Taking down the anti drone 'Intercepts'

Lawfare:
The Drone Papers: Intercepting the Nonsense
This is a devastating critique of the  recent attempt to delegitimize the drone program.  Classified information was published by the same guy who did the same thing with the NSA.

Christine Fair, an assistant professor at Georgetown University's Security Studies Program dissects the claims in a way that raises questions about the motivation of the leaker and the accuracy of the claims.
...
With respect to Pakistan, there is one study that actually comes to the exact opposite conclusion as the one put forward by Mr. Greenwald. A few years ago, a Pakistan-based journalist sent a Waziri stringer into Waziristan to interview locals about who died in the drone strikes in their villages. According to the report from that six-month-long study, villagers claimed that “at least 194 people killed in the attacks, about 70 percent–at least 138–were militants. The remaining 56 were either civilians or tribal police, and 38 of them were killed in a single attack on March 17, 2011. Excluding one catastrophically disastrous strike which inflicted one of the worst civilian death tolls since the drone program started in Pakistan, nearly 90 percent of the people killed were militants.
...
There is much more.  Greenwald had claimed that 90  percent of those killed in drone strikes were "innocent."

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