‘Following recent revelations by the New York Times that all military-aged males in Waziristan are considered fair game by the CIA in its drone strikes, many US journalists have been reassessing how they report on deaths in the attacks.

So when CNN’s national security analyst Peter Bergen produced a graph claiming that no civilians have been killed in Pakistan this year by US drones, his views were bound to attract criticism. Conor Friedersdorf, a columnist at The Atlantic, accused CNN and Bergen of running ‘bogus data‘, for example.

Bergen is also a director of the New America Foundation, which for more than three years has run a database on CIA drone strikes in Pakistan and produces estimates of numbers killed. That data is the most frequent source of statistics for the US media, including CNN itself. So the accuracy of its material is important.

Yet there are credible reports of civilian deaths in Pakistan this year. And unlike the New America Foundation the Bureau actively tracks those claims.

Up to July 16 for example, between three and 27 civilians have been reported killed in Pakistan this year, out of 148 – 220 deaths. Some were actively defined as civilians by news organisations including Reuters and AFP. But these are not necessarily the only civilian deaths. Ambivalent reports might sometimes refer only to ‘people’ or ‘local tribesmen’ killed. More research is needed. And of the remaining alleged militants killed, we have so far been able to name just 13 individuals.’

‘Alternative News tidbits for May 15, 2012

- Despite pressure from the Anglo-American-Israeli empire, Syria are still sending 10 or more athletes to the Olympic Games in London. They will represent many sports, including swimming, track and field, weightlifting, boxing, equestrian and shooting.

Syrian Olympic Committee President Gen. Mowaffak Joumaa could be banned from entering England due to the ongoing proxy war.

More @ NECN.com
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- The US war machine continues its reckless campaign of drone strikes on Yemen, killing as many as 12 innocent civilians today in two strikes. According to the West the collateral damage is justified because they are targeting Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, although as alternative commentators have continually pointed out, the dubious group was once run by Pentagon Asset Anwar Al-Awalki and was implicated in the contrived Underpants bombings; the first being the failed attack by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in 2009, who was directed on to the plane by US officials, and the much hyped 2012 bomb plot which turned out to be an operation by a CIA/Saudi/British intelligence informant.

More @ AntiWar.com
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- In a rare example of Israel being officially lambasted by a Western power, the European Union has issued a second report in its European Neighborhood Policy review, that describes “potentially discriminatory or even anti-democratic bills” passed in the Knesset, and that claimed “media freedom, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly remained problematic in the occupied Palestinian territory in 2011.”

More @ the Jerusalem Post’

‘Washington, DC. 08 May (Asiantribune.com): John Brennan, assistant to the US president for homeland security and counterterrorism, speaking on April 30 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. acknowledging for the first time the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAE or Drones) declared that “Strikes against individuals are subject to high levels of scrutiny and ordered when there is a high degree of confidence that civilians will not be injured or killed, “except in the rarest of circumstances.”

Dismissing the notion that the US drone attacks in the Afghan-Pakistan-Somalia and other targeted geographical areas cause the deaths of unarmed civilians, Obama administration’s top terrorism adviser further reiterated “Targeted strikes conform to the principle of distinction—the idea that only military objectives may be intentionally targeted and that civilians are protected from being intentionally targeted. With the unprecedented ability of remotely piloted aircraft to precisely target a military objective while minimizing collateral damage, one could argue that never before has there been a weapon that allows us to distinguish more effectively between an al-Qaeda terrorist and innocent civilians.”
Speaking on a previous occasion in June 2011 about the preceding year, he said “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.”

Mr. Brennan later adjusted his statement somewhat, saying, “Fortunately, for more than a year, due to our discretion and precision, the U.S. government has not found credible evidence of collateral deaths resulting from U.S. counterterrorism operations outside of Afghanistan or Iraq.”

In remarks on April 30, US counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan admitted for the first time that US drones have killed civilians. But he said “It is exceedingly rare, but it has happened,” he said.

This is just not true says the UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism the group that keeps the best count of casualties from U.S. drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. According to its figures, since 2004, U.S. has killed between about 2,500-3,000 people in Pakistan. Of those, between 479 and 811 were civilians, 174 of them children.
Here are the statistics that the mainstream media in the United States has not disclosed, and what Mr. Brennan endeavors to side step documented by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

CIA Drone Strikes in Pakistan 2004 – 2012

Total US strikes: 321 

Obama strikes: 269 

Total reported killed: 2,429 - 3,097 

Civilians reported killed: 479 – 811

Children reported killed: 174 

Total reported injured: 1,169-1,281

US Covert Action in Yemen 2002 – 2012

Total US strikes : 41 - 128 

Total US drone strikes: 31 - 67 

Total reported killed: 294 - 651 

Civilians reported killed: 55 - 105 

Children reported killed: 24 

US Covert Action in Somalia 2007 – 2012

Total US strikes: 10 - 21 

Total US drone strikes: 3 - 9 

Total reported killed: 58 - 169 

Civilians reported killed: 11 - 57 

Children reported killed: 1 - 3’

‘Since 2011, reports of arsonists and gunmen amongst Syria’s opposition have been included in reports regarding the unrest in Syria, albeit buried under sensational headlines of the Syrian government’s “brutality.” More recently, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has conceded that indeed the Syrian opposition “Free Syrian Army” is conducting widespread, systematic abuses including the kidnapping, torture, and murder of both security forces and civilians.

The HRW report titled, “Syria: Armed Opposition Groups Committing Abuses,” is broken into three parts; kidnapping, torture, and executions. And while the report attempts to focus mainly on atrocities carried out against security forces and government supporters, the mention of civilian victims is made as well.’

‘When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians, including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony. “[A]t times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!”

The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum.’