Hidden Pentagon Records Reveal Patterns of Failure in Deadly Airstrikes
-
The promise was a war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs. The documents show flawed intelligence, faulty targeting, years of civilian deaths — and scant accountability.
America.
| 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. |
In early 2017 in Iraq, an American war plane struck a dark-colored vehicle, believed to be a car bomb, stopped at an intersection in the Wadi Hajar neighborhood of West Mosul. Actually, the car had been bearing not a bomb but a man named Majid Mahmoud Ahmed, his wife and their two children, who were fleeing the fighting nearby. They and three other civilians were killed.
In November 2015, after observing a man dragging an “unknown heavy object” into an ISIS “defensive fighting position,” American forces struck a building in Ramadi, Iraq. A military review found that the object was actually “a person of small stature” — a child — who died in the strike.
None of these deadly failures resulted in a finding of wrongdoing.
Los registros ocultos del Pentágono revelan patrones de fracaso en ataques aéreos mortales
En noviembre de 2015, después de observar a un hombre arrastrando un “objeto pesado desconocido” a una “posición de combate defensiva” de ISIS, las fuerzas estadounidenses atacaron un edificio en Ramadi, Irak. Una revisión militar encontró que el objeto era en realidad “una persona de baja estatura”, un niño, que murió en el ataque.
Ninguno de estos fallos mortales resultó en un hallazgo de irregularidades.
Dec 19, 2021 at 9:34:40 AM
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/18/us/airstrikes-pentagon-records-civilian-deaths.html?smid=em-share
Civilian deaths was never a concern in the armed conflicts of the past. Concern for peripheral damage during war is a myth, chaos is hard to control.
|
La muerte de civiles nunca fue motivo de preocupación en los conflictos armados del pasado. La preocupación por el daño periférico durante la guerra es un mito, el caos es difícil de controlar. |