House Armed Services Chair Smith on Accountability for Drone Strike: ‘It Happened,’ ‘You’re Not Going to Fix It’

On Saturday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Alex Witt Reports,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-WA) dismissed “this idea that we have to hold people accountable, we have to fix this” in the wake of the August 29 drone strike and stated, “It happened. The people are dead and there isn’t a damn thing that anyone’s going to do to bring them back.” Smith further said that the most important thing is focusing “on not using the military as aggressively as we have, and that’s a huge part of Biden’s agenda.”

Smith said, “First of all, let’s not kid ourselves, okay. It happened. The people are dead and there isn’t a damn thing that anyone’s going to do to bring them back. And this idea that we have to hold people accountable, we have to fix this, you’re not going to fix it, okay? You’re just not. It happened, as countless mistakes have been made during the course of 20 years. What we’re going to do is we are going to focus on not using the military as aggressively as we have, and that’s a huge part of Biden’s agenda. You know, getting out of Iraq, getting out of Afghanistan, getting out of the business of thinking that the United States military can show up in a country and fix it at the point of a gun is the number one most important thing that we’re going to do.”

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