Obama confirms armed drones in Pakistan in rare acknowledgement

Jan 31, 2012, 18:29 GMT

San Francisco - US President Barack Obama has confirmed in a rare public acknowledgement that the United States is deploying armed drones in Pakistan against suspected al-Qaeda terrorists and their affiliated forces.

In his virtual town hall meeting with the public on Monday, Obama defended the attacks by unmanned aircraft and emphasized, that the United States uses them only to 'pinpoint' targets and keeps them 'on a very tight leash.'

'I think that we have to be judicious in how we use drones,' Obama said. The US does not use them 'willy-nilly.'

He made the remarks in a web interview with Google Plus on its 'Hangout' forum, billed by Google as the first-ever virtual interview. It followed previous appearances by Obama on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

In total, more than 133,000 questions were submitted to the forum from the public, which were selected down for the actual interview.

The CIA's use of armed Predator drones against al-Qaeda in Pakistan has been well known, but US officials do not normally discuss the programme in public. US media reports are based largely on unnamed sources, and numbers of dead are tallied by media that cover Pakistan.

The use of drones is a sore point in the increasingly fractured relationship between Washington and Islamabad. Obama said that many of the drone attacks occurred in the tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda takes refuge from the fight in Afghanistan.

According to the Washington-based think tank New America Foundation, which compiled its figures from press accounts, US drone strikes have killed between 1,717 and 2,680 individuals between 2004 and early 2012. Of those killed, 1,424 to 2,209 were described as militants.

In the virtual interview, those asking live questions of the president included a woman at an Occupy Wall Street camp and a wife helping her unemployed engineer husband find work. Other participants quizzed Obama about his small-business policies and how to explain the country's economic situation to children.

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