Please excuse a quick polemical comment before I post a report from The New York Times on the US military's handling of civilian deaths from drone attacks in Afghanistan.
If US commanders or, for that matter, President Obama really wanted to be up front and above board on this issue --- given our supposed campaign for “hearts and minds” in this conflict --- they would say: “Civilians die in war zones. They die from being caught up in the fight, even though they take no part in it. Civilians die from our tactics of unmanned planes firing missiles in this conflict. That is regrettable, but that is war.”
They would say that rather than pretending that these deaths --- which, let it be remembered, the US military denied at the time, just as they have initially denied on every occasion that they carry responsibility --- are the outcome of a one-off mistake by “rogue operators”.
The American military on Saturday released a scathing report on the deaths of 23 Afghan civilians, saying that “inaccurate and unprofessional” reporting by Predator drone operators helped lead to an airstrike in February on a group of innocent men, women and children.
The report said that four American officers, including a brigade and battalion commander, had been reprimanded, and that two junior officers had also been disciplined. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who apologized to President Hamid Karzai after the attack, announced a series of training measures intended to reduce the chances of similar events.
The attack, in which three vehicles were destroyed, illustrated the extraordinary sensitivity to the inadvertent killing of noncombatants by NATO forces. Since taking command here last June, General McChrystal has made protection of civilians a high priority, and has sharply restricted airstrikes.
The overwhelming majority of civilian deaths in Afghanistan are caused by insurgents, but the growing intensity of the fighting this year has sent civilian casualties to their highest levels since 2001.
General McChrystal’s concern is that NATO forces, in their ninth year of operations in Afghanistan, are rapidly wearing out their welcome. Opinion polls here appear to reflect that.
“When we make a mistake, we must be forthright,” General McChrystal said in a statement. “And we must do everything in our power to correct that mistake.”
The civilian deaths highlighted the hazards in relying on remotely piloted aircraft to track people suspected of being insurgents. In this case, as in many others where drones are employed by the military, the people steering and spotting the targets sat at a console in Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.
The attack occurred on the morning of Feb. 21, near the village of Shahidi Hassas in Oruzgan Province, a Taliban-dominated area in southern Afghanistan. An American Special Operations team was tracking a group of insurgents when a pickup truck and two sport utility vehicles began heading their way.
The Predator operators reported seeing only military-age men in the truck, the report said. The ground commander concurred, the report said, and the Special Operations team asked for an airstrike. An OH-58D Kiowa helicopter fired Hellfire missiles and rockets, destroying the vehicles and killing 23 civilians. Twelve others were wounded.
The report, signed by Maj. Gen. Timothy P. McHale, found that the Predator operators in Nevada and “poorly functioning command posts” in the area failed to provide the ground commander with evidence that there were civilians in the trucks. Because of that, General McHale wrote, the commander wrongly believed that the vehicles, then seven miles away, contained insurgents who were moving to reinforce the fighters he and his men were tracking.
There was a time --- say, six months ago --- when I wrote often about US "experts" who offered analysis and advice on Iran. But, taking the advice of readers, I walked away from those pieces: I found myself getting frustrated and involved in diversionary battles which were more about pundits striking public postures than about the complexity of the issues in Iran.
What matters, not just in the end but from the beginning, is not the pronouncements and priorities of broadcasters and columnists but the hopes, concerns, and fears of Iranians.
Forgive me, but I am going to break the pledge of silence over US commentary for a moment today.
I am prompted to do so not by another one-dimensional portrayal of Iran or by the deceitful words of those invoking sensitivity for the Iranian people to justifying bombing the Iranian people. I do so because of two pieces, by two intelligent and thoughtful writers, which start from the premise that we need to review the approach to Iran.
I can't figure out who is actually directing U.S. policy toward Iran, but what's striking (and depressing) about it is how utterly unimaginative it seems to be....We continue to ramp up sanctions that most people know won't work, and we take steps that are likely to reinforce Iranian suspicions and strengthen the clerical regime's hold on power.
I think Walt is an excellent analyst and, even if you disagree with his position on sanctions and the nuclear issue, his critique of the US Government's tactics is incisively realistic:
The Obama administration's approach to Iran is neither feasible nor consistent. To begin with, our objective --- to persuade Iran to end all nuclear enrichment -- simply isn't achievable. Both the current government and the leaders of the opposition Green Movement are strongly committed to controlling the full nuclear fuel cycle, and the United States will never get the other major powers to impose the sort of "crippling sanctions" it has been seeking for years now. It's not gonna happen folks, or at least not anytime soon.
What got my attention, however --- especially given Walt's normally sure-handed evaluation --- was not the clarity in that paragraph but the resignation and confusiion in one later in the piece:
The first [problem] is the mindset that seems to have taken hold in the Obama administration. As near as I can tell, they believe Iran is dead set on acquiring nuclear weapons and that Iran will lie and cheat and prevaricate long enough to get across the nuclear threshold. Given that assumption, there isn't much point in trying to negotiate any sort of "grand bargain" between Iran and the West, and especially not one that left them with an enrichment capability (even one under strict IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] safeguards). This view may be correct, but if it is, then our effort to ratchet up sanctions is futile and just makes it more likely that other Iranians will blame us for their sufferings....Maybe our focus ought to shift from our current obsession with Iran's nuclear program and focus on human rights issues instead (though it is harder for Washington to do that without looking pretty darn hypocritical).
I think --- although I have to admit that I am trying to put this on paper after reading the above paragraph for the 20th time --- that Walt is saying: well, if we have to put pressure on Iran's nuclear programme and aspirations in the region, let's use rhetoric on human rights rather than sanctions as our weapon of choice.
Wrong. So wrong. I'm all for putting human rights up-front but it should not be picked up as an instrument simply because you don't like other tools in your foreign-policy box. Human rights should be acknowledged as an end, not a means. To do otherwise does not sweep away the hypocrisy that Walt notes, it reinforces the reality as well as the impression of deceit.
Cohen has been an important US voice on Iran for some time and, to his credit, he has tried to bring the internal situation to the attention of readers, having spent time before and after the 2009 election in the country.
And, to his credit, the starting point of Cohen's latest column is well-intentioned. He highlights and draws from the recent publication of Death to the Dictator!, the account of a protestor detained, abused, and raped by security forces.
Human rights, not just in this story but in thousands of others, not as a rhetorical device but as an important objective. Right?
Not quite. For Cohen uses his story for a personal goal: to set himself up as arbitrator between two viewpoints that he dislikes:
Since June 12, U.S. realists and idealists have had an Iranian field day. The realists have dismissed the Green Movement, proclaimed a stolen election fair, and urged President Obama to toss aside human rights concerns and repair relations with Tehran in the American interest.
The idealists have rained renewed fury on Ahmadinejad, called for his overthrow and urged Obama to bury outreach and back Moussavi.
Leave aside, for the moment, that Cohen's portrayal of "idealists" (not one of whom he names) is a caricature. My experience is that those who have criticised the Iranian Govenrment on "idealistic" grounds, i.e., human rights, have not called for a burial of outreach. To the contrary, if one wants to acknowledge the Iranian people, one has to reach out and establish connections: to learn, to understand, to disseminate information, and to discuss. Some, indeed many, may wish to see the back of President, but they do not necessarily advocate "overthrow" (which Cohen is using to imply military action or US-supported regime change).
Here's my problem, which goes far beyond Cohen's ploy of setting himself up as the centrist voice of reason.
When Cohen declares that we should "pursue engagement because isolation only serves the horror merchants", his "engagement" is --- ironically --- not on human rights concerns. It is a call for a resolution of the nuclear issue: "[Iran's] renewed interest in Brazilian-Turkish mediated talks is worth skeptical consideration".
I respect the position that, whatever our perspective, on the political and legal issues inside Iran, the priority must be on a resolution with the current Iranian Government. I understand the geopolitical reasons: not only taking the destabilising dispute over Iran's nuclear programme off the table but also furthering an accommodation over Afghanistan, Iraq, and regional issues in the Middle East.
What I find objectionable is the justification of that approach through distortion and mis-representation of the situation inside Iran. Now that the authors of Race for Iran, pushing for a "grand settlement" with Tehran, have finally publicly declared that human rights plays no part in their calculations, then let them stick to that position by offering no deceptive comment on developments over those rights.
And I'm just as opposed to using human rights as a sleight-of-hand to push a nuclear-first approach. Just because Roger Cohen, who has raised awareness of the situation in Iran and has a concern for those rights, is the perpetrator in this case does not affect that opposition.
Here is Cohen's concluding sentence in full: "[Iran's] renewed interest in Brazilian-Turkish mediated talks is worth skeptical consideration....if you believe Mohsen [the abused detainee in Death to the Dictator!]--- in the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate --- deserves a future."
I have no idea of Mohsen's position on the Iran-Brazil-Turkey declaration on uranium enrichment. I doubt Cohen knows. However, I think I have a good idea of what Mohsen, and many others who have suffered in the post-election period, think of the Ahmaidinejad Government. A President and a Government who are using the nuclear game as a distraction from internal issues. A President and a Government which, it must be appreciated, will present any agreement on uranium enrichment as a "victory" for their policy and, thus, as evidence of their legitimacy.
So it is a bit presumptuous for Mr Cohen to use (I would say "manipulate" had this come from a less benevolent commentator like Charles Krauthammer) Mohsen's story not for Moshen's interests but for Roger Cohen's agenda.
It is still deceitful --- irrespective of whoever carries out the act --- to use human rights as his/her instrument of the moment to seek a settlement which is far removed from human rights.
The top American commander in the Middle East has ordered a broad expansion of clandestine military activity in an effort to disrupt militant groups or counter threats in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and other countries in the region, according to defense officials and military documents.
The secret directive, signed in September by Gen. David H. Petraeus, authorizes the sending of American Special Operations troops to both friendly and hostile nations in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa to gather intelligence and build ties with local forces. Officials said the order also permits reconnaissance that could pave the way for possible military strikes in Iran if tensions over its nuclear ambitions escalate.
While the Bush administration had approved some clandestine military activities far from designated war zones, the new order is intended to make such efforts more systematic and long term, officials said. Its goals are to build networks that could “penetrate, disrupt, defeat or destroy” Al Qaeda and other militant groups, as well as to “prepare the environment” for future attacks by American or local military forces, the document said. The order, however, does not appear to authorize offensive strikes in any specific countries.
In broadening its secret activities, the United States military has also sought in recent years to break its dependence on the Central Intelligence Agency and other spy agencies for information in countries without a significant American troop presence.
General Petraeus’s order is meant for small teams of American troops to fill intelligence gaps about terror organizations and other threats in the Middle East and beyond, especially emerging groups plotting attacks against the United States.
But some Pentagon officials worry that the expanded role carries risks. The authorized activities could strain relationships with friendly governments like Saudi Arabia or Yemen — which might allow the operations but be loath to acknowledge their cooperation — or incite the anger of hostile nations like Iran and Syria. Many in the military are also concerned that as American troops assume roles far from traditional combat, they would be at risk of being treated as spies if captured and denied the Geneva Convention protections afforded military detainees.
The precise operations that the directive authorizes are unclear, and what the military has done to follow through on the order is uncertain. The document, a copy of which was viewed by The New York Times, provides few details about continuing missions or intelligence-gathering operations.
Several government officials who described the impetus for the order would speak only on condition of anonymity because the document is classified. Spokesmen for the White House and the Pentagon declined to comment for this article. The Times, responding to concerns about troop safety raised by an official at United States Central Command, the military headquarters run by General Petraeus, withheld some details about how troops could be deployed in certain countries.
The seven-page directive appears to authorize specific operations in Iran, most likely to gather intelligence about the country’s nuclear program or identify dissident groups that might be useful for a future military offensive. The Obama administration insists that for the moment, it is committed to penalizing Iran for its nuclear activities only with diplomatic and economic sanctions. Nevertheless, the Pentagon has to draw up detailed war plans to be prepared in advance, in the event that President Obama ever authorizes a strike.
“The Defense Department can’t be caught flat-footed,” said one Pentagon official with knowledge of General Petraeus’s order.
The directive, the Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force Execute Order, signed Sept. 30, may also have helped lay a foundation for the surge of American military activity in Yemen that began three months later.
Special Operations troops began working with Yemen’s military to try to dismantle Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an affiliate of Osama bin Laden’s terror network based in Yemen. The Pentagon has also carried out missile strikes from Navy ships into suspected militant hideouts and plans to spend more than $155 million equipping Yemeni troops with armored vehicles, helicopters and small arms.
Officials said that many top commanders, General Petraeus among them, have advocated an expansive interpretation of the military’s role around the world, arguing that troops need to operate beyond Iraq and Afghanistan to better fight militant groups.
The order, which an official said was drafted in close coordination with Adm. Eric T. Olson, the officer in charge of the United States Special Operations Command, calls for clandestine activities that “cannot or will not be accomplished” by conventional military operations or “interagency activities,” a reference to American spy agencies.
While the C.I.A. and the Pentagon have often been at odds over expansion of clandestine military activity, most recently over intelligence gathering by Pentagon contractors in Pakistan and Afghanistan, there does not appear to have been a significant dispute over the September order.
A spokesman for the C.I.A. declined to confirm the existence of General Petraeus’s order, but said that the spy agency and the Pentagon had a “close relationship” and generally coordinate operations in the field.
“There’s more than enough work to go around,” said the spokesman, Paul Gimigliano. “The real key is coordination. That typically works well, and if problems arise, they get settled.”
During the Bush administration, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld endorsed clandestine military operations, arguing that Special Operations troops could be as effective as traditional spies, if not more so.
Unlike covert actions undertaken by the C.I.A., such clandestine activity does not require the president’s approval or regular reports to Congress, although Pentagon officials have said that any significant ventures are cleared through the National Security Council. Special Operations troops have already been sent into a number of countries to carry out reconnaissance missions, including operations to gather intelligence about airstrips and bridges.
Some of Mr. Rumsfeld’s initiatives were controversial, and met with resistance by some at the State Department and C.I.A. who saw the troops as a backdoor attempt by the Pentagon to assert influence outside of war zones. In 2004, one of the first groups sent overseas was pulled out of Paraguay after killing a pistol-waving robber who had attacked them as they stepped out of a taxi.
A Pentagon order that year gave the military authority for offensive strikes in more than a dozen countries, and Special Operations troops carried them out in Syria, Pakistan and Somalia.
In contrast, General Petraeus’s September order is focused on intelligence gathering --- by American troops, foreign businesspeople, academics or others — to identify militants and provide “persistent situational awareness,” while forging ties to local indigenous groups.
Few issues highlight Barack Obama's extreme hypocrisy the way that Bagram [the US detention facility in Afghanistan] does. As everyone knows, one of George Bush’s most extreme policies was abducting people from all over the world -- far away from any battlefield -- and then detaining them at Guantanamo with no legal rights of any kind, not even the most minimal right to a habeas review in a federal court.
Back in the day, this was called "Bush's legal black hole." In 2006, Congress codified that policy by enacting the Military Commissions Act, but in 2008, the Supreme Court, in Boumedienev. Bush, ruled that provision unconstitutional, holding that the Constitution grants habeas corpus rights even to foreign nationals held at Guantanamo. Since then, detainees have won 35 out of 48 habeas hearings brought pursuant to Boumediene, on the ground that there was insufficient evidence to justify their detention.
Immediately following Boumediene, the Bush administration argued that the decision was inapplicable to detainees at Bagram --- including even those detained outside of Afghanistan but then flown to Afghanistan to be imprisoned. Amazingly, the Bush DOJ [Justice Department] --- in a lawsuit brought by Bagram detainees seeking habeas review of their detention --- contended that if they abduct someone and ship them to Guantanamo, then that person (under Boumediene) has the right to a habeas hearing, but if they instead ship them to Bagram, then the detainee has no rights of any kind. In other words, the detainee's Constitutional rights depends on where the Government decides to drop them off to be encaged.
One of the first acts undertaken by the Obama DOJ that actually shocked civil libertarians was when, last February, as The New York Times put it, Obama lawyers "told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embraci.ng a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team"
But last April, John Bates, the Bush-43-appointed, right-wing judge overseeing the case, rejected the Bush/Obama position and held thatBoumediene applies to detainees picked up outside of Afghanistan and then shipped to Bagram. I reviewed that ruling, in which Judge Bates explained that the Bagram detainees are "virtually identical to the detainees in Boumediene," and that the Constitutional issue was exactly the same: namely, "the concern that the President could move detainees physically beyond the reach of the Constitution and detain them indefinitely".
But the Obama administration was undeterred by this loss. They quickly appealed Judge Bates' ruling. As the New York Times described that appeal: "The decision signaled that the administration was not backing down in its effort to maintain the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight."
Today, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals adopted the Bush/Obama position, holding that even detainees abducted outside of Afghanistan and then shipped to Bagram have no right to contest the legitimacy of their detention in a U.S. federal court, because Boumediene does not apply to prisons located within war zones (such as Afghanistan).
So congratulations to the United States and Barack Obama for winning the power to abduct people anywhere in the world and then imprison them for as long as they want with no judicial review of any kind. When the Boumediene decision was issued in the middle of the 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain called it "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country." But Obama hailed it as "a rejection of the Bush Administration's attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantanamo," and he praised the Court for "rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus". Even worse, when Obama went to the Senate floor in September, 2006, to speak against the habeas-denying provisions of the Military Commissions Act, this is what he melodramatically intoned:
As a parent, I can also imagine the terror I would feel if one of my family members were rounded up in the middle of the night and sent to Guantanamo without even getting one chance to ask why they were being held and being able to prove their innocence....
By giving suspects a chance --- even one chance --- to challenge the terms of their detention in court, to have a judge confirm that the Government has detained the right person for the right suspicions, we could solve this problem without harming our efforts in the war on terror one bit....
Most of us have been willing to make some sacrifices because we know that, in the end, it helps to make us safer. But restricting somebody's right to challenge their imprisonment indefinitely is not going to make us safer. In fact, recent evidence shows it is probably making us less safe.
Can you smell the hypocrisy? How could anyone miss its pungent, suffocating odor? Apparently, what Obama called "a legal black hole at Guantanamo" is a heinous injustice, but "a legal black hole at Bagram" is the Embodiment of Hope. And evidently, Obama would only feel "terror" if his child were abducted and taken to Guantanamoand imprisoned "without even getting one chance to ask why and prove their innocence".
But if the very same child were instead taken to Bagram and treated exactly the same way, that would be called Justice -- -or, to use his jargon, Pragmatism. And what kind of person hails a Supreme Court decision as "protecting our core values" --- as Obama said of Boumediene --- only to then turn around and make a complete mockery of that ruling by insisting that the Cherished, Sacred Rights it recognized are purely a function of where the President orders a detainee-carrying military plane to land?
Independently, what happened to Obama's eloquent insistence that "restricting somebody's right to challenge their imprisonment indefinitely is not going to make us safer; in fact, recent evidence shows it is probably making us less safe"? How does our policy of invading Afghanistan and then putting people at Bagram with no charges of any kind dispose people in that country, and the broader Muslim world, to the United States? If a country invaded the U.S. and set up prisons where Americans from around the world where detained indefinitely and denied all rights to have their detention reviewed, how would it dispose you to the country which was doing that?
One other point: this decision is likely to be appealed to the Supreme Court, which serves to further highlight how important the [Elena] Kagan-for-[John Paul] Stevens replacement could be. If the Court were to accept the appeal, Kagan would be required to recuse herself (since it was her Solicitor General's office that argued the administration's position here), which means that a 4-4 ruling would be likely, thus leaving this appellate decision undisturbed. More broadly, though, if Kagan were as sympathetic to Obama's executive power claims as her colleagues in the Obama administration are, then her confirmation could easily convert decisions on these types of questions from a 5-4 victory (which is whatBoumediene was, with Stevens in the majority) into a 5-4 defeat. Maybe we should try to find out what her views are before putting her on that Court for the next 40 years?
This is what Barack Obama has done to the habeas clause of the Constitution: if you are in Thailand (as one of the petitioners in this case was) and the U.S. abducts you and flies you to Guantanamo, then you have the right to have a federal court determine if there is sufficient evidence to hold you. If, however, President Obama orders that you be taken to from Thailand to Bagram rather than to Guantanamo, then you will have no rights of any kind, and he can order you detained there indefinitely without any right to a habeas review. That type of change is so very inspiring --- almost an exact replica of his vow to close Guantanamo...all in order to move its core attributes (including indefinite detention) a few thousand miles north to Thompson, Illinois.
Real estate agents have long emphasized "location, location, location" as the all-determining market factor. Before we elected this Constitutional Scholar as Commander-in-Chief, who knew that this platitude also shaped our entire Constitution?
UPDATE: Law Professor Steve Vladeck has more on the ruling, including "the perverse incentive that today's decision supports," as predicted by Justice [Antonin] Scalia in his Boumediene dissent: namely, that a President attempting to deny Constitutional rights to detainees can simply transfer them to a "war zone" instead of to Guantanamo and then claim that courts cannot interfere in the detention. Barack Obama quickly adopted that tactic for rendering the rights in Boumediene moot --- the same rights which, less than two years ago, he was praising the Supreme Court for safeguarding and lambasting the Bush administration for denying. Vladeck also explains why the appellate court's caveat -- that overt government manipulation to evade habeas rights (i.e., shipping them to a war zone with the specific intent of avoidingBoumediene) might alter the calculus -- is rather meaningless.
UPDATE II: Guest-hosting for Rachel Maddow last night, Chris Hayes talked with Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights about the Bagram ruling and Obama's hypocrisy on these issues, and it was quite good, including a video clip of the 2006 Obama speech I excerpted above:
And in The New York Times, Charlie Savage has a typically thorough examination of the impact of the ruling. As he writes: "The decision was a broad victory for the Obama administration in its efforts to hold terrorism suspects overseas for indefinite periods without judicial oversight." But GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham (author of the habeas-denying provision in the Military Commissions Act) "called the ruling a 'big win' and praised the administration for appealing the lower court’s ruling", and that's what really matters.
Amidst the ongoing reaction on the uranium front, Dissected News offers a provocative reading, working through and around four partial viewpoints to argue:
The Obama administration was given the opportunity to eliminate the myths and start a new chapter in U.S. foreign policy. Instead, [the President] scrambled to defend the old policy.
Lack of change domestically [can] be blamed on predecessors or legislatures, but Obama owns his own foreign policy legacy.
Roger Cohen of The New York Times is even sharper in his criticism of Washington, calling for a negotiation between the caricatures of US-Iranian relations but concluding:
Last year, at the United Nations, Obama called for a new era of shared responsibilities. “Together we must build new coalitions that bridge old divides,” he declared. Turkey and Brazil responded — and got snubbed. Obama has just made his own enlightened words look empty.
EA's Ms Zahra offers a far different perspective:
The only language the Iranian system understands is power (zaban-e zoor). Accepting the Iran-Brazil-Turkey declaration as a first step would create another delay of several months. Rejecting it may appear as unwillingness to negotiate, but only from a very superficial perspective. The regime made this diversion on purpose, and Clinton replied, "Who do you think you're fooling?"
Well, let's see, if Tehran finally realises that it has crossed all red lines. If Turkey was really tacitly supported by the US, then it certainly was not for this mockup of treaty. I have the impression that [the Turkish and Brazilian leaders] Erdogan and Lula weren't able to push the Supreme Leader further.
Farideh Farhi, in a wide-ranging interview on the Iranian internal situation and US-Iranian relations, adds this incisive point:
It is very interesting to watch and see the different reactions to this nuclear agreement in the past few days and compare that to the kind of reaction that occurred when the previous agreement was announced last October. This time there is the sense to me that a very large sector of the Iranian elite are being called upon to support this deal. The kind of disagreement that manifested itself last time I do not see. There have been important voices that have objected to this deal, but, for example, 200 of the 290 members of the parliament say they support the agreement. And last year, for example, the Speaker of the Parliament Ali Larijani strongly opposed the deal. This time he told the people to be united. Even some important individuals considered to be more reform-oriented have written editorials talking about these being very critical times for Iranian history. You get a real sense that a high-level decision has been made to push for an agreement and to try to resolve the nuclear issue.
Sunday, May 30, 2010 at 8:45 
Please excuse a quick polemical comment before I post a report from The New York Times on the US military's handling of civilian deaths from drone attacks in Afghanistan.
