MEDIA ROOTS – Recently, I had the honor of going on the Joe Rogan Experience, a popular podcast hosted by comedian and TV show host, Joe Rogan. Although I was a little nervous before going on the show, I was eased by the dope art decorating the studio–especially the naked mannequins sporting Boba Fet heads.
Congressional candidate and activist, David Seaman, along with his campaign manager, Dell Cameron, joined me for a three hour conversation with Redban and Joe Rogan about everything from US politics to space exploration, including discussion about the NDAA, media activism, drone wars, the two-party system and Prometheus.
If you know me in real life you know I swear like a sailor, so don’t be alarmed at the language used during the broadcast.
Abby Martin
The above comment is a bit old but still relevant because I still hear that 98% failure rate being bandied about. As someone who works with statistics all day, a figure like this is always a red flag for me – what does it even mean? Does it mean that 98% of all drone strikes miss their target? I haven’t seen anything to support this. How does one define a successful strike exactly? I won’t even go into the obvious problems with the reliability of military and other sources of casualty reports. An informative critique of NAF analyses can be found here: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/flawed-analysis-of-drone-strike-data-is-misleading-americans/259836/
My point is that instead of throwing around ambiguous figures like this we should stick to the simple point that drone strikes do indeed cause an enormous amount of civilian casualties and have been shown to be more, not less, harmful to civilians than manned airstrikes (this was demonstrated in a study done by Larry Lewis from the Center For Naval Analyses and referred to in several fairly recent publications).
The NAF report does not say that 2% of drone strikes works. It says that 89% do. Slightly different. Any civilian death is problematic, but please keep your facts straight.
counterterrorism.newamerica.net/drones