Journalism, as practiced on Meet The Press

This past week Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair confirmed that the Obama administration is targeting U.S. citizens for assassination abroad, assuming the right to execute an American in a foreign country without giving him or her so much as a military tribunal. Mr. Blair also upheld the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, reaffirming that the U.S. intelligence community has no evidence Iran's leaders have made the decision to build nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, increasingly less covert but still officially denied U.S. wars continued to expand, with three American soldiers killed in northwest Pakistan.

With that in mind, here is the entirety of David Gregory's questions for Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan on today's Meet the Press:

MR. GREGORY: We're up against a very difficult threat, as was underlined during testimony in front of the Intelligence Committee this week. This is a portion of that question.

[(Videotape, February 2, 2010)

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN (D-CA): What is the likelihood of another terrorist attempted attack on the U.S. homeland in the next three to six months, high or low? Director Blair:

MR. DENNIS BLAIR: An attempted attack, the priority is certain, I would say.]

MR. GREGORY: First off, what can you say about the intelligence that's behind such a specific warning like that?

MR. GREGORY: And how do you win against a threat like this, when CIA Director Panetta was saying that al-Qaeda is adapting its methods in ways that are oftentimes very difficult to detect?

MR. GREGORY: Any credible threats against the Super Bowl today?

MR. GREGORY: What, what kinds of attacks is al-Qaeda now interested in pulling off?

MR. GREGORY: How worried are you about sleeper cells in the United States trying to pull off lower level, you know, what in the terrorist world they may call a single rather than a home run, whether it's attacking a shopping mall or this kind of attack?

Gregory then presumably broke for a word from NBC's sponsors: Depends and Lockheed-Martin.

We're number one (at killing Muslims)!

It just wouldn’t be Sunday if NBC’s Meet the Press wasn’t being used by some senior government official to make outrageously false but politically advantageous claims -- after all, as folks like former Vice President Dick Cheney realized, it does make an ideal platform for disseminating disinformation. As surprising as the sun rising in the East, host David Gregory this week continued the program’s longstanding role as a megaphone for power, permitting White House adviser Valerie Jarrett to make unchallenged this claim in response to a question regarding the release of a new purported recording from Osama bin Laden:

We have no independent confirmation that that is, in fact, his voice. But let's look at--the fact of the matter is, is that he's a murderer, he has attacked Americans. In fact, he's killed more Muslims than any other group in the region. And so the president is committed to going after al-Qaeda and all of their affiliates and bringing them to justice.

While that statement might work on the gut level (it just feels right, doesn't it?) and thus fly in the world of politics -- David Gregory sure as hell didn’t challenge it -- it is demonstrably, laughably (in a morbid sense) untrue. The group that has killed more Muslims in the Middle East than any other group in the region is, indisputably, the United States military; over the last few decades alone it has killed well over a quarter million Muslims. Indeed, as Stephen Walt pointed out last year at his Foreign Policy blog in response to a particularly inane Tom Friedman column, the most conservative estimate has the U.S. government killing 288,000 Muslims since 1983 -- a number that that's less than half some estimates of preventable deaths caused by U.S. sanctions against Iraq during the 1990s.

Still, assuming the most conservative estimate is true, “the United States has killed nearly 30 Muslims for every American” killed both by terrorists and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, says Walt. “The real ratio is probably much higher, and a reasonable upper bound for Muslim fatalities (based mostly on higher estimates of ‘excess deaths’ in Iraq due to the sanctions regime and the post-2003 occupation) is well over one million, equivalent to over 100 Muslim fatalities for every American lost.”

Even if one were to accept a broad, expansive definition of “al Qaeda,” comprising all the organizations from Somalia to Yemen that claim some sort of affiliation with or affinity for bin Laden, the group he heads -- assuming he’s still alive -- has killed at most perhaps 1/100th the Muslims the U.S. government has, which I guess says something for American productivity, if not morality. Bastards, no doubt, al Qaeda's killing power nevertheless still not approach the awe (and shock)-inspiring might of cluster bombs, Predator drones and half-trillion defense budgets.

When al Qaeda kills Muslims, though, they at least acknowledge it.