Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.
The U.S. government is apologizing for a CIA-led drone strike against an al Qaeda compound in January that accidentally killed an American and an Italian hostage.
News of the covert CIA counterterrorism operation in January that accidentally killed Dr. Warren Weinstein, an American aid worker, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian aid worker, was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, which led to the government issuing a statement about the incident.
According to White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, the CIA did not believe there were any hostages at the suspected al Qaeda compound in Pakistan when it led its counterterrorism drone strike.
“As President and as Commander-in-Chief, I take full responsibility for all our counterterrorism operations, including the one that inadvertently took the lives of Warren and Giovanni,” President Barack Obama said in a statement. “I profoundly regret what happened. On behalf of the United States government, I offer our deepest apologies to the families.”
Both Weinstein and Lo Porto were aid workers in Pakistan when they were abducted, Weinstein in 2011 and Lo Porto in 2012. Obama said that his national security team did “everything possible to find [Weinstein] and to bring him home safely to his family.”
“On behalf of myself, our two daughters, our son-in-law, and two grandchildren, we are devastated by this news and the knowledge that my husband will never safely return home,” Warren’s wife, Elaine Weinstein, who resides in Bethesda, Md., said in a statement. “We were so hopeful that those in the U.S. and Pakistani governments with the power to take action and secure his release would have done everything possible to do so and there are no words to do justice to the disappointment and heartbreak we are going through.”
Obama said he’s directed a full review of the incident and what went wrong so as to “identify the lessons that can be learned from this tragedy.”
“We will do our utmost to ensure it is not repeated,” Obama said. “And we will continue to do everything we can to prevent the loss of innocent lives—not just innocent Americans, but all innocent lives in our counterterrorism operations.”
