It's Time to Challenge the Propaganda Regarding Who is Killed by U. S. Drones

"The public would not be accepting of drones, if they knew how kill decisions are made, and how many innocents are killed in the process."-- Robert Greenwald, Brave New Films

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Greenwald recounted one situation, as told to him from people from area of the bombing that there was a group of elders were meeting in a Jirga -- a kind town meeting of elders -- to resolve a community conflict , this one a dispute about mining. But the meeting was interpreted by drone intelligence as a group of men with guns -- obviously not unusual for the region -- and it became a "signature strike" -- and a missile killed between 20 and 40 of the elders.

Like with their intense efforts to work to end the war in Afghanistan, Greenwald and Brave New Films started their quest to change U.S. drone policy with heavy odds (and check out his latest efforts at WarCosts.com). But just as the public attitude toward the Afghan war shifted over time, with heavy dosages of strong factual information contrary to the administration's line, Greenwald is confident that thee attitude toward drones will shift.

AlterNet spoke with Greenwald in his Culver City California offices on November 26th, just after his return from Pakistan.

Don Hazen: Tell us a little bit about what it was like in Pakistan, and what surprised you, and made you think you were doing the right thing by going there and pursuing the drone story.

Robert Greenwald: The first-hand experience immediately was that the people couldn't have been more gracious, and that was surprising, given how hated the drones are -- by virtue of all measure of statistics -- in the great majority of the country.

Don Hazen: What was their message to you? Did they understand you to be a messenger to the public here in the US?

Robert Greenwald: Many of the people asked me to talk to the president of the United States, and to explain to him who they were -- that they were not terrorists; they were farmers, they were peasants, they were poor people, they were working people, they were religious people. I heard that over and over again -- to please explain this to the President how much damage this was doing. And some of them had the belief that just his understanding who they really were would force him to change his mind about the drone attacks.

Don Hazen: What is your sense of the Obama policy's effect in Pakistan? What's your thinking about why we have moved to the use of drones as a major policy shift, and is it working?

Robert Greenwald: After a trip to the region, is very hard to understand or justify why we're doing it. I feel, like when I went to Afghanistan -- there two minutes after walking around on the streets, and you knew this was a country that invading and occupying was not going to be a security solution. After a short period of time in Pakistan, it's clear that drones are not a security solution either.. If you believe in drones, the original idea was to go after so-called high-value targets, which according to the NYU-Stanford study 2% of the people killed by drones are high-value targets -- now, who are all the rest of the people? Well, it's a secret program, so therefore the CIA doesn't have to tell us anything, yet they claim that with each attack they're getting militants. Now we have people coming forward, saying, actually, no we're not terrorists. One man, he had a picture of a 65 year old woman with grey hair -- his mother. She's not a militant terrorist. So the notion that we're killing terrorists exclusively is fundamentally inaccurate. It has been estimated by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that as many as 178 children have been killed in drone attacks (Read the full report on child casualties from the drone war on WarCosts.com and watch Greenwald's related video at the bottom of this interview).