The New York Times Practically Ignores Shocking Drone War Disclosures
Sunday, 08 November 2015 00:00 By John Hanrahan, ExposeFacts | News Analysis
Do The New York Times editors really believe that one major drone story every
year or so is all that is required, even in the face of vital new information
published by a competitor? (Image: Predator drone via Shutterstock)
For that slice of the American public that still depends heavily on major daily
newspapers as their main source of news, they might not even know that the
on-line publication The Intercept has published a package of alarming
drone-assassination articles based on secret military documents provided by an
anonymous intelligence whistleblower.
These "Drone Papers" show, among other disclosures, that the U.S. government
has been lying about the number of civilian deaths caused by drone strikes in
Afghanistan,Yemen and Somalia. For every targeted individual assassinated,
another five or six non-targeted individuals are killed - giving the lie to the
Obama administration's long-standing claims of careful, precision killing of
specific targets in order to avoid killing civilians.
The Intercept, relying on a cache of slides provided to it by its whistleblower
source, posted its package of eight articles on October 15, 2015. Among those
picking up on the stories was the Huffington Post (which ran excerpts), and
other outlets - including The Guardian, Newsweek, New York Magazine, NPR, the
PBS NewsHour, CNN - which generally cited some of The Intercept's main findings
or speculated about a "second [Edward] Snowden" coming forth as a national
security whistleblower.
As of this writing, the premiere mainstream publications that carry influence
beyond their own immediate readership in setting the nation's news agenda - The
New York Times and The Washington Post - have carried virtually nothing about
what is in these explosive documents, which cover the 2011-2013 period. The
documents show the inner workings, and the deadly failures, of the Joint
Special Operations Command's targeted killing programs, a/k/a assassinations,
which President Obama signs off on.
The Post so far appears to have ignored The Intercept's stories; The Times - in
a move lightly criticized by the paper's public editor Margaret Sullivan -
managed to attach a whopping two paragraphs about The Intercept's scoop to the
end of a story about Obama's decision to keep troops in Afghanistan until 2017.
Those who didn't read beyond the first few paragraphs of the
troops-in-Afghanistan story would have missed altogether that bare mention of
The Intercept's scoop in the article's 24th and 25th paragraphs - as I did.
Among the findings derived from the documents, which Post and Times readers
have been deprived of: While drones do kill some of their intended targets,
they kill far more non-targeted people who happen to be in the vicinity of the
drone strike (or who happen to be using the cell phone or computer of someone
who was targeted). In one major special operations program in northeastern
Afghanistan called Operation Haymaker (the only finding The Times mentioned in
its two paragraphs), 35 individuals targeted for assassination were actually
killed in drone strikes, but 219 other non-targeted individuals were also
killed.
This meant, The Intercept reported, that during one five-month period of
Operation Haymaker, "nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were
not the intended targets. In Yemen and Somalis where the U.S. has far more
limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are the intended
targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse."
All those killed - intended target or not - are designated "enemy killed in
action" (EKIA), the source told The Intercept. Official U.S. government
statements minimizing the number of civilian casualties, the source said, are
"exaggerating at best, if not outright lies."
Now at first I thought it could be that The Times and The Post were working
diligently to match The Intercept stories, attempting before printing anything
to obtain and carefully review similar sets of slides as The Intercept used for
its stories. After all, The Intercept's articles didn't just appear overnight,
but rather "were produced by a team of reporters and researchers…that has spent
months analyzing the documents." Perhaps these mainstream outlets were also
attempting to take the story beyond what The Intercept has posted, I
speculated. If so, we should all eagerly await the results.
But at least as far as The Times is concerned, that doesn't appear to be the
case. The paper's public editor Margaret Sullivan questioned Times executive
editor Dean Baquet, and the editor for national security coverage, William
Hamilton, as to "why the story had received relatively short shrift."
In response, Sullivan wrote, "Both said they found the project a worthy one.
They and several Washington editors looked it over with interest, they said,
and agreed that there was new detail in it. But they didn't see it as something
that warranted its own story, at least not at the moment, they said."
The Times editors' responses smack of that old chestnut of an excuse in the
newsroom when some other publication scoops you: "We had that story already.
Nothing much new here. Let's kiss it off with two paragraphs."
Before commenting further on The Times's editors' fairly inane response, it
must be noted that over the past few years New York Times reporter Scott Shane
has written some revealing stories about the U.S. drone program - without
benefit of documents such as The Intercept is reporting on. Shane's articles
included one earlier this year noting that, despite reassurances from the
President on down, the U.S. is often unsure about whom it is actually killing
in drone strikes - a major disclosure reinforced by The Intercept documents and
its source.
And in May 2012, Shane and Jo Becker were the first to report that President
Obama signed off on a secret "kill list" of individuals to be targeted in drone
strikes. The reporters at the same time also revealed that Obama "embraced a
disputed method for counting civilian casualties… It in effect counts all
military-age males in a strike zone as combatants…unless there is explicit
intelligence posthumously proving them innocent."
But this past significant coverage does not excuse why The Times and much of
the mainstream press has so far not reported even a good timely summary of what
The Intercept has published in its articles, which advance the drone story
beyond what has previously been reported. As revealing as The Times stories
were at the time, they lacked what The Intercept now has: actual secret
military documents that back up what its exclusive source is telling it, and
that provide far more detail and data about the program than what was printed
earlier.
The Times editors' explanations just don't wash. Do these editors really
believe that one major drone story every year or so is all that is required,
even in the face of vital new information published by a competitor? In a
newspaper full of wall-to-wall stories on Donald Trump, Republican Benghazi
shenanigans, the ever-shifting permutations of the Democratic and Republican
presidential races in Iowa and New Hampshire - stories all full of much the
same elements one day to the next - it boggles the mind to think The Times
believes it has "done" its quota of drone-atrocity stories for the time being.
That they saw nothing in The Intercept's stories "that warranted its own story"
in The Times.
Do Times editors believe we, their reading public, don't need to know anything
more about this dreadful subject than what they told us in articles last spring
and in the spring of 2012? That what Shane reported last May, as substantial a
story as it was, is the last word in drone murders? The editors even
acknowledged to Sullivan that The Intercept stories contained "new detail." Why
not share all that new detail with its readers?
The Intercept, after all, is a reliable, hard-charging news organization
staffed by several of the nation's top national security investigative
reporters, and no editor at any other news operation should have any hesitancy
about reporting a summary of its drone findings, backed up as they are by
insider documents. And in reporting the summary, of course crediting The
Intercept in the same manner print news media and broadcast newscasts
frequently do when they themselves don't have a particular important story from
their own reporters. It happens all the time.
Mainstream news organizations have an obligation to provide their readers with
important, credible, timely news reports, even when the report comes from a
competing - and reputable - news organization, and even if they might be
working on their own story which they hope to publish at some point.
Margaret Sullivan didn't come down hard on The Times for all but ignoring The
Intercept's stories, noting that since the newspaper "has done so much on this
subject, it may be understandable that only a brief mention of The Intercept's
scoop has been made so far." Still, she added, "given the revelations in the
released documents - as well as the mere existence of a major intelligence
leaker who is not Edward Snowden - Times journalists would have served readers
well to do more on 'The Drone Papers.' They also could consider doing so in the
future."
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of readers of The Times and The Post and other
mainstream news outlets are being denied actual news that has serious
implications for the ways the United States wages the endless wars this nation
has been recklessly embarked on for the last 14 years.
Jeremy Scahill, the award-winning reporter who headed The Intercept's reporting
team on the Drone Papers, described the importance of the documents this way:
"Taken together, the secret documents lead to the conclusion that Washington's
14-year high-value targeting campaign suffers from an overreliance on signals
intelligence [metadata from cellphones and computers], an apparently
incalculable civilian toll, and - due to a preference for assassination rather
than capture - an inability to extract potentially valuable intelligence from
terror suspects. They also highlight the futility of the war in Afghanistan by
showing how the U.S. has poured vast resources into killing local insurgents,
in the process exacerbating the very threat the U.S. is seeking to confront."
Scahill said the information in these secret slides is "especially relevant
today as the U.S. military intensifies its drone strikes and covert actions
against ISIS in Syria and Iraq."
Tragically, there are few voices in the mainstream press and in Congress
raising any alarms about the proliferation of what Scahill calls the borderless
U.S. "unconventional wars that employ special operations forces at the tip of
the spear…"
Like so much else in the never-ending global war on Terror, Inc., the
euphemistically named targeted killings have become part of the military
landscape which most Americans passively accept as just the way things are, if
they pay any attention at all. There are many brave souls around the country
who regularly protest and get arrested at military drone sites and drone
contractors' facilities, or at the Pentagon and White House protesting against
drones and U.S. militarism generally, but there is no mass movement.
With only a relative handful of people protesting - and with no congressional
hearings and only sporadic news coverage raising any serious questions about
the morality and legality of targeted assassinations under international law -
the policy isn't likely to change. Not unless and until a critical mass of well
organized citizens rises up in revulsion and anger at these cowardly killings
and endless wars being carried out in our name.
And one big way the public should be able to find out more about the horrors of
drone warfare - and how it fits into never-ending U.S. militarism - is from a
news media that sees it as its mission to report about such subjects in all
their terror and gruesome death aspects.
This topic truly is one of life and death for many people, particularly the
beleaguered citizens of the greater Middle East. And it carries deep
implications for our democracy, as well. As Scahill wrote about the Drone
Papers:
"Whether through the use of drones, night raids, or new platforms yet to be
unleashed, these documents lay bare the normalization of assassination as a
central component of U.S. counterterrorism policy."
The normalization of the United States as prime International Assassin:
Somehow, that sounds like news - scary news that the American people need to
know, and need to hear again and again.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be
reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
JOHN HANRAHAN
John Hanrahan, currently on the editorial board of ExposeFacts, is a former
executive director of The Fund for Investigative Journalism and reporter for
The Washington Post, The Washington Star, UPI and other news organizations. He
also has extensive experience as a legal investigator. Hanrahan is the author
of Government by Contract and co-author of Lost Frontier: The Marketing of
Alaska. He has written extensively for NiemanWatchdog.org, a project of the
Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
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Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
The New York Times Practically Ignores Shocking Drone War Disclosures
Sunday, 08 November 2015 00:00 By John Hanrahan, ExposeFacts | News Analysis
• font size Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
reference not valid.
• Do The New York Times editors really believe that one major drone
story every year or so is all that is required, even in the face of vital new
information published by a competitor? (Image: Predator drone via Shutterstock)
• For that slice of the American public that still depends heavily on
major daily newspapers as their main source of news, they might not even know
that the on-line publication The Intercept has published a package of alarming
drone-assassination articles based on secret military documents provided by an
anonymous intelligence whistleblower.
These "Drone Papers" show, among other disclosures, that the U.S. government
has been lying about the number of civilian deaths caused by drone strikes in
Afghanistan,Yemen and Somalia. For every targeted individual assassinated,
another five or six non-targeted individuals are killed - giving the lie to the
Obama administration's long-standing claims of careful, precision killing of
specific targets in order to avoid killing civilians.
The Intercept, relying on a cache of slides provided to it by its whistleblower
source, posted its package of eight articles on October 15, 2015. Among those
picking up on the stories was the Huffington Post (which ran excerpts), and
other outlets - including The Guardian, Newsweek, New York Magazine, NPR, the
PBS NewsHour, CNN - which generally cited some of The Intercept's main findings
or speculated about a "second [Edward] Snowden" coming forth as a national
security whistleblower.
As of this writing, the premiere mainstream publications that carry influence
beyond their own immediate readership in setting the nation's news agenda - The
New York Times and The Washington Post - have carried virtually nothing about
what is in these explosive documents, which cover the 2011-2013 period. The
documents show the inner workings, and the deadly failures, of the Joint
Special Operations Command's targeted killing programs, a/k/a assassinations,
which President Obama signs off on.
The Post so far appears to have ignored The Intercept's stories; The Times - in
a move lightly criticized by the paper's public editor Margaret Sullivan -
managed to attach a whopping two paragraphs about The Intercept's scoop to the
end of a story about Obama's decision to keep troops in Afghanistan until 2017.
Those who didn't read beyond the first few paragraphs of the
troops-in-Afghanistan story would have missed altogether that bare mention of
The Intercept's scoop in the article's 24th and 25th paragraphs - as I did.
Among the findings derived from the documents, which Post and Times readers
have been deprived of: While drones do kill some of their intended targets,
they kill far more non-targeted people who happen to be in the vicinity of the
drone strike (or who happen to be using the cell phone or computer of someone
who was targeted). In one major special operations program in northeastern
Afghanistan called Operation Haymaker (the only finding The Times mentioned in
its two paragraphs), 35 individuals targeted for assassination were actually
killed in drone strikes, but 219 other non-targeted individuals were also
killed.
This meant, The Intercept reported, that during one five-month period of
Operation Haymaker, "nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were
not the intended targets. In Yemen and Somalis where the U.S. has far more
limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are the intended
targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse."
All those killed - intended target or not - are designated "enemy killed in
action" (EKIA), the source told The Intercept. Official U.S. government
statements minimizing the number of civilian casualties, the source said, are
"exaggerating at best, if not outright lies."
Now at first I thought it could be that The Times and The Post were working
diligently to match The Intercept stories, attempting before printing anything
to obtain and carefully review similar sets of slides as The Intercept used for
its stories. After all, The Intercept's articles didn't just appear overnight,
but rather "were produced by a team of reporters and researchers…that has spent
months analyzing the documents." Perhaps these mainstream outlets were also
attempting to take the story beyond what The Intercept has posted, I
speculated. If so, we should all eagerly await the results.
But at least as far as The Times is concerned, that doesn't appear to be the
case. The paper's public editor Margaret Sullivan questioned Times executive
editor Dean Baquet, and the editor for national security coverage, William
Hamilton, as to "why the story had received relatively short shrift."
In response, Sullivan wrote, "Both said they found the project a worthy one.
They and several Washington editors looked it over with interest, they said,
and agreed that there was new detail in it. But they didn't see it as something
that warranted its own story, at least not at the moment, they said."
The Times editors' responses smack of that old chestnut of an excuse in the
newsroom when some other publication scoops you: "We had that story already.
Nothing much new here. Let's kiss it off with two paragraphs."
Before commenting further on The Times's editors' fairly inane response, it
must be noted that over the past few years New York Times reporter Scott Shane
has written some revealing stories about the U.S. drone program - without
benefit of documents such as The Intercept is reporting on. Shane's articles
included one earlier this year noting that, despite reassurances from the
President on down, the U.S. is often unsure about whom it is actually killing
in drone strikes - a major disclosure reinforced by The Intercept documents and
its source.
And in May 2012, Shane and Jo Becker were the first to report that President
Obama signed off on a secret "kill list" of individuals to be targeted in drone
strikes. The reporters at the same time also revealed that Obama "embraced a
disputed method for counting civilian casualties… It in effect counts all
military-age males in a strike zone as combatants…unless there is explicit
intelligence posthumously proving them innocent."
But this past significant coverage does not excuse why The Times and much of
the mainstream press has so far not reported even a good timely summary of what
The Intercept has published in its articles, which advance the drone story
beyond what has previously been reported. As revealing as The Times stories
were at the time, they lacked what The Intercept now has: actual secret
military documents that back up what its exclusive source is telling it, and
that provide far more detail and data about the program than what was printed
earlier.
The Times editors' explanations just don't wash. Do these editors really
believe that one major drone story every year or so is all that is required,
even in the face of vital new information published by a competitor? In a
newspaper full of wall-to-wall stories on Donald Trump, Republican Benghazi
shenanigans, the ever-shifting permutations of the Democratic and Republican
presidential races in Iowa and New Hampshire - stories all full of much the
same elements one day to the next - it boggles the mind to think The Times
believes it has "done" its quota of drone-atrocity stories for the time being.
That they saw nothing in The Intercept's stories "that warranted its own story"
in The Times.
Do Times editors believe we, their reading public, don't need to know anything
more about this dreadful subject than what they told us in articles last spring
and in the spring of 2012? That what Shane reported last May, as substantial a
story as it was, is the last word in drone murders? The editors even
acknowledged to Sullivan that The Intercept stories contained "new detail." Why
not share all that new detail with its readers?
The Intercept, after all, is a reliable, hard-charging news organization
staffed by several of the nation's top national security investigative
reporters, and no editor at any other news operation should have any hesitancy
about reporting a summary of its drone findings, backed up as they are by
insider documents. And in reporting the summary, of course crediting The
Intercept in the same manner print news media and broadcast newscasts
frequently do when they themselves don't have a particular important story from
their own reporters. It happens all the time.
Mainstream news organizations have an obligation to provide their readers with
important, credible, timely news reports, even when the report comes from a
competing - and reputable - news organization, and even if they might be
working on their own story which they hope to publish at some point.
Margaret Sullivan didn't come down hard on The Times for all but ignoring The
Intercept's stories, noting that since the newspaper "has done so much on this
subject, it may be understandable that only a brief mention of The Intercept's
scoop has been made so far." Still, she added, "given the revelations in the
released documents - as well as the mere existence of a major intelligence
leaker who is not Edward Snowden - Times journalists would have served readers
well to do more on 'The Drone Papers.' They also could consider doing so in the
future."
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of readers of The Times and The Post and other
mainstream news outlets are being denied actual news that has serious
implications for the ways the United States wages the endless wars this nation
has been recklessly embarked on for the last 14 years.
Jeremy Scahill, the award-winning reporter who headed The Intercept's reporting
team on the Drone Papers, described the importance of the documents this way:
"Taken together, the secret documents lead to the conclusion that Washington's
14-year high-value targeting campaign suffers from an overreliance on signals
intelligence [metadata from cellphones and computers], an apparently
incalculable civilian toll, and - due to a preference for assassination rather
than capture - an inability to extract potentially valuable intelligence from
terror suspects. They also highlight the futility of the war in Afghanistan by
showing how the U.S. has poured vast resources into killing local insurgents,
in the process exacerbating the very threat the U.S. is seeking to confront."
Scahill said the information in these secret slides is "especially relevant
today as the U.S. military intensifies its drone strikes and covert actions
against ISIS in Syria and Iraq."
Tragically, there are few voices in the mainstream press and in Congress
raising any alarms about the proliferation of what Scahill calls the borderless
U.S. "unconventional wars that employ special operations forces at the tip of
the spear…"
Like so much else in the never-ending global war on Terror, Inc., the
euphemistically named targeted killings have become part of the military
landscape which most Americans passively accept as just the way things are, if
they pay any attention at all. There are many brave souls around the country
who regularly protest and get arrested at military drone sites and drone
contractors' facilities, or at the Pentagon and White House protesting against
drones and U.S. militarism generally, but there is no mass movement.
With only a relative handful of people protesting - and with no congressional
hearings and only sporadic news coverage raising any serious questions about
the morality and legality of targeted assassinations under international law -
the policy isn't likely to change. Not unless and until a critical mass of well
organized citizens rises up in revulsion and anger at these cowardly killings
and endless wars being carried out in our name.
And one big way the public should be able to find out more about the horrors of
drone warfare - and how it fits into never-ending U.S. militarism - is from a
news media that sees it as its mission to report about such subjects in all
their terror and gruesome death aspects.
This topic truly is one of life and death for many people, particularly the
beleaguered citizens of the greater Middle East. And it carries deep
implications for our democracy, as well. As Scahill wrote about the Drone
Papers:
"Whether through the use of drones, night raids, or new platforms yet to be
unleashed, these documents lay bare the normalization of assassination as a
central component of U.S. counterterrorism policy."
The normalization of the United States as prime International Assassin:
Somehow, that sounds like news - scary news that the American people need to
know, and need to hear again and again.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be
reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
John Hanrahan
John Hanrahan, currently on the editorial board of ExposeFacts, is a former
executive director of The Fund for Investigative Journalism and reporter for
The Washington Post, The Washington Star, UPI and other news organizations. He
also has extensive experience as a legal investigator. Hanrahan is the author
of Government by Contract and co-author of Lost Frontier: The Marketing of
Alaska. He has written extensively for NiemanWatchdog.org, a project of the
Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
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