Foreign Policy: The Obama administration opened a small window on the lethality of its drone program Friday, for the first time offering a rough estimate of the number of civilians killed in counterterrorism air raids. But the death toll estimate continues to obscure much more than it illuminates.
In a long-anticipated move, the White House said that the 473 airstrikes conducted by the CIA and the U.S. military between January 2009 and December 2015 killed between 64 and 116 civilians, while taking out as many as 2,581 militants. All of those strikes by both drones and manned aircraft occurred outside recognized war zones like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, though officials would not specify where the bombing raids happened. And administration officials on Friday admitted that those numbers are little more than best guesses.
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