'Sometimes You Have to Take Life to Save Lives'

It’s no real secret that the Obama Administration’s ever escalating drone war has killed a massive lot of innocent people, but White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan was surprisingly glib today when pressed on the matter in an interview with ABC’s “This Week.”

“Unfortunately, in war, there are casualties, including among the civilian population,” Brennan insisted, though he did not mention that the drone strikes have been carried out almost exclusively in nations with which the United States is not at war: Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

Brennan went on to defend the killings, saying “sometimes you have to take life to save lives.” He provided no examples of how the killing of nearly 2,000 people, virtually all of them unidentified, had “saved lives.”

Indeed the only thing that the drone strikes have conclusively done is ruin the US relationship with Pakistan, whose parliament has conditioned a return to normal relations on the US ending such attacks.