{"id":50132,"date":"2014-11-24T12:00:38","date_gmt":"2014-11-24T12:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=50132"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:27:17","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:27:17","slug":"on-media-outlets-that-continue-to-describe-unknown-drone-victims-as-militants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/11\/on-media-outlets-that-continue-to-describe-unknown-drone-victims-as-militants\/","title":{"rendered":"On Media Outlets That Continue to Describe Unknown Drone Victims as \u201cMilitants\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo:<\/a>

Photo: Justin Sullivan\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

It has been more than two years since\u00a0The New York Times<\/em> revealed<\/a> that \u201cMr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties\u201d of his drone strikes which\u00a0\u201cin effect\u00a0counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants<\/strong>\u2026unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.\u201d The paper noted<\/a> that \u201cthis counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths,\u201d and even quoted CIA officials as deeply \u201ctroubled\u201d by this decision: \u201cOne called it \u2018guilt by association\u2019 that has led to \u2018deceptive\u2019 estimates of civilian casualties.\u00a0\u2018It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants.\u00a0They count the corpses and they\u2019re not really sure who they are<\/strong>.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

But what bothered even some intelligence officials at\u00a0the agency carrying\u00a0out the strikes seemed of no concern whatsoever to most major media outlets. As I documented<\/a> days after the\u00a0Times<\/em> article, most large western media outlets\u00a0continued to describe completely unknown victims of U.S. drone attacks as \u201cmilitants\u201d\u2014even though they (a) had no idea who those victims were or what they had done and (b) were well-aware by that point that the term had been \u201cre-defined\u201d by the Obama administration into Alice in Wonderland<\/em>-level nonsense.<\/p>\n

Like the U.S. drone program itself, this deceitful media practice continues unabated.\u00a0\u201cDrone strike kills at least four suspected militants in northwest Pakistan,\u201d a\u00a0Reuters headline<\/a> asserted last week. The headline<\/a> chosen by\u00a0ABC News,<\/em> publishing an AP report, was even more definitive: \u201cU.S. Drone in Northwest Pakistan Kills 6 Militants.\u201d In July,\u00a0The Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u2018s headline<\/a> claimed: \u201cU.S. Drone Strike Kills Five Militants in Pakistan\u2019s North Waziristan.\u201d Sometimes they will turn over their headlines to \u201cofficials,\u201d as this AP report<\/a> from July did: \u201cOfficials: US drone kills 7 militants in Pakistan.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"abc-540x328<\/a><\/p>\n

\"reuters-540x375<\/a><\/p>\n

Since its 2012 report, the Times<\/em> itself has tended to avoid the \u201cmilitant\u201d language in its headlines, but often lends credence to dubious official claims<\/a>, as when it said this<\/a> about a horrific U.S. drone strike<\/a> last December on a Yemeni wedding party that killed 12 people and wounded\u00a0at least 15 others, including the bride: \u201cMost of the dead appeared to be people suspected of being militants linked to Al Qaeda, according to tribal leaders in the area, but there were also reports that several civilians had been killed.\u201d Other U.S. media accounts of that strike were just as bad<\/a>, if not worse. The controversies over the definition of \u201cmilitant\u201d are almost never mentioned in any of these reports.<\/p>\n

A new article<\/a> in\u00a0The New Yorker <\/em>by Steve Coll underscores how deceptive this journalistic practice is. Among other things, he notes that the U.S. government itself\u2014let alone the media outlets calling them \u201cmilitants\u201d\u2014often has no idea who has been\u00a0killed\u00a0by drone strikes in Pakistan. That\u2019s because, in 2008, George W. Bush and his CIA chief, Gen. Michael Hayden, implemented \u201csignature strikes,\u201d under which\u00a0\u201cnew rules allowed drone operators to fire at armed military-aged males engaged in or associated with suspicious activity even if their identities were unknown<\/strong>.\u201d The Intercept<\/em> previously reported<\/a> that targeting decisions\u00a0can even be made on the basis of\u00a0nothing more than\u00a0metadata analysis and tracking of SIM cards in mobile phones.<\/p>\n

The journalist Daniel Klaidman has noted<\/a> that within the CIA, they\u00a0\u201csometimes call it crowd killing<\/strong>\u2026. \u00a0If you don\u2019t have positive ID on the people you\u2019re targeting with these drone strikes.\u201d The tactic of drone-killing first responders and rescuers<\/a>\u00a0who come to the scene of drone attacks or even mourners at funerals of drone victims\u2014used by<\/a> the Obama administration<\/a> and designated \u201cterror groups\u201d alike\u2014are classic examples. Nobody has any real idea who the dead are, but they are nonetheless routinely called \u201cmilitants\u201d by the American government and media. As international law professor Kevin Jon Heller documented<\/a> in 2012, \u201cThe vast majority of drone attacks conducted by the U.S. have been signature strikes\u2014those that target \u2018groups of men who bear certain signatures, or defining characteristics associated with terrorist activity, but whose identities aren\u2019t known.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Coll also describes the critical work of Noor Behram, a photojournalist who has spent years traveling to drone strike scenes in North Waziristan to document\u2014as a 2011 Guardian <\/em>profile<\/a> put it\u2014\u201dthat far more civilians are being injured or dying than the Americans and Pakistanis admit\u201d; that \u201cthe world\u2019s media quickly reports on how many militants were killed in each strike\u201d even though\u00a0\u201creporters don\u2019t go to the spot, relying on unnamed Pakistani intelligence officials\u201d; and that \u201cfor every 10 to 15 people killed, maybe they get one militant.\u201d Coll describes the propagandistic process that continues to shape U.S. media reports on these strikes:<\/p>\n

I picked up a photo that showed Behram outdoors, in a mountainous area, holding up a shredded piece of women\u2019s underwear. He said it was taken during his first investigation, in June, 2007, after an aerial attack on a training camp. American and Pakistani newspapers reported at the time that drone missiles had killed Al Qaeda-linked militants.<\/strong> There were women nearby as well. Although he was unable to photograph the victims\u2019 bodies, he said, \u201cI found charred, torn women\u2019s clothing\u2014that was the evidence.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Since then, he went on, he has photographed about a hundred other sites in North Waziristan, creating a partial record of the dead, the wounded, and their detritus. Many of the faces before us were young. Behram said he learned from conversations with editors and other journalists that if a drone missile killed an innocent adult male civilian, such as a vegetable vender or a fruit seller, the victim\u2019s long hair and beard would be enough to stereotype him as a militant.\u00a0<\/strong>So he decided to focus on children.<\/em><\/p>\n

There\u2019s simply no doubt that U.S. media outlets have continuously and repeatedly\u2014and falsely\u2014described innocent civilians killed by\u00a0U.S. drone attacks as \u201cmilitants.\u201d Just last month, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism documented<\/a> that \u201cfewer than 4% of the people killed have been identified by available records as named members of al Qaeda,\u201d directly contrary to\u00a0\u201cJohn Kerry\u2019s claim last year that only \u2018confirmed terrorist targets at the highest level\u2019 were fired at.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s certainly true that reporting is extremely difficult in those places where U.S. drone strikes are most common. But that\u2019s all the more reason to exercise caution when making claims about who the victims are. Instead, these media outlets reflexively adopt the extremely dubious claims of U.S. officials\u00a0and those of\u00a0allied governments (such as Yemen and Pakistan) about the identity of the victims. That practice, standing alone, is\u00a0indefensible enough as pro-government stenography, but the fact that it continues even two years after the\u00a0Times\u00a0<\/em>revealed\u00a0that the U.S. government has formally adopted a completely propagandistic definition of \u201cmilitant\u201d makes this behavior willfully misleading.<\/p>\n

\"drones<\/a><\/p>\n

\"wsj1-540x236<\/a><\/p>\n

All of this has achieved\u00a0the desired effect. Any time you discuss U.S. drone attacks, you inevitably will be told that the U.S. government is killing \u201cterrorists\u201d and \u201cmilitants\u201d\u2014even though the people making that claim have absolutely no idea who the government is actually killing. It\u2019s easy to dismiss that mindset as supreme irrationality and authoritarianism\u2014what kind of person runs around claiming their government is killing \u201cterrorists\u201d and \u201cmilitants\u201d when they have no idea who the victims are?\u2014but they\u2019re just adopting\u00a0the formula for how the U.S. government and media have consciously chosen to propagandize on this issue.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n

Coll\u2019s article also discusses an oft-ignored aspect of drone warfare: its psychologically terrorizing effects on the targeted population. A joint\u00a02012 report<\/a> from the law schools of Stanford University and NYU, \u201cLiving Under Drones,\u201d documented that \u201cU.S. drone strike policies cause considerable and under-accounted-for harm to the daily lives of ordinary civilians, beyond death and physical injury\u201d\u2014specifically, they \u201chover twenty-four hours a day over communities in northwest Pakistan, striking homes, vehicles, and public spaces without warning. Their presence terrorizes men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities.\u201d Coll\u2019s article similarly notes:<\/p>\n

Being attacked by a drone is not the same as being bombed by a jet. With drones, there is typically a much longer prelude to violence. Above North Waziristan, drones circled for hours, or even days, before striking. People below looked up to watch the machines, hovering at about twenty thousand feet, capable of unleashing fire at any moment, like dragon\u2019s breath. \u201cDrones may kill relatively few, but they terrify many more,\u201d Malik Jalal, a tribal leader in North Waziristan, told me. \u201cThey turned the people into psychiatric patients.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff just released their\u00a0annual \u201ccounterterrorism\u201d report<\/a>\u00a0and it defined \u201cterrorism\u201d this way:<\/p>\n

Terrorism is the unlawful use of violence or threat of violence, often motivated by religious, political, or other ideological\u00a0beliefs, to instill fear and coerce governments or societies in pursuit of goals that are usually political.<\/em><\/p>\n

There is, to put it generously, enormous doubt<\/a> about the legality<\/a> of both \u201csignature strikes\u201d and the targeting of rescuers and mourners. The UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, summary or arbitrary executions, Christof Heyns, has even said<\/a> some U.S. drone attacks may constitute \u201cwar crimes.\u201d Given their intended effects\u2014both physical and psychological\u2014on entire populations, there is a very compelling case to make that continual, sustained drone warfare in places such as Pakistan and Yemen meet the U.S.\u2019s formal definition of \u201cterrorism\u201d found in its latest strategy document.<\/p>\n

___________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

Correction:<\/em><\/strong> This post initially claimed that the bride was among those killed in the so-called \u201cWedding Strike\u201d in Yemen in December 2013. In fact, the bride was injured but not killed.<\/em><\/p>\n

Additional reporting by Margot Williams.<\/em><\/p>\n

Email the author: glenn.greenwald@theintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 firstlook.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties of his drone strikes which \u201cin effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants\u2026unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}