Obama Leaned on the Times, WaPo To Black Out Drone Papers

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.”