More on the Amnesty and Human Rights Watch Reports

Over at Security States today, Ken and I have a piece adapted in part from my post of Wednesday (to which Amnesty International responds here) on the recent Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports on civilian casualties in drone strikes. The piece combines some of my analysis from the earlier Lawfare post with thoughts of Ken's added later. It opens:

Two leading human rights NGOs, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, released separate reports on U.S. drone warfare this week. They were focused on different places geographically—Amnesty’s report, “Will I be next? U.S. Drone Strikes in Pakistan,” focuses on Waziristan and the tribal regions of Pakistan that border Afghanistan, while Human Rights Watch’s offering, “Between a Drone and Al Qaeda: The Civilian Cost of U.S. Targeted Killings in Yemen,” looks at six drone strikes (one in 2009, three in 2012, and two in 2013) in Yemen. Following closely on the heels of the Interim Report of UN Special Rapporteur Ben Emmerson on U.S. drone strikes and targeted killing, presented a week earlier at the U.N., these reports represent a determined challenge to the Obama administration’s drone warfare policies, on the grounds of factual claims about the actual civilian harms of the strikes in both Pakistan and Yemen, claims that the alleged “blowback” and other second-order effects of the strikes outweigh any putative benefits, and claims that the framework of the strikes, as well as specific strikes themselves, violate international law. On the factual claims of civilian casualties, the reports suffer from the limitations of their groups’ ability to gain independent access to the areas at issue, though both groups have clearly done some significant on-the-ground reporting. That said, it is equally difficult for outside commentators—such as ourselves—to say anything authoritative either, either in endorsement of their findings or in critique of them. The facts the groups allege are horrific, including drone strikes gone horribly awry killing numerous innocents, and they warrant further investigation.