Hidden Pentagon records reveal patterns of failure in deadly airstrikes
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Are we the baddies?
P.S I wonder what was extracted in exchange for a Saturday publish date.
No but we can do better.
For bonus points: non-NATO and non-“Western”
They're just someone else's civilians!
Yes, we are the baddies. This is where a large portion of our tax dollars go instead of providing the people in the US with universal healthcare, public housing, high-speed rail, etc.
Instead of building a better life for all the people, the US destroys the lives of others for some very small amount of people to become filthy rich.
Now on to the next manufactured conflict with China [0][1] and repeat what we have been doing for decades and well through the 20th century [2].
[0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/wearytolove/status/14309595626521...
[1]: https://www.vox.com/2014/6/16/5814270/the-successful-70-year...
23.4% of the FY2022 DoD budget is for direct payments to personnel. Including health insurance for military members and their families. 1.2% in family support programs: child care, schools, etc. With about 1/3 of total funding going to some sort of job or benefit.
> Instead of building a better life for all the people
Like the 0.5% dedicated to DARPA, which among other things funded research in 2013 into rapid development of novel vaccines using mRNA platforms under the ADEPT program?
... I won't say 100% of the DoD budget is morally pristine. Or even most of it.
But it's a huge budget, and it funds a ton of good work that wouldn't otherwise be palatable to the legislative branch, but magically becomes so "because military."
So as the quip goes, American defense spending is as much about social welfare and foreign aid as it is about bombs and bullets.
So all the headlines regarding missing piles of cash and appeasements being given to local child-abusing warlords etc was just a one-time thing, or fake, or...
Foreign aid essentially forever has amounted to delivering money to the least bad options, so that some of it trickles out to the people who actually need it.
You may find that morally reprehensible, but what's your proposed alternative?
Not to say the US hasn’t done bad things, but “High speed rail”? Really?
Should the US have done that in WW2? Korea?
Interestingly, those were the governments that the US sought to overthrow.
Yes, we are, and people will literally bury their heads in the sand every time our government cries about Russia, Iran, or China (despite the fact that none of those are invading any other countries). Not saying those countries never do bad things, but we are way worse, and even worse, we try to justify our actions with words like "democracy" and "freedom" which actually hurts those causes.
There is so much innocent blood on America's hands from just the last two decades alone, its really quite something unfathomable everytime I hear one of those CIA people cry about what Russia or China is doing.
Russia invaided also Georgia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Georgian_War ), with direct trigger caused by South Ossetian separatists but Russia was clearly prepared for war.
China has ongoing invasion of Bhutan by simply building roads and military bases in that country ( https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/05/07/china-bhutan-border-vil... )
China-India relation thankfully not reached invasion level but see say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932021_China%E2%80%...
Believing that USA is perfect is delusional but your comment has multiple blatant lies.
But hey, we had to put a stop to that darned ole communism, didn't we? Couldn't have that. wouldn't be profitable or godly.
We can and must do better. The brutality of an enemy doesn't justify this indifference to human life, nor the willful blindness, nor the dishonesty.
But I expect that the vast majority of people in the region are glad ISIS lost.
The problem is the people we fought did everything they could to look like civilians. They would carry trash bags full of bombs, and dress like women to hide weapons under loosely fitting clothing. This has the obvious effect of causing Americans to suspect normal, everyday activities as terrorist operations. Add to that the facts that things are hard to see at engagement distance and a failure to engage the enemy effectively will result in greater casualties on our side, and it's a recipe for misidentification.
It turns out the woman I almost killed was "washing" her dishes in a pothole of a road after a rainstorm. I had never seen someone do that before and her dish was a large metal bowl that resembled a common type of armor piercing IED. I don't know why I didn't kill her. I can't imagine the regret I would feel had I taken her life.
I can’t help but feel like you are blaming the victims. The bottom line is that those are civilians who were killed by US military. When the most powerful military in the world invades and occupies a country it can’t expect its people to fight according to its rules and expectations. And when those occupied people indeed fight back it does not justify the killing hundreds of thousands of civilians by the US military.
That too was my understanding for the longest time. However Jocko Wilink (today a podcaster, then a Seal commander fighting in Ramadi) specifically said that the people wanted them there and most of the people they fought were either teenagers being paid to plant IEDs (basically the same as the drugs gangs in the US who will pay teenagers to be lookouts and mules), former Sadam regime people or foreign fighters.
ISIS took civilians as sex slaves, sold them internally and _bragged about it_, so most assuredly no. They threw people suspected of being homosexual of roofs, they killed suspected traitors by drowning them in an iron cage and, lets not forget, they cut the heads of westerners and bragged about it on TV.
Only difference between them and the Nazies was that they were only able to do this on a small scale and that the Nazis tried to cover up what they were doing.
When you go to war, there are likely going to be civilian casualties. We should understand every one of these cases, ensure that mistakes are prevented and if somebody didn't follow orders they are punished.
But if we are not willing to go to war over civilian casualties, those who don't care are going to rule everything.
So...the people attacking your troops because of their civilian casualties — no issues, right?
The issue here is, there are no saints. And to claim any side if being saintly is throwing up blinders.
As a TLDR for the article. American soldier dismissed for incident involving an Afghan allie who spent money on "dancing boys" and had a young boy chained to a bed as a sex slave. Multiple incidents occured with other afghan militia allies, even on US Bases, US Military policy is essentially to ignore it.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/military-overlook...
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.
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.
The complaints I remember - and the ones I hold - are about HOW we left Afghanistan. It was a chaotic train wreck. I'm glad we left, I think staying longer would have continued to risk innocent civilians, but I think our departure was a nightmare.
>And don’t say the alternative is a perfect utopia where bombs only get dropped on bad people.
I actually think that our technological advantage allows us to be VERY precise and gives me confidence that we have reduced collateral damage. We have missiles that take a bunch of pictures before blowing up, so can say "look, this really was a bad guy place and not a shoe factory". We have people embedded in the country so we can accurately say "the bad guy is in X room". We have really cool sniper weapons that automatically shoot guys that are deliberaly "tagged" as bad guys and avoid bystanders.
I'm proud of a lot of what we are able to do and not do. That being said, we blew up a car full of children and the response was "we thought there was 1 bad guy surrounded by 8 civilians, but it was just 9 civilians". This makes me sad.
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.
I would even be okay if they asked to sign in to access the documents but not need to subscribe.
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.
When some people say the candidates for head of state are the same
Because what is a voter to do here?
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.