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Have you noticed there have been several Mondoweiss articles on drones lately? This isn’t just because we’re trying to get your attention. Drones are finally starting to garner the attention they deserve and it’s not for lack of effort on several fronts. Lots of people have been working very diligently to expose the truth about drones. The recent emergence of reports from Stanford and New York University law schools and Columbia University Law School’s Human Rights Clinic, (highlighted by the UK’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism) coinciding with Code Pink activists traveling to the region to join up with Imran Khan’s march in the Waziristan region in Pakistan, a region under constant drone surveillance, is finally breaking thru to the main stream media.

The U.S. policy of CIA drone strikes is getting global attention. Albeit, still not enough and it’s been a long time coming. This media blackout is about to change big time.

Drones are not a popular topic with the media and the US government is secretive about the CIA drone program and claims it has “tacit consent” to conduct drone strikes within the borders sovereign nations. Drones are also a cash cow for federal defense contracts (the explosive expansion of the drone industry is spelled out in the opening chapters of Medea Benjamin’s must read page turner Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control).

New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan critiques the Times coverage in her Op-ed Questions on Drones, Unanswered Still :

But The Times has not been without fault. Since the article in May, its reporting has not aggressively challenged the administration’s description of those killed as “militants” — itself an undefined term. And it has been criticized for giving administration officials the cover of anonymity when they suggest that critics of drones are terrorist sympathizers. Americans, according to polls, have a positive view of drones, but critics say that’s because the news media have not informed them well. The use of drones is deepening the resentment of the United States in volatile parts of the world and potentially undermining fragile democracies, said Naureen Shah, who directs the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia University’s law school. “It’s portrayed as picking off the bad guys from a plane,” she said. “But it’s actually surveilling entire communities, locating behavior that might be suspicious and striking groups of unknown individuals based on video data that may or may not be corroborated by eyeballing it on the ground.” ……. “It’s very narrow,” said David Rohde, a columnist for Reuters who was kidnapped by the Taliban in 2008 when he was a Times reporter. “What’s missing is the human cost and the big strategic picture.” Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer who has written extensively on this subject for Salon and now for The Guardian, told me he sees “a Western media aversion to focusing on the victims of U.S. militarism. As long as you keep the victims dehumanized it’s somehow all right.”

Mr. Rohde raised another objection: “If a Republican president had been carrying out this many drone strikes in such a secretive way, it would get much more scrutiny,” he said. Scott Shane, the Times reporter, finds the topic knotty and the secrecy hard to penetrate. “This is a category of public yet classified information,” he told me. “It’s impossible to keep the strikes themselves secret, but you’ve never had a serious public debate by Congress on it.” Last month, ProPublica admirably framed the issue in an article titled “How the Government Talks About a Drone Problem It Won’t Acknowledge Exists.”

How can I tell it’s broken through? A conversation between Joe Scarborough and Joe Klein on Morning Joe (beginning around 7:20 in the video above). Klein justifies drone strikes and the resulting deaths of children because he believes they will keep people safer in the U.S. Klein says:

But: the bottom line in the end is – whose 4-year-old get killed? What we’re doing is limiting the possibility that 4-year-olds here will get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror.

Glenn Greenwald called it “the most nakedly sociopathic defenses yet heard of these killings.”

Scarborough distinguishes himself here (and note the backhanded recognition of Code Pink’s diligent activism around drone strikes). First the exchange and then a smidgen of Greenwald’s seethings.

The Guardian: