The foggy numbers of Obama’s wars and non-wars

The Washington Post reports:

As the Obama administration prepares to publish a long-delayed accounting of how many militants and noncombatant civilians it has killed since 2009, its statistics may be defined as much by what is left out as by what is included.

Release of the information was first envisioned three years ago this month, as part of strict new guidelines President Obama announced for the United States’ controversial use of drones and other forms of lethal force to battle terrorism abroad. Such operations, Obama said in a 2013 speech at the National Defense University, would also be subject to new transparency and oversight.


The death tolls, like the guidelines, will cover places where the United States conducts airstrikes but does not consider itself officially at war: Yemen, Somalia and Libya. They are likely to exclude Pakistan, where the CIA has conducted hundreds of drone strikes but which the administration has long labeled part of the Afghanistan war theater. The United States still does not publicly acknowledge CIA attacks inside Pakistan, although the Pentagon announced Saturday that it had targeted Taliban leader Akhtar Mohammad Mansour in Pakistan.

The Welfare-Warfare state sure is secretive.