2) As the New York Times reported (I read this quote to the panel and the audience) "Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent."

Given all this, I asked Harman, how can you confidently assert that our drones kill "very few" innocents? As soon as I stopped speaking I grabbed my iPad to record her answer. And here it is:

For me, it was a frustrating exchange. I hoped that the moderator, NPR counterterrorism correspondent Dina Temple-Raston, would press Harman, or former Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, or Retired Brigadier General Craig Nixon to give the audience more information on the subject at issue - the actual number of civilian deaths from American drone strikes, and whether "very few" is an accurate or misleading characterization. She took the conversation in a different direction, pointing out that the military folks who pilot drones take it very seriously. The vast majority of drone critics would readily concede that to be the norm (though as I told her after the panel, we know comparatively little about the C.I.A drone protocol).

So how many civilian casualties from American drone strikes are there? Harman praised White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan for making public some information on the subject of drones. Unfortunately, he isn't a credible source on casualties, which isn't surprising given that he works for an administration that is willing to count all dead military age males as militants.

Even given that absurd standard, the civilian casualty numbers the White House puts out are self-contradictory, as Pro-Publica demonstrates. They go on to give a good rundown of independent civilian casualty estimates in Pakistan:

A count by Bill Roggio, editor of the website the Long War Journal, which bases its estimates on news reports, puts the number of civilian killed in Pakistan at 138. The New America Foundation estimates that, based on press reports, between 293 and 471 civilians have been killed in the attacks. The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which draws on a wider array of sources including researchers and lawyers in Pakistan, puts the number of civilians killed at between 482 and 832. The authors of the various estimates all emphasize that their counts are imperfect.



Of course, drones are being used in other countries too. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which lays out its methodology here, estimates that 58 to 146 civilians have been killed in Yemen, and that 11 to 57 civilians have been killed in Somalia. Michael O'Hanlon is correct when he says, in the clip above, that there are some abroad who have an incentive to inflate the number of deaths by drone the United States is causing. It is also true that the United States has an incentive to understate the numbers, that its methodology for determining who is a militant obviously overstates their numbers, and that there are almost certainly C.I.A. strikes that never get mentioned in the press reports that independent investigators rely on to formulate their numbers.