armed drones in the targeted killings of terrorism suspects.
higher estimates
Independent research groups that track drone strikes have produced significantly higher estimates of noncombatant deaths, and the administration drew criticism from many of those groups over its report.
The New America Foundation and the Long War Journal each put the number of civilians killed at about 250. A third group, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, said it believes that the number is far higher, estimating that as many as 358 civilians have died in U.S. counterterrorism operations since Obama took office.
The newly released figures were cast as a rebuke to those claims, which U.S. officials have said are often inflated by erroneous press reports or even efforts by Pakistan and Yemen to pass off their own military miscues as U.S. drone strikes. But by withholding information about its methodology and refusing to release data on specific strikes, the administration is seen as unlikely to sway skeptics.
"I give this administration credit for being more forthcoming and recognizing the need" for increased public accountability, said Micah Zenko, an expert on the U.S. drone program at the Council on Foreign Relations. But "putting out raw numbers without any clarifying information" leaves reason to remain skeptical of the government's claims, Zenko said. "You can't grade your own homework."
The administration's figures were largely drawn from post-strike analyses done by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command -- entities that even critics acknowledge have become more accurate in their use of armed drones but that nevertheless have institutional incentives to undercount the number of civilians they kill.
Bill Roggio of the Long War Journal said the administration's report will "do little to quell the criticism" of those who want full disclosure of civilian casualties. That would include the names of those killed and dates, locations and other details on the strikes.
"The numbers reported by the White House today simply don't add up, and we're disappointed by that," said Federico Borello, executive director of Center for Civilians in Conflict in Washington. "We're concerned that as more countries gain access to armed drone technology, it's more likely that drones will be used as a first response in conflicts and more likely civilians will pay the price."
Letta Tayler, senior terrorism researcher at Human Rights Watch, concurred.
"So long as the public is examining these casualties in the dark, with these little bitty flashlights, we are never going to understand the depth and breadth of this lethal program," Tayler said, adding that the administration's claim of fewer than 100 civilian casualties is "highly questionable."
Tayler attributed the gap between the administration's and outside estimates to the government's "overly elastic definitions of combatant and civilian."
One administration official who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity said agencies classify casualties as combatants on the basis of whether the person appears to be performing activities beneficial to a terrorist group or is integrated into the group's activities. That may include whether the individual appears to be giving out orders or is armed, the official said.
Military-age males aren't automatically considered combatants, nor are people within any given distance of a target, the official said. The administration makes assessments on the basis of drone video, electronic intercepts of communications, intelligence sources on the ground, foreign governments, and public information such as media reports and reports from nongovernmental organizations, the official said.
Still, White House spokesman Josh Earnest called the strikes a "powerful tool, one that has been used to great effect and one that has made Americans safer."
secret guidelines
Obama's executive order codifies standards put into place in May 2013 through a still-secret document called Presidential Policy Guidelines.
The guidelines narrowed standards for the use of lethal force outside war zones that at the time included only Afghanistan. Iraq and Syria have been added to the zones where the United States deems itself at war.
For places outside those zones, "lethal force will be used only to prevent or stop attacks against U.S. persons," according to a public summary of the standards released at the time, and even then, "only when capture is not feasible and no other reasonable alternatives exist to address the threat effectively."
Such force was to be used "outside areas of active hostilities," it said, only when certain preconditions were met. They included a "near certainty" that "the terrorist target is present" and that "non-combatants will not be injured or killed."
The summary also said that Obama had directed the military gradually to take over all lethal strikes, the bulk of which at that time were being conducted by the CIA. Officially considered covert actions, the CIA strikes have been shielded from disclosure, while the military is bound to account for its actions to Congress and the public.
The administration agreed earlier this year, as part of a court case filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, to release a redacted version of the Presidential Policy Guidelines document. That release has been delayed by ongoing discussions between the court and the administration over what portions can be legitimately blacked out.
This year, the military began publicly acknowledging drone strikes on al-Qaida targets in Yemen, a step that the Pentagon had refused to take in previous years largely out of concern that identifying its own operations, while the administration remained silent on others, would indirectly expose those carried out by the CIA.
In Yemen on Friday, security officials and tribesmen said that at least three suspected al-Qaida militants were killed in a drone strike in the south.
The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal, said the militants were hit while traveling in an SUV in the province of Shabwa. Tribesmen put the death toll among the militants at six. They said they believe a U.S. drone was behind the attack, though it was not immediately possible to verify their account.
Information for this article was contributed by Karen DeYoung, Greg Miller and Julie Tate of The Washington Post; by Deb Riechmann and Ahmed Al Haj of The Associated Press; and by Mike Dorning of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 07/02/2016