Air Force Times: Air Force stopped reporting drone strikes and deleted stats from old reports two days after filibuster notice from Sen. Rand Paul

(Note: Air Force Times is not a publication of the United States Air Force; it is published by Gannett, the parent company of USA Today.)

The United States Air Force, the branch of the US government which brought you a $72 billion fleet of pilot-killing jets which have never flown a combat mission, the highest incidence of rape in the armed services and surveillance photos of male college students kissing each other to protest DADT is now engaged in Orwellian (or perhaps Stalinist) censorship of its own statistics.
     According to Air Force Times:

Last October, Air Force Central Command started tallying weapons releases from RPAs, broken down into monthly updates... The Air Force maintained that policy for the statistics reports for November, December and January. But the February numbers, released March 7, contained empty space where the box of RPA statistics had previously been.
     Additionally, monthly reports hosted on the Air Force website have had the RPA data removed — and recently.
     Those files still contained the RPA data as of Feb. 16, according to archived web pages accessed via Archive.org. Metadata included in the new, RPA-less versions of the reports show the files were all created Feb. 22.
     Defense Department spokesman Cmdr. Bill Speaks said the department was not involved in the decision to remove the statistics. AFCENT did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
     The data removal coincided with increased scrutiny on RPA policy caused by President Barack Obama’s nomination of John Brennan to head the CIA. Brennan faced opposition in the Senate over the use of RPAs and his defense of their legality in his role as Obama’s deputy national security adviser.
     On Feb. 20, two days before the metadata indicates the scrubbed files were created, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., sent a letter to Brennan saying that he would filibuster the nomination over concerns about using RPA strikes inside the U.S., a threat he carried out for over 12 hours on March 6 (Brennan was confirmed the next day).
Click here to see the original December 2012 and January 2013 statistics and the ones apparently loaded online Feb. 22.