Every so often, I get frustrated with the latest piece of rubbish published by the New York Times (usually in their US Politics or Op-Ed pages) and consider cancelling my subscription. Then a few days later, they’ll publish a piece that requires months or years of reporting and makes me re-up my subscription. This week’s magazine will contain one such article by Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal, titled: The Uncounted.
I’ve written here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here about the disastrous toll our wars and bombing campaigns are exacting. Meanwhile, at home our newscasters are paid millions to gush over videos of these bombings they call “beautiful”.
Our own reporting, conducted over 18 months, shows that the air war has been significantly less precise than the coalition claims. Between April 2016 and June 2017, we visited the sites of nearly 150 airstrikes across northern Iraq, not long after ISIS was evicted from them. We toured the wreckage; we interviewed hundreds of witnesses, survivors, family members, intelligence informants and local officials; we photographed bomb fragments, scoured local news sources, identified ISIS targets in the vicinity and mapped the destruction through satellite imagery. We also visited the American air base in Qatar where the coalition directs the air campaign. […]
We found that one in five of the coalition strikes we identified resulted in civilian death, a rate more than 31 times that acknowledged by the coalition. It is at such a distance from official claims that, in terms of civilian deaths, this may be the least transparent war in recent American history. Our reporting, moreover, revealed a consistent failure by the coalition to investigate claims properly or to keep records that make it possible to investigate the claims at all. While some of the civilian deaths we documented were a result of proximity to a legitimate ISIS target, many others appear to be the result simply of flawed or outdated intelligence that conflated civilians with combatants. In this system, Iraqis are considered guilty until proved innocent.
The article delves into the impact of a botched airstrike that killed four members of one extended family. A cousin’s wife, teaching the US, wrote a NY Times Op-Ed about the airstrike and its impact on her family. Other relatives in the US faced FBI interviews/interrogations. The bureau was concerned they might be upset at the US government and “sympathize with the bad guys”. Funny how the government knows our bombing campaigns cause resentment and fuel more conflict and somehow manages to reach the wrong conclusions every time.
One of the survivors tries to get answers from the US embassy for the strike, and a military lawyer says there is “no way to prove the US was involved”. Except there is, because the US military posted video of the “successful” airstrike on YouTube.
In November, we wrote to the coalition ourselves, explaining that we were reporters working on an article about Basim. We provided details about his family and his efforts to reach someone in authority and included a link to the YouTube video the coalition posted immediately after the strike. A public-affairs officer responded, “There is nothing in the historical log for 20 SEP 2015,” the date the coalition had assigned to the strike video. Not long after, the video disappeared from the coalition’s YouTube channel. We responded by providing the GPS coordinates of Basim’s home, his emails to the State Department and an archived link to the YouTube video, which unlike the videos on the Pentagon’s website allow for comments underneath — including those that Basim’s family members left nearly a year before.[...]
Over the coming weeks, one by one, the coalition began removing all the airstrike videos from YouTube.
A 15 year old AUMF obtained by providing falsified information to Congress is being used to wage war on three continents. These wars are begetting more wars. And those wars will beget more wars.
How long will we let our government wage an unending war that has destroyed and is destroying millions of lives? How long will we let this go on?
You can feel helpless in the midst of so much destruction. Our “allies” in Saudi Arabia have been using the weapons we sell them to bomb Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world, to impose their will upon its people. The far-right regimes in the KSA and Israel both want the US to go to war with Iran. It devastating to remember that the burden of war often falls on the weakest, as do the burdens of most disasters. But it is also critical that we remember their humanity.
There was an earthquake on the Iraq/Iran border last week. This little boy wanted to make sure his friend got something to eat. So he took her hand and walked her to the rescue workers.
I don’t want my country to cause that little child and others like them, more suffering. Natural disasters are bad enough, let’s stop creating man-made ones.