MSM Misleading Americans on Trump’s CIA Drone ‘Reauthorization’

Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier

I’ve found the news coverage this week more than a bit confusing; then I realized that I’m only finding it confusing because I’ve been paying attention the whole time, and that makes me a bad American.

The mainstream media has been all a-flutter over President Trump’s “reauthorization” of the CIA’s ability to carry out drone strikes independently of the Pentagon in foreign nations. It took me a while to figure out why everyone is aghast at this. Turns out, the official narrative we’re supposed to believe is that the benevolent murderer Barack Obama ended the CIA drone program in 2013, shortly after finally admitting it existed for the first time.

That’s how the mainstream media has been phrasing this latest development so as to enrage their listeners/viewers/readers against Trump as much as possible; a laudable goal, mind you, but one that shouldn’t require lies to pull off.

“The Wall Street Journal reports that one of the Trump administration’s first acts was to authorize the CIA’s use of drones to carry out targeted strikes against suspected terrorists. The Obama administration took that ability away from the CIA and gave it to the Pentagon. NPR’s David Welna has the story,” NPR’s Robert Siegel lied to his listeners.

“President Donald Trump has given the Central Intelligence Agency new authority to conduct drone attacks against suspected militants, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing U.S. officials,” Reuters fabricated from a nonsensical Wall Street Journal account that Huffpo also ran verbatim.

Ironically, the New York Times really swung for the fences:

“The Trump administration is exploring how to dismantle or bypass Obama-era constraints intended to prevent civilian deaths from drone attacks, commando raids and other counterterrorism missions outside conventional war zones like Afghanistan and Iraq, according to officials familiar with internal deliberations…

Mr. Obama imposed the civilian-protection rules in May 2013 as part of an effort to recalibrate counterterrorism operations after he had overseen a steep increase in military and C.I.A. drone strikes in places like Yemen and tribal Pakistan.

Critics, including inside the government, worried that the strikes were causing too many civilian casualties, driving terrorist recruitment and undermining support among local partners in the regions. In response, the Obama administration developed the rules, known as the Presidential Policy Guidance.” reads a couple of ‘graphs of Charlie Savage and Eric Scmitt’s piece for the NYT.

The paper really needs to hire a Winston Smith to go back and make sure the archive says we’ve always been at war with Eastasia. Let’s go back to the NYT to a column contributed by Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, which ran back in January of 2016.

“These purported ‘reforms’ were formalized by President Obama in a May 2013 speech and accompanying presidential policy guidance. However, there is no evidence that most reforms were ever implemented, and officials emphasized that they did not apply to C.I.A. drone strikes in Pakistan, where roughly 40 percent of all non-battlefield drone strike have since occurred,”

Wait, what?

So, the much-lauded 2013 Presidential Policy Guidance that Trump is eschewing was never really implemented and didn’t apply to the one country where many CIA drone strikes were taking place anyway. Yet, the mainstream media is selling this story to us as Trump having bestowed some new and terrible power upon CIA. Why is the mainstream media trying to gin up hatred for drone strikes under Trump when they applauded them under Obama?

To be honest, I’ve several theories, but none of them have enough actual evidence supporting them to where I’d feel comfortable posting them here. That the MSM is decidedly pro-left generally and anti-Trump specifically is nothing new, but I’m not sure that alone explains the intentional misleading of the American public on the subject of their presidents’ mass-murdering of foreigners.

Whatever their gambit is, dear readers, please just keep in mind this is most certainly not the first time the entire MSM has been caught in a lie and it won’t be the last. Stay wary.