The Dead, the Dollars, the Drones: 9/11 Era by the Numbers

[n2doc]

By Lena Groeger September 9, 2011 | 6:30 am | Categories: Af/Pak, Crime and Homeland Security, Iraq
Ever since the Twin Towers fell, the United States has been at war. The costs of that decade of conflict have been unimaginably high: trillions of dollars spent, hundreds of thousands of lives lost. The numbers are almost too big to grasp, let alone quantify. The graphics below are our incomplete attempt to do so.

These figures are also a way of showing the radical transformation the U.S. military has undergone during the 9/11 era. Drones, once an afterthought in tactical plans, have become a central component, flying millions of hours in combat. Special operations forces have added tens of thousands to their ranks. Bomb-resistant armored vehicles, absent from the American arsenal in 2001, are now a primary means of battlefield transportation — even as Afghanistan’s militants find new ways to render them irrelevant.

We know how many American troops have been killed in this decade’s wars. How many Afghans and Iraqis have lost their lives isn’t clear. The United Nations only started keeping reliable statistics on Afghanistan’s casualties in 2007. The estimates for the number of dead Iraqis vary by 1,000 percent or more. And even if these conflicts last another 10 years, the final toll may never be known.

You can dive into the data behind these graphics — and check the sourcing of the numbers we’ve used. The chart below is interactive. Mouse over the year headings and the data blocks to view additional details.








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http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/09/dangerroom_911toll_0909/all/1

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. K&R !

[Mira]

2. Heavy hearted recommendation no words

[peace13]

3. Oh my god.........

All of the days in the protest lines, trips to DC and campaign activism. To see the results is heartbreaking. To know that the average American is ignorant to 100% of this is debilitating. One heartbreaking figure that has been left out however is the total number of injured US soldiers. We have hundreds of thousands of men and women who have been damaged by these wars and I see that they are not even counted here.

Very sad indeed.

[court jester]

4. current edition of frontline helps to drive home the point-- must see tv

Top Secret America

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/iraq-war-on-terror/topsecretamerica/dana-priest-top-secret-america-is-here-to-stay

A two-year examination into the massive, unwieldy, top-secret world the government has created in response to 9/11.

Q: (To Dana Priest): Has Top Secret America changed under the Obama administration?

"Barack Obama came in to office pledging the new era of transparency, and that clearly has not happened in national security. It is just as opaque as it always was.

And on top of that, you could argue that it’s worse, because this administration has gone after so-called leakers, the leak investigations, in a larger way than the Bush administration did. There’s an unprecedented number of indictments and investigations of subjects accused or thought to have released classified information to, usually, reporters. So they are actively trying to stop the flow of that information and using the courts to do that, which the Bush administration, although it criticized reporters, did not do...
--

"I just think that we have accepted what it is the government says we need to do without questioning how much money it costs, without questioning whether it’s effective or not. And in part we’ve done that because we’ve accepted the secrecy that surrounds it all...
--

"...We started to try to find all the government agencies that do secret work. And within a couple weeks, we decided there are just too many, so we’ll up the ante to top secret, which is really going into an elite level. And even then, after 2.5 years, we found nearly a million people, 860,000 people have top secret clearance in this country. That’s about 2.5 times the size of the District of Columbia itself.

And another 1,900 private companies also work at the top secret level. And there are another 1,100 federal government organizations that do work at the top secret level. And if you were to put all those on a map, you would have 17,000 locations, because a lot of the companies and a lot of the agencies have multiple buildings..."
--

Top CIA Official: Obama Changed Virtually None of Bush’s Controversial Programs

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/iraq-war-on-terror/topsecretamerica/dana-priest-top-secret-america-is-here-to-stay

[madmax]

5. Is this a great country or what? We suck. :(

[dixiegrrrrl]

6. We're # 1 !!!!!! USA!! USA!!! USA!!

Seriusly, this is fucking up our national Karma, big time.

[WCGreen]

7. So we bankrupt ourselves in order to "protect" oursleves...

How can we say we are winning...

[n2doc]

8. yep. See toon

[gratuitous]

9. In Iraq alone, we've killed at least 33 for every 1 killed on 9/11

And nobody in a position to say so has said that Iraq had anything to do with those attacks. Isn't that nice? By the way, 33 to 1 is the lowest ratio; it could be as many as 300 to 1. I wonder when our blood lust will be sated, if ever. I look forward to the inevitable next round of "They hate us for our freedom" when a little righteous revenge is again exacted on us.