(multimedia)
President Obama’s counter-terrorism adviser has given the most detailed explanation so far of America’s use of drones to kill members of al-Qaeda.
In a speech to a Washington think tank, John Brennan said the strikes were helping to win the war on the militant network.
President Barack Obama wanted to be more open about the practice, Mr Brennan added.
The comments come in the week marking a year since Osama Bin Laden’s death.
BBC Washington correspondent Paul Adams says this is not the first time the Obama administration has confirmed the use of drone strikes.
‘Disaster after disaster’
In January, the president did it himself, during a webchat. But our correspondent says Mr Brennan has gone further than anyone so far in laying out the rationale for a policy that remains controversial.
Mr Brennan said unmanned drone strikes were legal, ethical, necessary and proportional, overseen with what he called extraordinary care and thoughtfulness, especially when the target was an American citizen.
In his speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, he said al-Qaeda was losing badly.
For the first time since America’s war on the organisation began, Mr Brennan said it was possible to envision a world in which the core of al-Qaeda was no longer relevant.
He added that drone strikes usually took place with the co-operation of the host government, in “full accordance with the law”.
Such strikes are thought to have killed hundreds of militants in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.
But Mr Brennan also conceded that there had been civilian deaths as a result of some strikes.
Pakistan has previously demanded an end to US drone strikes on Pakistani soil.
Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union, told the BBC’s World Today programme that Mr Brennan’s speech showed the US administration believed its authority went “far beyond what has been recognised under international law”.
Ms Shamsi said: “We believe there are few things as dangerous as the proposition that the government should be able to kill people anywhere in the word, including citizens, on the basis of legal standards and evidence that are never submitted to the court either before or after the fact.”
She added: “Anyone willing to trust President Obama with the power to secretly declare people as enemies of the state and order their extrajudicial killing should ask whether they would be willing to trust the next president with that dangerous power, and the next president after that.”
BBC has the full article
