The accidental killing of two Western hostages in a drone strike was what President Obama calls a "deadly mistake"—and despite protests from the ACLU and others, it appears to have been a legal one, experts say. "I don't initially see legal problems," an assistant professor of government at American University tells the AP. ''If the attacks were carried out against al-Qaeda, they were legitimate under US law." President Obama said yesterday that he took "full responsibility" for the CIA drone strikes in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region in January, which also killed two American al-Qaeda suspects. In other developments:
- American officials say weeks of surveillance of the compound hit by a drone strike did not reveal the presence of American hostage Warren Weinstein and Italian hostage Giovanni Lo Porto, the New York Times reports. It was only from analyzing communications in the weeks after the strike that the CIA realized six people, not four, had been killed and buried, the Times reports.