Exit
may be in part because his style of
access journalism doesn’t allow for
pushing your sources too hard, let
alone calling bullshit on them.
For instance, Sanger writes that
White House counter-terrorism
adviser John Brennan said in June
2011 that over the previous year
there had not been a single collateral death from drone strikes (he
later. (Brennan later amended that
to say there was no “credible evidence” of such deaths.)
Yet there is ample evidence of,
as one example, a March 2011 CIA
drone attack in Pakistan killing
some 50 people, including tribal elders, who were gathered for a tribal
conclave. In fact, the U.K.-based
Bureau of Investigative Journalism
has exhaustively documented the
deaths of 479 to 821 Pakistani civilians, including 174 children, in CIA
drone strikes since 2004.
All Sanger can bring himself to
say is: “It is hard to believe that
no civilians have been killed, and
Brennan’s argument may not be of
much