Russia's Invasion of Ukraine (Official Thread)

[Professor Emeritus]

How the U.S. Hid an Airstrike That Killed Dozens of Civilians in Syria (Published 2021)

The military never conducted an independent investigation into a 2019 bombing on the last bastion of the Islamic State, despite concerns about a secretive commando force.

www.nytimes.com

Revelations raise questions about U.S. military targeting procedures

We provide a list of specific questions for members of Congress, reporters, and investigators to ask about the strike.

www.justsecurity.org

Centcom's Full Statement on Baghuz Strike: Annotated

Our co-editor-in-chief identifies and annotates the 20 most significant elements in Centcom's statement about US airstrike that reportedly killed dozens of civilians.

www.justsecurity.org

So to be clear:

1) Talon Anvil called in an F-15 strike based on supposed immediate need for self-defense, justifying their strike with a standard-def drone video that has never been released.

2) The high-def drone video over the site showed 50+ apparently unarmed women and children, not in any way actively engaged in fighting, along with TWO guys with guns walking around who didn't appear to be engaged in fighting either.

3) In real time, multiple people watching the shyt go down thought it looked like a war crime.

4) Despite strong fight from the legal wing to investigate it as a potential war crime, the only investigation done was by the very unit that had called in the bombing in the first place, who immediately absolved themselves.

5) The report on the bombing fails to follow International Law or DOD policy on how to define combatants and civilians.

6) All attempts to force an investigation to happen for OVER TWO YEARS afterwards were repeatedly stymied, despite the efforts of both the Air Force Legal Officer and the Inspector General's Office to force the DOD to investigate. They state that the brass were actively preventing an investigation. Vital evidence has never been released and numerous relevant questions never answered.



Yet you, definitively, have decided that no war crime was committed, something that people with far more knowledge of the case and authority than you felt very different about. And your three-paragraph statement absolving the USA of any sort of crime in the matter, where virtually your entire argument was solely about what bad people Isis are yet with no breakdown of the actual event, was dapped up straightaway by 6 posters.

I almost feel like you're a plant regarding how well you've demonstrated my case.

 

[Pressure]

Thread not even close to being on topic at this point

 

[Carl Tethers]

i'm just here for the dead ruzzians. the world wins when putin loses, simple as that. so i'll support whoever is on the other side.

I've had skin in the game and that is just it. Russia fukking STINK

 

[Professor Emeritus]

i'm just here for the dead ruzzians. the world wins when putin loses, simple as that. so i'll support whoever is on the other side.

Sounds remarkably similar to our position in 1980s Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Iran-Iraq. None of which worked out exactly the way we thought they would.

 

[42 Monks]

Beautiful for you to reduce the bombing of 60+ unarmed women and children to "calling everything a war crime". *tangent*

and i knew it was coming too

 

[MoneyTron]

So what's the latest brehs?

 

[Orbital-Fetus]

Sounds remarkably similar to our position in 1980s Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Iran-Iraq. None of which worked out exactly the way we thought they would.

Do you have anything to say about the war in Ukraine?

You are running through topical walls like the fukking Juggernaut.


Everybody in this thread: Ukraine, Russia, NATO, etc...

Rah:

Spoiler

Everyone:

Spoiler

Rah:

Spoiler

 

[42 Monks]

So what's the latest brehs?

russia pretending like it knows how to dig in and fortify, using dirty bomb rhetoric to stall while setting the stage for large scale weapons, and people acting like the US doesn't mimic real world scenarios for training all the time

in the meantime several people in here posturing up for self-validation even though they can tell who exactly agrees with them on what

 

[Orbital-Fetus]

So what's the latest brehs?

According to @Rhakim, nothing but U.S. war crimes on the menu today.

 

[88m3]

It's not an "excuse", I think they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law even if the psychological distance of their screen-based kills is contributing to them happening. And it's not an "equivilency" because there's no relative worth or value of their actions being measured. I don't require that we set up a scale where we're "as bad" as the enemy. They can be 10x worse than us and we'll still learn something from recognizing how we do some of the same things wrong for the same reasons.

It's a practical attempt to understand why war crimes happen, so we can try to stop them. If we ever get stuck in the mode of "War crimes happen because Russians are orcs!" then we'll never get anywhere, because that thought process is mirrored on the other side (look at the Russian propaganda about Ukrainian military/soldiers going back to 2014 and it is is disturbingly similar to our own) and in part drives both their and our own war crimes. We decieve ourselves into thinking, "Is it really a crime if the people are so evil they deserve it?" Throw in a little guilt-by-association ("Well they're evil and thus anyone who happens to be within their borders is evil enough to deserve it too!") and pretty soon even the worst targeting of non-combantants is just some collaterol damage not worth fretting over.

And making relative value judgments of who is doing it worse only encourages a race to the bottom, because by that criteria our actions remain justifiable so long as they're marginally better than those evil guys over there. It's not dissimilar to police-violence apologists who defend their actions by positively comparing the police to the "criminals" they act against - once that becomes your measure, then you cease any serious attempt to do better and can justify almost anything.


I have zero doubt that there are people in this thread who will justify war crimes - targeting any or all of women, children, medics, non-combatants, etc. - if the "enemy" can be portrayed negatively enough. We've done it for literally every conflict we've ever engaged in. Even in cases where numerous military personnel involved call it a war crime (such as the Iraqi torture policies), even when our most initimately involved leaders call it a war crime (see Hiroshima/Nagasaki), you have Americans both civilian and military who are willing to defend it. And they almost always defend it by demonizing the other side. As long as we're defending our own war crimes by painting the enemy as bad enough to deserve it, then what power or impact will our condemnations of the war crimes of others have?

"First, remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother's eye" is a lasting moral edict not just because hypocrisy looks bad. It's a powerful lesson because we literally can't fix these problems unless we understand why they happen, and we won't understand why they happen until we come to terms with the instances where our side is doing them too.



But, if you're not interested in actually stopping war crimes, and just want to highlight them in order to get a W on the internet over your enemy, then by all means proceed as you are.

Okay and there's really no purpose in trying to draw a parallel where none exists.

Russia is intentionally attacking civilians and infrastructure. They've even resorted to using their SA units to attack cities and are currently using Iranian suicide drones and missiles on playgrounds and apartment buildings.


I'm not one of those people and you damn well know that.


The intention of the strikes matter. That's the whole point.


The US isn't even a belligerent in this war so I don't even see the point in bringing it up.

 

[987654321]

Beautiful for you to reduce the bombing of 60+ unarmed women and children to "calling everything a war crime". Let's go in order:








Note - there is NO doubt that the drone footage in question is the absolute best picture of the bombing targets that anyone has ever had. So the people who had the actual clearest picture of the bombing targets thought they were a bunch of unarmed women and children, both in real time and in observing the footage later. Not just 1 or 2 people, but at least half-a-dozen military personel who were directly involved have characterized the footage in that manner.

Now, there was another drone there, one with standard-resolution capabilities, and it was being used by those who actually called in the strike. But that footage has never been released and was never turned over even to the official investigators of the incident. In the DOD report where they absolved themselves of a war crime, they mentioned the low resolution of the drone and stated that no civilians were observed. And yet the footage remains a secret.


Let's keep going:



So from right when it happened, people with intimate knowledge of the legality of war, and who had a large vested interest in the events in question, who were watching the absolute best footage available, said, "Well fukk, that looked like a war crime."

And note - he immediately ordered the preservation of all video and other evidence. And yet the video from the drone that was used by the team calling in the strike is still missing.






To be clear, the ground unit claimed that the strike had killed 4 civilians (and injured 8), 16 combatants, and 60 people for whom it was "Unable to conclusively characterize their status". However, the claim of "16 combatants" has never been supported or verified in any way, and "unknown status" is not a legitimate category. ODNI rules state that if someone cannot be determined to be a combatant, then they must be considered a civilian. But DOD rules state that they can only be determined a civilian if the preponderance of evidence points to that, otherwise they are deemed a combatant. Either way, just leaving 60 people out of the count was against policy - whether or not it was "conclusive", did the preponderance of evidence point to them being civilians or not? Because everyone who evaluates the main tape appears to think they look like unarmed civilians.

Now so far as international law goes (as opposed to DOD policy), it states that persons must be PRESUMED civilians until demonstrated otherwise. Thus, under international law, those were civilians no matter how much the DOD wants to weasel out of not labeling them.





Remember, the Air Force lawyer immediately notified the task force that all evidence had to be preserved. That task force was part of the force that managed to overrun the camp that very same day, and had full unobstructed access to the site the next day. They could have evaluated those sixty "undetermined" bodies to see if there was clearer evidence whether they were combatants. Yet instead they just bulldozed the bodies over.



Now, you claim the event wasn't memory-holed. However:




So we had a credible report of mass civilian casualties, one serious enough that people watching the feed recommended a war crimes investigation immediately, yet neither Baghdad command nor Central Command had ever reviewed the investigation until the New York Times reported on it nearly 3 years later. Also.....





There is no dispute that civilians were killed in the strike. The original task force report claims 4 civilians killed, 8 civilians injured, and 60 women/children of undetermined status killed. Yet NONE of those numbers make it into the civilian casualty report, just like numerous other incidents with clear civilian casualties failed to ever appear in the official numbers afterwards. Like I said, memory-holed.








Again, the guy who was right there thought it was a potential war crime that needed much more serious investigation. And he's not the only one. The Inspector General's office that he had alerted tried to investigate, and ran into the same problems he had with officials straight up blocking it:






Again, memory-holed. You have yet another person who was directly involved with the investigation saying that leadership tried to bury it.

If you were breathing you saw the exact same broadcasts everyone else did, showing a lot more than a reported handful of civilians on the island. Unless your head was up your ass you also saw armed ISIS fighters among them, as if they were a human shield, prepared to die fighting. Again, you’re not changing anyones mind. No one is going to physically breach an island occupied by suicidal suicide bombers lol. AGAIN this was all known and reported publicly days before the strike. I KNOW you saw this because if you cared this much you were watching any and all coverage.

You seem to have also memory holed the public testimony of escaped and captured ISIS brides who were expected to die as human shields.

You haven’t changed anyones’ mind by fixating yourself on a poor example of a war crime. You haven’t mentioned the dozens of illegal things the haqqani and Taliban did, in Khowst, alone. You’ve never dealt with the UCMJ. You have no idea what a deliberate war crime really is. You have no real reference. There’s also nothing stopping you from filing suits, complaints, or FOIA requests to find the same results I’m telling you lol.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Do you have anything to say about the war in Ukraine?

You are running through topical walls like the fukking Juggernaut.

My initial statement (#20,671) was directly relevant to the war on Ukraine, though I made an extended analogy to an action from another war. Analogies to actions from other wars have been common in this thread, and discussing the wars in Syria, Afghanistan, Vietnam, World War II, etc. was done many times in the thread before my comment.

In an attempt to deflect from the point I made, multiple people but most especially #20,686, #20,698, and #20,699 immediately tried to rebut the parts of my statement that had nothing to do with the war in Ukraine, while completely ignoring the part actually relevant to the war. Those comments, which had nothing to do with Ukraine, are being dapped up by all the same people complaining that I'm not talking about Ukraine.

When I then respond to their specific rebuttals, which had EXACTLY as little to do with Ukraine as my responses did, the actual quality of the argument is completely ignored and people complain that I'm not talking about Ukraine anymore....even though the people I'm responding to weren't talking about Ukraine either.

Another demonstration how frequently y'all respond with bad faith arguments.

 

[42 Monks]

If you were breathing you saw the exact same broadcasts everyone else did, showing a lot more than a reported handful of civilians on the island. Unless your head was up your ass you also saw armed ISIS fighters among them, as if they were a human shield, prepared to die fighting. Again, you’re not changing anyones mind. No one is going to physically breach an island occupied by suicidal suicide bombers lol. AGAIN this was all known and reported publicly days before the strike. I KNOW you saw this because if you cared this much you were watching any and all coverage.

You seem to have also memory holed the public testimony of escaped and captured ISIS brides who were expected to die as human shields.

You haven’t changed anyones’ mind by fixating yourself on a poor example of a war crime. You haven’t mentioned the dozens of illegal things the haqqani and Taliban did, in Khowst, alone. You’ve never dealt with the UCMJ. You have no idea what a deliberate war crime really is. You have no real reference. There’s also nothing stopping you from filing suits, complaints, or FOIA requests to find the same results I’m telling you lol.

its not worth it lol... there's a distinct difference between poor decision making, bad information, and working through assumed risk (risk as a part of the process, imagine that) and legit terrorizing/ purposefully targeting civilians as a part of your actual doctrine and warfighting strategy.

this discussion been in the weeds for a minute already

 

[Professor Emeritus]

If you were breathing you saw the exact same broadcasts everyone else did, showing a lot more than a reported handful of civilians on the island. Unless your head was up your ass you also saw armed ISIS fighters among them, as if they were a human shield, prepared to die fighting. Again, you’re not changing anyones mind. No one is going to physically breach an island occupied by suicidal suicide bombers lol. AGAIN this was all known and reported publicly days before the strike. I KNOW you saw this because if you cared this much you were watching any and all coverage.

You seem to have also memory holed the public testimony of escaped and captured ISIS brides who were expected to die as human shields.

You haven’t changed anyones’ mind by fixating yourself on a poor example of a war crime. You haven’t mentioned the dozens of illegal things the haqqani and Taliban did, in Khowst, alone. You’ve never dealt with the UCMJ. You have no idea what a deliberate war crime really is. You have no real reference. There’s also nothing stopping you from filing suits, complaints, or FOIA requests to find the same results I’m telling you lol.

The actual military legal investigators who I quoted came to a very different conclusion than you, so your weak attempt at an argument from authority doesn't pass muster. The reports I linked and quoted from Just Security are also far more damning than you want to admit, and again, those are people with a much broader view than you ever had.


And your defense for the strike proves that you are failing to read even the basic details. The strike was NOT justified as a pre-planned attack in order to help breach the "island". The strike had NOT been pre-cleared or justified as part of an assault on the camp. The strike was justified under the claim that it was an immediate emergency self-defense need to protect coalition soldiers who were under attack.

Since the unarmed women and children huddled together under blankets there were NOT in the process of attacking anyone, that supposed justification is bullshyt. And your weak-ass attempt to create a completely different justification which bears no resemblance at all to the justification in military reports is embarassing.




And of course I "haven’t mentioned the dozens of illegal things the haqqani and Taliban did, in Khowst, alone". What kind of deranged derailment is that?

 

[Pressure]