In a 2007 interview, the Pentagon's ex-chief of high-value targeting at the start of the Iraq invasion, Marc Garlasco, said that " the magic number was 30 " when it came to a thumbs up estimating how many dead could be expected in a planned attack without a hassle. Anything much over would require the bother of getting explicit approval from Rumsfeld or Bush himself. As long as within bounds, the strike could be given the a-ok by commanders on the ground. So as an upper limit, thirty seemed an acceptable count, given some wiggle room. Too few to matter politically or to garner much attention from the media beyond a brief blurb or two, without the higher-ups having to deal with any public relations backwash. We and our international buds must have gotten really, really good since then at not having to bother for the big bosses' blessing, keeping the dead to around batches of thirty at a time, always precisely getting largely just the bad someones. Sometimes sli...