Spencer Ackerman interviewed a man documenting the drone war:
One resident of North Waziristan wants to expose the conflict. Noor Behram has spent years photographing the aftermath of drone strikes, often at personal risk. … [B]e aware that our sources came to us with an agenda: discrediting the drone war. "I want to show taxpayers in the Western world what their tax money is doing to people in another part of the world: killing civilians, innocent victims, children," Behram says. …Nevertheless, after careful consideration, we chose to publish some of these images because of the inherent journalistic value in depicting a largely unseen battlefield.
The above photo is of Dande Darpa Khel and was taken on August 21, 2009. The caption:
By the time Behram reached Bismullah Khan's mud house, partially destroyed in the strike, Khan's youngest son, Syed Wali Shah, had already died. Behram watched as the boy's body was laid out on a prayer rug, a "very small" one, in preparation for his funeral.
Greg Scoblete compares the graphic photographs to the administration's rhetoric:
Behram's images are not conclusive proof that the Obama administration was incorrect (or disingenuous) when it claimed that no civilians had been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, but it's additional evidence that the claim was unfounded. It does beggar belief why such a claim was made in the first place.
