121 bombs a day

By the time you finish reading this article, someone will be bombed. The U.S. military will drop a bomb on someone somewhere in the world 121 times today and every day, which averages to five bombs per hour. This is a huge number considering that we are not at war with any sovereign country.

According to an Office of the Inspector General’s report, $21 trillion has gone unaccounted for at the Pentagon over the last 20 years. According to Consortiumnews. com, under President Bush, 70,000 bombs were unleashed on five countries. Fifty-seven of those bombs really upset the international community because they targeted countries the U.S. was not at war with or even had ongoing conflicts there. Under President Obama there were 563 strikes, largely by drones, that targeted those same countries during his two terms, a horrific violation of international law. But when you have the biggest and baddest military in the world, who will enforce those laws?

Despite those bombings during Obama’s presidency, there was basically a media blackout of reporting those bombings. According to that same article, in total, Obama dropped 100,000 bombs in seven countries. He out-bombed President Bush by 30,000 and two countries, but you’d never know that listening to our mainstream media.

And don’t believe the hype that our smart bombs only hit bad guys. According to the CIA’s own documents, the people on the “kill list” who were targeted for death-by-drone accounted for only 2 percent of the deaths caused by drone strikes. Therefore, 98 percent of those killed by drone strikes weren’t even intended targets. Do Americans feel that there’s no blowback from this?

President Trump has already exceeded Bush’s and Obama’s bombing totals and he is only half way through the second year of his administration! Independent news journalist David DeGraw showed that President Bush dropped 24 bombs per day and President Obama dropped 34 bombs per day. In President Trump’s first year in office, he’s dropped 121 bombs per day. That means five bombs per hour are dropped, every hour of every day: one every 12 minutes!

Which is more outrageous? The crazy amount of death and destruction our government is creating around the world in our name, or the fact that our mainstream media basically never investigates or reports these statistics to the American people? They are more than willing to speak about Trump’s character defects and outrageous tweets, but they don’t criticize the massacres committed by our military.

When you have a Department of Defense with a completely unaccountable budget (Google search shows “$21 trillion missing”) and a president with no interest in overseeing the military’s actions, we get into a situation in which our military may be running out of bombs (defensenews.com, May 2018). Journalist Whitney Web wrote, “Shockingly, more than 80% of those killed have never even been identified, and the CIA’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.”

This is about a runaway military industrial complex that our ruling elite are more than happy to let loose. I see no one in Congress or anyone in this administration trying to restrain the 121 bombs a day. I see no one in mainstream media trying to get people to care about this. The government and military that you and I are supporting are killing people every 12 minutes and there is nothing but a ghostly silence in the mainstream media. The silence is deafening.

Horacio Moronta, Lusby