It can be assumed that a terrified, desperate and enraged Barack Obama gave the orders to The New York Times and The Washington Post not to cover The Intercept’s explosive expose on the atrocities Obama has committed through his illegal drone program. The two dailies clearly complied.

Reporter John Hanrahan, himself a former Post reporter, and now on the editorial board of ExposeFacts, doesn’t say this explicitly in his article in the Nov. 5 Consortium News; but he damns the Post and The Times for filling their pages with inane blather about Donald Trump, and irrelevant nonsense about GOP and Democratic presidential candidacies, rather than reporting a story that Americans absolutely need to know. The Post has virtually ignored the story, he said, while the best the Times could come up with was “a whopping two paragraphs about The Intercepts’s scoop,” in the 23d and 24th paragraphs of a long story on Obama’s decision to keep troops in Afghanistan until 2017. If you didn’t get to the end of the article, you missed it.

How is this possible, Hanrahan asks, noting that the hard evidence offered in the military documents provided to The Intercept, exposing Obama’s murders, goes well beyond anything the Times has ever produced. After cautiously questioning executive editor Dean Baquet, and editor for national security William Hamilton, on the lack of coverage, the Times public editor Margaret Sullivan reported,

Sullivan meekly added that Times journalists “would have served readers well to do more on ‘The Drone Papers.’ They also could consider doing so in the future.”

What will it take to end the blackout, asks Hanrahan. “With only a handful of people protesting—and with no congressional hearings, and only sporadic news coverage raising any serious questions about the morality and legality of targeted assassinations under international law,” the policy of blacking out this explosive story isn’t likely to change, he asserts. “Not unless, and until, a critical mass of well-organized citizens rises up in revulsion and anger at these cowardly killings and endless wars being carried out in our name.”

In its just-released 2015 Drug Threat Assessment, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reveals the terrifying extent of the drug epidemic in the United States, with the startling statistic that drug overdoses now constitute the leading cause of injury deaths, surpassing those from auto accidents or firearms. In 2013, the latest year for which data is available, more than 46,000 people died from a drug overdose and more than half of those were caused by prescription painkillers and heroin.

In its press release announcing the release of its annual report, the DEA referenced a recent survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) which shows that between 2013-2014, the number of current heroin users—defined as individuals who reported using heroin within the previous 30 days—increased by 51%!

At a press conference in Washington, D.C., Wednesday, DEA Acting Administrator Chuck Rosenberg said that overdose deaths from abuse of analgesic prescription drugs “have reached epidemic proportions,” exceeding those caused by cocaine and heroin combined; and abuse of controlled prescription drugs is higher than that of cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, MDMA (“Molly”) and PCP combined.

While the DEA report didn’t identify the specific age cohorts victimized by the drug epidemic, the National Institute of Drug Abuse reports that young adults, aged 18-25, are the biggest abusers of prescription opioid pain relievers, ADHD stimulants (Ritalin, Adderal), and anti-anxiety drugs. In 2010, 3,000 people in this age group died of prescription drug overdose; 13% of all 18-25 year-olds engaged in non-medical use of prescription drugs the same year. The figure was 7% for 12-17 year-olds, and 4% for people age 26 or older.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), between 2000 and 2013, the rate for heroin-related drug-poisoning deaths was highest among adults aged 25-44. Between 2010 and 2013, the death rate for adults aged 18-24 increased 2.3-fold, from 1.7 to 3.9 per 100,000. In 2000, non-Hispanic blacks, aged 45-64, had the highest rate for drug-poisoning deaths involving heroin. But in 2013, non-Hispanic whites, aged 18-44, had the highest rate.

Between 2000 and 2013, the rate for drug-poisoning deaths involving heroin increased in all regions of the country, but the greatest increase occurred in the Midwest. On Nov. 1, CBS’s Sixty Minutes program ran a segment on “Heroin in the Heartland,” detailing how heroin is ravaging the state of Ohio, without discrimination as to race or income bracket. State Attorney General, former Republican Sen. Mike DeWine, reported, “In my lifetime, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Doctors Without Borders/Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) yesterday released its internal document reviewing the Oct. 3 “relentless and brutal aerial attack by U.S. forces” on its 140-bed Kunduz Trauma Center (KTC) in Afghanistan.  MSF’s International President, Dr. Joanne Liu, revealed in her letter introducing the report, the horrifying fact that “some patients burned in their beds, medical staff were decapitated and lost limbs, and others were shot by the circling AC-130 gunships while fleeing the burning building.”  [emphasis added]

Dr. Liu points out that although the MSF launched a call for an independent investigation by the International Humanitarian Fact Finding Commission (IHFFC), this has yet to begin, because the U.S. and Afghanistan have not given their consent.  Yesterday, she added, “we are handing over this internal report to both the public and the IHFFC.” Today, Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis said the Defense Department has received the MSF’s report, but is continuing its own investigation, and had no response to the report.

MSF reviews the details of each day leading up to the Oct. 3 attack, including the Oct. 1 phone call it received  from a U.S. official in Washington, asking whether the hospital “or any other of MSF’s locations had a large number of Taliban ‘holed up.'” MSF replied that the staff was working at full capacity, and that the hospital was full of patients including wounded Taliban combatants.  In its conclusions, MSF states that its rules in the hospital “were implemented and respected, including the ‘no weapons’ policy,” and that MSF was in “full control of the hospital at the time of the airstrikes…. There were no armed combatants within the hospital compound, that there was no fighting from, or in, the direct vicinity of the KTC at the time of the airstrikes.”

Despite this, “a series of multiple, precise and sustained airstrikes targeted the main hospital building, leaving the rest of the buildings in the MSF compound comparatively untouched.” The first room to be hit was the ICU; airstrikes then continued from the east to the west end of the main hospital building, destroying the ICU, archive, laboratory, ER, x-ray, outpatient department, mental health and physiotherapy departments, as well as all operating theaters.  The attack “destroyed our ability to treat patients at a time of their greatest need…A functioning hospital caring for patients cannot simply lose its protected status and be attacked,” Dr. Liu said.