A tragic ending to a U.S. terrorism operation leads of CNN STUDENT NEWS today.
An American named Warren Weinstein and an Italian named Giovanni Lo Porto had been held hostage for years by the al Qaeda terrorist group.
The U.S. government announced yesterday that an American operation in January accidentally killed the two hostages at an Al Qaeda compound in Pakistan.
Some U.S. officials said it was a U.S. drone strike that also killed an American who had become a leader in al Qaeda.
Here, they had intelligence indicating that this was an al Qaeda compound, but they did know that you had an American and an Italian hostage there.
This is the intense difficulty of doing this and we've seen risks taken by this administration. Some of those risks have worked out. The-you'll remember, with the bin Laden raid, famously, the president was told there was 50 percent certainty (ph) that all-that bin Laden was there.
They went in, they found him, they killed him. And here's one with just a-just the-the worst in-in collateral damage,you know, that totally soulless term that is used in strikes like this.This is really a worst case scenario here.
And I think, you know, the president clearly felt the need to get it out and get it out in public.
It is a cruel and bitter truth that in the fog of war generally and our fight against terrorists specifically, mistakes can occur.
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.
In response to the announcement, a legal director with the American Civil Liberties Union said, "The U.S. quite literally didn't know who it was killing."
Warren Weinstein's wife issued a statement saying her family was devastated by the news. She said they were hopeful that the U.S. and Pakistani governments would have done everything possible to secure Weinstein's release and that no words do justice to the disappointment and heartbreak they're going through.
She also said the ultimate responsibility was borne by those who took her husband captive.
The European Union is tripling the amount of money it spends on search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean.There's a crisis there involving migrants trying to find asylum, refuge in a stable European country.
They're set afloat on often rickety or overloaded boats. The BBC reports that this year alone, more than 35,000 people are believed to have traveled from Africa to Europe.More than 1,700 of them have died while trying.
So where are these people coming from?
Well, a lot of these migrants are coming from failed states, countries that simply are under nobody's control,where there's failed government,where there's rampant corruption.
联系客服
