I'll say it again: A lie travels at the speed of sound; Truth travels at the speed of Light...
Robert Naiman is still asking the critical three questions thart journalists should be asking regarding the strange case of Julian Assange.
1) why Sweden won't agree to question Assange in the UK;
2) why Sweden won't promise not to extradite Assange to the United States if he voluntarily goes to Sweden;
3) why the UK won't promise to oppose an extradition request from the U.S. to Sweden if Assange voluntarily goes to Sweden.”
The New America Foundation – NAF, to you wonkers out there. ‘Naff’’if you believe murder raining down out of the sky is “tacky, uncool, déclassé” – has been crunching numbers like a squirrel in a walnut tree and here’s what it has come up with: 24 strikes with civilian casualties accounting for only 30 percent of the total.
Okay; Back to the Factual: In 24 drone strikes from 2008 through 2011, Civilians accounted for 74 percent of the death toll
The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) spent three months in late 2010 and early 2011 interviewing eyewitnesses and others with direct knowledge of the strikes.
The data on 11 drone strikes from 2008 through 2011 were collected in 2010 and 2011 from families of victims of the strikes by Pakistani lawyer Mirza Shahzad Akbar. Those 11 cases represent only a fraction of the total number on which Akbar has obtained data from victim's relatives.
Could relatives of drone strike victims have a personal interest in declaring the innocence of their relatives? Well, hell yes. However, the details provided by relatives in legal affidavits, such as the age, employment and other characteristics of the victims, appear in almost every case to support their claims that those killed were not actively involved with al-Qaeda or other military organizations.
The extraordinarily wide spread between the low and high estimates for total number of deaths from drone strikes, as well for as the total number of "militants" killed turns out to be a major problem with the NAF statistics on drone victims. It strains credibility – and it fucking-well should.
Because here’s the nut of it: if you don’t have sufficient information, it isn’t possible to ask the right questions. Information wanted to “be free” but that hasn’t worked out so instead, information wants to play dress-up. Sort of the Incognito Truth…
- KBOO