does acknowledge which is they don t keep track of people killed in their drone strikes. that makes it harder for organizations and media and those that track the strikes to have an accurate sense of how many drones, how many civilians, how many legitimate targets have been killed since the united states began this type of warfare. that is something the military is clear about. they do not make that information public. there is no accountability to the public or from within the military ranks itself. during the obama era we had signature strikes where we openly said we re attacking and killing people we don t know their names based on behavior. they looked dodgy. finally, i want to talk to you about this new new york times piece. what s been dubbed the ai assisted remote control killing machine. this is a piece of israeli technology smuggled unassembled into iran to kill that country s top nuclear scientist, quote, a high tech computerized sharp
what you could call cruise missile diplomacy, a risky counter terror strategy favored if you remember by his former boss, president obama. bring in former military intelligence analyst, drone expert, bret belovich. bret, thank you for being here. your implications of this strike in afghanistan and how we use drones generally? we have long term mistakes with the strike. mistakes have long term consequences. when i was told when i conduct operations there is major responsible when you conduct all of this. if you have the ability to choose whether someone lives or dies you better be right. the team was completely wrong. the team that conducted this they will have to look for the criteria conducting these strikes in the future. the biden administration will have to look at what is known the signature strikes.
area? brianna, we don t know whether they had intelligence about where he was going to be at a particular point of time or they just got lucky through one of these so-called signature strikes where they see sort of vehicles convoys, groups of jihadi s jihadis which they think potentially could be al qaeda. it s possible they could have got lucky here if they did have intelligence that s significant because they ve been trying to play catchup in syria. they haven t gotten the same eyes and ears human intelligence sources there they have in other places like tribal areas of pakistan like in recent times at least yemen. so it will be interesting to see if we hear more about what led to this strike. and we expect to hear that barbara, do you think? what are you hearing? well, i think the pentagon is going to play their cards very close, not likely to hear much more than we did yesterday which was the bare bones of what they
follow through on a number of his verbal threats. reaching out to george bush s spokesperson the former president s spokesperson for him says they are not commenting on this as it was a closed door off-the-record meeting. sometimes things don t always stay off the record. rich thank you very much. the u.s. drone program in the crosshairs after the deaths of an american and an italian hostage in pakistan. we are learning the obama administration apparently relaxed the rules for drone strikes allowing the cia to target militants in packkistan without first proving that they posed an immigrant threat to the u.s. chief intelligence correspondent katherine harris is live in washington tracking all of this. what can you tell us about these so-called signature strikes? well shannon, signature strikes are based on a target s pattern of life. that s defined by who they associate with travel with, as well as their access to weapons and other suspect behavior. what we know now that the admi
that no civilians will be killed or injured. reporter: but so-called signature strikes have continued. that s when the cia fires a missile based on a pattern of behavior of people on the ground even if it does not know who i killing. of the 3800 people killed by drones since 2011, 11% have been 12% have been civilians. john brennan said the deaths are overstated. a lot of these stories you hear about, in terms of oh, my goodness hundreds of civilians have been killed. a lot of that is propaganda put out by the elements opposed to the u.s. coming in and helping. reporter: just 14% of pakistanis view the u.s. favorably. meanwhile in washington this week, and on the campaign trail a deafening silence. rand paul staged a 13-hour filibuster two years ago to protest u.s. drone policy. this time, his campaign issued just a sentence. it is a tragedy that these hostages lost their lives. my prayers and thoughts are with