The US Record of Drone Bombings
According to a little-noticed Newsweek report, it took US President Trump only seven months to kill more innocent civilians via drone bombings than Obama did over his entire eight-year presidency, and that is with increased secrecy concerning civilian causalities.
Drone bombing operations became very controversial during the George W. Bush Administration due to the high innocent civilian causality rate (collateral damage). The international community was outraged, as Bush conducted 57 drone strikes, outside of the Afghanistan and Iraq war zones, in three countries: Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.
As scandalous as that was, the Obama Administration, under the cover of a U.S. media blackout, conducted a stunning 563 drone strikes in those same three countries, with an outrageous innocent civilian death rate. 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.
Overall Bush & Obama Bombing Rates
George W. Bush was known as a “War President,” with the invasion of Afghanistan, the Shock & Awe campaign to start the Iraq War, and several other intense bombing campaigns throughout his presidency. Overall, he dropped an astonishing 70,000 bombs, in five countries.
As horrifying as that is to comprehend, over the course of Obama’s presidency, he dropped 100,000 bombs in seven countries. Obama out-bombed Bush by 30,000 bombs and two countries. Yet, somehow, he was given a Nobel Peace Prize.
Speaking of getting the Peace Prize for record-breaking bombing campaigns, 1973 Nobel winner Henry Kissinger, who was an adviser to Obama and Bush, and Ford and Nixon’s Secretary of State and National Security Advisor during the Vietnam War, made some incredible statements about Obama’s bombing campaigns in comparison to Nixon’s.
Kissinger said the Obama Administration has “hit more targets on a broader scale than the Nixon Administration ever did…. And I bet if one did an honest account, there were fewer civilian casualties in Cambodia than there have been from American drone attacks.”
Whether that is true or not is debatable. Just the fact that this comparison can even be made is highly disturbing.
Trump’s Overall Bombing Rate
As a declassified United States Air Forces Central Command Combined Air Operations Center report reveals, after the first full year of the Trump Administration, the overall bombing rate has skyrocketed.
Over the course of Bush’s presidency, he averaged 24 bombs dropped per day, 8750 per year.
Over the course of Obama’s presidency, he averaged 34 bombs dropped per day, 12,500 per year.
Over the course of Trump’s first year in office, he averaged at an annual total of 44,096. That is five bombs dropped per hour – every hour of every day. A bomb is dropped every twelve minutes.
Trump has more than tripled Obama’s outrageously scandalous bombing rate.
In fact, when you break the numbers down, it appears that Trump may have actually quadrupled Obama’s overall bombing rate.
144 Bombs per Day
Trumps actual bombing total is most likely significantly more than 44,096. After news on the dramatic increase in bombings began to spread in September of 2017, the Trump Administration and the Pentagon became much more secretive over releasing battlefield information.
The officially released bombing numbers dropped dramatically over the last three months of 2017. The number of bombings officially reported during October, November and December fell to a combined total of 4686, which is an average of 51 bombs per day. The total number of bombings officially reported for the nine months prior was 39,410, for an average of 144 per day.
No matter what argument you try to make for the huge decrease in bombings following the news coverage, a sudden drop from 144 bombs per day to 51 is definitely suspicious, to say the least. When you look at the bombing patterns from the previous three years, October, November and December have been months with increased bombing activity.
To matters even worse, the civilian casualty rate has skyrocketed. According to a little-noticed Newsweek report, citing statistics from bombing and casualties monitoring group Airwars, it took Trump only seven months to kill more innocent civilians via drone bombings than Obama did over his entire eight-year presidency, and that is with increased secrecy concerning civilian causalities.
A significant reason why the number of bombings and civilian causalities are so much higher is due to a key policy change that Trump made once he came into office. During the Obama Administration, the C.I.A. would identify potential drone strike targets, and then the military would decide whether or not to conduct the strikes.
As soon as Trump got into office, he quickly changed this policy and gave the C.I.A. a never-ending green light to conduct strikes on their own, whenever they want, without the need for any approval or oversight whatsoever. This also makes keeping track of strikes and death rates much more difficult because the C.I.A. can conduct drone strikes covertly.
As journalist Whitney Webb summed it up:
“Trump’s drone assassination rate is now eight times that of Obama. Obama’s, in turn, was 10 times that of Bush, making Trump’s drone kill rate a whopping 80 times higher than that of Bush. In other words, Trump is on track to be a record-breaking war criminal….
“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.”
Bottom line, under Trump, the C.I.A. is killing thousands of innocent civilians via drone strikes alone.
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