Dear Dirty America

So here’s an extra 20,000, which I would regard as noteworthy from WikiLeaks, some significance. But the question is: The American people do not demand and Congress does not demand, unfortunately—I can’t blame it all on the president—they don’t demand to know how many people we are killing in this collateral damage.

And the truth is that when they take credit for killing a terrorist here and a terrorist there—the Taliban—what they don’t tell is how many people they killed in a hunt for that particular terrorist. The same calculation. In some cases, to get this guy, it took 78 other people who had to die here, he wasn’t here then, we hit the wrong place, here was a whole collection of people we didn’t know were there, and so forth. And it adds up. Time over time. And finally we got him. Well, you killed 78 people or 17 people other than the one you were after. And their families joined the resistance.