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Drone deaths: 4,700

lambert's picture
Submitted by lambert on Thu, 02/21/2013 - 4:56pm

Nice to see support for drones is thoroughly bipartisan:

Just how many people have America’s drones killed? Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham has put the death toll at 4,700—the first time an American official has publicly put a precise figure on the impact of strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles. The South Carolina lawmaker's office said he was citing an estimate already discussed on cable television.

Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, used the figure during a question and answer session on Tuesday with the Rotary Club of Easley in his home state of South Carolina. His remarks were first reported by the Easley Patch.

“We've killed 4,700,” the lawmaker said. “Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we're at war, and we've taken out some very senior members of al-Qaida.”

Yeah, like the AQ's second-in-command how many times? One, and one word:

Blowback. Dear Lord, we've made entire swaths of Pakistan and Afghanistan into free-fire zones, and we're happily slaughtering people by remote control, and handing out medals for it. If I were a faraway brown person who had to worry about random, instant death from the air, I'd be pissed.

Then again, if they bring the war here we started there, that just cycles the self-licking security ice cream cone one more time, which is why the only answer is to end the empire.

NOTE * Good for the Patch, by the way. Who would have thought AOL would survive in useful form?

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Comments

nomad2's picture
Submitted by nomad2 on

They won't have to bring the war here. We'll do it ourselves. The drones are coming home to roost.

lambert's picture
Submitted by lambert on

DIck is perhaps our pre-eminent dystopian:

Something sizzled to the right of him. A commercial, made by Theodorus Nitz, the worst house of all, had attached itself to his car.

"Get off," he warned it. But the commercial, well-adhered, began to crawl, buffeted by the wind, toward the door and the entrance crack. It would soon have squeezed in and would be haranguing him in the cranky, garbagey fashion of the Nitz advertisements.

He could, as it came through the crack, kill it. It was alive, terribly mortal: the ad agencies, like nature, squandered hordes of them.

The commercial, flysized, began to buzz out its message as soon as it managed to force entry. "Say! Haven't you sometimes said to yourself, I'll bet other people in restaurants can see me! And you're puzzled as to what to do about this serious, baffling problem of being conspicuous, especially-"

Chic crushed it with his foot.

If only!

Turlock