"My hope is that by the time I leave office, there is a not only an internal structure in place that governs these standards (for drones) that we've set, but there's also a institutionalised process whereby the actions that the US government takes through drone technology are consistently reported on an annualised basis, so that people can look," Obama said in his remarks at the University of Chicago.
He said this was really important to him as there is a lot of misinformation about the drone strikes. "There is no doubt that some innocent people have been killed by drone strikes. It is not true that it has been this sort of willy-nilly let's bomb a village, that is not how folks have operated," Obama said.
Citing the example of the Osama Bin Laden raid, he said this was as precise, as effective an operation that anybody would dispute was in the national security interest of the US. "We put our best people in there who operate as precisely and as effectively as any group of individuals probably ever have in the history of the planet. They executed their mission flawlessly," he added.
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pretty high civilian casualty rate for this extraordinarily precise mission. "Now, imagine during the height of the Iraq war or when we were still actively fighting in Afghanistan, the number of civilians who were killed in normal military operations," he said.
"We talk about the number of US troops that were killed in Iraq. The number of Iraqis that were killed, primarily by AQI and those we were righting, but also by US military that was trying to be as careful as possible in chaotic situations like Fallujah or Ramadi, were in the tens of thousands," he said.