I am not an Obama fan but I cannot place blame on anyone here except Al Qaeda. Intelligence isn't perfect, it appears due diligence was done, but unfortunately hostages were killed. Perhaps the blame should go to the group that took perfectly innocent people hostage and held them near military commanders who they knew were being targeted.
What's with the blame-adverse atmosphere that seems to be going around these days? In this case, I place the blame all over the place, to be shared unequally by many involved.
First off, an operative was compromised and taken captive. Someone fell down on their job for this to happen. Secondly, Obama issued the executive order that caused him (and many others) to be killed. Somewhere in between those two events, other operatives and military intelligence lost track of where their missing operative was being held. Also, they misidentified what was actually taking place at that AQ hideout. Finally, we've got the Pakistani government involved in all this, giving a foreign power carte blanche to send a drone in to kill other foreigners on its soil.
After all that, we get back to blaming the AQ strategists who messed up using foreigners as a human wall to protect their commanders -- because someone forgot to let the enemy know that this was happening. Unless, of course, they didn't, and both people killed were actually government operatives that were considered expendable for the cause -- but their cover can't be blown without implicating others (hence the delay) -- even though it looks like AQ already blew their cover long ago. Not saying this is what happened, but it's just as much a possibility as the official story. Ant everyone on all sides of the conflict made lots of mistakes here, many of which could be learned from and avoided in the future. Kudos to Obama for at least admitting this and aiming to do something towards these ends.