New US DOD honcho Leon Panetta opened his big yap last week and blubbered to the troops in Iraq that they were there “because on 9/11 the United States got attacked,” but he, of course, was just playing, talking shit to the troops.
He backpedaled, or tried to run it back: “I wasn’t saying, you know, the invasion — or going into the issues or the justification of that. It was more the fact that we really had to deal with Al Qaeda here, they developed a presence here and that tied in.”

In other words, he lied.
And from the results, there’s not much an ordinary US person can do.

(Illustration found here).

When it comes to war, the US doesn’t always show its brightest side, the words ‘cover up,’ are tossed about like a beach ball, bouncing from place to place, never settling — and the media just goes, duh!
No one really took Leon to absolute task for such shit, instead tried to play up the George Jr. vs President Obama angle, leaving out the fact the entire thinking world knows that’s a lie — even the US senate.

So, no surprise when John Brennan, President Obama’s counter-terrorism advisor, bald-faced lied last month about civilian casualties off the US drone war in Afghanistan.
Brennan blubbered:

Later, when asked whether a policy of targeted killing was appropriate for the United States, Brennan responded that the U.S. is “exceptionally precise and surgical in terms of addressing the terrorist threat. And by that I mean, if there are terrorists who are within an area where there are women and children or others, you know, we do not take such action that might put those innocent men, women and children in danger.”
He added that in the last year, “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop.”

Such bullshit — and Brennan knew it.

And however — from the ACLU blog (h/t antiwar.com):

Zero civilian casualties — during a period when there were more than 100 CIA drone strikes — sounded almost too good to be true.
As it turns out, it was.
According to a new report from the UK’s award-winning Bureau of Investigative Journalism, released last night, at least 45 civilians were killed in 10 strikes since August 2010.
Among these, the Bureau reports that it has identified, by name, six children killed in drone strikes. More civilians are likely to have been killed in an additional 15 strikes for which precise information is not available.
In response to queries from the Bureau, a senior official stood by Brennan’s zero-civilian casualties claim and insisted that “the most accurate information on counter-terror operations resides with the United States.”
The trouble is that United States refuses to share its information — even basic information — with the public.

On Monday, I wrote about the drone operations in the Af-Pak theater and highlighted a report from the UK’s The Guardian about this guy, Noor Behram, who investigates the aftermath of such attacks.
He was quoted as saying: “For every 10 to 15 people killed, maybe they get one militant,” he said. “I don’t go to count how many Taliban are killed. I go to count how many children, women, innocent people, are killed.”

On top of that, Afghan civilian deaths have jumped 15 percent this year.
A death to lying, or turning that nasty blind eye.