DronesDespite persistent questions, support for use of drones against terrorists remains strong

The CIA counterterrorism program which captured, interrogated, and tortured al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons was criticized by lawmakers, including Senate Democrats who questioned the secrecy of the program. Many of those same lawmakers overwhelmingly support CIA targeted drone missions aimed at killing terror suspects and militants in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia.

When Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) was asked in a 2013 meeting with reporters why she was confident the CIA provided her with truthful information about the drone program, when she had already accused the agency of lying to her about its torture program, the former chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said, “That’s a good question, actually,” but did nit elaborate.

About once a month, staff members of the congressional intelligence committees meet with CIA officials at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia to watch footage of drone strikes in Pakistan and other countries. The staffers do not read the classified CIA cables discussing the strikes and their aftermath, but the screenings have made up a large part of the congressional “oversight” lawmakers claim they have over the CIA’s drone program.

It is this claimed oversight and the success of the program in killing foreign terror suspects that will ensure drone strikes remain a part of American warfare and unlikely to change significantly despite President Barack Obama’s announcement last Thursday that a January drone strike in Pakistan accidentally killed two al-Qaeda hostages, an American aid worker and an Italian.

TheNew York Times reports that the CIA’s drone program, championed by the White House, is largely operated and or influenced by the same CIA officers who led the agency’s torture program. According to the Times, “perhaps no single CIA officer has been more central to the effort than Michael D’Andrea…who was chief of operations during the birth of the agency’s detention and interrogation program and then, as head of the CIA Counterterrorism Center, became an architect of the targeted killing program.”

Until March, when D’Andrea was shifted to another role, he presided over the development of CIA drone operations and hundreds of strikes in Pakistan and Yemen during his nine-year tenure. D’Andrea has been a forceful advocate for the drone program and was particularly effective in winning the support of Feinstein, to the point that she rejected criticism of the program from some Democrats and human rights groups. In 2013 she said that CIA officials had assured her that hardly any civilian deaths occur under its drone strikes. “The figures we have obtained from the executive branch, which we have done our utmost to verify, confirm that the number of civilian casualties that have resulted from such strikes each year has typically been in the single digits,” she said.

While the agency has killed hundreds of al-Qaeda operatives, the CIA has never provided detailed count or explanation of the many attacks witnesses say killed women and children. In 2013 Obama and the White House pledged to make the CIA drone program more transparent by shifting the bulk of drone operations from the CIA to the Pentagon, but intelligence committees, influenced by D’Andrea and top CIA officials’ claim that the CIA strikes are more precise than those conducted by the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, have resisted the White House’s plans.

The deaths of two hostages by a January CIA drone strike brings raises questions about how difficult it is for the CIA to know exactly who it is killing with drones. Senator John McCain (R-Arizona), who heads the Senate Committee on Armed Services, said last week’s revelations about the hostages’ death “will renew this discussion with the administration, within Congress, as to who actually should be running the drone operation.”

Asked whether the CIA should be running the program, McCain said, “I do not think so.”

“That’s why they’re called the intelligence agency and why we call the armed forces, obviously, the people that are supposed to be carrying out military operations,” McCain told CNN’s State of the Union. “I can understand when it was a very small operation why it would be done by the intelligence agency, such as U-2s and other reconnaissance aircraft, for many years.”

“Now it’s reached the point where it’s an integral part of the conflict and a very essential one, so I think it should be conducted and oversight and administered by the Department of Defense,” he said.