Barack Obama did something yesterday that government leaders tend not to do: He talked about the CIA drone war in Pakistan.

This admission--which, it should be pointed out, happened in a Google-sponsored Q & A with the public, not a session with reporters--made it into the papers. The New York Times (1/31/12) flagged civilian deaths as the most newsworthy aspect, headlining a report by Mark Lander "Civilian Deaths Due to Drones Are Not Many, Obama Says." Lander writes:

Mr. Obama, in an unusually candid public discussion of the Central Intelligence Agency's covert program, said the drone strikes had not inflicted huge civilian casualties. "We are very careful in terms of how it's been applied," he said. "It is important for everybody to understand that this thing is kept on a very tight leash."

It would have been helpful for the Times to point out that there are other sources who might comment on civilian casualties from drone strikes. The Times addressed this topic last year, challenging the CIA's absurd claims that there were no civilian deaths at all.  The British Bureau of Investigative Journalism noted  (8/10/11) that between 391 and almost 800 civilians have reportedly been killed since the drone program began in 2004, including 168 children.

The Times offers a curious explanation for the government's refusal to speak openly about their program:

The CIA's drone program, unlike the use of armed unmanned aircraft by the military in Afghanistan and previously in Iraq, is a covert program, traditionally one of the government's most carefully-guarded secrets. But because of intense public interest--the explosions cannot be hidden entirely--American officials have been willing to discuss the program on condition of anonymity.

Granting anonymity to official sources  because of "intense public interest" in a story is a little puzzling.

The Wall Street Journal also weighed in (1/31/12), pointing out that the "U.S. says roughly 60 civilians have been killed there. Pakistani officials and some human-rights group say the number of civilian dead is far higher."

The Journal adds that some think secrecy is bad PR:

Proponents of more disclosure inside the administration and the military argue U.S. secrecy has fueled charges in Pakistan that the drone strikes frequently kill civilians. They say releasing at least some details about the operations will help deflect criticism.

Or maybe the drones do actually kill innocents, and it's better not to acknowledge this fact.

By the tone of  some of the media coverage, you might have thought Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced a plan to slash military spending yesterday.  On the front page of USA Today (1/27/12), under the headline "Panetta Backs Far Leaner Military," readers learn in the first paragraph:

The Pentagon's new plan to cut Defense spending means a reduction of 100,000 troops, the retiring of ships and planes and closing of bases--moves that the Defense secretary said would not compromise security.

The piece quotes critics of the cuts like Sen. Joe Lieberman and an analyst at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. And the article talks about the most commonly cited figure of $487 billion in cuts over 10 years. As economist Dean Baker writes about such coverage--"Military Budget Cuts: Denominator Please"--there is no way people can assess the significance of what sounds like a lot of money if they don't know how much the Pentagon is planning to spend over the same 1o-year period--roughly $8 trillion.

The PBS NewsHour did little to clarify the issue. The broadcast began with Jeffrey Brown announcing, "The Pentagon today outlined almost half a trillion dollars in budget cuts that would shrink the size of the U.S. military by trimming ground forces, retiring ships and planes, and delaying some new weapons." PBS aired clips from Republicans Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich denouncing the budget cuts, and then interviewed a Pentagon official.

Even coverage of the Pentagon's new "austerity" that managed to include some helpful context didn't make things very clear. "The Pentagon took the first major step toward shrinking its budget after a decade of war" was how a New York Times story by Elisabeth Bumiller (1/27/12) begins. In the fourth paragraph, readers found this:

Even though the Defense Department has been called on to find $259 billion in cuts in the next five years--and $487 billion over the decade--its base budget (not counting the costs of Afghanistan or other wars) will rise to $567 billion by 2017. But when adjusted for inflation, the increases are small enough that they will amount to a slight cut of 1.6 percent of the Pentagon's base budget over the next five years.

So the "first major step" in cutting the military budget... isn't really a cut?

A Washington Post piece by Craig Whitlock (1/27/12) had a more accurate lead--"The Pentagon budget will shrink slightly next year"-- but later tries to make a 1 percent cut sound more significant: "While the difference may sound small, it represents a new era of austerity for the Defense Department."

To make matters even more confusing, the Post points out later that

Although the defense budget will decline next year, to $525 billion from this year's $531 billion, under Obama's current projections it will inch upward in constant dollars between 1 percent and 2 percent annually thereafter.

Kudos to Nancy Yousef of McClatchy for writing a piece (1/26/12) that took a different tack. Under the headline "Defense Budget Plan Doesn't Cut as Deeply as Pentagon Says," Yousef led with this:

Pentagon officials on Thursday announced the outlines of what they called a pared-down defense budget, but their request would increase baseline spending beyond the projected end of the war in Afghanistan, even as they plan to reduce ground forces.

To Yousef, the Pentagon was " employing a definition of the term 'reduction' that may be popular in Washington but is unconventional anywhere else."

And activist/writer David Swanson pointed out that the first question at Panetta's briefing got right at this question of whether the cuts are really cut. From the transcript:

Mr. Secretary, you talked a little bit on this, but over the next 10 years, do you see any other year than this year where the actual spending will go down from year to year? And just to the American public more broadly, how do you sort of explain what appears to be contradictory, as you talk about, repeatedly, this $500 billion in cuts in a Defense Department budget that is actually going to be increasing over time?

Panetta's answer:

Yeah, I think the simplest way to say this is that under the budget that was submitted in the past, we had a projected growth level for the Defense budget. And that growth would've provided for almost $500 billion in growth. And we had obviously dedicated that to a number of plans and projects that we would have. That's gotta be cut, and that's a real cut in terms of what our projected growth would be.

See the new release from the Institute for Public Accuracy for more of the context largely missing from the Pentagon budget coverage.

On December 25, New York Times reporter David Barstow filed this update on the scandal that he broke back in 2008:

A Pentagon public relations program that sought to transform high-profile military analysts into "surrogates" and "message force multipliers" for the Bush administration complied with Defense Department regulations and directives, the Pentagon's inspector general has concluded after a two-year investigation.

Those who don't recall Barstow's original story can catch up by reading this FAIR action alert (4/22/08):

According to the Times, the Pentagon recruited over 75 retired generals to act as "message force multipliers" in support of the Iraq War, receiving special Pentagon briefings and talking points that the analysts would often parrot on national television "even when they suspected the information was false or inflated." The Times even noted that at one 2003 briefing the military pundits were told that "We don't have any hard evidence" about Iraq's illicit weapons--a shocking admission the analysts decided not to share with the public.

The idea that the Pentagon has exonerated itself (again) isn't all that notable.

Among the many serious problems with the Pentagon's PR efforts was the idea that corporate media outlets would be so enthusiastic to put "experts" on the air who were basically acting in concert with the military.  To that end, one anecdote in Barstow's new report is worth singling out:

Wesley K. Clark, a retired four-star Army general who worked as a military analyst for CNN, told investigators he took it as a sign that the Pentagon "was displeased" with his commentary when CNN officials told him he would no longer be invited to special briefings for military analysts. General Clark told investigators that CNN officials made him feel as if he was less valued as a commentator because "he wasn't trusted by the Pentagon." At one point, he said, a CNN official told him that the White House had asked CNN to "release you from your contract as a commentator."

So CNN didn't want an on-air analyst of the Iraq War who was too critical of the Pentagon? That would be astonishing--or, at least, it ought to be. As the FAIR alert noted, one former CNN executive spoke openly about vetting their war pundits with the Pentagon:

The Times likened the program to "other administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism," but that would seem to discount the fact that the media have for decades demonstrated a preference for featuring retired military officials in their war coverage, with little if any serious efforts to offer balancing perspectives. The run-up to the Iraq invasion was no different. As former CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan explained (4/20/03): "I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with important people there and said, for instance, at CNN, 'Here are the generals we're thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war,' and we got a big thumbs-up on all of them. That was important."

If Clark is telling the truth, it would seem that it was also "important" for CNN to drop an analyst if the Pentagon gave him a thumbs-down.

Today New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (12/21/11) gives readers a sense of what the Iraq War was all about:

Iraq was always a war of choice. As I never bought the argument that Saddam had nukes that had to be taken out, the decision to go to war stemmed, for me, from a different choice: Could we collaborate with the people of Iraq to change the political trajectory of this pivotal state in the heart of the Arab world and help tilt it and the region onto a democratizing track?

Huh. A collaborative effort with the people of Iraq? Friedman goes on:

But was it a wise choice?

My answer is twofold: "No" and "Maybe, sort of, we'll see."

Hmm.

Others remember a different Tom Friedman, interviewed by Charlie Rose on May 30, 2003.

"Now that the war is over," Rose began his question--a conclusion widely jumped to in the early days of the war. When asked if invading Iraq was worth it, Friedman responded that it was "unquestionably worth doing."

The war, back then, was an attack on the "terrorist bubble," which in Friedman's mind meant that "we needed to go over there and take out a very big stick... and there was only one way to do it."

He went on:

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying: "Which part of this sentence don't you understand? You don't think, you know we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow? Well, suck. On. This." That, Charlie, is what this war is about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia; it was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

The house-to-house, "suck on this" democracy campaign. That's how it's normally done.

I guess one great thing about being a Times columnist is that you not only  get to write about the present--you can also re-write your own past.

The Washington Post's Scott Wilson has a piece (12/13/11) looking back on the Iraq War, where he writes of  the "arc of the American experience in Iraq" being "from hope to barbarity, from swaggering invasion to quiet departure."

When it comes to the rationale for the entire war, things get a bit fuzzy. Like we pointed out recently about CBS Evening News, the main driver of the invasion--the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction--is reduced to something like a footnote:

The premise was contested from the start, a new doctrine of preemptive war tailored to an era in which stateless militants could batter the once-distant United States with the everyday tools of modern society--commercial jets as missiles, cellphones as triggers, trucks as bombs.

The neoconservatives at the Pentagon and in the West Wing argued that the invasion of Iraq was necessary. Hussein, the longtime U.S. nemesis who once tried to kill then-President Bush's father, was openly encouraging Palestinian militancy at a time when Hamas was blowing up cafes and pizzerias in Jerusalem. A model of democracy in the Middle East--imposed by the U.S. military--would inspire change in its neighbors or frighten them into reform.

Besides, Hussein had murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people in the Anfal campaign against the Kurds, and in the aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf War to put down a Shiite rebellion that the United States failed to support after pledging to do so--a broken promise that helped fill the mass graves of Hilla, south of Baghdad. And he supposedly had an arsenal of some of the world’s nastiest weapons that had to be found and destroyed before they ended up with Al-Qaeda.

In this bizarre re-telling, Saddam Hussein's support for Hamas and a plot to kill George H. W. Bush seem to matter more than the bogus stories about Iraq's WMDs. Perhaps all you can say about this is that it makes a certain kind of sense for the U.S. government and elite media to want people to forget the falsehoods that launched the war.

Back in March, we wondered when U.S. corporate news outlets would find U.S./NATO killing of Afghan kids newsworthy. Back then, it was nine children killed in a March 1 airstrike. This resulted in two network news stories on the evening or morning newscasts, and two brief references on the PBS NewsHour.

On November 25, the New York Times reported--on page 12--that six children were killed in one attack in southern Afghanistan on November 23. This news was, as best I can tell, not reported on ABC, CBS, NBC or the PBS NewsHour.

There were, on the other hand, several pieces about U.S. soldiers eating Thanksgiving dinners.

Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald was one of the few commentators to write about the latest killings. As he observed:

We're trained simply to accept these incidents as though they carry no meaning: We're just supposed to chalk them up to regrettable accidents (oops), agree that they don’t compel a cessation to the war, and then get back to the glorious fighting. Every time that happens, this just becomes more normalized, less worthy of notice. It's just like background noise: Two families of children wiped out by an American missile (yawn: at least we don't target them on purpose like those evil Terrorists: we just keep killing them year after year after year without meaning to). It's acceptable to make arguments that American wars should end because they're costing too much money or American lives or otherwise harming American strategic interests, but piles of corpses of innocent children are something only the shrill, shallow and unSerious--pacifists!--point to as though they have any meaning in terms of what should be done.

International efforts to ban cluster bombs fell apart late last week. If you were reading about this in the New York Times, you might have been led to believe that the United States was pushing to get rid of the weapons--instead of the opposite.

Here's the lead sentence from a story in Saturday's paper (11/26/11):

GENEVA -- Despite last-minute attempts to broker a compromise, American-led efforts to conclude an international treaty restricting use of cluster munitions collapsed on Friday in the face of opposition from countries that said it did not address their humanitarian concerns and would undermine existing international law.

This "American-led effort," readers were told, "reflected the increasing stigmatization of a weapon recognized as causing unacceptable harm to civilians and seen as having lasting effects on development for decades after conflicts have ended."

Well, who opposes such efforts? It takes a little while to understand that the other side is taking a much tougher stance to eliminate cluster bombs, as outlined at an Oslo conference in 2008:

But countries and disarmament groups opposing the draft treaty said the humanitarian impact of the proposed protocol would be minimal and would legitimize continued use of other cluster munitions that are recognized to cause unacceptable harm.

These countries, together with the International Committee of the Red Cross and United Nations agencies dealing with development and human rights, also argued that the adoption of a legal instrument that was weaker than the Oslo agreement would set a dangerous precedent.

The Times' confused account is in stark contrast to other reporting. This  Reuters piece, for example, does a much better job of explaining things in its lead:

GENEVA (Reuters) -- A U.S.-led push to regulate, rather than ban, cluster munitions failed Friday after 50 countries objected, following humanitarian campaigners' claims that anything less than a outright ban would be an unprecedented reversal of human rights law.

Something tells me the Times story would look a little differently if the United States weren't on the pro-cluster bomb side of this argument.

The New York Times (11/13/11) had a Sunday Style section profile of ABC Pentagon correspondent Martha Raddatz that started off on a bad note--only to get much worse.

First the bad:

If there has been a glamour beat in television news in recent years, it may well be war correspondent. Starting with the original "Scud Stud," Arthur Kent of NBC in the 1991 gulf war, conflict reporters, including the current slate of Richard Engel (NBC), Lara Logan (CBS) and Ms. Raddatz's ABC colleague Alexander Marquardt, have become news media celebrities not just for acting fearless but for looking fabulous.

You might think the fact that Lara Logan was sexually assaulted while reporting from Egypt--which the Times piece mentions toward the end--would make Times reporter Jennifer Conlin think twice about referring to war coverage as a "glamour beat." But then you probably wouldn't have introduced the subject of your profile this way:

Glamour is probably not an adjective at the forefront of Ms. Raddatz's viewers' minds. At 58, she is older than most of her on-air competitors, and though she looks great--petite, blond and remarkably put together

I suppose a Style profile is the place one should expect a reporter to point out that a female TV reporter is "put together" and yet still not totally glamorous.

Then the piece gets much worse. Conlin writes:

Her approach to the beat is to cover war in its entirety, not just not on the battlefield.

What does that mean? The piece says Raddatz goes to warzones, which is part of the job. What they seem to be saying is that she knows to keep American troops first: "Her network of sources also includes numerous families at bases back home." Again, it's hard to see how that would all that remarkable for a network correspondent.

The truth is that Raddatz is a faithful Pentagon correspondent who rarely strays from the preferred storyline. Drone strikes in Afghanistan? Sure, they kill innocents, but there's no other way, according to Raddatz:

They simply have to carry out air strikes over there. It's a very rapid response. It's real-time intelligence. It's certainly flawed at some points.

But I've been on these missions. I've been on a combat mission in a fighter jet. I've seen all the very, very careful steps they take. They go through what's called the nine line. In fact, the mission I went on, some French soldiers were calling for them to bomb and the pilot and the weapons officer said, "We can't bomb, we think there's a school, we think there might be people in there."

Praising American military leaders? Raddatz knows how to do that too:

A warrior and a scholar, Petraeus is sometimes jokingly referred to as a water walker, since almost everything he touches seems to turn to gold.

The point the Times drives home is that Raddatz is close to her U.S. sources-- she is "a reporter who shows the human side of war," a point illustrated by the fact that one general like her work. Raddatz "calls us and invites us over for dinner....  She knows both the soldier's side and the military family’s side."

The "human side," meaning the humans from her own country. As Raddatz says:

"I know how they notify families of the dead," she said. "No matter how you feel about this war or how we got into it, you have to care about our servicemen. I can’t pretend to be objective when it comes to service or sacrifice."

You read all of that, and yet the Times comes up with this idea in the very next sentence:

Despite her worldview, Ms. Raddatz is very much a denizen of the Beltway culture, having been married to three well-known Washington figures. Tom Gjelten, her husband of the past 15 years, is a correspondent for National Public Radio; Julius Genachowski, her second husband, was a law school classmate of President Obama and is now chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Her first marriage was to Ben Bradlee Jr., son of the legendary Washington Post editor--a relationship that propelled her into a gossip column dust-up earlier this year.

What exactly in her "worldview" would make her a Beltway outsider? All evidence would seem to point the other way.

Richard Engel on NBC Nightly News (10/21/11), speaking about the end of the Iraq War:

The training wheels off, Iraq will have to succeed or fail without American troops on the ground to guide the way.

That's quite a metaphor--invading and occupying a country for eight years as "training wheels."

Engel's report includes this reference to the death toll:

Iraqi deaths, almost 150,000, but many Iraqis believe it's a million.

Of course it's not just Iraqis who believe this--the British polling firm Opinion Research Business (ORB), which has worked for the BBC, the British Conservative Party and the International Republican Institute, conducted a survey that arrived at the 1 million estimate.  A survey published in the Lancet medical journal  (10/11/06) estimated that the war caused 600,000 violent deaths between March 2003 and June 2006.

The "almost 150,000" number that Engel puts forward as reality appears to be based on the Iraq Family Health Survey, a joint effort by the World Health Organization and the Iraqi government, which actually estimated that there were 151,000 violent deaths (and some 400,000 total excess deaths--MedPage Today, 7/23/08) as a result of the war--between March 2003 and June 2006.

Apparently some Americans believe the war hasn't killed anyone in the last five years.

As one would expect, corporate media reacted to the developments in Libya by turning to one of their favorite sources: Republican Sen. John McCain. He was on CNN this morning (and last night as well), and odds are that he'll be on a  Sunday show.

McCain's line on Libya is that the White House should have waged a more aggressive war.  If any of these outlets wanted to challenge him on his record on Libya, all they would need to do is talk about this ancient newspaper article from August 2009:

Or perhaps this item from Politico, from way back in August of this year:

NBC Nightly News (10/7/11) marked the 10th anniversary of the Afghan War on October 7 with a segment that linked the war to the Occupy Wall Street protests. As anchor Brian Williams put it in the introduction:

Tonight protesters remain in the streets of a dozen U.S. cities, angry over what's happened to their lives and our country; and a big part of that, over these last 10 years, the two wars we've been fighting, starting 10 years ago today. This is the anniversary of the start of the war in Afghanistan, longer now than World War II and the Civil War combined.

That's pretty unusual. The report that followed was not.  Quoted in Jim Miklaszewski's report: Retired general Karl Eikenberry, retired general David Barno and retired general Barry McCaffrey (who some might recall for his role as part of Pentagon propaganda effort to feed talking points to TV pundits; he's also on the board of military companies that profit from government contracts).

Not to worry--also quoted in the piece was Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who is not retired. Getting current and former military officials into a story counts is a kind of balance, right?

Over the course of the Iraq War, many U.S. media outlets have managed to misconstrue Iraqi public opinion about the presence of U.S. troops.  As early as 2004, as FAIR (6/2/04) pointed out, research showed that the Iraqi public wanted U.S. troops out:

According to a new poll from the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, which is partly funded by the State Department and has coordinated its work with the Coalition Provisional Authority, more than half of all Iraqis--including the Kurds--want an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces, up from 17 percent last October.

But prominent media outlets didn't want to believe this. As John Burns of the New York Times explained:

Opinion polls, including those commissioned by the American command, have long suggested that a majority of Iraqis would like American troops withdrawn, but another lesson to be drawn from Saddam Hussein’s years is that any attempt to measure opinion in Iraq is fatally skewed by intimidation. More often than not, people tell pollsters and reporters what they think is safe, not necessarily what they believe. My own experience, invariably, was that Iraqis I met who felt secure enough to speak with candor had an overwhelming desire to see American troops remain long enough to restore stability.

Turn to yesterday's Times (9/11/11), and you saw this headline:

Many Iraqis Have Second Thoughts as U.S. Exit Nears

The article, by Michael Schmidt, doesn't given any sense of a shift in the broad opposition to the U.S. occupation. Instead, it's mostly an attempt--like others before it, documented in this piece in Extra! by Dahr Jamail--by the Times to convince readers that a series of anecdotes and interviews give a better measure of Iraqi opinion:

Though Iraqis have called for Americans to leave from the start of the occupation in 2003, the prospect of such a drastic drawdown, from the 48,000 troops here now, has revealed another side of the Iraqi psyche. This is a nation that distrusts itself, with little faith in the government’s own security forces or political leaders. It is as if people here never actually believed that the United States would leave, so all along demands for a pullout were never carefully weighed against the potential fallout.

So the "Iraqi psyche" doesn't really trust Iraqis and never thought about what would happen in the event of a "drastic drawdown" of U.S. troops a mere eight years after the occupation began.

Al-Qaeda, bin Laden, never imagined that the 3,000 people who lost their lives that day would inspire 3 million to put on the uniform and harden the resolve of 300 million Americans. They never imagined the sleeping giant they were about to awaken.

-- Vice President Joe Biden at September 11 commemoration (9/11/11)

Actually, that's precisely what bin Laden imagined: Al-Qaeda's central strategy was to draw its Western foes into economically ruinous wars in Muslim lands (Extra!, 7/11). But I suppose it would be bad form for journalists to raise this fact as the U.S. commemorates a decade of war and economic decline.

The New York Times has a long piece (8/12/11) looking at the question of how many civilians in Pakistan are killed by CIA drones. The agency doesn't even speak about the program on the record, except to make the far-fetched claim that no civilians have died in the past year or so.

The article, written by Scott Shane, includes some useful criticism of the CIA, and it's hard not to conclude that the agency's claims are not very credible.

But the real problem with the piece is that it gives much weight to the CIA's defense at all, using their almost entirely anonymous claims as one side in a dispute:

The government's assertion of zero collateral deaths meets with deep skepticism from many independent experts. And a new report from the British Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which conducted interviews in Pakistan's tribal area, concluded that at least 45 civilians were killed in 10 strikes during the last year.

Shane writes that a "closer look at the competing claims... suggests reasons to doubt the precision and certainty of the agency's civilian death count." He adds, though, that "if there are doubts about the CIA claim, there are also questions about the reliability of critics' reports of noncombatant deaths."

Shane also reports that "American officials" do not trust Pakistani lawyer Mirza Shahzad Akbar, who has been a key player and is suing the CIA-- which apparently discredits the British Bureau of Investigative Journalism study:

American officials said the Bureau of Investigative Journalism report was suspect because it relied in part on information supplied by Mr. Akbar, who publicly named the CIA's undercover Pakistan station chief in December when announcing his legal campaign against the drones.

If you read some of the British press about this study (as I did, thanks to CommonDreams.org), you get a very different impression than the one you get from the New York Times. From the Telegraph:

168 Children Killed in Drone Strikes

in Pakistan Since Start of Campaign

New research to send shockwaves through Pakistan

by Rob Crilly, Islamabad

In an extensive analysis of open-source documents, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that 2,292 people had been killed by U.S. missiles, including as many as 775 civilians.

An opinion piece at the Guardian:

The Civilian Victims

of the CIA's Drone War

A new study gives us the truest picture yet--in contrast to the CIA's own account--of drones' grim toll of 'collateral damage'

by Clive Stafford Smith

In that piece, Smith writes:

This week, a new report from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism gives us the best picture yet of the impact of the CIA's drone war in Pakistan. The CIA claims that there has been not one "noncombatant" killed in the past year. This claim always seemed to be biased advocacy rather than honest fact. Indeed, the Guardian recently published some of the pictures we have obtained of the aftermath of drone strikes. There were photos of a child called Naeem Ullah killed in Datta Khel and two kids in Piranho, both within the timeframe of the CIA's dubious declaration.

The BIJ reporting begins to fill in the actual numbers. It's a bleak view: more people killed than previously thought, including an estimated 160 children overall. This study should help to create a greater sense of reality around what is going on in these remote regions of Pakistan. This is precisely what has been lacking in the one-sided reporting of the issue--and it doesn't take an intelligence analyst to realize that vague and one-sided is just the way the CIA wants to keep it.

The Times account obeys normal journalistic  "rules" about balance and giving official sources their say. Which, in this case, amounts to giving space to anonymous killers to defend their actions.

August 6, 2011, when 38 soldiers, including 30 U.S. troops, were killed when their helicopter was shot down, was the "deadliest day" of the Afghan War, several media outlets told us:

• David Muir (ABC World News Saturday, 8/6/11): "It was the deadliest day of the war in Afghanistan, 30 Americans, 22 Navy SEALs lost."

• David Gregory (NBC Meet the Press, 8/7/11): "This was the single deadliest day of the war."

• Chicago Tribune headline (8/7/11): "Taliban Says It Downed Copter in Deadliest Day of War in Afghanistan"

• ABC This Week graphic (8/7/11): "DEADLIEST DAY IN AFGHANISTAN"

• Terrell Brown, CBS Morning News (8/8/11): "America mourns the loss of 30 warriors killed in Afghanistan on the war's deadliest day."

• AP (8/9/11): "Troops killed in the deadliest day of the Afghan War are coming home today."

But, of course, it wasn't the war's deadliest day--that unhappy distinction goes to May 4, 2009, when the U.S. military attacked the village of Granai, killing 140 people, 93 of them children, according to an Afghan government investigation (Reuters, 5/16/09). (The U.S. government says it does not know how many people it killed that day.)

Other deadlier days in Afghanistan include July 6, 2008, when U.S. bombing killed 47 civilians, including 39 women and children, attending a wedding in Nangarhar province (Guardian, 7/11/08); August 22, 2008, when a U.S. airstrike killed at least 90 civilians, including 60 children, in the village of Azizabad (UN News Centre, 8/26/08); and July 23, 2010, when the U.S. killed 39 civilians in the village of Sangin (RTTNews, 8/5/10).

To be sure, many U.S. news reports, unlike those cited above, remembered to add "for Americans" to their descriptions of August 6 as the "deadliest day." But there's little evidence that anyone in U.S. media remembers the village of Granai.