About Obama's kill list: You can't kill civilians with drones if there are no civilians.
A new report from a team of British and Pakistani journalists finds one U.S. drone strike occurs every four days in Pakistan. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan have killed as many as 775 civilians, including 168 children, since 2004. The report also challenges a recent claim by President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, that no civilians have been killed in the drone attacks for nearly a year. According to the Bureau’s researchers, at least 45 civilians were killed in 10 U.S. attacks during the last year.
Democracy Now
Early this morning, the U.S. fired a missile from a drone in northwest Pakistan — its first since the
NYT story – and killed two people.
[...]
Chris Woods, Senior Reporter with the Bureau of Investigative
Journalism, which has done sterling work in documenting drone attacks in
Pakistan, emails today to say this:
Today’s strike is far from clear right now: maybe one – or two events. May also involve civilian deaths (Dawn reports that the motorbike was accidentally hit). . . .
There’s also an obverse to this coin. As well as reporting all those killed as “militants”, the mainstream US media is consistently failing to report when civilians are credibly reported killed, even as media internationally do so.
Excepting today, civilians have only been reported killed twice in Pakistan in 2012, from 17 attacks (February 9 and May 24). On both occasions civilian deaths were reported by major international agencies (Reuters, AP etc), and picked up worldwide (eg BBC, Jerusalem Post…) But not within the US. I can find no reference to civilian casualties in any mainstream US publication on either occasion (for the May 24 attack most also censored out the fact that a mosque was hit.)
So the US mainstream media is not only classing all victims – regardless of known status – as “militants.” It is actively censoring out actual reports of civilian deaths.
Glenn Greenwald
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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