{"id":18320,"date":"2012-12-27T10:39:24","date_gmt":"2012-12-27T15:39:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=18320"},"modified":"2012-12-27T10:39:24","modified_gmt":"2012-12-27T15:39:24","slug":"remember-this-next-time-you-hear-about-a-drone-strike-on-suspected-militants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/12\/27\/remember-this-next-time-you-hear-about-a-drone-strike-on-suspected-militants\/","title":{"rendered":"Remember this next time you hear about a drone strike on &#8220;suspected militants&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/reason.com\/blog\/2012\/12\/27\/dont-believe-initial-accounts-of-drone-s\" target=\"_blank\">Matt Welch<\/a> rounds up the actual events which were originally euphemistically described as a successful strike against &#8220;suspected&#8221; al Qaeda militants:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>What enables such state-sanctioned murder? One crucial ingredient is highlighted in the next paragraph:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>Quoting unnamed Yemeni officials, local and international media initially described the victims of the Sept. 2 airstrike in al-Bayda governorate as al Qaeda militants.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Follow that link to the Sept. 2 Reuters article, and you&#8217;ll see this loaded lead paragraph:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>Five suspected militants linked to al Qaeda were killed by a U.S. drone attack on Sunday in central Yemen, in what appears to be stepped up strikes by unmanned aircraft on Islamists.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Note that &#8220;suspected&#8221; only modifies &#8220;militants&#8221;; Reuters treated as fact that the charred bodies were &#8220;linked to al Qaeda,&#8221; and part of a broader campaign against &#8220;Islamists&#8221; who don&#8217;t qualify as being &#8220;suspected.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This isn&#8217;t just linguistic nitpicking of journalismese; this is how you midwife propaganda &mdash; straight from anonymous government sources who have a huge incentive to legitimize targeted death-dealing against undesirables, and unadorned with the kind of protective skepticism that such ultimate power (let alone fog of war) so richly deserves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Matt Welch rounds up the actual events which were originally euphemistically described as a successful strike against &#8220;suspected&#8221; al Qaeda militants: What enables such state-sanctioned murder? One crucial ingredient is highlighted in the next paragraph: Quoting unnamed Yemeni officials, local and international media initially described the victims of the Sept. 2 airstrike in al-Bayda governorate [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,370,5,13],"tags":[387,213,269,257,149,666],"class_list":["post-18320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-middle-east","category-military","category-usa","tag-alqaeda","tag-newspapers","tag-propaganda","tag-terrorism","tag-uav","tag-yemen"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4Lu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18320"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18320\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18321,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18320\/revisions\/18321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}