Three years
and thousands of deaths later, the administration of U.S. President
Barack Obama late Friday finally made public its guidelines for
conducting lethal drone strikes.
The release
of the Presidential Policy Guidance (PPG), also known as "the
Playbook," came in response to a lawsuit filed last year by the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) seeking the framework—which
Obama said at the time was created in the interest of greater
transparency and oversight over the expansive targeted killing
program.
"For
the same human progress that gives us the technology to strike half a
world away also demands the discipline to constrain that power—or
risk abusing it," the president declared in May 2013 during a
landmark foreign policy speech at National Defense University.
Now, three
years after that address, the redacted PPG finally provides the
rights group with "crucial information about policies that have
resulted in the deaths of thousands of people, including hundreds of
non-combatants, and about the bureaucracy that the Obama
administration has constructed to oversee and implement those
policies," said ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer in a
statement on Saturday.
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