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.

The New York Times and London Guardian both published stories yesterday (4/25/11) examining the WikiLeaks documents about the Guantanamo prison. While obviously just a snapshot, it is interesting to see how the papers have headlined their findings.

The Guardian:

The New York Times:

And today the Times stresses the potential danger allegedly posed by those imprisoned there:

This is not to suggest that the Times' pieces are particularly bad. But the difference in emphasis is striking--and reminiscent of how differently the papers treated previous WikiLeaks disclosures.

The Guardian published a piece yesterday (2/15/11) based on an interview with "Curveball," the Iraqi exile whose fraudulent claims about Iraq's WMDs helped the Bush administration sell the Iraq War. "I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime," he explained.

The piece is pretty revealing--as Curveball watched Colin Powell's UN address in February 2003, the Guardian reports that "he had not met a U.S. official, let alone been interviewed by one."

One "flight of fantasy" Curveball delivered was the  claim that Iraq was manufacturing mobile bio-weapons labs. These did not exist. But if you were watching U.S. television news during the war, you got to see them discovered by at least two networks:

ABC:

On April 26, ABC's World News Tonight led with a major scoop. Anchor Claire Shipman announced at the top of the broadcast, "U.S. troops discover chemical agents, missiles, and what could be a mobile laboratory in Iraq. An ABC News exclusive." But ABC's "exclusive," as it turns out, appears to be false.

And on NBC (5/11/03):

May 11, 2003

—NBC anchor John Seigenthaler introduces a story about trailers found in Iraq that some U.S. officials say are mobile biological warfare labs: "There is new evidence tonight that Saddam Hussein's regime was capable of building weapons of mass destruction." Reporter Jim Avila concludes the report by declaring that the findings present "a set of circumstances military sources contend is very close to that elusive smoking gun."

May 12, 2003
—In a follow-up report, NBC Nightly News correspondent Jim Avila declares that two trailers found by the U.S. military in northern Iraq "may be the most significant WMD findings of the war." Former U.N. nuclear inspector David Kay performs an impromptu inspection—armed with a pointer, he rattles off the trailer's parts: "This is a compressor. You want to keep the fermentation process under pressure so it goes faster. This vessel is the fermenter...." Avila expresses little doubt about the discovery: "A mobile lab capable of manufacturing anthrax or botulism from the back of a truck, with equipment manufactured as late as 2003."

The New York Times:

Cables Show Delicate U.S. Dealings With Egypt's Leaders

The Guardian:

WikiLeaks Cables Show Close U.S. Relationship With Egyptian President

That reminds me of something Times executive editor wrote in a forthcoming piece on WikiLeaks, where he explains the difference between The Newspaper of Record and the Guardian in handling the Afghanistan documents:

If anyone doubted that the three publications operated independently, the articles we posted that day made it clear that we followed our separate muses. The Guardian, which is an openly left-leaning newspaper, used the first War Logs to emphasize civilian casualties in Afghanistan, claiming the documents disclosed that coalition forces killed "hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents," underscoring the cost of what the paper called a "failing war." Our reporters studied the same material but determined that all the major episodes of civilian deaths we found in the War Logs had been reported in the Times, many of them on the front page.

They are indeed different newspapers. The Guardian thinks civilian deaths should be reported, in some cases maybe more than once.

The Guardian's piece today reports:

Another cable, from March 2009, shows the U.S.'s astonishingly intimate military relationship with Egypt. Washington provides Cairo $1.3bn annually in foreign military finance (FMF) to purchase U.S. weapons and defence equipment, and the cable said. "President Mubarak and military leaders view our military assistance program as the cornerstone of our mil-mil relationship and consider the $1.3bn in annual FMF as 'untouchable compensation' for making and maintaining peace with Israel.

"The tangible benefits to our mil-mil relationship are clear: Egypt remains at peace with Israel, and the U.S. military enjoys priority access to the Suez canal and Egyptian airspace."

Presumably Keller would argue that the Times has already--somewhere, at some time--mentioned U.S. military aid to Egypt, and thus didn't need to dwell on it today.

Former special ops squad leader/current think tank fellow Andrew Exum noisily yawns at the WikiLeaks Afghan document release on the New York Times op-ed page today (7/27/10):

The news media have done a good job of showing the public that the Afghan war is a highly complex environment stretching beyond the borders of the fractured country. Often what appears to be a two-way conflict between the government and an insurgency is better described as intertribal rivalry. And often that intertribal rivalry is worsened or overshadowed by the violent trade in drugs.

As it happens, Extra! (12/09) devoted an entire article to the question of how U.S. media have examined the role of interethnic conflict in the Afghan War, and the answer is that by and large they've done a terrible job: Acknowledging that the conflict is largely a civil war between Pashtuns and other ethnic groups does not help the U.S. military sell the war, and so U.S. journalists, following the lead of their Pentagon handlers, barely ever describe it that way. Wrote Robert Naiman in that Extra! piece:

Searching through the Washington Post and the New York Times for the past year, Extra! could not find a single news article that mentioned the idea that Afghanistan was in a state of civil war at any time following the 2001 U.S. invasion--with the exception of the Post article [10/27/09] about [civilian official Matthew] Hoh's resignation.

If the WikiLeaks dump encourages U.S. news outlets to take another look at the war through the civil war prism, that in itself will be a valuable service.

Exum also pooh-poohs WikiLeaks' "documentation of Afghan civilian casualties caused by United States and allied military operations," because "civilians inevitably suffer in war"--ho hum! But perhaps readers conditioned to the "Afghan Casualties Disputed" school of journalism will be nevertheless surprised to read a discussion of how such suffering actually occurs that's informed by the WikiLeaks documents. As the Guardian, which has shown considerably more interest than the Times in the documents' revelations regarding civilian deaths, reported Sunday (7/25/10):

Most of the assaults on civilians recorded here do not appear to have been investigated. French troops "opened fire on a bus that came too close to convoy" near the village of Tangi Kalay outside Kabul on 2 October 2008, according to the logs. They wounded eight children who were in the bus.

Two months later, U.S. troops gunned down a group of bus passengers even more peremptorily, as the logs record.

Patrolling on foot, a Kentucky-based squad from 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, known as "Red Currahee," decided to flag down the approaching bus, so their patrol could cross the road. Before sunrise, a soldier stepped out on to Afghanistan's main highway and raised both hands in the air.

When the bus failed to slow--travelers are often wary of being flagged down in Afghanistan's bandit lands--a trooper raked it with machine-gun fire. They killed four passengers and wounded 11 others.

Stories like this may be old news to an Afghan War vet who researches the conflict for a living--but I suspect that for most people, WikiLeaks' glimpse behind the scenes at how the war is actually fought will be a real eye-opener.

The Associated Press' Shawn Pogatchnik (5/12/09) has the incredible and deeply alarming story of Dublin sociology student Shane Fitzgerald having "posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia" just as the world's reporters were writing up the March 18 death of composer Maurice Jarre. Intended for "testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news," Fitzgerald's fib "flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper websites in Britain, Australia and India"--in short, "Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked."

"They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia quickly caught the quote's lack of attribution and removed it, but not quickly enough to keep some journalists from cutting and pasting it first"--and from there it only gets more embarrassing:

A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets in an e-mail and the corrections began....

So far, the [London] Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version--or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald's florid prose weeks after he pointed out its true origin.

If anything, Fitzgerald said, he expected newspapers to avoid his quote because it had no link to a source--and even might trigger alarms as "too good to be true." But many blogs and several newspapers used the quotes at the start or finish of their obituaries.

Not only did the Guardian honestly own up to its mistake, but readers' editor Siobhain Butterworth got "the moral of this story" right in her May 4 column on the episode: It's "not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn't use information they find there if it can't be traced back to a reliable primary source." For his part, Fitzgerald himself now is "100 percent convinced that if I hadn't come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up," and in doing so "would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact."