Washington Is Dropping Bombs on Moms,
Kids, Farmers Every 12 Minutes
Washington
Is Dropping Bombs on Moms, Kids, Farmers Every 12 Minutes
Be sure to
read this. It is priceless.
Trump’s
military drops a bomb every 12 minutes, and no one is talking about it - Lee
Camp
Published
time: 21 Jun, 2018 11:12
© Nikola
Solic / Reuters
We live in a
state of perpetual war, and we never feel it. While you get your gelato at the
hip place where they put those cute little mint leaves on the side, someone is
being bombed in your name.
While you
argue with the 17-year-old at the movie theater who gave you a small popcorn
when you paid for a large, someone is being obliterated in your name. While we
sleep and eat and make love and shield our eyes on a sunny day, someone’s home,
family, life and body are being blown into a thousand pieces in our names.
Once every
12 minutes.
The United
States military drops an explosive with a strength you can hardly comprehend
once every 12 minutes. And that’s odd, because we’re technically at war
with—let me think—zero countries. So that should mean zero bombs are being
dropped, right?
Hell no!
You’ve made the common mistake of confusing our world with some sort of
rational, cogent world in which our military-industrial complex is under
control, the music industry is based on merit and talent, Legos have gently
rounded edges (so when you step on them barefoot, it doesn’t feel like an
armor-piercing bullet just shot straight up your sphincter), and humans are
dealing with climate change like adults rather than burying our heads in the
sand while trying to convince ourselves that the sand around our heads isn’t
getting really, really hot.
You’re
thinking of a rational world. We do not live there.
Instead, we
live in a world where the Pentagon is completely and utterly out of control. A
few weeks ago, I wrote about the $21 trillion (that’s not a typo) that has gone
unaccounted for at the Pentagon. But I didn’t get into the number of bombs that
ridiculous amount of money buys us. President George W. Bush’s
military dropped 70,000 bombs on five countries. But of that
outrageous number, only 57 of those bombs really upset the international
community.
Because
there were 57 strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen—countries the U.S. was
neither at war with nor had ongoing conflicts with. And the world was kind of
horrified. There was a lot of talk that went something like, “Wait a
second. We’re bombing in countries outside of war zones? Is it possible that’s
a slippery slope ending in us just bombing all the goddamn time? (Awkward
pause.) … Nah. Whichever president follows Bush will be a normal adult person
(with a functional brain stem of some sort) and will therefore stop this
madness.”
We were so
cute and naive back then, like a kitten when it’s first waking up in the
morning.
The Bureau
of Investigative Journalism reported that under President Barack Obama there were “563
strikes, largely by drones, that targeted Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. …”
It’s not
just the fact that bombing outside of a war zone is a horrific violation of
international law and global norms. It’s also the morally reprehensible
targeting of people for pre-crime, which is what we’re doing and what the Tom
Cruise movie “Minority Report” warned us about. (Humans are
very bad at taking the advice of sci-fi dystopias. If we’d listened to “1984,”we
wouldn’t have allowed the existence of the National Security Agency. If we
listened to “The Terminator,” we wouldn’t have allowed the
existence of drone warfare. And if we’d listened to “The Matrix,” we
wouldn’t have allowed the vast majority of humans to get lost in a virtual
reality of spectacle and vapid nonsense while the oceans die in a swamp of plastic waste. … But you know, who’s
counting?)
There was
basically a media blackout while Obama was president. You could count on one
hand the number of mainstream media reports on the Pentagon’s daily bombing
campaigns under Obama. And even when the media did mention it,
the underlying sentiment was, “Yeah, but look at how suave Obama is
while he’s OK’ing endless destruction. He’s like the Steve McQueen of aerial
death.”
And let’s
take a moment to wipe away the idea that our “advanced weaponry” hits
only the bad guys. As David DeGraw put it, “According to the C.I.A.’s own documents,
the people on the ‘kill list,’ who were targeted for ‘death-by-drone,’
accounted for only 2% of the deaths caused by the drone strikes.”
Two percent. Really,
Pentagon? You got a two on the test? You get five points just
for spelling your name right.
But those
70,000 bombs dropped by Bush—it was child’s play. DeGraw again: “[Obama]
dropped 100,000 bombs in seven countries. He out-bombed Bush by 30,000 bombs
and 2 countries.”
You have to
admit that’s impressively horrific. That puts Obama in a very elite group of
Nobel Peace Prize winners who have killed that many innocent
civilians. The reunions are mainly just him and Henry Kissinger wearing little
hand-drawn name tags and munching on deviled eggs.
However, we
now know that Donald Trump’s administration puts all previous presidents to
shame. The Pentagon’s numbers show that during George W. Bush’s eight years he
averaged 24 bombs dropped per day, which is 8,750 per year. Over the course of
Obama’s time in office, his military dropped 34 bombs per day, 12,500 per year.
And in Trump’s first year in office, he averaged 121 bombs
dropped per day, for an annual total of 44,096.
Trump’s
military dropped 44,000 bombs in his first year in office.
He has
basically taken the gloves off the Pentagon, taken the leash off an already
rabid dog. So the end result is a military that’s behaving like Lil Wayne crossed
with Conor
McGregor. You look away for one minute, look back, and are like, “What
the f*ck did you just do? I was gone for like, a second!”
Under Trump,
five bombs are dropped per hour—every hour of every day. That averages out to a
bomb every 12 minutes.
And which is
more outrageous—the crazy amount of death and destruction we are creating
around the world, or the fact that your mainstream corporate media
basically NEVER investigates it? They talk about Trump’s
flaws. They say he’s a racist, bulbous-headed, self-centered idiot (which is
totally accurate)—but they don’t criticize the perpetual Amityville massacre
our military perpetrates by dropping a bomb every 12 minutes, most of them
killing 98 percent non-targets.
When you
have a Department of War with a completely unaccountable budget—as we saw with
the $21 trillion—and you have a president with no interest in overseeing how
much death the Department of War is responsible for, then you end up dropping so
many bombs that the Pentagon has reported we are running out of bombs.
Oh, dear
God. If we run out of our bombs, then how will we stop all those innocent
civilians from … farming? Think of all the goats that will be allowed to go
about their days.
And, as with
the $21 trillion, the theme seems to be “unaccountable.”
Journalist
Witney Webb wrote in February, “Shockingly, more than 80
percent of those killed have never even been identified and the C.I.A.’s own
documents have shown that they are not even aware of who they are
killing—avoiding the issue of reporting civilian deaths simply by naming all
those in the strike zone as enemy combatants.”
That’s
right. We kill only enemy combatants. How do we know they’re enemy combatants?
Because they were in our strike zone. How did we know it was a strike zone?
Because there were enemy combatants there. How did we find out they were enemy
combatants? Because they were in the strike zone. … Want me to keep going, or
do you get the point? I have all day.
This is not
about Trump, even though he’s a maniac. It’s not about Obama, even though he’s
a war criminal. It’s not about Bush, even though he has the intelligence of
boiled cabbage. (I haven’t told a Bush joke in about eight years. Felt kind of
good. Maybe I’ll get back into that.)
This is
about a runaway military-industrial complex that our ruling elite are more than
happy to let loose. Almost no one in Congress or the presidency tries to
restrain our 121 bombs a day. Almost no one in a mainstream outlet tries to get
people to care about this.
Recently,
the hashtag #21Trillion for the unaccounted Pentagon money has gained some
traction. Let’s get another one started: #121BombsADay.
One every 12
minutes.
Do you know
where they’re hitting? Who they’re murdering? Why? One hundred and twenty-one
bombs a day rip apart the lives of families a world away—in your name and my
name and the name of the kid doling out the wrong size popcorn at the movie
theater.
We are a rogue
nation with a rogue military and a completely unaccountable ruling elite. The
government and military you and I support by being a part of this society are
murdering people every 12 minutes, and in response, there’s nothing but a
ghostly silence. It is beneath us as a people and a species to give this topic
nothing but silence. It is a crime against humanity.
Lee Camp is an American stand-up comedian,
writer, actor, and activist. Dubbed by Salon as the “John Oliver of Russia
Today”, Camp is the host of RT America’s first comedy news show Redacted
Tonight, which tackles the news agenda with a healthy dose of humor and satire.
Lee’s writing credits are vast, having written for The Onion, Comedy Central
and Huffington Post, as well as the acclaimed essay collections Moment of
Clarity and Neither Sophisticated Nor Intelligent. Lee’s stand-up comedy
has also been featured on Comedy Central, ABC’s Good Morning America,
Showtime’s The Green Room with Paul Provenza, Al-Jazeera, BBC’s Newsnight, E!,
MTV, and Spike TV.
This article was originally published by Truthdig.
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