Most who die in 'targeted attacks' weren't targets

Foreign Policy in Focus - According to [the civil rights organization] Reprieve, a stunning 28 innocent people have been killed for every known terrorist or militant felled by a drone strike. The report echoes recent data of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which managed to identify 704 of the 2,904 drone victims who were killed before October 2014 and found that just 10 percent were members of an armed group.

Given this terrible record, it should come as no surprise that the U.S. government frequently describes its drone war in what George Orwell called “political language” — or the jargon that politicians and government officials use to conceal the true nature of their actions. “In our time,” Orwell wrote in his famous 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.” He observed that “such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”

The clearest example of political language in the drone campaign is the misleading use of the word “targeted” — for instance in “targeted action” and “targeted strikes,” phrases that President Obama and CIA chief John Brennan have used in reference to drone strikes.