A Los Angeles Times editorial (2/7/12) begins:

When the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism released a report Sunday claiming that U.S. drone strikes have killed dozens of civilian rescuers and mourners in Pakistan, the American media scarcely noticed.

It's a good point.The Bureau's report got remarkably little media attention. A New York Times story (which included an anonymous U.S. official smearing the researchers as Al-Qaeda sympathizers) might be the only story in the mainstream media; the only stories coming up in the Nexis news database are from Antiwar.com (2/5/12) and papers in Pakistan. The report was covered on Democracy Now! (2/6/12) as well.

In other words, when the L.A. Times is talking about a media blackout, they're talking about themselves too. The paper's editorial page adds that the "findings are worth a look"--though they're sure to add a caveat:

Eyewitness accounts in such places as the tribal areas must be regarded with great skepticism; playing up alleged U.S. atrocities is a common recruiting strategy for terrorist groups.

Sure. And what do you call the strategy of playing down U.S. atrocities?

Not even a week after Barack Obama declared that not too many civilians die in the CIA's drone strikes in Pakistan, a new report from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism finds that  "at least 50 civilians" have been killed in rescues attempts, 20 in strikes on funerals, with at least 282 total civilians killed since Obama took office.

That much you learn from the New York Times report by Scott Shane (2/6/12):

WASHINGTON — British and Pakistani journalists said Sunday that the CIA's drone strikes on suspected militants in Pakistan have repeatedly targeted rescuers who responded to the scene of a strike, as well as mourners at subsequent funerals.

The report, by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, found that at least 50 civilians had been killed in follow-up strikes after they rushed to help those hit by a drone-fired missile. The bureau counted more than 20 other civilians killed in strikes on funerals. The findings were published on the Bureau's website and in the Sunday Times of London.

For some reason the Times felt it necessary to get an anonymous U.S. official--again--to smear the people trying to count the dead:

A senior American counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, questioned the report's' findings, saying "targeting decisions are the product of intensive intelligence collection and observation." The official added: "One must wonder why an effort that has so carefully gone after terrorists who plot to kill civilians has been subjected to so much misinformation. Let’s be under no illusions--there are a number of elements who would like nothing more than to malign these efforts and help Al-Qaeda succeed."

For the record, the Times' policy on the use of anonymous sources:

We do not grant anonymity to people who use it as cover for a personal or partisan attack. If pejorative opinions are worth reporting and cannot be specifically attributed, they may be paraphrased or described after thorough discussion between writer and editor. The vivid language of direct quotation confers an unfair advantage on a speaker or writer who hides behind the newspaper, and turns of phrase are valueless to a reader who cannot assess the source.

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.

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.

Last night's O'Reilly Factor (10/13/11), with guest Megyn Kelly, talking about how to deal with Iran:

BILL O'REILLY: What do we do?

MEGYN KELLY: It's a political question for President Obama and a military question for him, but it's not really much of a legal question because legally he can do it.

O'REILLY: OK.

KELLY: If he wants to do it....

O'REILLY: Let me stop you there. So there's no difference between killing bin Laden, Al-Awlaki with a drone? OK. Just today they killed another big terrorist guy in Pakistan with a drone. We could drop a drone right down Ahmadinejad's nose legally?

KELLY: We can go after Iran. We can start a military conflict with Iran. President Obama can do that tomorrow.

O'REILLY: With the drones. Boom.

KELLY: Just the same way...

O'REILLY: Ahmadinejad, ah.

KELLY: Look what we did in Libya. It's a lot more than what you are talking about right now. And he didn't seek congressional authority. Although he should have, technically, under the law. But even if he didn't, which he didn't, no one has ever gone after a president for doing this.

O'REILLY: OK. So legally, he could take the mullahs out. He could take Ahmadinejad out. He could send them a message, saying, "Look, you try to do this on our soil, here's what happens to you."

KELLY: The law is, technically, he's supposed to have an imminent threat against the homeland. Or....

O'REILLY: I think blowing up an embassy in Washington is an imminent threat. Do you?

KELLY: But that's been stopped. So technically....

O'REILLY: But the fact that it's been stopped doesn't really matter, because the threat is still there.

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.

In a piece today, the Washington Post's Greg Miller reports on a CIA base that will be used to conduct drone strikes in Yemen:

The agency is building a desert airstrip so that it can begin flying armed drones over Yemen. The facility, which is scheduled to be completed in September, is designed to shield the CIA's aircraft, and their sophisticated surveillance equipment, from observers at busier regional military hubs such as Djibouti, where the JSOC drones are based.

The Washington Post is withholding the specific location of the CIA facility at the administration's request.

The existence of the base has been reported elsewhere--the New York Times noted on June 15 that an "American official would not disclose the country where the CIA base was being built." The Times pointed out that the shift to CIA control was important, since with "the operations under CIA control, they could be carried out as a 'covert action,' which can be undertaken without the support of the host government." Meaning the U.S. could bomb Yemen without the approval of Yemen's government, in the event that the current government were to fall.

The story seemed to have been broken by the Associated Press (6/14/11), which, like the Post, is not telling readers what it knows about the base:  "The Associated Press has withheld the exact location at the request of U.S. officials."

This is reminiscent of the Post's decision in 2005 to report on CIA secret prisons ("black sites") in Eastern Europe--without disclosing the location of those sites, where terrorism suspects were taken to be interrogated (Extra! Update, 12/05).

It obviously makes senses for any White House to want to keep its secret programs under wraps--particularly when there's a chance that laws are being broken, or civilians are being killed. (Recall that the U.S. Navy launched a cruise missile loaded with cluster bombs into Yemen in 2009, reportedly killing 41 civilians.)

It does not make sense, however, for news outlets to assist them in these efforts.

Readers of the Washington Post can see this headline in today's edition (4/25/11) about the U.S. drone airstrikes:

Debates Underway on Combat Drones

But there is no actual debate in the article. Reporter Walter Pincus cites a British military study that calls the use of missile-firing drones "a genuine revolution in military affairs," adding that the "use of unmanned aircraft prevents the potential loss of aircrew lives and is thus in itself morally justified."

Pincus goes on to explain:

At a Washington conference of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) last week, the issue of drones was also widely discussed.

That "wide discussion" would seem to have involved drone proponents from the CIA and the military. Those quoted by the Post were:

--"Lt. Col. Bruce Black, program manager for the Air Force Predator and Reaper aircraft."

--"former CIA director Michael V. Hayden," who explained that drone pilots "can call up computer maps that show the potential effects of each weapon." Hayden explained that teams can ask for an attack's likely impact on the ground--which is apparently called "the bug splat."

--"Retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula, former Air Force deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance," who apparently talked about "potential problems with public perceptions."

--"Col. Dean Bushey, deputy director of the Air Force Joint Unmanned Aircraft Systems Center," who explained that drone pilots train like conventional pilots.

There are plenty of questions to ask about a government policy of assassination by remote-controlled drone aircraft--including whether or not this is even legal. The Post's "debate" would seem to exclude anyone who doesn't think this is a sound policy.

The Washington Post has an interesting piece on the CIA's drone program in Pakistan (2/21/11), pointing out that the drones are killing plenty of Pakistanis, but not the "high-value" ones:

CIA drone attacks in Pakistan killed at least 581 militants last year, according to independent estimates. The number of those militants noteworthy enough to appear on a U.S. list of most-wanted terrorists: two.

Despite a major escalation in the number of unmanned Predator strikes being carried out under the Obama administration, data from government and independent sources indicate that the number of high-ranking militants being killed as a result has either slipped or barely increased.

The piece seems to present a pretty clear story-- until they  allow anonymous U.S. officials to weigh in to defend their assassination program. Hence we hear from "U.S. officials familiar with drone operations":

"This effort has evolved because our intelligence has improved greatly over the years, and we're able to identify not just senior terrorists, but also al-Qaeda foot soldiers who are planning attacks on our homeland and our troops in Afghanistan," said a U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the classified program.

"We would be remiss if we didn't go after people who have American blood on their hands," the official said. "To use a military analogy, if you're only going after the generals, you're likely to be run over by tanks."

An unnamed former government official is also quoted comparing the drone assassinations to the HBO series The Sopranos and to a game of chess. Readers are told that drone advocates "say that empirical evidence suggests that the ramped-up targeting of lesser-known militants has helped to keep the United States safe." Sounds like the sort of thing Bush administration officials liked to say all the time about anything they were doing.

Pointing to a May 9 Boston Globe editorial saying that Barack "Obama conveyed the right message last week by hosting Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari" to emphasize "the close link between Pakistan and the anti-Taliban struggle in Afghanistan," before admitting that "U.S. military strikes against militants in both countries inevitably provoke anger and indignation among civilians," Palestine Chronicle editor Ramzy Baroud (5/14/09) notes that "this is as much as most U.S. media... are willing to concede as far as U.S. responsibility in lethal wars, civil strife and militancy in both countries is concerned."

Baroud elaborates in ways unheard in corporate media:

The escalation in Pakistan is not entirely surprising, however, as U.S. officials and media pundits have been adamant in advising the new administration that it was not Afghanistan that posed the greater threat to U.S. interests, but Pakistan. It was similar to the attitude of neoconservatives in the Bush administration after its failure in Iraq. It was not Iraq that the U.S. should have attacked, but Iran, they tirelessly parroted, hoping to generate yet another war.

What we are not told, however, is that unremitting U.S. bombings of the utterly poor and neglected northern provinces of Pakistan have garnered untold animosity towards the U.S. and its central government allies. It provoked, in some areas, total chaos and lawlessness, which in turn gave rise to the Pakistani "Taliban."

Closing with distressing estimates of "1 million Pakistanis already on the run in the northern and eastern parts of the country," Baroud tells us how "they are threatened by fighting, hunger and all sorts of predators, including U.S. drones circling overhead"--which U.S. media also are keen to push as the latest bloody solution in the region. See the new FAIR Action Alert: "CBS Pro-Drone Propaganda: 60 Minutes Slights Critics of Controversial Weapons" (5/12/09).