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An alleged  plot to kill Her Majesty the Queen was uncovered barely 2 days before the Remembrance Day celebrations. Four suspected Islamic terrorists were arrested by police for having put together a carefully designed plot to kill Queen Elizabeth II. A scanty yet authoritative police report was made public in a timely fashion on Friday, two days before the Remembrance Day celebrations.

The British media is rife with fabrications and innuendoes. The police reports were distorted by the media. This carefully designed plot to stab Her Majesty with a knife hit the headlines of  the weekend editions of London’s major tabloids, coinciding with the Remembrance Day Event.

According to Scotland Yard, the arrests were related  to “Islamist related terrorism”. Confirmed by the police reports, the alleged terrorists were supporters of the Islamic State (ISIL)  and had been called upon to extend the holy jihad to Western Europe.  Lest we forget the Islamic State (ISIS) is a creation of US intelligence, supported and financed out of Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Since the outset of the war in Syria in March 2011, US-NATO and their allies have been supporting the terror brigades.

It has been more than two years since The New York Times revealed that “Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties” of his drone strikes which “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants…unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” The paper noted that “this counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths,” and even quoted CIA officials as deeply “troubled” by this decision: “One called it ‘guilt by association’ that has led to ‘deceptive’ estimates of civilian casualties. ‘It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants. They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.’” But what bothered even some intelligence officials at the agency carrying out the strikes seemed of no concern whatsoever to most major media outlets. As I documented days after the Times article, most large western media outlets continued to describe completely unknown victims of U.S. drone attacks as “militants”—even though they (a) had no idea who those victims were or what they had done and (b) were well-aware by that point that the term had been “re-defined” by the Obama administration into Alice in Wonderland-level nonsense.

A new article in The New Yorker by Steve Coll underscores how deceptive this journalistic practice is. Among other things, he notes that the U.S. government itself—let alone the media outlets calling them “militants”—often has no idea who has been killed by drone strikes in Pakistan. That’s because, in 2008, George W. Bush and his CIA chief, Gen. Michael Hayden, implemented “signature strikes,” under which “new rules allowed drone operators to fire at armed military-aged males engaged in or associated with suspicious activity even if their identities were unknown.” The Intercept previously reported that targeting decisions can even be made on the basis of nothing more than metadata analysis and tracking of SIM cards in mobile phones.

The journalist Daniel Klaidman has noted that within the CIA, they “sometimes call it crowd killing….  If you don’t have positive ID on the people you’re targeting with these drone strikes.” The tactic of drone-killing first responders and rescuers who come to the scene of drone attacks or even mourners at funerals of drone victims—used by the Obama administration and designated “terror groups” alike—are classic examples. Nobody has any real idea who the dead are, but they are nonetheless routinely called “militants” by the American government and media. As international law professor Kevin Jon Heller documented in 2012, “The vast majority of drone attacks conducted by the U.S. have been signature strikes—those that target ‘groups of men who bear certain signatures, or defining characteristics associated with terrorist activity, but whose identities aren’t known.’”