Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) put a number on the United States' growing tally of kills caused by Uncle Sam's arsenal of drones on Tuesday this week while speaking to constituents at the Easley Rotary Club in Easley, South Carolina.
"We've killed 4,700," the Council for Foreign Relations Sen. Graham told the crowd. "Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we're at war, and we've taken out some very senior members of Al-Qaeda."
Comment: Yes, "senior members of Al-Qaeda" they created by bombing their people in the first place.
The influential American lawmaker has gone on the record several times in recent months to defend the expanding role of drone warfare in America's foreign wars, but the actual number of casualties caused by the missile-equipped robots has gone largely unreported. In fact, neither the Executive nor Legislative branches of the US have formally offered as much as an estimate regarding the number of kills, and drone-strikes led by the Central Intelligence Agency have largely gone unconfirmed by the CIA, despite first-hand accounts from survivors of the attacks.
Comment: Given how fervently Graham supports the CIA's drone program, we can only assume that he was gloating when he gave that figure on the number of people murdered by America's drones.