A U.S. drone strike targeting a compound frequented by al Qaida leaders accidentally killed two hostages, including one American, near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in January, the White House announced Thursday.
The hostages, both aid workers, had been kidnapped several years ago: Warren Weinstein, 73, of Maryland, a contractor with the U.S. Agency for International Development, had been held since 2011; Italian Giovanni Lo Porto, 39, had been held since 2012.
A somber President Barack Obama said Thursday, shortly after the White House announced the deaths, that he takes full responsibility for the botched operation that took two innocent lives despite hundreds of hours of surveillance. He had not given specific approval for the strike.
“I profoundly regret what happened,” Obama told reporters gathered in the White House briefing room. “On behalf of the U.S. government, I offer our deepest apologies to the families.”
The families of the two men will be compensated for their deaths, officials said, though the exact amount has not been determined.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest announced that two other Americans, both members of al Qaida, also had been killed in Pakistan in January.
One, Ahmed Farouq, al Qaida’s senior operations commander for India, died in the same operation that killed Weinstein and Lo Porto. The other, Adam Gadahn, 36, a California native who became an al Qaida spokesman and had been indicted in the United States for treason, was killed in a separate January operation.
Neither man had been targeted in the raids that killed them, U.S. officials said.
Al Qaida’s South Asia branch had announced in an audio message released April 12 that Farouq had been killed Jan. 5 in a drone strike on a compound in the mountainous Shawal area of North Waziristan. But the announcement made no mention of Weinstein or Lo Porto.
Earnest said the administration suspected in the weeks after the January operation that Weinstein might have died but did not realize that the U.S. had caused the death until the last several days. A senior administration official said Weinstein’s family had been told earlier in the year of the suspicions, but was told only Wednesday that the death had been confirmed. The official agreed to speak to McClatchy only under a grant of anonymity.
Obama said he called Weinstein’s wife, Elaine, and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi on Wednesday to express his sympathy. Several members of Congress were briefed on the situation Wednesday.
“It is a cruel and bitter truth that in the fog of war, generally, and our fight against terrorists specifically, mistakes – sometimes deadly mistakes – can occur,” Obama said.
Weinstein was not the first American hostage to be reported killed in a friendly fire incident this year. In February, humanitarian worker Kayla Mueller, who been kidnapped by the Islamic State, was killed in Syria when, the Islamic State said, Jordanian aircraft bombed the building where she was being held. U.S. officials have declined to acknowledge Jordanian involvement in the death and have not investigated what took place.
In December, an attempt to rescue Luke Somers, an American photographer being held hostage in Yemen, ended in his death when his captors detected the U.S. rescue team before it had launched its attack and shot him.
Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the revelation of Weinstein’s and Lo Porto’s deaths raised anew questions about Obama administration assurances that drone strikes carefully target only members of al Qaida.
“These new disclosures raise troubling questions about the reliability of the intelligence that the government is relying on to justify drone strikes,” he said. “In each of the operations acknowledged today, the U.S. quite literally didn’t know who it was killing.”
The White House said Thursday that both the CIA inspector general and national security officials were reviewing the operation. The investigations could prompt changes to the drone program first authorized by former President George W. Bush and later expanded by Obama.
On Capitol Hill, lawmakers vowed additional investigations.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., vice chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said her committee will continue to review what happened and that more information on the operations should be made public, including an annual report on the number of deaths – combatant and civilian – from U.S. strikes.
“We must be certain our counterterrorism strategy is aimed at defeating terrorist organizations,” she said.
The CIA has launched 415 drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas since 2004, with 364 coming during the Obama presidency, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. It estimates between 2,500 and 3,950 have been killed by drone-launched missiles in Pakistan, including between 420 and 960 civilians.
The U.S. had suspended drone strikes in early 2014 at the request of Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, as he had sought to engage Taliban insurgents in peace talks, but were resumed last June at the request of the Pakistani military, just ahead of an offensive against Taliban insurgents and foreign al Qaida militants based in North Waziristan and other tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.
The mountainous Shawal area of North Waziristan has been targeted frequently since; the drone strike that resulted in the deaths of Weinstein and Lo Porto was one of five conducted there in December and January.
Earnest said that the administration had not negotiated for Weinstein’s release, keeping with its practice, but that it had been trying to find and rescue him for years. He said no specific rescue mission had been attempted.
Sen. Ben Cardin, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he and his Maryland colleague, Democrat Barbara Mikulski, had raised the kidnapping with Obama, the CIA and the FBI. Obama, he said, told them it was very high on his agenda.
Obama said Thursday that he had directed his national security team to do everything possible to find Weinstein and that “dedicated professionals across our government worked tirelessly to do so.”
There was no official reaction from the Pakistani government. Lawyers who said they had been acting as intermediaries for the Weinstein family said they were shocked by the White House announcement, saying negotiations for him had continued unabated, without any hint from the kidnappers that he had died.
“Only last week, I spoke to an Afghan militant representing the kidnappers about obtaining proof of life. I offered him $2,000 for a photograph with Dr. Weinstein holding up his hand, showing V for victory. The militant joked $1,500 would be enough to cover his people’s expenses,” said an intermediary based in the northern city of Peshawar. He asked that he not be identified for security reasons.
Intermediaries said the kidnappers had previously received an undisclosed sum for Weinstein’s release but had reneged on their promise to release him, claiming the militant who’d collected the ransom money had fled with it and had spent most of it before he was captured by his colleagues.
Weinstein last spoke to his wife in an audio-only Skype call arranged more than two years ago by the kidnappers, intermediaries said. A handwritten note to some members of the media came with his last video in December 2013.
“I’ve appealed several times to President Obama to help me but to no avail,” Weinstein wrote. “I am therefore writing now to the media to ask that you to help me to gain my release. . . . I’m hoping that you will take up my case on a human interest and humanitarian basis and that you can help my family and me to convince President Obama to take action to negotiate my release.”
Obama said Thursday that he ordered details of the deaths to be made public, which had been classified until now.
“I did so because the Weinstein and Lo Porto families deserve to know the truth,” he said. “And I did so because, even as certain aspects of our national security efforts have to remain secret in order to succeed, the United States is a democracy committed to openness in good times and in bad.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story gave an incorrect age for Weinstein.
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