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How the U.S. hid an airstrike that killed dozens of civilians in Syria

234 points by AndrewBissell 5y ago

trasz 5y ago
Interestingly, despite a large number of upvotes this article is nowhere to be found on HN listing anymore.
bayesian_horse 5y ago
As horrible as those allegations are, let's appreciate that the U.S. military may be about the only military force that is both capable of committing these mistakes/war crimes and investigating them. Just imagine what would happen if Russian or Chinese military lawyers or journalists tried to do something similar.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  >U.S. military may be about the only military force that is both capable of committing these mistakes/war crimes and investigating them I'd prefer if they just not did them in the first place. I consider the alleged transparency simply to be a more subtle form of propaganda. It simply exists to give more credibility to warfare. It's in a sense how everything around American society is structured. When you make everyone belief they can be a millionaire they're not going rebel although they won't, when you get people to voluntarily fight they'll do it eagerly, etc Also as a psychological mechanism it is a kind of reverse version of what Adorno called secondary antisemitism. Which is the kind of antisemitism where someone will use the crimes committed against the Jews against them. (for example "I hate them, they've ruined the idea of German nationalism!"). Arguing to take American war-crimes as an opportunity to appreciate American virtue in dealing with them is to relegate the victim to an object, and to basically declare the American moral character the most important thing in the world, which is very bizarre.
  - lordgrenville 5y ago
    Following through on your analogy, though, this would be akin to "secondary patriotism" - responding to criticism of your country with mitigation: "well, we've done bad things, but at least we have mechanisms for internal criticism and improvement". Put that way it doesn't sound so bad.
- megous 5y ago
  So the US internally docummented some of the incidents. Is that useful to anyone? Did it have impact on anything? A lot of the reporting at the time in the west was actually done by non-US organizations like airwars.org. I watched the reporting quite closely at the time. At least now I know how to interpret the reports from reporters embedded with US coalition in the past that they were not allowed into some area before it was cleaned. This article paints a clear picture of what might have been happening.
- curiousgal 5y ago
  And y'all wonder why Americans are hated. It takes a special amount of delusion to pat yourself on the back, for whatever made-up reason, after having killed innocent people. Imagine saying the same thing about 9/11 and watch your life be torn to pieces.
  - gotoeleven 5y ago
    In the real world military actions often have unintended civilian casualties. The difference is that some groups don't care (china, russia) or are doing them purposefully (terrorists). If you can't understand the moral distinction then I don't think you're going to be able to add anything but noise to these kinds of debates.
    - kataklasm 5y ago
      I know I'm breaking HN rules here, but have you read the article? It literally is about the US Military not investigating its own war crimes.
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      The only intention of our many stupid wars is to further enrich armaments manufactures. It has nothing to do with security; Americans are vulnerable mostly to violence from ourselves. Killing civilians enriches armaments manufacturers just fine, and it plants the seeds for future wars, so it certainly is intended. Probably not by the rank and file (cf. Daniel Hale), but certainly by everyone in the Pentagon. Claiming otherwise is the best example of "noise".
    - toiletfuneral 5y ago
      Perptually committing events like My Lai & Abu Gharib show how much we 'care' You should read this. https://theintercept.com/2017/01/10/the-crimes-of-seal-team-6/ https://theintercept.com/2017/01/10/the-crimes-of-seal-team-...
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    Americans are hated? I think you hang out in a fairly small social circle if that is the norm. Or are you just one of those self-hating Americans who thinks everyone else is just like you? Guessing that's the case from the use of "y'all"
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- pessimizer 5y ago
  That's not what the article says. The article says that they stymied any internal inquiries, fudged numbers, and lied at every possible opportunity to do so. It's great that the NYT is covering it, because liberals might pay attention, but this looks like another case (like the rocket into the compound of an Afghan family seemingly out of a Hallmark card or a segment of CBS Sunday Morning) where pictures, testimony, and clear analysis were up shortly after the event, but since they were posted by locals and people opposed to the war, completely ignored by the media. No one will be punished for this, ever, except the people who wouldn't let go of the incident internally, and anyone who leaked to a journalist. I actually think that if it were China, we would see prosecution and punishment. It absolutely could never happen in the US.
  - adolph 5y ago
    I wonder what the larger societal context for this airstrike? The context for the "the rocket into the compound of an Afghan family" was a retreat from Afghanistan. Other previous bombings of questionable military value had other contexts. These justifications for the bombing were disputed by the owners of the plant, the Sudanese government, and other governments. American officials later acknowledged "that the evidence that prompted President Clinton to order the missile strike on the Shifa plant was not as solid as first portrayed. Indeed, officials later said that there was no proof that the plant had been manufacturing or storing nerve gas, as initially suspected by the Americans, or had been linked to Osama bin Laden, who was a resident of Khartoum in the 1980s." The attack took place a week after the Monica Lewinsky scandal and two months after the film Wag the Dog, prompting some commentators to describe the attack as a distraction for the public from the scandal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shifa_pharmaceutical_factory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shifa_pharmaceutical_factor...
- ZoomerCretin 5y ago
  The United States asked its ally countries to manufacture charges to imprison a foreign journalist for exposing many of its war crimes during the Iraq War, and they complied. We are no better than your imagined, contrived scenario. This hubris that we are somehow better, more moral, or more able to investigate and correct mistakes is a long disproven farce that needs to die.
- jessaustin 5y ago
  You overestimate the USA military's tolerance for investigation of its many "mistakes". Julian Assange has been persecuted for over a decade now for the "crime" of investigating such "mistakes". Korsak and Tate as described in TFA will probably suffer as previous whistleblowers like Daniel Hale, John Kiriakou, Thomas Drake, Chelsea Manning, etc. Let's not give TFA too much credit, however. In 12 pages of reporting on USA military action in Syria, they couldn't find space to mention the fact that right now in mid-November 2021 USA military still occupies the oil- and agriculturally-rich eastern third of this nation, thus ensuring that while they can't buy food due to sanctions they're also not allowed to eat their own food because "fuck you"? In order for this brutality to end, it must be reported upon. https://thegrayzone.com/2021/03/05/tulsi-gabbard-calls-out-the-us-dirty-war-on-syria-that-biden-aides-admit-to/ https://thegrayzone.com/2021/03/05/tulsi-gabbard-calls-out-t...
- trasz 5y ago
  It's a slightly different case, but look at what happened last time Russia shot down an airliner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17): the perpetrators weren't exactly judged, but they got "disappeared", which is a form of punishment. For comparison, when the US shot down an airliner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655), the perpetrators... got decorated.
  - m0llusk 5y ago
    And their weapon system was retired. There were terrible crimes, but trying to make complex situations simple to suit your preferred narrative actually weakens your arguments.
    - trasz 5y ago
      That American perpetrators got decorated for this is a pretty simple and easily verifiable fact.
  - bayesian_horse 5y ago
    The cases couldn't be more different... There is no record of an investigation of how the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 got shot down. Whereas the incident with the Iranian airliner almost looks like it was provoked by the Iranian side.
    - trasz 5y ago
      Yay, blaming the victims, I almost didn’t see that coming.
    - kataklasm 5y ago
      Provocation is not grounds for killing 290 civilians. If, and that's a big if, there really was intentional provocation from Iran that doesn't mean you can kill 290 civilians.
- adolph 5y ago
  > Just imagine what would happen if Russian or Chinese military lawyers or journalists tried to do something similar. There doesn't seem to be English language publication to establish if similar internal criticism occurs in other countries or not. For all we know Daesh PR did a through analysis of burning Jordanian pilots alive in cages [0] and found it unhelpful to their cause. Given that any large enough human organization has internal conflict it would stand to reason that similar internal criticism occurs. It's not as if US whistleblowers live carefree lives. The NYT associates Mr. Tate's job loss with criticism of the US' internal response to the bombing. Mr. Tate, a former Navy officer who had worked for years as a civilian analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Counterterrorism Center before moving to the inspector general’s office, said he criticized the lack of action and was eventually forced out of his job. 0. https://www.albawaba.com/development-iraq/breaking-daesh-burns-jordanian-pilot-death-652292 https://www.albawaba.com/development-iraq/breaking-daesh-bur...
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    > For all we know Daesh PR did a through analysis of burning Jordanian pilots alive in cages [0] and found it unhelpful to their cause. I mean... ISIS-K / Daesh is still murdering people in Afghanistan, even after we've left. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/world/asia/afghanistan-mosque-attack.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/world/asia/afghanistan-mo... Considering that the Daesh / ISIS-K organization is so freakishly violent that they're attacking the _TALIBAN_ for being too moderate, gives you everything you need to know about that group. For better or worse, ISIS-K is the Taliban's problem for now. But I do worry that the Taliban are going to be toppled by ISIS-K, and once ISIS-K is in power they'll use Afghanistan as a training center to launch international attacks from. Or Syria, or Iraq. ISIS-K has strength in a fair number of regions. They clearly don't care "which" land they get, they just want some land / safe havens to train up and grow in strength. ------ Brutally killing civilians is their modus operandi. USA hides it when we do it because we're at least embarrassed about it and nominally against that sort of thing.. Unfortunately, we have more important things to worry about and prepare for.
    - yardie 5y ago
- sollewitt 5y ago
  The story is how 1) there are systems in place to stop this happening. 2) there are system in place to investigate if it happens. 3) the systems in 1) are circumvented 4) the systems in 2) are stymied This means the systems have been corrupted. It means the US military can claim to care about those things but actually acts entirely contra to those stated principles. This is more cynical than not pretending to care.
- stunt 5y ago
  I think other NATO members do similar investigations too. But remember, most of the civilian casualties are never recorded to be even investigated. What you hear is just the tip of iceberg. Not to mention that the US military force is also the only military force that is in the business of invasion and dropping bomb ALL THE TIME, which translates to more and more casualties.
  - bayesian_horse 5y ago
    Well, just right now, Russia is doing the same in Syria and sometimes Ukraine and other regions around the world. Then there's Iran. Other "bad guys" are more involved with their general vicinity.
- __m 5y ago
  Next you’ll tell us that Julian assange is on the payroll of the us military and the us is not going after him.
- dang 5y ago
  You took the thread into a hellish nationalistic flamewar with this provocation. Please don't do that again. It's emphatically not what this site is for, and it's particularly avoidable. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
throwawaymanbot 5y ago
Not perfect and sadly Harbor some insurrectionists who are under some mistaken idea that fascism is protecting Freedom and America. But still a cut above Russians and Chinese brutalists.
chernevik 5y ago
https://archive.md/gNyhH https://archive.md/gNyhH
GaryTang 5y ago
And a more recent airstrike… https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/17/politics/kabul-drone-strike-us-military-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/17/politics/kabul-drone-strike-u...
- propogandist 5y ago
  This won't get coverage as it would put the blame on Biden administration. NYT is out to try and win support for the current administration, I don't believe they care about actual accountability for wrong doing.
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/world/asia/us-air-strike-drone-kabul-afghanistan-isis.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/world/asia/us-air-strike-... One of at least five NYT stories about the strike.
- hunterb123 5y ago
  Yeah that was the greatly touted response to ISIS for killing 13 US troops and 95 Afghans. I'm still waiting for the big apology from Biden and the actual retaliation to ISIS, murdering 10 innocent people including 7 children doesn't count. I heard from him we still had great intel and over-the-horizon capability. That seemed to be a lie.
vmception 5y ago
How long until people realize that any authority saying “justified” is not using a definition found in any dictionary. The term used by any American imbued with the option of extrajudicial killings is only to - at best - match your pre-existing agreement with the action or your likelihood of agreeing with authority. “Justified”, for these people, does not mean “other actions were evaluated in a hierarchy and we were in a circumstance that this greater level of force was necessary” such as how a civilian is evaluated, it means “this choice was in a catalog of equally weighted choices, any of the choices including inaction would be justified”. I don’t view this as good enough, as it makes investigations and courts a waste of time and energy, when the only resolution can be to say “and now I present as evidence: the catalogue of choices that happens to list the choice taken” acquitting all.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  I think it's even worse. "Justified" means "we issued a document that says that in in order to kill more terrorists, killing a lesser number of civilians is justified, then we issued a document that declared 90% of the civilians terrorists."
  - vmception 5y ago
    yeah, I think this is supported by a large number of people not understanding this. like, a lot of support comes from evaluating each event in isolation from more neutral people, but I think even more hawkish as well as bigoted people would say "hm this is not okay for domestic or foreign policy"
- charbonneau2 5y ago
  > The most foolish notion of all is the belief that everything is just which is found in the customs or laws of nations. Would that be true, even if these laws had been enacted by tyrants? > What of the many deadly, the many pestilential statutes which nations put in force? These no more deserve to be called laws than the rules a band of robbers might pass in their assembly. For if ignorant and unskillful men have prescribed deadly poisons instead of healing drugs, these cannot possibly be called physicians’ prescriptions; neither in a nation can a statute of any sort be called a law, even though the nation, in spite of being a ruinous regulation, has accepted it. Cicero
sharklazer 5y ago
Why do we believe we killed Bin Laden even? Given the track record of the military, it was probably some goat farmers in Pakistan—-which is why no one saw the body and it was unceremoniously dumped in the ocean.
cyberpsybin 5y ago
Americans literally fund murder of innocent children. Insane. We need Nuremberg Trails 2.0
- dumdumdumdum 5y ago
  Would be nice to have Nuremberg Trials 1.0 for Hiroshima and Nagasaki first.
csee 5y ago
Highlights: - Special task force ordered strike. They didn't have to go through normal checks and balances because they were doing it under emergency provisions apparently due to an emergency request from arab allies on the ground. - They claim they didn't see the civilians because they were relying on SD quality drone feed. - The group is accused of falsifying log records afterwards.
- adolph 5y ago
  Second paragraph: "Without warning, an American F-15E attack jet streaked across the drone’s high-definition field of vision and dropped a 500-pound bomb on the crowd, swallowing it in a shuddering blast." Who is lying about the surveillance quality?
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    Further in the article >A 5th Special Forces Group officer in the task force looked at the drone footage and didn’t see any civilians, a task force officer said. But the drone he relied on had only a standard-definition camera. Central Command said there were no high-definition drones in the area that could get a better view of the target...In fact, a high-definition drone was available. The task force did not use it.
  - csee 5y ago
    There were 2 drone streams. The HD one that the Qatar base was watching, and the SD one that the task force was watching (if we're to believe their account).
  - torstenvl 5y ago
    I wouldn't necessarily assume it's a lie. I have no inside information and, if I did, I probably wouldn't be able to share it. However, based on my experience in Iraq, it wouldn't surprise me if 5th Group were relying on a previous-generation drone and didn't know an MQ9 or better class drone was watching the same AO. We once had a TF call in requesting a strike on military-aged males carrying rifles. In the strike cell, we had a newer drone on station and checked out what they were calling in. I'm glad we did. With higher fidelity video, we could see that it was actually teenaged males with fishing poles. The strike request was (of course) denied. In our case, it worked out the way one would hope, but with aging equipment and poor networking, it's definitely a "there but for the grace of God go I" moment.
photochemsyn 5y ago
The US record in Afghanistan is arguably even more ridiculous (and psychotic) than in Iraq. We went in with a pretty good justification (Taliban refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden for his central role in 9/11 terrorism) - although to be honest, the argument for doing the regime change op in Saudi Arabia was far more robust, as members of the Saudi government aided the hijackers and Saudi Royal family members were a key funding source. Everything since then has been ridiculous. Getting in bed with heroin-shipping warlords because they were anti-Taliban? Not that the Taliban got over $100 million from the USA in 1999-2001 for opium poppy eradication efforts, which were quite successful, although TAPI pipeline talks didn't go as well in this period. The whole 'Special Forces' fetishization is also pretty ridiculous. The best of the best of the best, la-dee-dah. Lots of nightime raids, which only pissed off the local population and made them quite willing to hand over power to the Taliban without a fight this year. Didn't 'US leaders' learn that from Vietnam? If the locals all hate you they're not going to support your remotely installed puppet government. Oh, and the "Afghan Army Training Program" - at a cost of something like $10 billion to train and equip 350,000 Afghan Army members who'd be the nucleus of the new independent government... all that cash just went into Dubai bank accounts, didn't it? Or McMansions in Kabul. Gross blatant corruption (and the 'infrastructure projects' oh god... for a million bucks you get a chain of ten subcontractors backed up by one guy digging a ditch with a worn-out shovel... get used to it, that's coming here now). American foreign policy in the 21st century - what an absolute disaster. Reminiscent of say, France and Britain in the Middle East from oh 1945-1954. Similar long-term results are to be expected.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  > train and equip 350,000 Afghan Army members "Afghanistan's ghost soldiers undermined fight against Taliban" https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-59230564 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-59230564 IIRC there were complaints being published at least as far back as 2009 about that problem.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    People keep crapping on the Afghan Army, but it should be noted that the Afghan security forces suffered 65,000+ casualties officially (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Afghan_security_forces_fatality_reports_in_Afghanistan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Afghan_security_forces...). And some estimate that the number may be as high as 100,000. ----- In contrast, the US sent ~110,000 soldiers at its peak (2011 surge), and lost ~7000. The Afghan Army took the bulk of the attacks by any reasonable analysis.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
War is hell. Tell ISIS to stand further away from civilians.
- trasz 5y ago
  It's not ISIS that's droning those civilians.
deleted 5y ago
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stunt 5y ago
Most of the civilian casualties aren't even documented in a war. If you think the military you support invades a country and only kills the bad guys, you are watching too many hollywood movies.
- mirekrusin 5y ago
  I think everybody understands there was never in history a war without innocent dying.
  - PostOnce 5y ago
    I don't think most people do; you've lived through the pandemic, you've seen how people are. They don't know anything at all. (for some large group of "They")
- q1w2 5y ago
  Even Hollywood movies often show civilian casualties. It's a war - it's chaotic by nature.
tyingq 5y ago
It is encouraging to see this kind of in-depth reporting on the incident. I wonder for how much longer that's possible, given the declining revenue possible for news organizations.
deanCommie 5y ago
If the Nuremberg principles were applied, every post-World War 2 president would be indictable. [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BXtgq0Nhsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BXtgq0Nhsc
GoodJokes 5y ago
Ok military industrial complex coders, give us a reason why you don’t quit your job?
dd444fgdfg 5y ago
the US political system is completely broken, and it's destroying a great country. it's a leadership problem, and needs someone who is capable of detaching and acting in the best interest of the country, not themselves or their party. they need a complete reboot. rewrite the constitution (it's overdue). rebuild the democratic voting functions (they're a mess and don't work). time for democracy 2.0
- credit_guy 5y ago
  > time for democracy 2.0 What’s your proposal? How do you find that altruistic leader, and if you find them, how do you get them elected, and if you do, how do you arrange to get them enough support in Congress? I don’t like democracy that much, and it looks like Churchill didn’t either. But neither Churchill nor me can come up with anything better.
- webinvest 5y ago
  I completely agree.
lenkite 5y ago
As a non-american, for all the lauded military professionalism of the USAF, I personally find them to be a bumbling organisation that can't seem to even do basic research before dropping bombs on people. There have been dozens of incidents of non-combatants bombed to paste over the last decade and it seems USAF will just simply not fix what it is doing wrong.

234 points by AndrewBissell 5y ago

Interestingly, despite a large number of upvotes this article is nowhere to be found on HN listing anymore.

As horrible as those allegations are, let's appreciate that the U.S. military may be about the only military force that is both capable of committing these mistakes/war crimes and investigating them. Just imagine what would happen if Russian or Chinese military lawyers or journalists tried to do something similar.

Barrin92 5y ago
>U.S. military may be about the only military force that is both capable of committing these mistakes/war crimes and investigating them I'd prefer if they just not did them in the first place. I consider the alleged transparency simply to be a more subtle form of propaganda. It simply exists to give more credibility to warfare. It's in a sense how everything around American society is structured. When you make everyone belief they can be a millionaire they're not going rebel although they won't, when you get people to voluntarily fight they'll do it eagerly, etc Also as a psychological mechanism it is a kind of reverse version of what Adorno called secondary antisemitism. Which is the kind of antisemitism where someone will use the crimes committed against the Jews against them. (for example "I hate them, they've ruined the idea of German nationalism!"). Arguing to take American war-crimes as an opportunity to appreciate American virtue in dealing with them is to relegate the victim to an object, and to basically declare the American moral character the most important thing in the world, which is very bizarre.
- lordgrenville 5y ago
  Following through on your analogy, though, this would be akin to "secondary patriotism" - responding to criticism of your country with mitigation: "well, we've done bad things, but at least we have mechanisms for internal criticism and improvement". Put that way it doesn't sound so bad.
megous 5y ago
So the US internally docummented some of the incidents. Is that useful to anyone? Did it have impact on anything? A lot of the reporting at the time in the west was actually done by non-US organizations like airwars.org. I watched the reporting quite closely at the time. At least now I know how to interpret the reports from reporters embedded with US coalition in the past that they were not allowed into some area before it was cleaned. This article paints a clear picture of what might have been happening.
curiousgal 5y ago
And y'all wonder why Americans are hated. It takes a special amount of delusion to pat yourself on the back, for whatever made-up reason, after having killed innocent people. Imagine saying the same thing about 9/11 and watch your life be torn to pieces.
- gotoeleven 5y ago
  In the real world military actions often have unintended civilian casualties. The difference is that some groups don't care (china, russia) or are doing them purposefully (terrorists). If you can't understand the moral distinction then I don't think you're going to be able to add anything but noise to these kinds of debates.
  - kataklasm 5y ago
    I know I'm breaking HN rules here, but have you read the article? It literally is about the US Military not investigating its own war crimes.
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    The only intention of our many stupid wars is to further enrich armaments manufactures. It has nothing to do with security; Americans are vulnerable mostly to violence from ourselves. Killing civilians enriches armaments manufacturers just fine, and it plants the seeds for future wars, so it certainly is intended. Probably not by the rank and file (cf. Daniel Hale), but certainly by everyone in the Pentagon. Claiming otherwise is the best example of "noise".
  - toiletfuneral 5y ago
    Perptually committing events like My Lai & Abu Gharib show how much we 'care' You should read this. https://theintercept.com/2017/01/10/the-crimes-of-seal-team-6/ https://theintercept.com/2017/01/10/the-crimes-of-seal-team-...
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  Americans are hated? I think you hang out in a fairly small social circle if that is the norm. Or are you just one of those self-hating Americans who thinks everyone else is just like you? Guessing that's the case from the use of "y'all"
deleted 5y ago
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pessimizer 5y ago
That's not what the article says. The article says that they stymied any internal inquiries, fudged numbers, and lied at every possible opportunity to do so. It's great that the NYT is covering it, because liberals might pay attention, but this looks like another case (like the rocket into the compound of an Afghan family seemingly out of a Hallmark card or a segment of CBS Sunday Morning) where pictures, testimony, and clear analysis were up shortly after the event, but since they were posted by locals and people opposed to the war, completely ignored by the media. No one will be punished for this, ever, except the people who wouldn't let go of the incident internally, and anyone who leaked to a journalist. I actually think that if it were China, we would see prosecution and punishment. It absolutely could never happen in the US.
- adolph 5y ago
  I wonder what the larger societal context for this airstrike? The context for the "the rocket into the compound of an Afghan family" was a retreat from Afghanistan. Other previous bombings of questionable military value had other contexts. These justifications for the bombing were disputed by the owners of the plant, the Sudanese government, and other governments. American officials later acknowledged "that the evidence that prompted President Clinton to order the missile strike on the Shifa plant was not as solid as first portrayed. Indeed, officials later said that there was no proof that the plant had been manufacturing or storing nerve gas, as initially suspected by the Americans, or had been linked to Osama bin Laden, who was a resident of Khartoum in the 1980s." The attack took place a week after the Monica Lewinsky scandal and two months after the film Wag the Dog, prompting some commentators to describe the attack as a distraction for the public from the scandal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shifa_pharmaceutical_factory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shifa_pharmaceutical_factor...
ZoomerCretin 5y ago
The United States asked its ally countries to manufacture charges to imprison a foreign journalist for exposing many of its war crimes during the Iraq War, and they complied. We are no better than your imagined, contrived scenario. This hubris that we are somehow better, more moral, or more able to investigate and correct mistakes is a long disproven farce that needs to die.
jessaustin 5y ago
You overestimate the USA military's tolerance for investigation of its many "mistakes". Julian Assange has been persecuted for over a decade now for the "crime" of investigating such "mistakes". Korsak and Tate as described in TFA will probably suffer as previous whistleblowers like Daniel Hale, John Kiriakou, Thomas Drake, Chelsea Manning, etc. Let's not give TFA too much credit, however. In 12 pages of reporting on USA military action in Syria, they couldn't find space to mention the fact that right now in mid-November 2021 USA military still occupies the oil- and agriculturally-rich eastern third of this nation, thus ensuring that while they can't buy food due to sanctions they're also not allowed to eat their own food because "fuck you"? In order for this brutality to end, it must be reported upon. https://thegrayzone.com/2021/03/05/tulsi-gabbard-calls-out-the-us-dirty-war-on-syria-that-biden-aides-admit-to/ https://thegrayzone.com/2021/03/05/tulsi-gabbard-calls-out-t...
trasz 5y ago
It's a slightly different case, but look at what happened last time Russia shot down an airliner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17): the perpetrators weren't exactly judged, but they got "disappeared", which is a form of punishment. For comparison, when the US shot down an airliner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655), the perpetrators... got decorated.
- m0llusk 5y ago
  And their weapon system was retired. There were terrible crimes, but trying to make complex situations simple to suit your preferred narrative actually weakens your arguments.
  - trasz 5y ago
    That American perpetrators got decorated for this is a pretty simple and easily verifiable fact.
- bayesian_horse 5y ago
  The cases couldn't be more different... There is no record of an investigation of how the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 got shot down. Whereas the incident with the Iranian airliner almost looks like it was provoked by the Iranian side.
  - trasz 5y ago
    Yay, blaming the victims, I almost didn’t see that coming.
  - kataklasm 5y ago
    Provocation is not grounds for killing 290 civilians. If, and that's a big if, there really was intentional provocation from Iran that doesn't mean you can kill 290 civilians.
adolph 5y ago
> Just imagine what would happen if Russian or Chinese military lawyers or journalists tried to do something similar. There doesn't seem to be English language publication to establish if similar internal criticism occurs in other countries or not. For all we know Daesh PR did a through analysis of burning Jordanian pilots alive in cages [0] and found it unhelpful to their cause. Given that any large enough human organization has internal conflict it would stand to reason that similar internal criticism occurs. It's not as if US whistleblowers live carefree lives. The NYT associates Mr. Tate's job loss with criticism of the US' internal response to the bombing. Mr. Tate, a former Navy officer who had worked for years as a civilian analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Counterterrorism Center before moving to the inspector general’s office, said he criticized the lack of action and was eventually forced out of his job. 0. https://www.albawaba.com/development-iraq/breaking-daesh-burns-jordanian-pilot-death-652292 https://www.albawaba.com/development-iraq/breaking-daesh-bur...
- dragontamer 5y ago
  > For all we know Daesh PR did a through analysis of burning Jordanian pilots alive in cages [0] and found it unhelpful to their cause. I mean... ISIS-K / Daesh is still murdering people in Afghanistan, even after we've left. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/world/asia/afghanistan-mosque-attack.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/world/asia/afghanistan-mo... Considering that the Daesh / ISIS-K organization is so freakishly violent that they're attacking the _TALIBAN_ for being too moderate, gives you everything you need to know about that group. For better or worse, ISIS-K is the Taliban's problem for now. But I do worry that the Taliban are going to be toppled by ISIS-K, and once ISIS-K is in power they'll use Afghanistan as a training center to launch international attacks from. Or Syria, or Iraq. ISIS-K has strength in a fair number of regions. They clearly don't care "which" land they get, they just want some land / safe havens to train up and grow in strength. ------ Brutally killing civilians is their modus operandi. USA hides it when we do it because we're at least embarrassed about it and nominally against that sort of thing.. Unfortunately, we have more important things to worry about and prepare for.
  - yardie 5y ago
sollewitt 5y ago
The story is how 1) there are systems in place to stop this happening. 2) there are system in place to investigate if it happens. 3) the systems in 1) are circumvented 4) the systems in 2) are stymied This means the systems have been corrupted. It means the US military can claim to care about those things but actually acts entirely contra to those stated principles. This is more cynical than not pretending to care.
stunt 5y ago
I think other NATO members do similar investigations too. But remember, most of the civilian casualties are never recorded to be even investigated. What you hear is just the tip of iceberg. Not to mention that the US military force is also the only military force that is in the business of invasion and dropping bomb ALL THE TIME, which translates to more and more casualties.
- bayesian_horse 5y ago
  Well, just right now, Russia is doing the same in Syria and sometimes Ukraine and other regions around the world. Then there's Iran. Other "bad guys" are more involved with their general vicinity.
__m 5y ago
Next you’ll tell us that Julian assange is on the payroll of the us military and the us is not going after him.
dang 5y ago
You took the thread into a hellish nationalistic flamewar with this provocation. Please don't do that again. It's emphatically not what this site is for, and it's particularly avoidable. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

throwawaymanbot 5y ago

Not perfect and sadly Harbor some insurrectionists who are under some mistaken idea that fascism is protecting Freedom and America. But still a cut above Russians and Chinese brutalists.

chernevik 5y ago

https://archive.md/gNyhH https://archive.md/gNyhH

GaryTang 5y ago

And a more recent airstrike… https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/17/politics/kabul-drone-strike-us-military-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/17/politics/kabul-drone-strike-u...

propogandist 5y ago
This won't get coverage as it would put the blame on Biden administration. NYT is out to try and win support for the current administration, I don't believe they care about actual accountability for wrong doing.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/world/asia/us-air-strike-drone-kabul-afghanistan-isis.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/world/asia/us-air-strike-... One of at least five NYT stories about the strike.
hunterb123 5y ago
Yeah that was the greatly touted response to ISIS for killing 13 US troops and 95 Afghans. I'm still waiting for the big apology from Biden and the actual retaliation to ISIS, murdering 10 innocent people including 7 children doesn't count. I heard from him we still had great intel and over-the-horizon capability. That seemed to be a lie.

vmception 5y ago

How long until people realize that any authority saying “justified” is not using a definition found in any dictionary. The term used by any American imbued with the option of extrajudicial killings is only to - at best - match your pre-existing agreement with the action or your likelihood of agreeing with authority. “Justified”, for these people, does not mean “other actions were evaluated in a hierarchy and we were in a circumstance that this greater level of force was necessary” such as how a civilian is evaluated, it means “this choice was in a catalog of equally weighted choices, any of the choices including inaction would be justified”. I don’t view this as good enough, as it makes investigations and courts a waste of time and energy, when the only resolution can be to say “and now I present as evidence: the catalogue of choices that happens to list the choice taken” acquitting all.

pessimizer 5y ago
I think it's even worse. "Justified" means "we issued a document that says that in in order to kill more terrorists, killing a lesser number of civilians is justified, then we issued a document that declared 90% of the civilians terrorists."
- vmception 5y ago
  yeah, I think this is supported by a large number of people not understanding this. like, a lot of support comes from evaluating each event in isolation from more neutral people, but I think even more hawkish as well as bigoted people would say "hm this is not okay for domestic or foreign policy"
charbonneau2 5y ago
> The most foolish notion of all is the belief that everything is just which is found in the customs or laws of nations. Would that be true, even if these laws had been enacted by tyrants? > What of the many deadly, the many pestilential statutes which nations put in force? These no more deserve to be called laws than the rules a band of robbers might pass in their assembly. For if ignorant and unskillful men have prescribed deadly poisons instead of healing drugs, these cannot possibly be called physicians’ prescriptions; neither in a nation can a statute of any sort be called a law, even though the nation, in spite of being a ruinous regulation, has accepted it. Cicero

sharklazer 5y ago

Why do we believe we killed Bin Laden even? Given the track record of the military, it was probably some goat farmers in Pakistan—-which is why no one saw the body and it was unceremoniously dumped in the ocean.

cyberpsybin 5y ago

Americans literally fund murder of innocent children. Insane. We need Nuremberg Trails 2.0

dumdumdumdum 5y ago
Would be nice to have Nuremberg Trials 1.0 for Hiroshima and Nagasaki first.

csee 5y ago

Highlights: - Special task force ordered strike. They didn't have to go through normal checks and balances because they were doing it under emergency provisions apparently due to an emergency request from arab allies on the ground. - They claim they didn't see the civilians because they were relying on SD quality drone feed. - The group is accused of falsifying log records afterwards.

adolph 5y ago
Second paragraph: "Without warning, an American F-15E attack jet streaked across the drone’s high-definition field of vision and dropped a 500-pound bomb on the crowd, swallowing it in a shuddering blast." Who is lying about the surveillance quality?
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  Further in the article >A 5th Special Forces Group officer in the task force looked at the drone footage and didn’t see any civilians, a task force officer said. But the drone he relied on had only a standard-definition camera. Central Command said there were no high-definition drones in the area that could get a better view of the target...In fact, a high-definition drone was available. The task force did not use it.
- csee 5y ago
  There were 2 drone streams. The HD one that the Qatar base was watching, and the SD one that the task force was watching (if we're to believe their account).
- torstenvl 5y ago
  I wouldn't necessarily assume it's a lie. I have no inside information and, if I did, I probably wouldn't be able to share it. However, based on my experience in Iraq, it wouldn't surprise me if 5th Group were relying on a previous-generation drone and didn't know an MQ9 or better class drone was watching the same AO. We once had a TF call in requesting a strike on military-aged males carrying rifles. In the strike cell, we had a newer drone on station and checked out what they were calling in. I'm glad we did. With higher fidelity video, we could see that it was actually teenaged males with fishing poles. The strike request was (of course) denied. In our case, it worked out the way one would hope, but with aging equipment and poor networking, it's definitely a "there but for the grace of God go I" moment.

photochemsyn 5y ago

The US record in Afghanistan is arguably even more ridiculous (and psychotic) than in Iraq. We went in with a pretty good justification (Taliban refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden for his central role in 9/11 terrorism) - although to be honest, the argument for doing the regime change op in Saudi Arabia was far more robust, as members of the Saudi government aided the hijackers and Saudi Royal family members were a key funding source. Everything since then has been ridiculous. Getting in bed with heroin-shipping warlords because they were anti-Taliban? Not that the Taliban got over $100 million from the USA in 1999-2001 for opium poppy eradication efforts, which were quite successful, although TAPI pipeline talks didn't go as well in this period. The whole 'Special Forces' fetishization is also pretty ridiculous. The best of the best of the best, la-dee-dah. Lots of nightime raids, which only pissed off the local population and made them quite willing to hand over power to the Taliban without a fight this year. Didn't 'US leaders' learn that from Vietnam? If the locals all hate you they're not going to support your remotely installed puppet government. Oh, and the "Afghan Army Training Program" - at a cost of something like $10 billion to train and equip 350,000 Afghan Army members who'd be the nucleus of the new independent government... all that cash just went into Dubai bank accounts, didn't it? Or McMansions in Kabul. Gross blatant corruption (and the 'infrastructure projects' oh god... for a million bucks you get a chain of ten subcontractors backed up by one guy digging a ditch with a worn-out shovel... get used to it, that's coming here now). American foreign policy in the 21st century - what an absolute disaster. Reminiscent of say, France and Britain in the Middle East from oh 1945-1954. Similar long-term results are to be expected.

h2odragon 5y ago
> train and equip 350,000 Afghan Army members "Afghanistan's ghost soldiers undermined fight against Taliban" https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-59230564 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-59230564 IIRC there were complaints being published at least as far back as 2009 about that problem.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  People keep crapping on the Afghan Army, but it should be noted that the Afghan security forces suffered 65,000+ casualties officially (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Afghan_security_forces_fatality_reports_in_Afghanistan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Afghan_security_forces...). And some estimate that the number may be as high as 100,000. ----- In contrast, the US sent ~110,000 soldiers at its peak (2011 surge), and lost ~7000. The Afghan Army took the bulk of the attacks by any reasonable analysis.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

War is hell. Tell ISIS to stand further away from civilians.

trasz 5y ago
It's not ISIS that's droning those civilians.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

stunt 5y ago

Most of the civilian casualties aren't even documented in a war. If you think the military you support invades a country and only kills the bad guys, you are watching too many hollywood movies.

mirekrusin 5y ago
I think everybody understands there was never in history a war without innocent dying.
- PostOnce 5y ago
  I don't think most people do; you've lived through the pandemic, you've seen how people are. They don't know anything at all. (for some large group of "They")
q1w2 5y ago
Even Hollywood movies often show civilian casualties. It's a war - it's chaotic by nature.

tyingq 5y ago

It is encouraging to see this kind of in-depth reporting on the incident. I wonder for how much longer that's possible, given the declining revenue possible for news organizations.

deanCommie 5y ago

If the Nuremberg principles were applied, every post-World War 2 president would be indictable. [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BXtgq0Nhsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BXtgq0Nhsc

GoodJokes 5y ago

Ok military industrial complex coders, give us a reason why you don’t quit your job?

dd444fgdfg 5y ago

the US political system is completely broken, and it's destroying a great country. it's a leadership problem, and needs someone who is capable of detaching and acting in the best interest of the country, not themselves or their party. they need a complete reboot. rewrite the constitution (it's overdue). rebuild the democratic voting functions (they're a mess and don't work). time for democracy 2.0

credit_guy 5y ago
> time for democracy 2.0 What’s your proposal? How do you find that altruistic leader, and if you find them, how do you get them elected, and if you do, how do you arrange to get them enough support in Congress? I don’t like democracy that much, and it looks like Churchill didn’t either. But neither Churchill nor me can come up with anything better.
webinvest 5y ago
I completely agree.

lenkite 5y ago

As a non-american, for all the lauded military professionalism of the USAF, I personally find them to be a bumbling organisation that can't seem to even do basic research before dropping bombs on people. There have been dozens of incidents of non-combatants bombed to paste over the last decade and it seems USAF will just simply not fix what it is doing wrong.