Last month, The Intercept – an online news site co-founded by investigative journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill – published an exposé detailing the inner workings of the Obama administration’s targeted killing program.
Based on classified documents obtained by an unnamed US intelligence source, “The Drone Papers” identifies fundamental flaws in Obama’s drone campaign: from an over reliance on faulty signals intelligence and overstatements of the precision of drone strikes to lowballing civilian casualities.
While “The Drone Papers” presents a searing indictment of the criminality of US drone warfare, the media blackout surrounding this explosive report reveals the shortcomings of an all too compliant, and frequently complicit, press corps.
You’d think the mainstream media would be all over this story. After all, it has all the makings of a blockbuster: classified documents, a government whistleblower, and details surrounding one of the most secretive military operations in US history.
And yet, as of this broadcast, this exposé hasn’t gained much traction beyond the independent press and foreign news outlets.
Thus, “The Drone Papers” not only demonstrates the value of investigative journalism; it reveals the complicity of US news media in legitimating America’s imperial ambitions in the 21st century.
Sources
Scahill, J. et al. (15 October 2015). “The Drone Papers.” The Intercept.
Goodman, A. (16 October 2015). “Drone War Exposed: Jeremy Scahill on US Kill Program’s Secrets & the Whistleblower Who Leaked Them.” Democracy Now!
McCarthy, T. (16 October 2015). “Snowden and Ellsberg Hail Leak of Drone Documents From New Whistleblower.” The Guardian.
