• Secret US documents show Brennan’s ‘no civilian drone deaths’ claim was false: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
    http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2013/04/11/secret-us-documents-show-brennans-no-civilian-drone-deaths-cl

    US intelligence officials were aware that at least one civilian had died in drone strikes in Pakistan during 2011, despite claims to the contrary made by the man now running the Central Intelligence Agency.

    In June 2011, John Brennan, at the time President Obama’s chief counter terrorism adviser, stated publicly that for ‘almost a year’ no civilian had died in US drone strikes in Pakistan.

    But leaked US intelligence documents obtained by news agency McClatchy show this was not true.

    • An Inconvenient Truth
      Finally, proof that the United States has lied in the drone wars. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/10/an_inconvenient_truth_drones

      Jonathan Landay, national security reporter at McClatchy Newspapers, has provided the first analysis of drone-strike victims that is based upon internal, top-secret U.S intelligence reports http://seenthis.net/messages/129176.

      It is the most important reporting on U.S. drone strikes to date because Landay, using U.S. government assessments, plainly demonstrates that the claim repeatedly made by President Obama and his senior aides — that targeted killings are limited only to officials, members, and affiliates of al Qaeda who pose an imminent threat of attack on the U.S. homeland — is false.

      ...

      It is important to note that the claim of a single civilian casualty is based on the CIA’s interpretation that any military-age males who are behaving suspiciously can be lawfully targeted . No U.S. government official has ever openly acknowledged the practice of such “signature strikes” because it is so clearly at odds with the bedrock principle of distinction required for using force within the laws of armed conflict. According to the documents reviewed by Landay, even the U.S. intelligence community does not necessarily know who it has killed; it is forced to use fuzzy categories like “other militants” and “foreign fighters.”

      Some of the drone strikes that Landay describes, such as a May 22, 2007 attack requested by Pakistan’s intelligence service to support Pakistani troops in combat, do not appear in the databases maintained by the New America Foundation, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, or Long Wars Journal . This should strengthen the concerns of many analysts about the accuracy of reporting from Pakistan’s tribal areas. It also suggests that there may be a few additional targeted killing efforts of which we know nothing.

      ...

      ...based on the Obama administration’s patterns of behavior, the Department of Justice will assuredly target Landay and his sources for leaking classified information. While the DOJ has refrained from plugging the many selective leaks by anonymous administration officials that praise the precision and efficacy of drone strikes, it has sought more criminal prosecutions of leaks in Obama’s first term than during all previous presidential administrations combined. (...) Absolutely nothing in Landay’s reporting reveals the CIA’s sources and methods for determining who had been killed.

      Three key lessons from the Obama administration’s drone lies - http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/11/three-lessons-obama-drone-lies

      (1) The Obama administration often has no idea who they are killing.

      ....

      (2) Whisteblowers are vital for transparency and accountability, which is precisely why the Obama administration is waging a war on them.

      ...

      (3) Secrecy ensures both government lies and abuses of power.

      ...

    • Sequestering the War on Terror : The New Yorker
      http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/04/sequestering-the-war-on-terror.html

      Questions capitales:

      The logic is deeply troubling. Are drone strikes a diplomatic chit? Do we call someone dangerous because he gets in the way of what we’ve persuaded ourselves we need to do somewhere? If it was necessary to get a foreign leader to help us with a war, could we, by the same reasoning, kill someone who was merely a political threat—or a political figure who, say, by rallying domestic opposition to drone strikes in a foreign country, we’d decided was helping Al Qaeda?

    • Rights Groups Question Legality of Targeted Killing - NYTimes.com
      http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/13/us/politics/rights-groups-question-legality-of-targeted-killing.html

      .... efforts on Thursday by Representative Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois, to get John O. Brennan, formerly the president’s counterterrorism adviser and now the C.I.A. director, to discuss strike policies during a hearing of the House Intelligence Committee went nowhere.

      (...)

      Ms. Schakowsky was prompted to question Mr. Brennan in part by an article this week by McClatchy News Service reporting that it had obtained classified government documents showing that the drone strikes had killed hundreds of low-level suspected militants whose identities were not known. The article suggested that the documents undercut assertions by Mr. Obama and his aides.

      “There are a lot of things that are printed in the press that are inaccurate, in my mind, and misrepresent the facts,” Mr. Brennan said. When Ms. Schakowsky pressed the point, he said, “I’m not going to engage in any type of discussion on that here today, congresswoman.”