"There's this macabre kind of calculus that the military goes through on every air strike, where they try to figure out how many dead civilians is dead bad guy worth," says Marc Garlasco, who knows the calculus of civilian casualties as well as anyone.
At the Pentagon, Garlasco was chief of high value targeting at the start of the Iraq war. He told 60 Minutes his team was authorized to kill a set number of civilians around high-value targets -- targets like Saddam Hussein and his leadership.
"Our number was 30. So, for example, Saddam Hussein. If you're gonna kill up to 29 people in a strike against Saddam Hussein, that's not a problem," Garlasco explains. "But once you hit that number 30, we actually had to go to either President Bush, or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld."
Garlasco says, before the invasion of Iraq, he recommended 50 air strikes aimed at high-value targets -- Iraqi officials.
But he says none of the targets on the list were actually killed. Instead, he says, "a couple of hundred civilians at least" were killed.
Reading this gave me a bad case of the chills.
If you read the article it makes the claim that just as many innocent Afghans have been killed by the U.S. Military as are being killed by the Taliban. I just don't know how you could possibly justify that.
I wonder if that math would hold if someone killed 29 American civilians here for every "bad guy" over there.
ReplyDeleteThis is exactly why the people in that region hate us.