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Why Do We Let the President Determine Reality?
And what happens when the president loses touch with what’s real?
Civilian casualties from American drone strikes during the Obama years were “exceedingly rare.” That was nice to hear, at least until Americans learned how the military arrived at this determination.
As the United States conducted hundreds of strikes against suspected terrorists in countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen, it was impractical and sometimes impossible for Americans to investigate the aftermath of the bombings they had conducted. The military was not going to search through the rubble of a bombed-out building and check IDs or run DNA tests to see if they had actually killed the people they meant to kill.
So the CIA came up with a shortcut: label all of the men of “military age” who were killed in a bombing as terrorists.
This system, which was neither precise nor humane, allowed Barack Obama (along with the other presidents who conducted drone strikes around the world) to simply declare that his bombing campaigns were successful and caused very little of what we euphemistically call collateral damage. Reporters, unable to verify the reality on the ground, felt they had no choice but to report what the administration was telling them.
