American Jewish humanitarian aid worker Warren Weinstein, held hostage by Al Qaeda since 2011, was killed with an Italian hostage in a CIA counter terror strike in eastern Afghanistan along the border of Pakistan.
Giovanni La Porto, who was apparently being held captive with Weinstein, was also killed in the drone strike. The attack, aimed at killing senior Al Qaeda operative Ahmed Farouk, was successful, officials said.
But U.S. intelligence failed to detect the presence of the two hostages in the targeted compound, where officials said Al Qaeda had “hidden away” their captives.
The strike took place in January, according to U.S. President Barack Obama, who said during his televised announcement on Thursday morning from the White House that he had decided to declassify information about the strike because the families of the hostages “deserved to know the truth about what happened to their loved ones and why.”
In a grim tone, Obama noted in clipped phrases, “The United States is a democracy, committed to openness in good times and in bad. It is a cruel and bitter truth that in the fog of war generally, and our fight against terrorists specifically, that mistakes, sometimes deadly mistakes, can occur.
But a family’s grief cannot assuaged in the acknowledgment that “deadly mistakes” happen in the “fog of war,” Obama acknowledged. “I realize that there are no words that can ever equal their loss, I know that there is nothing that I can ever say or do to ease their heartache,” the president said, “And today I simply want to say this: As president and commander in chief I take full responsibility for all our counterterrorism operations. … I profoundly regret what happened.”
A second Al Qaeda senior terrorist, U.S.-born Adam Gadahn, was also killed in a separate strike in January. Gadahn was born in 1978 in California and raised there by his maternal grandparents, who were Jewish, according to the White House. Gadahn, a convert to Islam, was known around the world as the English-speaking voice of Al Qaeda for a number of years. He began to appear in Al Qaeda videos uploaded to the Internet around 2006. His last video statement came in August 2013 when he praised the murder of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christoper Stevens and three other American diplomats in the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi.
This is the first known instance in which the U.S. has accidentally killed a hostage in a drone strike. The mishap represents a major blow to the CIA and its covert drone program in Pakistan, which President Obama embraced and expanded after coming to office in 2009.