From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Our first two interviews are about facts,

facts that have political resonance and consequences and are elusive.

First, facts about drone strikes.

The Obama administration has long been known to be hitting al-Qaeda

with drones in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan, but the government rarely releases

death tolls in these strikes, and even more rarely, information on civilian casualties.

Questions arise even when numbers are supplied. On Tuesday, a piece in the New York Times by Scott

Shane and Joe Becker reported that, according to several administration sources, the government

considers, quote, all military age males in a strike zone as combatants, unless there is explicit

intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

Chris Woods is senior reporter for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in the U.K.

Since 2010, he's worked to confirm and map civilian deaths from drone strikes and covert actions in the Middle East and Africa.

In February, his group released findings that conflicted with those of the CIA.

U.S. officials accused Wood's group of being played by militants and Pakistani intelligence.

Wood says the charge is absurd.

We take our information from a huge variety of sources, including U.S. media and from leaked intelligence documents and from U.S. intelligence officials themselves on occasion when they speak to us. We speak to an enormous array of sources. Among those sources, for example, Pakistani lawyers representing civilians killed in the drone strikes

over in Pakistan. One of those lawyers, US intelligence officials have labeled as an agent of

Pakistani intelligence. I think that's an absolutely laughable claim. And unfortunately,

an indication of the extent to which the US intelligence community seems prepared

to go to ridicule claims of civilian casualties in Pakistan and elsewhere.

Our view is that instead of knocking down the messenger, we think that the CIA should be

...