Just imagine what would happen if Russian or Chinese military lawyers or journalists tried to do something similar.
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.
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-bur...
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-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.
Who's embarrassed by it and who's hiding it?
The civilian Afghans killed by ISIS- K are terrified because that is the point. The civilian Afghans killed by Americans are still terrified because they are largely irrelevant to Americans. Which is its own point. These deaths aren't being hidden from Afghans by Afghan media. They are being ignored by US media. The killings are chocked up as "accidents" and the machine moves on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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_factor...
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.
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-t...
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.
Imagine saying the same thing about 9/11 and watch your life be torn to pieces.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you have a long history of posting like this. We've already warned you more than once:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25513278
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11858996
- and you've continued repeatedly to do it, including recently. If you keep this up, we will have to ban you. I don't want to ban you, so please stop abusing HN in this way.
Maybe you need to travel more? You hear "Americans are hated" by.... Americans mostly. And, I would guess, Americans of a certain political bent that say it more as a badge of their identity rather than it being an honest belief in the truth(literally "America's #1!!!", but for liberals). It's a grade school level understanding of the world(as is "America #1") and I find it a fair indicator of stereotype-oriented thought patterns when I hear it.
By the way, I am not an American and I don't live in the US. So I have a perspective on this which you probably don't have.