Comments on: Analysis: CNN expert’s civilian drone death numbers don’t add up

By: Gwen Winter

Gwen Winter — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 20:26:55 +0000

It really amazes me that the droning of thousands of “terrorists” who in many other cases the US would call Freedom Fighters, are not at all who the majority of Americans are concerned about. Only the “innocent” casualties.

Actually, I don’t buy it. I think most Americans, if told the truth would consider those who oppose US occupation, Freedom Fighters, and not terrorists.

Remember how we loved them, same peoples, probably their ancestors, when we called them Mujahedin?

By: Lance

Lance — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 16:11:48 +0000

The truth needs to be told- even if most Americans mimic the “good Germans” of the Nazi era who just ignored what was being perpetrated under their noses. Bravo, Lance

By: Honza73

Honza73 — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 17:54:00 +0000

Number of killed “militants” and “civilians” much depends on that how you define these respective groups. If you would count every military aged man as well as unidentified charred or dismembered corpse as a suspect militant, then the share of killed militants is always impressively high. And if you ignore almost every reliable report on civilian victims of drone strikes as NAF is apparently doing, then the numbers look even better. Of course, if you choose to count as a militant only those persons positively identified as known active Taliban or other enemy group fighters or activists, then the share of killed militants would be probably well under 10%. And as we are speaking here about informal guerilla groups operating mostly underground and using covert terrorist tactics of asymmetric war, you can say that every single victim of drone attack in Pakistan was a civilian.

By: Tom Mauel

Tom Mauel — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 15:25:16 +0000

The Brookings Institute did a study in 2009 of U.S. drone strikes on Pakistan and found that 9 of 10 drone victims were civilian. A European study estimated 95% of drone victims were civilian.

By: hyperbola

hyperbola — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 08:56:52 +0000

Of course this is the kind of graph made by CNN. CNN is NOT a news organization – it is a tool for manipulating public opinion for the benefit of our corrupt oligarchy, like almost all of our corporate media. CNN stopped being a news organization when it fell into the same circle of “owners” as the rest of the israel-firsters.

By: fauxxbatt

fauxxbatt — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 05:07:29 +0000

was that demo-graphics or the less honest, true or decent,,, “death-o-graphics”,,,oo, ™-ka-ching/$$, on sale huh, the beguilled worry of the sences

By: Gabor Rona

Gabor Rona — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 21:36:06 +0000

BIJ does great work and has identified one of two shortcomings of NAF’s work: their failure to account for all the people who’ve died.

A second shortcoming, one which might, in fact, account for even more wrongful deaths than the first, is the mischaracterization of a casualty as “targetable” when in fact, that person was not targetable under the law of armed conflict. I’ve discussed this with Peter Bergen and he was dismissive, saying it was beyond his study, which relied on news reports to determine who is and is not targetable. However, while NAF swallows whole the US position as reported by most US and international media report on the targetability of any individual, it is skeptical of accounts that don’t track the US line. That, alone, has to skew the results.

The essence of the disconnect between US policy and applicable international law is not complicated, but little discussed. It is that the US gets away with using the emotive terms “terrorist,” “insurgent,” and “militant” to describe who it kills, but those terms have no meaning in applicable international law. Indeed, the much more narrow justification under the law of armed conflict for killing people without due process of law is that they are either a) member of the armed forces of an entity with which we are at war, or b) civilians directly participating in hostilites at the moment of targeting.

By: David

David — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 16:58:58 +0000

I think you are doing something very important not only for Americans, but for the world.
I can’t help but be saddened, though, by the fact that this is where we are as a society – we must argue over how many civilians are killed by our country.
I’d love to find a way to hammer home that these drone strikes, which everyone knows happen (despite the CIA’s “confirm or deny” defense in court), raise questions of legality and should make us all question whether we should allow our military to do whatever it wants.
Your work is a foundation for myself and others like me to bring those questions forward.