NPR Drones and Disappearing Civilian Casualties

It took awhile, but on Tuesday morning (3-22-11) NPR finally got around to covering (covering up) the March 17th drone-slaughter of civilians in AfPak. On the positive side, the report did feature the dire mental health effects that drone strikes have on residents of the area, and Julie McCarthy did contact a shopkeeper who ends the report by explaining:

"If anyone thinks that people here are happy over the drone strikes, they are foolish....In fact, the drones are fomenting hatred against the government and turning the people against America. We are killed by drones and then labeled as terrorists."

However, the story is undermined from the start. Steve Inskeep kicks things off this way,

"An attack last week reportedly killed at least 40 people. Some WERE militants but most are DESCRIBED as tribal elders." [No mention of where the confirmation of "militants" came from or why those other dozens are only "described" as elders.]

From this modest beginning, Julie McCarthy goes full-in:

"The U.S. has been conducting a covert program using unmanned drones to target militants in Pakistan since 2004. According to the Long War Journal, an authoritative website, the large majority of the 2,000 killed since 2006 were from the Taliban, al-Qaida and affiliated groups."

This statement tells you a lot about the rigor of NPR's standards. If thoroughly enmeshed with US state security/military institutions means authoritative - then the Long War Journal (LWJ) is very authoritative. Take a look at its website where you'll find out that its managing editor Bill Roggio has close ties to the conservative Hoover Institute and The Weekly Standard, frequently embeds with the US and allied militaries, and "presents regularly at the US Air Force's Contemporary Counterinsurgency Warfare School on the media and embedded reporting" (oh, and he also "served as a signalman and infantryman in the US Army and the New Jersey National Guard from 1991 to 1997.") As the LWJ masthead indicates, it is a project of the Foundation for Defence of Democracies - which a glance at its "Who We Are" section (rogues gallery) reveals what kind of "authoritative" viewpoint one can expect from the LWJ:

"Our Leadership Council of Distinguished Advisors includes former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former State Department Under Secretary Paula Dobriansky, Forbes CEO Steve Forbes, former National Security Advisor Robert “Bud” McFarlane, former Ambassador Max Kampelman, Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol, Sen. Joe Lieberman (ID-CT), and former CIA Director R. James Woolsey."

No surprise then that the LWJ's snappy charts claim - absent of any hard evidence - that in 2010, US airstrikes killed 801 Taliban/al-Qaeda operatives and only 14 civilians. In all the searching I've done it is clear that hard evidence is extremely difficult to come by - and that estimated of rates of civilian casualties in US drone strikes range from very high (over 90%) to high (about 30%) to low (3.5% ) to the LWJ's very low 1.7%! Given that the US and Pakistani governments have every reason to low-ball civilian casualties - and given that the US military always denies civilian casualties unless confronted by hard evidence - only a propagandist for the US military would claim a source for the lowest number as "authoritative."

This opting for the lowest numbers of civilian victims of the US long, long, long war is nothing new on NPR, in fact it's their gold standard.

65 and a Half Men (Women and Children)

Here's a brief glimpse into recent activity at the NPR memory hole:

• How about that crazy General Caldwell running psy-ops in Afghanistan on US Senators?And the coverage on NPR? Anyone home?
• Somewhere else in Afghanistan a few (dozens) unarmed folks got wasted in a NATO operation. The response from NPR? Yawn.... Oh well, I guess since the Afghans burned their children to make the US look bad (at least according to that "special breed of soldier: the warrior-scholar") there's nothing to cover on this one...

Then again NPR doesn't have unlimited resources and has to focus on the stories that really matter...such as Ronnie Reagan's Hollywood buddy and Charlie Sheen's personal implosion....

3,000,000 + 58,000 = 58,000

One of history's great villains died yesterday, and NPR was on-call to provide its special math for the occasion . Robert Strange McNamara died yesterday and Monday's ATC featured three segments on his life and legacy - one by Daniel Schorr, the second by Mary Louise Kelly, and the last being Robert Siegel interviewing Errol Morris, McNamara filmmaker and documentarian.

Here's a challenge: listen to all three reports and see if you can find mention of the millions (2 to 4 is the usual estimate) of civilians killed by the United States in the Vietnam war. At least twice, you'll hear of the 58,000 US service people killed in Vietnam. Siegel safely mentions something that McNamara has already admitted to - 100,000 Japanese civilians burned alive in one night of bombing he helped engineer during WWII - but those millions of Vietnamese dead somehow just vanish.

In addition to disappearing millions of civilian victims - there are other distortions in the reports. Daniel Schorr describes McNamara's killing spree as "his stewardship of the Vietnam War." Also McNamara's presidency of the World Bank - where he lavished money on the torture states of Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Romania - is described by Mary Louise Kelly as "a successful tenure" and by Schorr as "helping underdeveloped countries." Schorr goes even further and sees it as McNamara's "way of working out a sense of guilt."

Siegel's interview with Morris offers a telling bit of analysis from Siegel himself. Citing critics who have complained that if McNamara had admitted to some of his mistakes sooner it might have made an actual difference, he surmises "but that might have required his exile from the Washington establishment." Well, Mr. Siegel, turn that judgement on yourself and NPR: to investigate and report the news truthfully would put you and NPR on the outs with those who wield economic, military and political power - and might just lead to NPR's "exile from the Washington establishment." And that just wouldn't do...would it?

And That Video?

On Tuesday I saw Glenn Greenwald's post about secrecy-creep in which he noted this report from McClatchy regarding the Pentagon's decision to suppress a report on the May 4th massacre of Afghan civilians in Farah. This passage in the McClatchy piece caught my eye:

U.S. officials also said they'd release a video that military officials said shows Taliban fighters attacking Afghan and U.S. forces and then running into a building. Shortly afterward, a U.S. aircraft dropped a bomb that destroyed the building.

Video...hmmm? That seemed awfully familiar - and then I remembered that I'd heard about it on NPR. Back on May 29th's Morning Edition - Steve Inskeep interviewed General Petraeus and actually asked him about the May 4th killings, which led to this interchange:

• Inskeep: "....U.S. military officers have said that there is video showing that in fact Taliban fighters were the targets. Have you seen that video?"
• Petraeus: "I have....there is indeed video from a B-1 Bomber that very clearly shows bombs hitting individuals who are the Taliban who are reacting to the movements of the Afghan and coalition forces on the ground."
• Inskeep: "How are they identifiable as Taliban? Men with guns? Men who had just been fighting with Afghan allies on the ground? What is it?
• Petraeus: "It's a combination of intelligence that is then confirmed by this actual video. But we'll lay this out when in fact this brigadier general briefs the press in Kabul, when he's done briefing President Karzai, our leaders in Washington and then returns to Afghanistan."
• Inskeep: "Are you going to release the video itself?"
• Petreaus: "We won't give it to you, but I believe that we will show it as part of the press briefing."
• Inskeep: "So, you're that confident that this video will prove your side of events that you're willing to publicize this?"
• Petraeus: "What it will prove, is that the targets of these different strikes were the Taliban. What it does not prove, is that there were not civilians killed. I think we agree, actually, that there were civilians killed in this incident along — again — with a substantial number of Taliban...."

That was May 29th, and the military quickly made Petraeus' claims a DefenseLink news item. But now it's mid-June and it seems the amazing video isn't so amazing after all. So now I'm just waiting for NPR to get Inskeep back on the phone to the good general and ask him, "Oh yeah, General, about that video....?

My guess is, I'll be waiting and waiting.

Chickens and Eggs

(Cross-posted at Corrente)
As mentioned in an earlier post on the most recent Afghan carnage from US air strikes, NPR presents heaps of skepticism when the US military is accused of any wrongdoing. This drumbeat was maintained by the "liberal" Dan Schorr on Saturday morning:

"...although military sources say they believe that the Taliban itself may have been responsible for at least some of those. The real problem there is that because we don't have enough troops in Afghanistan - that they do a lot of their work from the air, and if you are working from the air...clearly if we go on being blamed for, whether or not we did it, being blamed for the civilian casualties - it's not going to help our cause very much."

You've just got to love that phrase "work from the air" - Schorr is certainly doing his work on the air!

On Monday morning we get to hear from Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson who tells us

"There are very widely diverging accounts about what happened. You have the US military saying that the Taliban in fact may have caused these casualties. You have the human rights commissions saying these were caused by bombs, although they're basing this on second hand accounts....villagers that in fact the attacks did come from the Americans. BUT WHAT SEEMS TO BE CLEAR is that the Taliban instigated these attacks, that basically they had gone into these two remote villages and tried to collect taxes, behead people, or just take over the villages depending on who you talk to..."

How's that for logic? This is not a defense of the Taliban, but - seriously - because they are fighting the puppet of Kabul and the US/NATO occupiers they "instigated" the slaughter of civilians? But wait, shouldn't Nelson have said that the US instigated the deaths when it attacked Afghanistan in 2001? No, wait, maybe it was the Taliban who instigated the deaths when it hosted al-Qaeda who attacked the US in 2001...no, wait, it was the US who helped extremists come to power by funding the mujaheddin...no, wait, it was the Soviets who invaded Afghanistan in 1979...no wait it was the US who baited the Soviets into invading Afghanistan in the first place, no, wait....

Was it the chicken or the egg? On NPR, definitely the chicken...

Blood & Gold

BLOOD

Yesterday on ATC Jason Beaubien's piece on El Salvador's coming election features the usual erasure and distortion of history. Block introduces the feature with this winner:

"In the 1980s, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front drew the U.S. into a bloody Cold War conflict in Central America."

And were the Serbs "drawn in" to the bloody war in Bosnia or Kosovo? Were the Janjaweed "drawn in" to the conflict in Darfur, etc?

From Beubien we get the usual blather about El Salvador being a "front" in Reagan's "battle against the spread of communism in the Americas." Oh, and by the way, "more than 70,000 people died in the war, " though he fails to mention that the vast majority were atrocities against civilians carried out by the US backed government.

GOLD

This morning Lourdes Garcia-Navarro is on for a reprise of her previous cover-up of civilian deaths in Iraq (remember the "Gold Standard"?). There's no mea culpa in this morning's report. More of the same about how unknowable the death count in Iraq is and how "controversial" the Lancet report was - although it's a bit better than her previous report in that it conveys how completely death and violence have touched virtually everyone in Iraq.

I did go ahead and drop a comment on the NPR site beneath the story. I'd recommend occasionally reading listeners' comments - as they are often quite pointed and astute.

Tampering with a Crime Scene

Sometimes there's silence when war crimes are being covered up - and sometimes there's just plain old disinformation. This morning Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, reporting on Bush's trip to Iraq opts for the latter:

"In many ways the Iraq War defined Mr. Bush's presidency....more than 4200 US service members have died, not to mention tens of thousands of Iraqis..."

Imagine the firestorm of criticism that would result if NPR reported that "hundreds of US service members have died." And imagine how galling it would be if NPR continued to do this not once but over and over. The outrage would be immediate and well deserved.

And yet, NPR reporters feel completely comfortable reducing the Iraq death toll by a factors of ten. In June of 2007 John Ydstie silently accepted the low figure of 75,000 deaths "on both sides of the Iraq War," and in August of 2007 Robert Siegel used the comforting rhetoric of "tens of thousands of Iraqis" having died in the war. And sometimes it's simply deafening silence or distortion when reality intrudes on the fantasy of Iraq that NPR and the US government is trying to sell. As Media Bloodhound points out, NPR is right in the mainstream on this coverup of the slaughter that the US has wreaked on Iraq - but that doesn't make it any less criminal...

As always, for more on the well researched Iraqi civilian death toll take a look at Just Foreign Policy.

Militant Radio

Definition 2 from Merriam Webster online's entry for militant is useful: aggressively active (as in a cause) : combative <militant conservationists> militant attitude>

During the hourly news summaries this morning Jackie Northam simply read out a US military statement regarding the killing of several dozen human beings in Afghanistan. By afternoon Craig Wyndam had dropped any reference to the dubious source and was presenting the propaganda if it were established fact:

"In the southern part of the country clashes between militants and Afghan and US-led troops led to a coalition airstrike that killed 25 militants, but also 8 civilians who were being held hostage."

I'm not saying that the information is definitely untrue. It might be true, but - given the record of our high flying wedding crashers - it might well be a flat-out lie. Simply rebroadcasting the US/NATO version of events is sloppy at best, criminal at worst. NPR could simply tell us briefly what the US/NATO version is and then state, "At the current time we have no way of verifying the claims." Or God forbid, they could unembed Jackie Northam who is covering US special forces and their "ambitious training project expected to pay dividends" and send her off to investigate the scene, interview witnesses and report on the findings.

An Endless Supply of Militants

Sickened and frustrated, I sent the following to the Ombudsman:

Dear Ombudsman,

This morning at 8am ET, your newscaster Giles Snyder read the following report during the hourly news summary:

"In eastern Afghanistan, airstrikes have killed at least 22 militants. The US led coalition says Afghan police called for help when Taliban gunmen attacked government offices in two separate towns in Paktika province last night. A provincial governor says surviving militants fled toward the Pakistani border."

As a member of my local NPR affiliated station, I am requesting NPR to be more professional in its reporting and stop its usual practice of repeating as fact claims that are made by US military authorities in Iraq and by US-NATO authorities in Afghanistan.

You must know that the credibility of the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan has been proven to be lacking. The McClatchy News service has recently confirmed that the US military practiced the systematic use of torture for nearly two years early in the Afghanistan War. Also the Afghanistan War has been marked from the start by high levels of civilian casualties from US airstrikes, numbers which the US military has denied. It was only last May and June that media attention was focused on the extremely high numbers of civilian deaths in Afghanistan and the US and NATO's reluctance to admit their responsibility.

You also must know that disputes over US-NATO claims about its airstrikes in Afghanistan have not diminished. A brief look at RAWA, a respected Afghan women's advocacy group, reveals stories on June 11, 2008, June 14, 2008, and June 23, 2008 that call into question the credibility of US-NATO authorities regarding their actions in Afghanistan.

I know you must be very busy and I'm not assuming you will have a chance to read all the links I've included in this letter, but I felt it was important to convey to you that this is not just a matter of opinion and perception. NPR is practicing poor journalism and doing its listeners a grave disservice by repeatedly restating the statements of US-NATO military authorities as if they were factual.

If NPR is going to persist in broadcasting the statements of NATO and US forces in Afghanistan, it is essential that these statements be qualified by disclaimers such as "Previous coalition assertions frequently have been inaccurate or disputed by witnesses," or "Our staff were unable to independently confirm any of these figures through observation or interviews."

Thank you for your time, and you should be aware that I am posting this letter, and any response I receive, on my blog, NPR Check.

We'll see what comes of it...

Two Thousand Bucks

There is something truly grotesque about a nation that spends $12 billion a month on wars in two countries and then offers a few of the families of local victims of its wars $2000 a piece for those killed. There is an ugly racist math involved, too, when one considers the compensation given to US victims of 9/11. However, equally grotesque is a "public" media outlet - NPR - praising this crass use of blood money to supposedly win hearts and minds.

Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reports from Afghanistan on Wednesday's ATC with Michele Norris introducing the story. "Deaths from NATO raids and air strikes have badly damaged relations with the Afghan people, so the US is trying to make amends" Norris assures us.

Nelson then comes on to say how one US raid killed six people, "including a mother and two children." The local governor, she tells us "is not happy...but he's determined to help the military right this wrong, lest the insurgents gain from the tragedy." She describes how US military teams meet with locals who lost family in the raid:

"And so begins a tough 40 minute meeting, a meeting that under international law doesn't have to take place. Nor do American payments need to be made to relatives of the dead which in this case amounts to $2000 for each of the six people killed, but the Americans believe such meetings and payments help keep Afghanistan from ending up back in the hands of the Taliban."

In case you're like me, and thinking that our government and Pentagon leaders are really sick and soulless individuals, Nelson props up the morality of such payoffs by tagging them with an endorsement from Sarah Holewinski, the executive director of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict. Nelson also includes a bit of justification for the killings by touching base with Col. Martin Schweitzer, head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and noting that "he says in this case some of the dead...were insurgents linked to hundreds of Afghan deaths."

To be fair, Nelson did convey the weight of the losses suffered by the local people in this Afghan village - and relates their anger. She mentions that one adolescent boy at the meeting lost both parents and that his uncle must now raise him and several orphans. But the human tragedies were undermined by her insistence on the overall morality and noble intentions of the US military.

Liberating a Million

I'm still waiting for NPR to report on the thousands killed in Darfur - instead of 200,000 - since NPR insists on reducing the number of Iraqi civilians killed by a huge factor. Tonight Siegel introduces John Burnett's Reporter's Notebook segment by stating that since the invasion "more than three thousand seven hundred US troops and at least tens of thousands of Iraqis have died in the war." (Tens of thousands? Here's a little news flash for you Mr. Siegel: it's more like a million).

It was a bizarre report in which Burnett contrasts the immediate post invasion Iraq to today's Made in the USA apocalypse. Back in 2003 Burnett tells us that "in 'liberated' Baghdad, optimism seemed infectious." That Burnett thinks the US ever "liberated" Iraq explains a lot of NPR's coverage of the war. The piece then goes on to feature the longest serving DOD civilian employee who likes to chill by a wading pool with a book in the Green Zone and pretend she's at the beach - pretty scary. Her choice comment was "it's been a life changing experience for me and it's one that I would not trade for anything in the world - nothing..."

Body Counts

"...75,000 people have died on both sides of the Iraq War" asserts Christopher Fettweis, assistant professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. And does John Ydstie mention that this figure is grossly understated based on the respected Lancet Study -which found IRAQI CIVILIAN deaths as high as 655,000 back in October of 2006. No surprise, really, since NPR has made a practice out of savaging the Lancet numbers (numbers which even the Blair government secretly acknowledged as accurate).

Fettweis was trying to make the point that the US loss in Vietnam was a greater "moral" failure than Iraq is - but, hey, there's still a few more years for the US to match the slaughter it achieved in Vietnam.

I will say that Fettweis was at least on to discuss the obvious fact that the US effort in Iraq is a failure.

Other's Have Noticed

Cursor.org picked up this post from Left I on the News disputing the UN report on Iraqi civilian casualties in 2006. There is a telling "update" following the post:

• "A friend heard an NPR report on the U.N. report this morning. After an expert guest explained the limitations of the U.N. report (e.g., some deaths go unreported), he then explained the "better method" of actually surveying the population and how it had been done twice. But, here's the kicker...no mention of Johns Hopkins or the Lancet, and no mention of the actual numbers produced by those studies! And, you won't be surprised to hear, no follow-up question from the NPR interviewer to ask what those numbers were."

It was even worse on Morning Edition that day. Renee Montagne said, "The UN reports more than 34,000 civilians died in Iraq last year, another 36,000 were wounded....the figures are a sharp increase from those previously reported. Earlier in the month the death toll was put at slightly more than 12,000 by the Iraqi government."

No Renee, the figures are a decrease from the approximately 200,000 a year estimate of the Hopkins/Lancet study, which as Left I's friend noted doesn't even get a mention. To see earlier critiques of NPR's assaults on the Lancet study click on the "civilian casualties" label below.

It's a Math Mystery

Tom Gjelten takes on the Johns Hopkins study tonight. Jacki Lyden sets the table by telling listeners, "The number of Iraqis who have died violently since the US invasion in 2003 remains a mystery." Is that so?

The piece is an interesting case of NPR taking a "sideways" approach to discrediting news that doesn't fit the official story. I say sideways, because Gjelten doesn't assert that the Bush 30,000 or the Iraq Body Count's 49,000 is accurate. In fact he quotes a National Democratic Institute guy who thinks the number is more around the 100,000 figure. Regardless of these partial concessions to reality, notice how Gjelten attacks the respected Johns Hopkins study.

After citing the numbers of dead in the report and the breakdown of dead at the hands of US and "coalition" forces Gjelten says with slow, deliberate emphasis, "This would mean US and foreign troops shooting and killing on average 87 Iraqis each and every day over a three and a half year period" and then, with no pause, a different voiceover comes in "...it doesn’t meet the, you know, the plausabiltity test." Again with no pause Gjelten's voice cuts in to say, "Jeffrey White, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, is among those doubting the Johns Hopkins figure" and then finally with no pause, we are back to White saying, "nothing we know about the war in Iraq looks like that." I will admit that it is a skillful bit of sound editing -- worthy of a DIA employee!

Later in the report Gjelten states "Some researchers have criticized the Johns Hopkins surveyors for not using a large enough sample or taking sufficient steps to insure that it was representative of the entire Iraqi population." I'd like to know exactly who these "researchers" are and what agencies they work for.

It's interesting because I did a little of my own math and found that the average of 87 Iraqis killed "each and every day" is not so hard to accept (though it is hard to stomach.) Based on the war and occupation of Iraq lasting 3.5 years I found that the US figure of about 25,000 troops wounded and killed comes out to an average of about 20 US troops killed or seriously wounded every single day. As Left I on the News has noted the typical US response to an attack has been to unleash overwhelming deadly force, a 4:1 ratio of killing seems within reason.

Perhaps what NPR finds really implausible is that our government and its military would slaughter so many people. Maybe they think our country is just too noble and peaceful to do such things. But I did another little bit of depressing math. I calculated the Vietnam War to last 10 years (3650 days) with a death toll of 2 million Vietnamese killed (a conservative estimate) and came up with the figure of 548 humans killed "each and every single day" by the Americans. My conclusion is that 87 killed a day in Iraq by the US meets the "plausibility test" in spite of what Pentagon apologist Jeffery White and NPR wants us to believe.

Passive Attack

This morning offered an interesting contrast between coverage of a story by BBC radio and NPR. I woke up to hear Dan Damon of the BBC interviewing one of the authors of the latest study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health--the study, published in The Lancet, concludes that between 426,369 to 793,663 violent deaths of Iraqi civilians have occured since the US invasion of Iraq.
Then about twenty minutes later I heard Anne Garrels of NPR discrediting the report by noting "that the timing and methodology are being scrutinized," that the previous Lancet Report in 2004 was "criticized as high" and that this current study has numbers that are "more than ten times Iraq Body Count."
This offered a real study. Dan Damon is one of the BBC characters that really irks me--he is hard-hitting and aggressive in his questioning with guests whose politics he is at odds with. At times he is even self-righteous and sarcastic. BUT, in this case, his highly skeptical questions about the report were directed at one of the authors of the report, who answered his questions knowledgably and carefully--frequently explaining the methodology and why the numbers differ from other estimates. It was INFORMATIVE--and listeners could draw their own conclusions. Anne Garrels, by contrast, simply provided the negative reactions of nameless critics (who clearly have a stake in keeping the numbers low).
For thoses wanting more, Juan Cole offers a far more cogent look at the report and how it will be attacked.