'There are, to put it mildly, numerous reasons for serious skepticism when it comes to administration claims about its drone program and civilian deaths. For one, Obama's chief counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, was conclusively proven to be spouting outright lies about civilian deaths from US drones.

That the Obama administration re-defined "militant" to mean "all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants" by itself demands extreme skepticism of its claims; as the Times put it when revealing that fact: "this counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths." Independently, the fact that the administration has erected such extreme secrecy around the program - refusing to release even the most basic facts in court or elsewhere - further demands great skepticism of its assertions.'

Read more: The Brookings Institution Demands Servile Journalism