That's an incredible claim. Folks arrested in the United States are investigated for weeks by police officers with local knowledge and access to the friends, family, and associates of the accused. Attorneys are provided. A discovery process helps the prosecution and defense to unearth all relevant evidence. A trial is held before a jury instructed to assign guilt only when the charges are proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Even then the defendant has access to a system of appeals. And as we all know, innocent people are sent to prison despite these safeguards.

How does the Obama Administration perform so much better from thousands of miles away, operating in an unfamiliar culture, often without any American boots on the ground? What's their specific explanation for how they accomplish such unerring judgments with the very same intelligence services that failed to prevent the September 11 attacks, concluded that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, imprisoned scores of innocent people in the prison at Guantanamo Bay, and failed to find Osama bin Laden for an entire decade after they began looking?

The Obama Administration has no explanation. It's all classified.

And what little they have said undermines their credibility. Reading the account that anonymous Obama Administration officials gave the New York Times, you'd think that the president himself is judiciously evaluating the status of everyone who winds up being killed by an American drone. There are a lot of reasons we know that isn't true. Here's another one: No one man is capable of rigorously issuing death warrants at the pace of more than one per day, even as he runs for reelection and conducts all of the other functions that are demanded of American presidents.

Don't get me wrong. The dead killed by American drones in Pakistan are often actually bad guys, just as if police chiefs were empowered to execute murderers without trial the dead would often be guilty. But believing that innocents are killed as seldom as the Obama Administration claims is willfully naive. You don't have to see the video of an Apache helicopter mistaking journalists for insurgents, or to read about the two American soldiers killed in a friendly-fire drone death, or to hear a retired brigadier general discussing how easy it is for drone operators to misidentify targets, in order to intuitively grasp that America can't reliably discern between the guilty and the unlucky via drone camera, at least not at the pace of one guilty person killed every single day.

This isn't an argument about whether the drone war is necessary or not, a subject best left to other posts. All I'm saying is that, necessary or not, the drone war results in a lot more innocents killed than the Obama Administration acknowledges. There is a lot of different evidence for that proposition. The sheer pace at which we're killing people is one piece of evidence.

