 So, for years on this program, I have tried to sound the alarm about the evils of our drone program. It was created by George W. Bush, and when Obama took over, he basically ramped up drones exponentially and killed so many civilians that he was forced to scale back the program. But once Donald Trump took office, he once again scaled up the program, and we learned that he increased drones by more than 400%, and on top of that, he loosened the rules of engagement. So, there were warnings that this would lead to much more civilian casualties. And we speculated that by the time we learned about how many deaths Trump's drone program caused, it would be a disaster. The damage would be unfathomable. And now we're starting to get a sense of the destruction that Donald Trump caused from this drone program. And honestly, this is worse than any of us could have imagined. So as Brett Wilkins of Common Dreams reports, the Trump administration's 2017 decision to loosen military rules of engagement meant to protect civilians was followed by a sharp increase in civilian deaths, a report released on Monday revealed. The report by Nita C. Crawford of the Brown University Watson Institute's Cost of War Project, one of the premier authorities on civilian casualties in the 19-year so-called war on terror, found a 330% increase in the number of Afghan civilians killed by US-led airstrikes from 2016, the final year of the Obama administration, to 2019. From 2007 to 2016, US-led and Afghan government forces killed an average of 582 civilians each year. The report found. From 2017 through 2019, those same forces killed an average of 1,134 civilians each year, a nearly 95% increase. The sharp uptick in civilian deaths followed a decision by President Donald Trump in consultation with former Defense Secretary James Mattis and other military civilian officials to relax rules of engagement in the Afghan war in order to give US commanders more battlefield flexibility and to gain leverage at the bargaining table with the Taliban as both sides sought to end the devastating war whose course has spanned nearly the entire 21st century. From 2017 through 2019, civilian deaths to US and allied forces airstrikes in Afghanistan dramatically increased the report's dates. In 2019, airstrikes killed 700 civilians, more civilians than in any other year since the beginning of the war in 2001 and 2002. After the US and Taliban reached a peace agreement in late February 2020, US and other international airstrikes declined and so did the harm to civilians caused by those strikes. According to the United Nations, US-led and Afghan government airstrikes killed more civilians than did Taliban militant attacks during the first half of 2019. The new report found that as US-led bombings declined following the 10 US peace pact reached with the Taliban in February of 2020, Afghan government airstrikes have increased as the Kabul government negotiates its own peace agreement with the insurgents. So this report is shocking. It sent chills down the back of my neck when I read it because what it tells us is that in order for us to have more leverage, we started to kill more and more people indiscriminately so that way the Taliban would come to the table to get us to stop killing innocent civilians. Our government killed non-enemy combatants to get more leverage. Do you know what that makes us? That makes us terrorists. Do you want to know what that makes Donald Trump for doing this? A war criminal. He and anyone else involved with this, they should be imprisoned for the rest of their lives. But they do this because they know there's no accountability. Obama didn't prosecute George Bush for war crimes because he'd go on to commit war crimes himself. So of course Donald Trump now feels free to do whatever he wants. Even if that means murdering innocent civilians, also we have more leverage in negotiations with the Taliban. It's just, it's sickening. How are we allowed to get away with this? How do we have any legitimacy whatsoever in the world when we are using innocent human beings as bargaining chips? How does this not outrage people? How is this not a national scandal? We're killing people in order to get the Taliban to want to make us stop. Hey, if you negotiate with us, we'll stop killing innocent civilians. That's, that's monstrous. Like there are no words to describe this. This is psychopathic behavior, but it's pretty normal for our empire. This is something that we do all the time. So I mean, for me, I knew that the civilian casualties would increase under Donald Trump since he not only loosened the rules of engagement, but on top of that, you know, he increased drone strikes exponentially, even more so than Obama did. But for our government to indiscriminately kill innocent civilians, also that way we are better off negotiating a so-called peace deal with the Taliban. I don't even know what to say about that. I think the worst part about the story, aside from the fact that all these lives are gone and will never come back, is that there's going to be no accountability. Mattis isn't going to see a day in prison. Trump is going to live the rest of his life a free man when he should be in prison. The way that I see it, both Obama and Trump and Bush, they can all share a jail cell for all I care. What matters is accountability. And listen, ask yourself this. Why hasn't the United States government signed on to be a member of the International Criminal Court? Isn't that pretty obvious? It's because if we actually subjected ourselves to be accountable to international authorities, how many of our government officials would go to prison? Now, there's issues with the International Criminal Court. There is a bias towards Africa. They prosecute more African war criminals than anyone else. They don't necessarily look to the war crimes that are being committed by developed countries, and that's a problem. But I mean, there should be some international entity that can hold war criminals accountable, that should have jurisdiction over any government that does things like this, that does what our government does. So it's outrageous to me that we can do this. We can commit acts of terrorism, and there's zero accountability. None whatsoever. The only accountability that Obama saw was criticism, and the consequence was he scaled back the program. But that doesn't take back the lives that you took. And now Trump didn't even bother to scale back the program. He wanted to show everyone how tough he was. And he did this so he can get the Taliban to come to the table, so then he can claim to be the president who struck a peace deal and ended wars. Meanwhile, to get there, killing hundreds of innocents. It's just, it's nauseating to hear things like this. I don't even know what to say. It's just, it's depressing.