9 ms·

Hidden Pentagon records reveal patterns of failure in deadly airstrikes

123 points by jbegley 5y ago

hetspookjee 5y ago
I wonder if the bombing done by the Royal Dutch Airforce on instructions from the US allies on Hawija that caused 70 civilian deaths on accident, is part of this pattern. Thinking the strike was on a weapon depot.
- mcguire 5y ago
  I believe it's discussed in the article.
cjnicholls 5y ago
https://archive.md/5dug6 https://archive.md/5dug6
ss48 5y ago
I don't know if anyone else feels this way, but making documents like these public but behind a paywall is just really discouraging and seems contrary to public interest. When I tried to submit feedback to the Times, and the link to submit feedback is behind a paywall too. I would even be okay if they asked to sign in to access the documents but not need to subscribe.
- leephillips 5y ago
  I costs a fortune to run The New York Times. I’m sure they feel that most of their stuff is in the public interest, in one way or another. If they want to charge for access as part of their business plan, that’s really up to them. I don’t see that as having a moral dimension. That being said, they maintain a paywall that seems to be deliberately trivial to get around.
- ghaff 5y ago
  So you don't want to subscribe. Where is the money supposed to come from?
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    I would pay the hosting bill for the text files.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      You actually think that is the cost of digging up the information? If it were just a hosted text file I'm sure are tons of other places you can download it from.
  - ss48 5y ago
    So, a few comments regarding this. A good amount of the money can come from most of the articles published summarizing and critiquing the records that they are publishing, and the investigations they did related to the records at question. I was really more focused on the source records themselves being available for download and viewing after all the articles about them were written. I wasn't really sure how much retrieving the documents and hosting them would cost considering that smaller organizations like Wikileaks are able to publish much larger numbers of documents as a nonprofit and governmental agencies like archive.gov do keep documents like the Pentagon Papers hosted for free access. Although, granted, the Times must have put a lot more effort in evaluating and verifying the records and coming up with ideal ways to present them before publishing them. It's not exactly that I myself don't want to subscribe, but my thought was that people who chose not to subscribe to the Times but other newspapers like Washington Post or USA Today and also journalism in general would probably benefit with non-paywalled access to the source records, even though this doesn't fully equate to a moral dimension, as a commenter below said. That's mostly what was going on in my mind when posting my comment.
sh4un 5y ago
I don't know what people expect. This is a problem that goes beyond the armed forced. This is a general problem across the board as companies and governments are forced to recruit and hire people who are barely qualified. Every time we have to drop requirements to appease some SIG we lose quality. At one point I was told I would never be able to fly fighter aircraft because I didn't have 20/20 vision, however now a days, you can be completely blind and they will let you fly just to avoid discrimination lawsuits. Lol. Bombs away.
- thanatos519 5y ago
  This is entirely intentional.
helaoban 5y ago
>Shortly before 3 a.m. on July 19, 2016, American Special Operations forces bombed what they believed were three ISIS “staging areas” on the outskirts of Tokhar, a riverside hamlet in northern Syria. They reported 85 fighters killed. In fact, they hit houses far from the front line, where farmers, their families and other local people sought nighttime sanctuary from bombing and gunfire. More than 120 villagers were killed. Are we the baddies? P.S I wonder what was extracted in exchange for a Saturday publish date.
- nathias 5y ago
  Yes, of course, and you could have known that with certainty since Wikileaks.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  > Are we the baddies? No but we can do better.
  - vmception 5y ago
    Would you rationalize it that way if a different country did it? For bonus points: non-NATO and non-“Western”
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
      If a different country was trying to bomb ISIS and made a mistake? Nope.
      - vmception 5y ago
        and killed thousands of civilians and children with dehumanizing ambiguous categorizations?
  - klyrs 5y ago
    If another country was bombing our villages because one our soldiers was thought to live there, would they be baddies?
vmception 5y ago
They’re referring to the subset of things they do the same When some people say the candidates for head of state are the same Because what is a voter to do here?
DisjointedHunt 5y ago
>That strike was ordered by a top-secret strike cell called Talon Anvil that, according to people who worked with it, frequently sidestepped procedures meant to protect civilians Is it just me, or reading the CIA document about sabotaging an organization and reading this link now, it's hard not to draw the conclusion that there are rogue elements in US military and government that have managed to subvert the hard work of the larger organization? This sounds like exactly what our enemies would want us to do if i were reading this as someone looking in from China or Russia. Takes just one "incompetent" looking decision which could be malice that leads to hundreds of deaths and propagates the sentiment that EVERYTHING the US is doing is flawed.
joelbondurant 5y ago
If billionaires paid more taxes we could eliminate the homeless with orbital space lasers and nuclear fusion powered drone bombers.
parsimo2010 5y ago
I suspect this opinion will be unpopular, but I feel like this needs to be remembered- just a few months ago people were shitting all over the US military and the president for leaving Afghanistan. A bunch of people in this comment section are saying how horrible it is that these “systematic” failures could happen. We can’t have it both ways. We can’t complain about civilian casualties and also say that the military should have continued to occupy Afghanistan. The US military are the best in the world but they aren’t perfect. If there is fighting in a place then people are going to die. There isn’t a system in the world with perfect precision and specificity. So I guess what I’m trying to get at, is before you skewer some commander on the choices made in action or their findings in an investigation for scenarios that (statistically) more than 99% of us have no experience in, consider the alternative we have seen play out in the last few months. The Taliban took over at an astonishing pace. The Afghanistan Ministry of Women’s Affairs is now gone, and the Taliban Ministry of Vice and Virtue is back. The literal thought police are back in Afghanistan after the US military kept them at bay for 20 years. Those pilots and soldiers made mistakes, and it’s tragic for the families that lost a loved one. But just take a pause to consider the rest of the story and the alternative. And don’t say the alternative is a perfect utopia where bombs only get dropped on bad people.
- jackpirate 5y ago
  > And don’t say the alternative is a perfect utopia where bombs only get dropped on bad people. The alternative is that bombs don't get dropped at all. That means less US hegemony and more need for non-military solutions. Those also have their drawbacks, but to pretend those options don't even exist is nonsense.
  - parsimo2010 5y ago
    That alternative you’re suggesting is the one we’re seeing right now with the Taliban. The one the citizens were so afraid of that they were filling planes to the brim to evacuate- something that didn’t happen when the US military was there. I wasn’t pretending that alternatives don’t exist, but make sure the alternative you’re suggesting is actually preferable.
- 5y ago
wrp 5y ago
To anyone who has examined the records in question, is there sufficient data there to identify actual patterns of system failure?

123 points by jbegley 5y ago

I wonder if the bombing done by the Royal Dutch Airforce on instructions from the US allies on Hawija that caused 70 civilian deaths on accident, is part of this pattern. Thinking the strike was on a weapon depot.

mcguire 5y ago
I believe it's discussed in the article.

cjnicholls 5y ago

https://archive.md/5dug6 https://archive.md/5dug6

ss48 5y ago

I don't know if anyone else feels this way, but making documents like these public but behind a paywall is just really discouraging and seems contrary to public interest. When I tried to submit feedback to the Times, and the link to submit feedback is behind a paywall too. I would even be okay if they asked to sign in to access the documents but not need to subscribe.

leephillips 5y ago
I costs a fortune to run The New York Times. I’m sure they feel that most of their stuff is in the public interest, in one way or another. If they want to charge for access as part of their business plan, that’s really up to them. I don’t see that as having a moral dimension. That being said, they maintain a paywall that seems to be deliberately trivial to get around.
ghaff 5y ago
So you don't want to subscribe. Where is the money supposed to come from?
- tshaddox 5y ago
  I would pay the hosting bill for the text files.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    You actually think that is the cost of digging up the information? If it were just a hosted text file I'm sure are tons of other places you can download it from.
- ss48 5y ago
  So, a few comments regarding this. A good amount of the money can come from most of the articles published summarizing and critiquing the records that they are publishing, and the investigations they did related to the records at question. I was really more focused on the source records themselves being available for download and viewing after all the articles about them were written. I wasn't really sure how much retrieving the documents and hosting them would cost considering that smaller organizations like Wikileaks are able to publish much larger numbers of documents as a nonprofit and governmental agencies like archive.gov do keep documents like the Pentagon Papers hosted for free access. Although, granted, the Times must have put a lot more effort in evaluating and verifying the records and coming up with ideal ways to present them before publishing them. It's not exactly that I myself don't want to subscribe, but my thought was that people who chose not to subscribe to the Times but other newspapers like Washington Post or USA Today and also journalism in general would probably benefit with non-paywalled access to the source records, even though this doesn't fully equate to a moral dimension, as a commenter below said. That's mostly what was going on in my mind when posting my comment.

sh4un 5y ago

I don't know what people expect. This is a problem that goes beyond the armed forced. This is a general problem across the board as companies and governments are forced to recruit and hire people who are barely qualified. Every time we have to drop requirements to appease some SIG we lose quality. At one point I was told I would never be able to fly fighter aircraft because I didn't have 20/20 vision, however now a days, you can be completely blind and they will let you fly just to avoid discrimination lawsuits. Lol. Bombs away.

thanatos519 5y ago
This is entirely intentional.

helaoban 5y ago

>Shortly before 3 a.m. on July 19, 2016, American Special Operations forces bombed what they believed were three ISIS “staging areas” on the outskirts of Tokhar, a riverside hamlet in northern Syria. They reported 85 fighters killed. In fact, they hit houses far from the front line, where farmers, their families and other local people sought nighttime sanctuary from bombing and gunfire. More than 120 villagers were killed. Are we the baddies? P.S I wonder what was extracted in exchange for a Saturday publish date.

nathias 5y ago
Yes, of course, and you could have known that with certainty since Wikileaks.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
> Are we the baddies? No but we can do better.
- vmception 5y ago
  Would you rationalize it that way if a different country did it? For bonus points: non-NATO and non-“Western”
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
    If a different country was trying to bomb ISIS and made a mistake? Nope.
    - vmception 5y ago
      and killed thousands of civilians and children with dehumanizing ambiguous categorizations?
- klyrs 5y ago
  If another country was bombing our villages because one our soldiers was thought to live there, would they be baddies?

vmception 5y ago

They’re referring to the subset of things they do the same When some people say the candidates for head of state are the same Because what is a voter to do here?

DisjointedHunt 5y ago

>That strike was ordered by a top-secret strike cell called Talon Anvil that, according to people who worked with it, frequently sidestepped procedures meant to protect civilians Is it just me, or reading the CIA document about sabotaging an organization and reading this link now, it's hard not to draw the conclusion that there are rogue elements in US military and government that have managed to subvert the hard work of the larger organization? This sounds like exactly what our enemies would want us to do if i were reading this as someone looking in from China or Russia. Takes just one "incompetent" looking decision which could be malice that leads to hundreds of deaths and propagates the sentiment that EVERYTHING the US is doing is flawed.

joelbondurant 5y ago

If billionaires paid more taxes we could eliminate the homeless with orbital space lasers and nuclear fusion powered drone bombers.

parsimo2010 5y ago

I suspect this opinion will be unpopular, but I feel like this needs to be remembered- just a few months ago people were shitting all over the US military and the president for leaving Afghanistan. A bunch of people in this comment section are saying how horrible it is that these “systematic” failures could happen. We can’t have it both ways. We can’t complain about civilian casualties and also say that the military should have continued to occupy Afghanistan. The US military are the best in the world but they aren’t perfect. If there is fighting in a place then people are going to die. There isn’t a system in the world with perfect precision and specificity. So I guess what I’m trying to get at, is before you skewer some commander on the choices made in action or their findings in an investigation for scenarios that (statistically) more than 99% of us have no experience in, consider the alternative we have seen play out in the last few months. The Taliban took over at an astonishing pace. The Afghanistan Ministry of Women’s Affairs is now gone, and the Taliban Ministry of Vice and Virtue is back. The literal thought police are back in Afghanistan after the US military kept them at bay for 20 years. Those pilots and soldiers made mistakes, and it’s tragic for the families that lost a loved one. But just take a pause to consider the rest of the story and the alternative. And don’t say the alternative is a perfect utopia where bombs only get dropped on bad people.

jackpirate 5y ago
> And don’t say the alternative is a perfect utopia where bombs only get dropped on bad people. The alternative is that bombs don't get dropped at all. That means less US hegemony and more need for non-military solutions. Those also have their drawbacks, but to pretend those options don't even exist is nonsense.
- parsimo2010 5y ago
  That alternative you’re suggesting is the one we’re seeing right now with the Taliban. The one the citizens were so afraid of that they were filling planes to the brim to evacuate- something that didn’t happen when the US military was there. I wasn’t pretending that alternatives don’t exist, but make sure the alternative you’re suggesting is actually preferable.
5y ago

wrp 5y ago

To anyone who has examined the records in question, is there sufficient data there to identify actual patterns of system failure?