WASHINGTON -- The father of Bowe Bergdahl, a U.S. soldier held prisoner by the Taliban since 2009, is so frustrated that more than a year of covert diplomacy has been unable to free his son that he is learning the Pashto language so he can contact militants directly.

Speaking out about his son's case after a long silence, UPS worker Bob Bergdahl urged President Barack Obama's administration to push harder for his release. 

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The soldier's father added that he intends to take matters into his own hands, studying Pashto -- the language spoken in southern Afghanistan -- reaching out to regional experts and contacting the media-savvy Taliban through its website.

"I feel that I have to do my job as his father," he said. "I'm working toward a diplomatic and humanitarian solution."

Bob Berghdal said he and his wife Jani are disappointed their son, now 26, remains in danger after almost three years of captivity.

"We believe that Bowe's specific situation is not being addressed," Bergdahl told Reuters in an interview.

Peace talks suspended
The missing serviceman's fate is tied up in U.S. efforts to broker a peace deal between the Taliban and the Afghan government, a high-level, high-risk diplomatic initiative which appeared to be on the cusp of a breakthrough before the Taliban suspended preliminary talks in March.

In a separate interview with the Idaho Mountain Express, Bob Bergdahl said there was "a dynamic here that has to change."

"Everybody is frustrated with how slowly the process has evolved," he added. 

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Bob Bergdahl told the newspaper that swapping Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo for his son represents a "win-win" for the United States. He said in addition to his son's safe return, the United States could foster good will with the Afghan people.

Bergdahl, of Hailey, Idaho, was stationed in Paktika province, a hotbed of militant activity, when he disappeared in unclear circumstances on June 30, 2009. He is believed to be held by the Haqqani network, an insurgent group affiliated with the Taliban, probably somewhere in Pakistan.

The family appears even more frustrated that prospects for progress seem to have dimmed in Washington, where the idea of negotiating with the shadowy militant group has exposed the White House to political attack in the run-up to the presidential elections.

For months, U.S. negotiators were seeking to arrange the transfer of five Taliban detainees held at Guantanamo Bay military prison to the Gulf state of Qatar. The transfer was intended as one of a series of confidence-building measures designed to open the door to political talks between the Taliban and Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government.

US offers 'safe passage' to Afghan Taliban leaders

That move -- at the center of U.S. strategy for ending the long, costly conflict in Afghanistan -- was also supposed to lead directly to Bowe's release. The Taliban has consistently called for the United States to release those held at Guantanamo Bay in exchange for freeing Western prisoners.

The Guantanamo transfer proposal, which would have required notification to Congress, ground to a halt when the Taliban rejected U.S. conditions designed to ensure transferred Taliban would not slip away and re-emerge as military leaders.

While most American officials do not expect that proposal to be taken up again in earnest in the months leading up to the Nov. 6 presidential election, they are exploring alternative steps they hope might rekindle the process.

The prospect of a quick start to peace talks grows more unlikely just as questions mount about what the West, after over 10 years of war in Afghanistan, will be able to accomplish before NATO withdraws most of its troops at the end of 2014.

From the start, the Guantanamo transfer plan drew fire from politicians on Capitol Hill who, according to U.S. law, would have had to closely examine the proposal. The criticism came not just from leading Republicans, but also from some Democrats.

The Bergdahl family said it believes the opposition may have been too intense at a time when the administration is seeking to burnish Obama's national security credentials. "It doesn't seem like dialogue is even allowed" by Congress, Bergdahl said.

Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, also has rejected the proposed transfer. "We do not negotiate with terrorists," he said in December.

'Too much risk'
The imprisonment of suspected militants at Guantanamo is an irritant in U.S. relations with Muslim nations including Afghanistan, which has long demanded the release of its citizens held since shortly after the U.S. invasion that toppled the Taliban government in Kabul in 2001.

Bob Bergdahl said he does not advocate an attempt to rescue his son by force. 

"That's too much risk, for too many people," said Bergdahl, who described Bowe as a "soft-spoken," "compassionate" young man who, as a home-schooled youth, was a skilled outdoorsman drawn to martial arts and biking.

A senior U.S. military official told The Associated Press that the Pentagon believes Bergdahl to be alive and in relatively good health. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because efforts to free Bergdahl remain sensitive.

A senior Obama administration official, also speaking on condition of anonymity because of concerns for Bergdahl's safety, told reporters that the case has been a topic at each of several direct meetings that U.S. officials have held with the Taliban. Direct contact, once taboo for the United States, began in secret last year in hopes that the channel could speed larger peace talks with the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai and ultimately end the long Taliban insurgency.

The official said the U.S. hopes to revive the Bergdahl deal with the Taliban.

Marine Col. David Lapan, spokesman for Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that the military has a "collaborative" relationship with Bergdahl's family, which is given quarterly updates from Washington. He said the family is not advised on whether to discuss the case with the news media.

"Our message to them is: We are working hard to obtain Sgt. Bergdahl's release, to bring him back into U.S. hands," Lapan said.

Asked about the family's complaint that the U.S. government has not done enough, Lapan said: "It's perfectly understandable that parents whose son has been kept in captivity for several years now are frustrated. We certainly understand that. That's why we do everything thing we can to try to keep them updated, to the extent we can."

He added: "If they are angry and/or frustrated, that is certainly understandable. I would say that our leaders are frustrated as well."

The last time the Bergdahls saw their son was the Christmas holiday of 2008, when he came home from his military service just months before shipping out to Afghanistan.

To solicit support for further action, Bob Bergdahl plans to speak at an annual demonstration to recognize prisoners of war over Memorial Day weekend in Washington. The event, organized by the nonprofit POW support group Rolling Thunder, typically attracts more than 100,000 motorcyclists to the nation's capital.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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LONDON - The organized sexual exploitation of girls as young as 13, for which nine men were jailed in Britain Wednesday, is abuse in the most pernicious form imaginable. 

Last year I spent six months investigating this crime for British television on Channel 4's investigative news show, Dispatches. It was one of the most grueling stories I have worked on in my 17 years as a journalist.

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I met victims, their families, police investigators and people who helped the victims piece together their broken lives – as well as men with an inside knowledge about the underworld of ‘on-street grooming’.

I spent time in some of the areas where these crimes took place and listened in great detail to the nature of the crime and the impact it had on the young victims.

I was haunted by what I learned. During my time off or away from the story, I had vicious nightmares. Graphic accounts of rape and sexual abuse are not easy to put out of mind when heard in detail, especially not when the victims are barely pubescent. The men I met, who spoke to me anonymously about the motivations of the gangs who carry out these crimes, told me things that disgusted and enraged me. That was the impact on me, a professionally dispassionate reporter long accustomed to remaining cool no matter what the story. Imagine the impact on someone at the heart of this terrible crime.

Investigating Britain's 'sex gangs'

The parents of the victims, whose destroyed lives were so obviously in pieces, were fighting feelings of guilt, sadness and anger. And the girls, who had faced rape and gang-rape at the hands of men much, much older than them, were some of the bravest I've ever met. I saw pictures of them before their ordeal; they could have been anyone's daughter, sister or niece. But the girls who sat before me were damaged, perhaps beyond repair, their innocence stolen.

What I now find more terrifying than the crime is the sheer scale of it: case after case is turning up in British courts. What we know about it is still emerging, and those who work with the girls say organized sex abuse is at least a generation old.  That, too, makes me shudder: There are victims who never received the help they needed or the justice they should have had.

Newspaper front pages on Wednesday showed the faces of the men who will now spend years in prison, but behind other closed doors there are girls whose lives were brutally stolen from them and whose future will always be marked by the horrors they faced in their childhood.

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LONDON -- Nine men were jailed on Wednesday for grooming and sexually exploiting girls aged as young as 13 in the north of England.

Five victims were "shared" by Kabeer Hassan, Abdul Aziz, Abdul Rauf, Mohammed Sajid, Adil Khan, Abdul Qayyum, Mohammed Amin, Hamid Safi and a 59-year-old man who cannot be named for legal reasons, The Guardian reported. 

The men were aged between 24 and 59, all but one were of Pakistani heritage. The other was from Afghanistan. They were found guilty of conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child, the BBC News reported. Other convictions included rape, sexual assault and sexual activity with a child.

They were given sentences ranging from four to 19 years, the BBC reported.

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Jurors were told that the men gave the victims alcohol and drugs and then would "pass them around" for sex, according to the BBC. Some of the victims were forced to have sex with "several men in a day, several times a week," the jury heard.

NBC News Correspondent Tazeen Ahmad: Investigating Britain's 'sex gangs'

The gang preyed on girls -- all of whom were white -- from "chaotic" backgrounds, the BBC quoted the police as saying. 

The men, who live in the run-down industrial towns of Rochdale and Oldham, were found guilty on Tuesday. Two others were acquitted after the 11-month trial. 

50 members of grooming gang?
It emerged after the conviction that police believed the grooming gang had 50 members, the Manchester Evening News reported.

Sentencing the men, Judge Gerald Clifton said they treated the girls "as though they were worthless and beyond respect," the BBC reported.

"One of the factors leading to that was the fact that they were not part of your community or religion," he added. "Some of you, when arrested, said it (the prosecution) was triggered by race. That is nonsense. What triggered this prosecution was your lust and greed."

Police and social workers have been accused of initially not acting on allegations raised in 2008 for fear of appearing racist.

"This is an absolute scandal. They were petrified of being called racist and so reverted to the default of political correctness," former member of parliament Ann Cryer told The Daily Telegraph.  "They had a greater fear of being perceived in that light than in dealing with the issues in front of them."

The tabloid Daily Mail newspaper ran the front-page headline: "Why did no one listen to teenage victims of sex gang?"

Cop: 'Not a racial issue'
However, a senior police officer involved in the investigation rejected calls for the case to be seen through the prism of race. 

"It is not a racial issue. This is about adults preying on vulnerable young children," the Telegraph quoted Assistant Chief Constable Steve Heywood of Greater Manchester Police as saying. "It just happens that in this particular area and time the demographics were that these were Asian men."

"I am currently running several other inquiries about on-street grooming and it is not Asian men," BBC News quoted Heywood as saying.

Nevertheless, the case was seized on by the head of the far-right British National Party (BNP), raising the specter of an extremist backlash.

The leader of the BNP, Nick Griffin, tweeted before the jury had announced its decision that seven verdicts had been reached. It is not clear how he learned of the jury's decision given that strict reporting restrictions were in place. 

The case has already sparked protests by far-right groups. Greater Manchester Police said on Wednesday they were preparing for possible racially motivated violence. 

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Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters Tuesday that terrorists keep trying to come up with “more and more perverse and terrible ways to kill innocent people” after a plot by al-Qaida's affiliate in Yemen to bomb a U.S.-bound airliner was foiled by the CIA.

U.S. officials said Monday that the plot involved a bomb that improved on the one that had been sewn into the underpants of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who failed in a plot to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day 2009.

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The latest bomb had a more refined detonation mechanism and was "totally non-metallic," which officials told NBC News would have made it more difficult to detect by traditional screening processes.

“With respect to the plot that was discussed in Washington, as the White House said, the device did not appear to pose a threat to the public air service, but the plot itself indicates that these terrorists keep trying,” Clinton, who is in New Delhi, India, said.

“They keep trying to devise more and more perverse and terrible ways to kill innocent people, and it's a reminder as to why we have to remain vigilant at home and abroad … protecting our nation and protecting friendly nations and peoples like India and others,” she added.

Clinton also called for India’s neighbor Pakistan “to do more” to tackle terrorists. “It needs to make sure that its territory is not used as a launching pad for terrorist attacks anywhere, including inside of Pakistan, because the great unfortunate fact is that terrorists in Pakistan have killed more than 30,000 Pakistanis,” she said.

CIA foiled al-Qaida plot to destroy US-bound airliner

The new underwear bomb had some “refinements on reliability” that made it more likely to explode, a U.S. counterterrorism official told NBC News. In addition to being a threat to commercial planes, this type of bomb could be used in crowded places, on other transportation systems or for assassinations, the official said.

More than 30 Yemeni troops killed in militant attack

The official noted that the bomb “was never near a plane” and “never posed a risk.” The plot was disrupted well before it threatened Americans or U.S. allies, the official added.

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The U.S. received the device last month. The FBI is conducting technical and forensic analyses on it.

The official would not specify which international security service provided the intelligence that led to the unraveling of the plot, as there is concern about retaliatory attacks against U.S. targets inside Yemen.

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The FBI said in a statement that the successful operation was the "result of close cooperation with our security and intelligence partners overseas."

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Updated at 1:20 p.m. ET: ISLAMABAD -- An American aid worker abducted by al-Qaida in Pakistan last year pleaded with President Barack Obama to meet his captors' demands for the release of prisoners. 

The SITE monitoring service, which follows al-Qaida's statements, quoted Warren Weinstein, who was kidnapped in the central Pakistani city of Lahore last August, appealing to Obama directly. 

"My life is in your hands, Mr. President. If you accept the demands, I live; if you don't accept the demands, then I die," it quoted Weinstein as saying in the video.

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The video was posted on Islamist websites on Sunday. It is the first time Weinstein has been seen since being seized by gunmen.

Weinstein appears dressed in a clean, neatly pressed shalwar kameez -- the country's traditional dress -- and is shown seated a table with a stack a books and two large plates of food before him. He occasionally takes bites of the food as he delivers his message.

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Weinstein had lived and worked in Pakistan for more than five years before being snatched.

His kidnapping puzzled many who knew him. Friends said Weinstein had gone to great lengths to learn and adopt local customs, even learning to speak some Urdu.

Senior Taliban commanders told NBC News that Pakistani Taliban members were responsible for Weinstein's kidnapping and that they had shifted him from place to place for three months until they reached a location they considered "secure" in the country's tribal areas.

Heart condition
A news report in January quoted a "ranking Pakistani militant" who claimed to have seen Weinstein in December 2011. The source claimed Weinstein was in good health, receiving regular medical treatment and prescription medicines.

A former colleague of Weinstein's told NBC News Weinstein's health had been deteriorating in the months before his kidnapping, and he suffered from a heart condition he was managing with medication and diet.

Al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri said in an audio recording in December that the group was responsible for Weinstein's abduction and demanded the release of all those in U.S. detention for ties his Islamist militant group or the Taliban. 

He also demanded an end to airstrikes by the United States and its allies against militants in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia and Gaza. 

Reuters contributed to this report. 

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Eight suspected militants were killed in a U.S. drone attack Saturday in northwest Pakistan, intelligence officials said.

A Pakistani security official on condition of anonymity told NBC News the drone had fired four missiles and struck a compound in the forest-covered Dre Nishtar area of Shawal valley, a remote part of North Waziristan.

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"Shawal is an area where militants from different countries had gathered and set up their sanctuaries," the official said.

He said mostly tribal militants, Punjabi Taliban, Afghans, Arabs, and Chechen and Uzbek militants have training camps in the area and often suffer losses in the drone strikes.

The strike Saturday was the second American drone operation in Pakistan this week.

Pakistan: Attacks are illegal
Pakistan's government of Pakistan condemned the attack in the strongest terms, NBC News reported.

"Pakistan has consistently maintained that these illegal attacks are a violation of its sovereignty and territorial integrity, and are in contravention of international law" a Pakistan Foreign Office spokesman said in a statement.

"It is our considered view that the strategic disadvantages of such attacks far outweigh their tactical advantages, and are therefore, totally counterproductive," he added.

Last month, a U.S. drone strike killed four suspected militants in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal region, despite the recent demand by a Pakistani parliamentary committee that such operations end.

The unmanned aircraft can be remotely piloted from hundreds or thousands of miles away.

The U.S. campaign of drone strikes to kill militants in other countries is legal under international law, President Barack Obama's counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, said last week.

'National self-defense'
Brennan cited legal opinions from the administration, the U.S. Constitution and the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"As a matter of international law, the United States is in an armed conflict with al Qaida, the Taliban, and associated forces, in response to the 9/11 attacks, and we may also use force consistent with our inherent right of national self-defense," Brennan said.

"There is nothing in international law that bans the use of remotely piloted aircraft for this purpose or that prohibits us from using lethal force against our enemies outside of an active battlefield, at least when the country involved consents or is unable or unwilling to take action against the threat," he said.

Pakistan closed its Afghan border crossings to NATO supplies last November in retaliation for American airstrikes that accidentally killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. The government also kicked the U.S. out of a base used by American drones.

This article includes reporting from Reuters and The Associated Press.

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In letters from his hideout in Pakistan written in the five years before his death, Osama bin Laden fretted about dysfunction among the far-flung affiliate organizations in his terrorist network, according to documents seized during the U.S. military’s raid on his compound that that were released on Thursday. 

Seventeen declassified letters seized in last year's raid on bin Laden's compound by U.S. Navy SEALs were posted online Thursday by the U.S. Army's Combating Terrorism Center, accompanying its analysis of their contents titled, "Letters from Abbottabad: Bin Ladin Sidelined?" The letters -- 175 pages in Arabic -- probably represent only a small fraction of materials taken from the compound, the center’s distinguished chair, retired Gen. John Abizaid, said in a note published with the translations.

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U.S. intelligence analysts have spent countless hours poring over the vast stash of computerized and paper data seized during the raid that killed bin Laden, as NBC News’ Jim Miklaszewski and Robert Windrem reported earlier this week.

But the letters released Thursday, which were written between September 2006 and April 2011, add new nuances to the previous reports. 

Among other things, they show the al-Qaida founder was troubled by the actions of other Islamist groups that aligned themselves with his terrorist network.

As Associated Press reporter Kimberly Dozier puts it:

The documents show dark days for al-Qaida and its hunkered-down leader after years of attacks by the United States and what bin Laden saw as bumbling within his own organization and its terrorist allies.

The so-called affiliate organizations – including al-Qaida in Iraq, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula; the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (Student Movement of Pakistan); and the Somalia-based Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen – were of particular concern to bin Laden. 

In the words of the report’s authors: 

Rather than a source of strength, bin Ladin was burdened by what he viewed as the incompetence of the “affiliates,” including their lack of political acumen to win public support, their media campaigns and their poorly planned operations which resulted in the unnecessary deaths of thousands of Muslims. 

"I plan to release a statement that we are starting a new phase to correct (the mistakes) we made," bin Laden wrote in 2010. "In doing so, we shall reclaim, God willing, the trust of a large segment of those who lost their trust in the jihadis."

Nothing in the papers points directly to al-Qaida sympathizers in Pakistan's government. Bin Laden described "trusted Pakistani brothers" but didn't identify any Pakistani government or military officials who might have been aware of or complicit in his hiding in Abbottabad. 

Watch World News videos on msnbc.com

The letters also indicate that American Adam Gadahn played a much greater role in al-Qaida than has been acknowledged by U.S. authorities, who have often dismissed him as a propagandist and spokesman. In fact, Gadahn appeared to act as an adviser to bin Laden and in one letter urged that al-Qaida disassociate itself from al-Qaida in Iraq. 

One letter also outlined Gadahn’s views of U.S. news organizations as part of a discussion of how al-Qaida might go about publicizing the 10^th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the U.S.

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He indicated a particular dislike of Fox News, writing, “Let her die in her anger”; said MSNBC-TV appeared to be “good and neutral a bit,” while complaining about the firing of Keith Olbermann; said CNN appeared to be aligned with the U.S. government but was better in its Arabic reports; and made flattering comments about CBS and ABC.

NBC News senior investigative producer Robert Windrem contributed to this report.

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Osama bin Laden wanted to assassinate Barack Obama so that the "utterly unprepared" Joe Biden would become U.S. president, according to documents seized last year during the U.S. raid that killed the al-Qaida leader.

In letters from his last hideout -- according to a report called "Letters from Abbottabad: Bin Ladin Sidelined?" that was posted online Thursday by the U.S. Army's Combating Terrorism Center -- bin Laden also fretted about dysfunction in his terrorist network and the loss of trust from Muslims he wished to incite against their government and the West. 

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Read the Combating Terrorism Center's report (pdf)

Other materials found inside the compound last May have revealed how al-Qaida's then leader regularly ordered his subordinates to plan new attacks, despite an increasingly limited cadre of operatives. 

Bin Laden in hiding: Hatching horrific plots despite crippling attacks on al-Qaida

During the raid, Navy SEALs recovered five computers, 10 hard drives and more than 100 storage devices -- DVDs, discs and thumb drives --  that included between 10,000 and 15,000 documents and between 15,000 to 25,000 videos, including a large number of duplicate files.

Al-Qaida hoped to convert Irish?

The documents also contained some slightly odd revelations, including the idea that al-Qaida thought Irish Catholics might be ripe for conversion to Islam.

“I noticed the sympathy of the Irish people to the Palestinian issue, and the soft treatment by the Irish Judicial system of Muslims accused of terrorism, and also not participating with its troops in [President George W.] Bush’s Crusade wars,” American al-Qaida spokesman Adam Gadahn wrote in a letter.

“The other matter is the increasing anger in Ireland towards the Catholic Church after exposing a number of sex scandals … The people there are moving towards secularism, after it was the most religious of atheist Europe, and why do not we face them with Islam?” he added.

Al-Qaida also fretted over its brand name. One document discussed how the group’s name was shortened from Qaida al-Jihad to al-Qaida and “this name reduces the feeling of Muslims that we belong to them.” It suggested names that could not be easily shortened “to a word that does not represent us.”

Those included “Muslim Unity Group,” “Restoration of the Caliphate Group,” and “Jihad Organization for the Unification and Rescue of the Nation.”

Al-Qaida also appears to have had a particular dislike for Fox News.

Talking about sending an al-Qaida message to the media, the spokesman Gadahn wrote, “I suggest that we should distribute it to more than one channel, so that there will be healthy competition between the channels in broadcasting the material, so that no other channel takes the lead. It should be sent for example to ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN and maybe PBS and VOA.”

However Fox News, Gadahn said, should be left out the loop.

“As for Fox News, let her die in her anger,” he wrote.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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ABBOTTABAD, Pakistan -- A contractor who was hired to demolish Osama bin Laden's former compound is selling the bricks as souvenirs.

Shakeel Ahmed was paid by Pakistan's government to strip the property of pipes, curtains, beams and even the former al-Qaida leader's bathtubs.

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Thousands of bricks remain, which Ahmed says he plans to donate to the poor and sell off at auction.

But since word got out about Ahmed's stash, people from across Pakistan have been showing up in the hill town to buy bin Laden's bricks as souvenirs -- at a cost of less than a nickel each.

 

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White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan on Monday spoke openly -- and at great length -- about what has long been one of the government’s most controversial official secrets:  the use of remotely piloted drones to kill suspected terrorists.

In doing so, he became the first U.S. government official to acknowledge that the drone strikes sometimes kill innocent people, though he characterized such deaths as  “exceedingly rare.” But a new analysis by an independent Washington think tank estimates that more than 300 civilians have been killed by drones since President Barack Obama took office.

In a major speech on the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death during a raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by U.S. Navy SEALs, Brennan proclaimed that al-Qaida is now "on the path to its destruction."  But the headline was what he had to say about the drone program — long a forbidden subject for senior U.S. officials  — and how the U.S. government uses it.

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“The United States conducts targeted strikes against specific al-Qaida terrorists, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones,” said Brennan, in his speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Washington, D.C., foreign policy think tank.  

While it has been openly reported in the press for years, the use by the CIA of pilotless drones to kill members of al-Qaida has long been officially classified,  prompting government officials to talk obliquely about “lethal operations” and “removal” of terrorists. They have done so even as Obama has dramatically escalated the number of such attacks and made them the central component of the administration’s counterterrorism efforts.

One U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told NBC News that the speech represents “a pretty big sea change for us” in terms of what officials will now be permitted to talk about. But the official said that while Brennan’s speech had been carefully vetted throughout the U.S. intelligence and national security community, there had been no formal declassification of the drone program. “The president can declassify anything he wants,” said the official, adding that Brennan – as the representative of the president — can speak about anything his boss wants him to discuss.   

Under Obama, there have been an estimated 250 drone strikes in northwest Pakistan that have killed as many as 2,345 people, according to an analysis by the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank that closely tracks the program. Such strikes have generated a storm of protest in Pakistan and stepped up demands by the Pakistani government to halt them.   

In what he described as an effort to be more open with the American people, Brennan on Monday described an elaborate process under which senior government officials select targets for drone strikes. They must first determine whether a prospective target is a bona fide member of al-Qaida or “associated forces” and poses a “significant threat” to U.S. interests.  The “lethal action” strikes are not used for “punishing terrorists for past crimes” or “seeking vengeance.” Instead, they are used to “stop plots” and “prevent future attacks,” citing as one example, targeting individuals  who possess “unique operational skills.”

Read more reporting by Michael Isikoff in 'The Isikoff Files'

Brennan  said the use of drones gives U.S. intelligence agencies the ability to use “laser-like” precision against the terrorists. But he acknowledged that "innocent civilians have been killed in these strikes." He said such instances have been "exceedingly rare, but it has happened.

“When it does, it pains us and we regret it deeply, as we do any time innocents are killed in war," he added. 

That passage of his speech alone was significant. In June 2011, Brennan said that in the previous year of operations in the government’s then-unspecified program to eliminate al-Qaida members, “There hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.”   

Brennan later changed that statement in response to questions by the New York Times, spurred in part by  reports about a May 6 strike in Pakistan that  hit a religious school, an adjourning restaurant and a house, killing 18 people. Although 12 militants were allegedly killed, British and Pakistani journalists on the scene reported that six civilians also died in the strike.

In Brennan’s adjusted statement last year, he said, “Fortunately, for more than a year, due to our discretion and precision, the U.S. government has not found credible evidence of collateral deaths resulting from U.S. counterterrorism operations outside of Afghanistan or Iraq.”

Brennan did not give any details on Monday about how rare civilian deaths have been. But according to the analysis by the New America Foundation, which relies heavily on local media and other reports from observers in Pakistan, about 17 percent of those who have been killed by drones since the program effectively began in 2004 were “non-militants.”  The foundation estimated that the  “non-military fatality rate” has since dropped to about 13 percent under Obama – as drone strikes have become more frequent and more precise.

Those numbers translate to 471 civilian deaths, including 309 under Obama.

Human rights groups — who have challenged the administration to be more open about its drone program — were not satisfied with the new details provided by Brennan’s speech.

“It is not enough that care is taken to avoid harm to innocent civilians,” said Raha Wala, an official with Human Rights First. “Brennan's assertion that any 'member' of al-Qaida or 'associated forces' is legally targetable is wrong. Under the laws of armed conflict, only members of the enemy's armed forces, or those directly participating in hostilities or who perform a continuous combat function, may be targeted.”

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The International Committee of the Red Cross condemned the murder of its staff member, Khalil Rasjed Dale, and asked Pakistani media not to broadcast a video of his execution.

"We are devastated," ICRC Director-General Yves Daccord said in a statement. "Khalil was a trusted and very experienced Red Cross staff member who significantly contributed to the humanitarian cause."

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Dale's beheaded body was found by the roadside on Sunday in the southwestern Pakistan city of Quetta, police and Red Cross officials said. Dale, 60, who was a British doctor, was abducted by suspected militants on Jan. 5 while on his way home from work.

Police discovered Dale wrapped in plastic near a western bypass road in the capital of southwestern Baluchistan province where Baluch separatist militants are fighting a protracted insurgency for more autonomy.

His name was written on the white plastic bag with black marker.

"A sharp knife was used to sever his head from the body," said Safdar Hussain, the first doctor to examine the body. "He was killed about 12 hours ago."

According to The Guardian, a note left with the body read: "This is the body of Khalil who we have slaughtered for not paying a ransom." The note went on to say a video of the execution would also be released.

The newspaper reported that the Red Cross's policy is not to pay ransoms as part of "a consistent and systematic approach that keeps people safe wherever they are."

"We did everything possible to try to get Khalil out and we are very sad that our efforts failed," ICRC's spokesman Sean Maguire told the BBC.

Dale had worked for the ICRC and the British Red Cross in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq before coming to Pakistan. He had been managing a health program for Baluchistan for almost a year when he was abducted, the ICRC statement said.

At least four foreigners are currently being held in Pakistan, The Guardian wrote.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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