The new issue of  Time magazine promises on its cover "Essential Info for the Year Ahead." One apparently essential report: U.S. drones are awesome.

The report--written by Mark Thompson, available to subscribers only explains that a "hot military trend" this way:

Today's generals and admirals want weapons that are smaller, remote-controlled and bristling with intelligence. In short, more drones that can tightly target terrorists, deliver larger payloads and are some of the best spies the U.S. has ever produced, even if they occasionally get captured in Iran or crash on landing at secret bases.

And also, you know, kill innocent civilians.

There's no time to dwell on that, because there are too many good things to say about our remote-control war. "Drones had a big year in 2011," Thompson writes, and 2012 will be even bigger. As Time readers learn, "Unlike humans, these weapons don't need sleep."

And best of all, apparently, the military aren't the only ones doing the killing:

America's arsenal has become so small and lethal, you don't need the U.S. Army--or any military service at all, in fact--to field and wield them. The CIA, which used to be limited to derringers and exploding cigars, is now not very secretly flying drones. With little public acknowledgment and minimal congressional oversight, these clandestine warriors have killed some 2,000 people identified as terrorists lurking in shadows around the globe since 9/11.

The British Bureau of Investigative Journalism's investigation of the CIA drone program in Pakistan (8/10/11) stressed less of the gee-whiz and more the real-life consequences of the attacks. Estimates of civilian deaths range from 390 to 780-- including almost 200 children. U.S. officials, for the record, were once making absurd claims that no innocents were killed.

As for the apparent enthusiasm for waging a war where "you don't need the U.S. Army" at all--that is precisely one of the criticisms of the drone program; some legal experts argue that non-military personnel are not legal combatants, and therefore killing every one of those 2,000 "people identified as terrorists" was a war crime. Others point out that employing drones outside an active combat zone could also violate international law. But none of that is "Essential Info" for 2012.

Documents discovered in Libya suggest a close relationship between the Libyan government and the CIA. The New York Times described it this way on September 3:

TRIPOLI, Libya -- Documents found at the abandoned office of Libya's former spymaster appear to provide new details of the close relations the Central Intelligence Agency shared with the Libyan intelligence service -- most notably suggesting that the Americans sent terrorism suspects at least eight times for questioning in Libya despite that country's reputation for torture.

And then today (9/6/11) the Times put it this way:

The cooperation appeared to be far greater with the American intelligence agency, which sent terrorism suspects to Libya for questioning at least eight times, despite the country's reputation for torture. Britain sent at least one suspect, according to the documents.

As  Glenn Greenwald pointed out on Twitter (in fewer characters), the whole point of rendition was to send prisoners to countries the United States knew would treat them a certain way. It wasn't a series of accidents. In other words, the CIA used Libya not despite its reputation for torture, but because of it.

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.

Every so often reports surface about the Justice Department's prosecution of CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling--often due to the government's attempts to convince New York Times reporter James Risen to testify about his interactions with Sterling. The Times reported on the latest such efforts yesterday (5/25/11):

Federal prosecutors are trying to force the author of a book on the CIA to testify at a criminal trial about who leaked information to him about the agency's effort to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program at the end of the Clinton administration.

Such efforts to get journalists to testify often lead media outlets to champion their First Amendment rights and the necessity of protecting valuable sources (though, as in the case of Judith Miller, the arguments are sometimes rather unconvincing).

The story Risen told--which the government thinks came from Sterling--is pretty fascinating. As the Times summed it up:

The chapter details an effort by the CIA in 2000 to disrupt Iran's nuclear program by sending a former Russian scientist to give it blueprints for a nuclear triggering device with a hidden design flaw. Mr. Risen portrayed the operation as botched, saying the agency may have helped Iranian scientists gain valuable and accurate information.

Now that sounds pretty damn newsworthy, right?  Well, you didn't read about it in the New York Times:

The material in that chapter did not appear in the New York Times. Mr. Sterling's indictment said that Mr. Risen had worked on an article about the program in 2003, but that the newspaper decided not to publish it after government officials told editors that such a disclosure would jeopardize national security.

I guess it would be a little awkward for the Times to spend much time championing Risen's cause. "We must defend our reporters' need to protect their sources for the sake of a story we didn't publish because the government told us not to" is hardly a stirring defense of journalistic freedom.

On the release of CIA agent Raymond Davis, who was held in Pakistan on charges of killing two Pakistani men on a street in Lahore, the Times explains the reaction (3/17/11)

The Davis episode was particularly sensitive because of the resentment among Pakistanis who believe that a growing American security contingent roams the country with relative impunity.

The Davis incident would seem to confirm this "belief," wouldn't it?

Yesterday the Guardian reported that Raymond Davis, the American held in Pakistan on charges of killing two men last month in Lahore, was working for the CIA. The Davis case has received sustained coverage in the U.S. media and is the subject of intense U.S lobbying. All the while U.S. officials referred to Davis as a "diplomat."

Today the New York Times has posted a story on its website catching up with the Guardian. The most notable revelation, though, comes when the Times admits that it knew Davis' status--but obeyed a government request to keep it quiet:

The New York Times had agreed to temporarily withhold information about Mr. Davis' ties to the agency at the request of the Obama administration, which argued that disclosure of his specific job would put his life at risk. Several foreign news organizations have disclosed some aspects of Mr. Davis' work with the CIA, and on Monday, American officials lifted their request to withhold publication.

So is the lesson here that if you're interested in what your government is doing, read a foreign newspaper?

UPDATE: Michael Calderone at Yahoo! News notes that several U.S. outlets-- the Post, the New York Times and the Associated Press-- knew about Davis' status. The Guardian was asked by U.S. officials to keep Davis' status under wraps, but decided not to:

Ian Katz, deputy editor of The Guardian, told The Cutline that "similar representations were made to the Guardian to those received by U.S. media." But unlike its U.S. counterparts, The Guardian went ahead with the story.

Katz noted that two senior Pakistan government sources officially confirmed that Davis was a CIA operative and explained in an email why it was relevant to report.

"We believe Davis's role in Pakistan is unavoidably connected with both the legal case surrounding him and with the U.S. government's attempts to seek his release," Katz said. "And since Davis is already widely assumed in Pakistan to have links to U.S. intelligence, we did not accept that disclosing his CIA role would expose him to increased risk."

A Newsweek report (2/21/11) looks at the CIA's aerial drone assassination program through the agency's eyes--leaving questions about civilian deaths and the effort's dubious legality for a couple of brief paragraphs at the end. To encourage Newsweek to take critics of the drone program seriously, see FAIR's new Action Alert. Please leave copies of your messages--or comments on the alert--in the comments thread here.

Apparently not, judging by the Washington Post's October 3 story ("Military Drones Aid CIA's mission") about the CIA's expansion of its drone war in Pakistan. It is "part of a high-stakes attempt by the Obama administration to deal decisive blows to Taliban insurgents," and also  "a significant evolution of an already controversial targeted killing program."

Post readers get details from "a U.S. official"--who says things like, "Our intelligence has gotten a lot better." The only other perspective comes from Bruce Reidel at Brookings, who is "a former CIA analyst who led the Obama administration's initial overhaul of its Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy." In other words, not much of a critic.

There are obviously fundamental questions about this policy--such as whether it's legal, something Jim Lobe wrote about recently for Inter Press Service (4/2/10).

"CIA Sees Increased Threat in Yemen" is the Washington Post's headline today (8/25/10) over a story that tells of a "sober new assessment"  of Al Qaeda-related activities that has "helped prompt senior Obama administration officials to call for an escalation of U.S. operations there--including a proposal to add armed CIA drones to a clandestine campaign of U.S. military strikes."

At present, U.S. airstrikes in Yemen are not carried out by drones, but "have involved cruise missiles and other weapon that are less precise." The Post adds:

Proponents of expanding the CIA's role argue that years of flying armed drones over Pakistan have given the agency expertise in identifying targets and delivering pinpoint strikes. The agency's attacks also leave fewer telltale signs.

When a newspaper quotes anonymous officials who argue for expanding an undeclared war in ways that hide U.S. involvement, you might hope that would call out for some balancing perspectives who might question the legality, if not the wisdom, of launching secret deadly airstrikes on a non-belligerent country. But such voices are missing from the Post story.

Some of the same problems were evident in an August 15 New York Times story about the very same issue--the expanding war in Yemen, part of a military campaign happening in "roughly a dozen countries." The Times explained the relevant concerns about such operations: fueling "anti-American rage," the lack of congressional oversight, and "a blurring of the lines between soldiers and spies that could put troops at risk of being denied Geneva Convention protections."

One would hope that media interest in the Geneva Conventions and international law might include larger questions than what might happen to captured U.S. soldiers and spies.  Like the actual legality of launching undeclared wars, for instance.

Deep into the piece, the Times gets back to the details of a December attack:

A Navy ship offshore had fired the weapon in the attack, a cruise missile loaded with cluster bombs, according to a report by Amnesty International. Unlike conventional bombs, cluster bombs disperse small munitions, some of which do not immediately explode, increasing the likelihood of civilian causalities. The use of cluster munitions, later documented by Amnesty, was condemned by human rights groups.

An inquiry by the Yemeni Parliament found that the strike had killed at least 41 members of two families living near the makeshift Qaeda camp. Three more civilians were killed and nine were wounded four days later when they stepped on unexploded munitions from the strike, the inquiry found.

So the United States military killed dozens of civilians in a cluster bomb attack. One has to read deep into a rather long piece in order to learn this fact. The Times neatly captures the way many media outlets view these kinds of stories:

The Yemen operation has raised a broader question: Who should be running the shadow war?

Should the military bomb Yemen, or should the CIA do it? That's the way the Times sees the "debate."

David Ignatius starts off his Washington Post column today ("A New Deal for the CIA," 9/17/09) with a story about Jeannie de Clarens, a 90-year-old Frenchwoman who infiltrated the Nazi army, discovered information about German rockets that "saved London," was captured by the Gestapo and survived a year in a concentration camp without betraying her secrets.

De Clarens sounds like a real hero with a great story. But the moral Ignatius draws from it is not so great: "When we read about waterboarding and other techniques that shock the conscience, it's easy to lose sight of what intelligence agents like my friend Jeannie do most of the time--and their importance in protecting the country."

Somehow I suspect, contrary to Ignatius, that CIA employees in recent years have been more likely to be engaged in waterboarding and other forms of torture than to have performed death-defying, world-saving undercover work like de Clarens.  In any case, we admire someone like her because she stood up to a ruthless force that used torture routinely; to suggest that her example should make us pay less attention to torturers working for our own government is rather perverse.

Ignatius goes on to endorse the proposal of David Omand, former coordinator of British intelligence, for a "paradigm shift"--replacing the old system "in which  intelligence agencies could do pretty much as they liked" with a new system where "the public gives the intelligence agencies certain powers needed to keep the country safe." Well, the latter certainly sounds preferable to the former--but as far as the public is concerned, we've always been living under the second system, passing laws through our elected representatives that limited the powers of intelligence agencies. If the agencies decided to act as though they lived under the other system, that's called "breaking the law."

But for Ignatius, expecting that intelligence agencies will follow the law is a new, rather radical idea, and it will require concessions on the part of the citizenry:

In this new "grand bargain," Omand stressed, the public must understand that if it decides--for moral and political reasons--to limit certain activities (as in interrogation or surveillance techniques), it also accepts the risk that there will be "normal accidents."

Ignatius really ought to understand that the U.S. public made that decision a long time ago--back in 1791, when it ratified the Bill of Rights.

Deeming "the battle against baseless, worthless grants of anonymity by journalists" to be "at this point, probably futile," Salon's Glenn Greenwald (6/15/09, ad-viewing required) is exasperated to see how "even many of the nation's best and most valuable reporters--such as the New Yorker's Jane Mayer--seem helplessly addicted to it." Greenwald points to "an otherwise solid and at times enlightening article on CIA Director Leon Panetta and his resistance to investigating past CIA abuses" in which Mayer

includes this passage at the beginning of her article to explain how Panetta was chosen only after Obama's first choice, John Brennan, was rejected:

A friend of Brennan's from his C.I.A. days complained to me, "After a few Cheeto-eating people in the basement working in their underwear who write blogs voiced objections to Brennan, the Obama Administration pulled his name at the first sign of smoke, and then ruled out a whole class of people: Anyone who had been at the agency during the past 10 years couldn't pass the blogger test."

What possible justification is there to grant anonymity to someone to spout these clichéd and factually false insults? First, as I've documented numerous times and as Mayer herself well knows, the case against Brennan was not that he was "at the agency for the past 10 years" or even that he had anything to do with the torture program, but rather that (as she herself documents later in the piece) he explicitly advocated and defended many of the worst torture techniques and other Bush abuses. Second, unlike the individual who is willing to spout these insults only while cowardly hiding behind Mayer's shield of anonymity, the bloggers who led the opposition to Brennan (including myself and the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan) all attached their names to their views and--as Spencer Ackerman notes--are about as far away as one can be from the trite, adolescent cartoons spewed by Mayer's anonymous insulter. Third, one of the principal points of Mayer's long article is that the objections to Brennan have been vindicated, because--as Obama's chief counter-terrorism adviser--he has led the way in urging Obama to keep past CIA abuses suppressed and Bush crimes protected from accountability.

While "the anonymous name-calling Mayer passes on appears on the first page of her piece," Greenwald discovers that way down "on page 5, she includes the facts that show how factually false is the characterization of the objections to Brennan"--there Mayer personally admits that "in an interview with me two years ago, Brennan defended the use of 'enhanced' interrogation techniques and extraordinary renditions." Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Glenn Greenwald on Torture" (4/24/09).

"Amid all the recent negatives in the worlds of intelligence and journalism," Consortium News' Robert Parry (6/2/09) has spotted "one encouraging development": "the recognition of common ground between two beleaguered groups, honest U.S. intelligence analysts and honest American journalists, two groups that previously had been on opposite sides of the secrecy divide." The strangeness of which is not lost on Parry, who says that "what brought them together, ironically, was that they both were targeted by the same dishonest forces":

Through the 1980s, the neocons spearheaded an assault on the CIA's analytical division by pushing a politicization of intelligence that reversed the tradition of giving policymakers the best possible information. Instead, careerists got rewarded for tailoring intelligence to fit the neocon agenda--and those who wouldn't go along were pushed aside or out the door.

Simultaneously, within the Washington news media, the neocons and allied right-wing attack groups took aim at journalists who dug up unwanted information. Instead of rewards for such work, there were punishments. Many truth-telling reporters were "controversialized," while journalists who played ball moved to the center of the profession.

That last point is on a phenomenon Parry is regrettably quite familiar with--see the FAIR magazine Extra!: "America's Debt to Gary Webb: Punished for Reporting the Truth While Those Who Covered It Up Thrived" (3–4/05) by Robert Parry.

Robert Parry (Consortium News, 5/25/09) thinks that "there is no one, it seems, that the U.S. mainstream news media loves more than Colin Powell," and as proof offers "Powell's disingenuous response" to Bob Schieffer's May 24 CBS Face the Nation "question about the ex-secretary of state's knowledge regarding 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' which the International Committee of the Red Cross and virtually all other objective observers say constituted torture": Powell--whom, Parry recalls, "was a member of President George W. Bush's Principals Committee, which oversaw the interrogation policies"--claimed to an unchallenging Schieffer, "to have been kept mostly out of the loop.... He was 'not privy' to the legal memos authorizing the abusive treatment."

Such transparent tripe was left to the renegade Washington Stakeout questioner (and longtime FAIR associate) to take on:

Outside the CBS News' Washington offices after the interview, media analyst Sam Husseini asked Powell what he knew about the torture of al-Qaeda suspect Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who made false claims linking Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaeda, lies that Powell then cited in his infamous pro-invasion speech before the United Nations on February 5, 2003.

"I don't have any details on the al-Libi case," Powell responded.

When asked when he learned that some of the bogus evidence had been extracted by torture, Powell said, "I don't know that. I don't know what information you're referring to. So I can't answer."

And when Husseini explained to Powell "that the information had been publicly discussed by Powell's former chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson," Powell was reduced to a grade school reply of "So what?" All of which leads Parry to some questions of his own--"Did Powell participate in the Principals Committee?... Did he object to the abusive techniques... that he says 'were judged not to be torture'?--and to a pointed conclusion:

For a Washington press corps that has been up in arms challenging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's claim that the CIA obscured key details of the harsh interrogations from congressional leaders, it was impressive to see how little skepticism was evinced by Powell's claim of ignorance from his seat on Bush's Principals Committee.

See the FAIR Media Advisory: "Does the CIA Ever Lie?: Parsing the Pelosi Torture Controversy" (5/20/09)

The independent website Raw Story (5/6/09) recently summarized the human toll of the U.S. government's torture program.  Approximately 100 prisoners have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to human rights investigators, with 34 of those deaths officially classified as homicides; at least eight individuals were tortured to death.

Yet somehow, when corporate media report on the torture program's victims, they focus on the CIA, the agency that designed and helped implement the array of torture techniques known as "enhanced interrogation."  A  May 19 article by Walter Pincus, intelligence correspondent for the Washington Post, is a particularly gross example.

Pincus described the CIA as "battered by recriminations over waterboarding and other harsh techniques," and "girding itself for more public scrutiny."  The article presented the agency's view that "it is being forced to take the blame for actions approved by elected officials that have since fallen into disfavor."

"Fallen into disfavor"--that's one way to describe it.  Another way would be to say that these actions were violations of U.S. and international law, not to mention the Constitution, all of which clearly prohibit torture.

Usually when people are "forced to take the blame" for criminal actions, they are put on trial.  But Pincus notes that President Obama has promised that CIA torturers will not face punishment if they followed the Bush administration's torture guidelines.

But, writes Pincus, "agency personnel still face subpoenas and testimony under oath before criminal, civil and congressional bodies." His example: A grand jury investigation into the CIA's destruction of interrogation videotapes.  So even though CIA officers been effectively pardoned for the crime of torture, they still may have to answer for destroying the evidence.  Life can be so unfair sometimes.

Pincus cites a CIA officer's anguished plea, "Will I be in trouble five years from now for what I agree to do today?" In Pincus' world, the idea that a spy could commit a crime and not get away with it is a sign that something is very wrong.

Demonstrating his trademark ability to move effortlessly from belligerent grandstanding to completely fictive political commentary, Fox star Bill O'Reilly claimed on April 22 that current and former attorney generals "Eric Holder and Janet Reno put the wall up between the FBI and the CIA, which led to the 9/11 attacks." But Media Matters points out (4/23/09):

in fact, the 1995 Justice Department memo and guidelines to which O'Reilly referred only addressed communications among divisions within DOJ, clarifying longtime unwritten restrictions on the sharing of information between the FBI's intelligence arm and DOJ's criminal division. They had no impact on communications between the FBI and the CIA, the Department of Defense, or any other agencies.

And "O'Reilly should know this," considering that, "when he previously adopted the 'wall' falsehood, 9/11 Commission member and former Sen. Slade Gorton (R-WA) told O'Reilly that the policies in question made 'no limitation on any intelligence agency sharing anything with any other intelligence agency at all.'" But O'Reilly has never been one to let simple reality get in the way of what he chooses to know or not know.