U.S. Drone Strikes Are Even Worse Than We Knew

Updated at 7:30 p.m. ET on December 22, 2021

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This week there’s new information in a long-running debate.

For more than a decade I’ve opposed U.S. drone-war policies. Calling drone strikes “surgical” was Orwellian propaganda, I argued. I later urged a drone-strike moratorium due to repeated massacres of innocents, among other reasons. Still, accurate information on many strikes was hard to find––and as it turns out, what the American public didn’t know was additionally damning.

That’s the main takeaway from Pentagon documents that The New York Times reported on last week:

The trove of documents—the military’s own confidential assessments of more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties, obtained by The New York Times—lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths