Azmat Khan’s sobering piece on US drone warfare in Afghanistan left me less with a new insight on American military conduct and more so with a greater appreciation for journalism’s role in the systems of political accountability. What she demonstrated in her piece is that journalists go beyond simply relaying the information that they discover; sometimes they have to create their own lead rather than be informed by outside sources, as she did by questioning the official line put forward by the Obama government. The way in which she conducted her research however also displayed the limitations to a ‘free press’. The lawsuits currently in place to try and obtain more military documents credibility assessments in relation to Afghanistan and the fact that the Times only received 1,311 out of 2,866 reports made me think back to the state secrets privilege legal precedent that is active in the US and the limitations it creates for journalists and the information the public receives. If these 1000 or so documents were those deemed ok to be released to the public, knowing what kind of horrific details they revealed about the state of US military conduct, what would the remaining documents, not deemed suitable for the public eye, further reveal? Of course, state secrets and the 9 exemptions to the release of FOI documents or their use in legal proceedings can have grounds in protection of national security, but at the same time, the US has pulled out of Afghanistan. It doesn’t have to worry about maintaining relations or upholding foreign governments secrecy with a non-Taliban government, as that doesn’t exist any more. I find it very hard to see what the reasoning would be behind not releasing documents related to drone warfare, or at least releasing information in a way that could protect . For example, Khan was focused on the conversations and the way drone operators evaluated locations for their viability as ISIS targets. I am sure that in many cases, other snippets of these conversations and assessments could be released without releasing other vital pieces of information that perhaps would threaten national security or relationships with foreign allies – however I will admit that what I am saying is becoming very speculative of what these documents could actually contain. My main point is that I find it worrying the extent to which the agencies journalists are aiming to critique can shield themselves – it is not uncommon for the CIA and military agencies for example to withhold documents whose release would supposedly hurt ‘national security’, when later they merely addressed internal abuses of human rights committed by these agencies that would damage their reputations. In this way, these agencies still have some power in shaping media narratives simply by withholding information. Of course, Khan did most of the work on the ground by speaking to victims and sharing the stories of the victims killed but ignored by official figures. However what made her piece so monumental was the way she directly followed the patterns of US strikes where they had made it clear in their documents that there were potentially civilians; in a way conducting a form of present archeology and narrative reversal, deconstructing their claims that would not have been possible. The larger question is how to establish greater transparency, especially when agencies have powers to reject FOI requests, which remains a political question within which journalists play an essential role, even just by highlighting how many rejections they receive or by how hard it is to get some types of documents.