This one might be even worse. Like I said, this shyt is just getting memory-holed away because so long as the dead people are far enough from us and poor enough to not count, it doesn't have to ever matter:
DAVIES: In November, you wrote about a strike - an airstrike in March 2019 near a Syrian town called Baghuz. Tell us about the site of the attack. What was going on that day?
PHILIPPS: 2019 was the very end of the war against ISIS that had been going on for four years, essentially. And ISIS, which had once held a piece of territory in Iraq and Syria that was the size of Tennessee, had been bit by bit chased out of its caliphate until it was corralled in a tiny bend in the Euphrates River that was about a square mile. And there was tens of thousands of hardcore fighters and their families there, and they were going to make it their Alamo, their last stand, their fight to the death. And if you looked at this spot, one of the intelligence officers who was overseeing this described it to me as, like, Woodstock in hell. It was crammed with tents, tarps, mud, bullet-pocked vehicles parked every which way, hand-dug bunkers. And people were surrounded there by the U.S. and its allied forces for weeks. And at the very end of this, there was a series of airstrikes, one of which we found went really, really badly.
DAVIES: You mentioned that there was a drone with a high def - high-definition cameras flying above the scene, and its images were being viewed by commanders in the operations center in Qatar. What did they observe in this case?
PHILIPPS: Sure. So this is footage that is color, high definition, very clear, and the drone is flying over and watching this camp. And nothing in particular is going on, according to the people who are watching this video. There are some fighters carrying assault weapons, sort of winding their way through the camp, but they don't appear to be actively engaged in any fighting. And there's this large group of people that have sought refuge in this small depression down by the river, where they're protected by essentially a sand bank. And who is there is the types of people you might expect to seek shelter in a situation like this. It's women. It's children. It is the wounded. And what they're doing is essentially lying in rows, wrapped in blankets. There's no particular action.
And so the people in the command center are watching this, just waiting for essentially things to happen, when they see a American F-15 come into view in this video footage and drop a large bomb right in the middle of this crowd of noncombatants. And when the smoke clears, they see that almost everyone has been killed, probably about 50 or 70 people. And there are a few people that are straggling out and trying to get away, and then an F-15 comes in again and dropping really massive bombs - two 2,000-pound bombs - finishes off the survivors.
The people watching this are shocked. They don't understand why it happened. They don't know who did it. And it's only in scrambling to figure this out that they find out that it is the special operations force that we talked about that's been running this whole ground war. And they have called in these airstrikes believing that they were trying to target enemy combatants, or at least that's what they reported later. And so there's this huge scramble to figure out what happened and why did this happen and who made the call. And immediately, people in the command center start asking, OK, what are we going to do about this? - because this could be a war crime, and we need to report it.
DAVIES: By the way, do we know how many civilians were killed in this strike?
PHILIPPS: We know that about 80 people were killed. How many civilians were killed depends on how you count civilian according to the military, which is a really odd thing. So if I may, there was probably 16 people who were identified by the military as fighters. There were four people that were identified as civilian. And there were, you know, the vast majority of them - what? - that's about 60 that were left - who are in between, neither-nor. Now, under the rules, what a number of military lawyers have told me is unless you can positively identify somebody as enemy, they are civilian. But in, you know, the military's statements to us, they have a lot of people in this gray area, which has kept their civilian death toll to this strike very low at four people even though 80 were killed.
DAVIES: But I will note, though, that in your description of what this Air Force lawyer who was in the operations center and - did he actually see the video of the bombing?
PHILIPPS: Yes.
DAVIES: I forget whether he or somebody else said we just - well, what was the actual quote? There was no ambiguity about it.
PHILIPPS: Yeah, so there were some intelligence analysts who are trained to figure out what's on the screen that were watching this as it happened. And when the bombs hit, they immediately typed into their sort of group chat. One of them typed, we just killed 50 women and children, you know? And as I said, the number turned out to be higher, but that was the split-second reaction. They knew it was women and children that were there, and they watched them have a bomb dropped on them.
DAVIES: Now, if I understand - if I have this right, the U.S. military had never actually publicly acknowledged this strike until you presented them with your reporting, right?
PHILIPPS: So this strike never existed in any official records. And, again, we learned about it because people who witnessed it firsthand or at least saw the high-definition footage were deeply disturbed by what happened. But they didn't come to us first. And I think that that shows sort of the dysfunction that is in the accountability process in the military.
At first, these people went to their chain of command and said, hey. The regulations require that we investigate this because it could be a war crime. And their command did nothing. And so they went the next step up to the Air Force's Criminal Investigation Group, sort of their version of the FBI, which is called OSI. And they said, hey. This happened. It needs to be investigated. Can you take it? And they did nothing.
And so then these folks went to the Department of Defense's own watchdog, their inspector general, and said, hey. This happened. Nobody is investigating it. Someone needs to do something. Check it out. And there, they did find some traction. There was an investigator there named Gene Tate who immediately looked into it, decided, jeez, this is incredible; you know, this probably needs to be investigated by criminal authorities, not me. And so he, again, turned it - tried to turn it over to the right folks, and they did nothing. And so it was only years later, in 2021, that we heard about this from various people who'd seen it and who had tried through various channels inside to bring some accountability to it and had gotten nowhere.
DAVIES: Now, I want to go back to one part of this that's particularly striking to me. I mean, one of the people involved in this was an Air Force lawyer named Lieutenant Colonel Dean Korsak, who was very troubled by this. And he told people when he became aware of it, you should preserve all of the evidence. And he sought to get an investigation going. When he went to the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, which looks into criminal matters, and sought an investigation, the response he got from a major there was pretty interesting. What did they tell him?
PHILIPPS: Yeah. And I should be clear that I never - when I tried to speak to Dean Korsak, he declined. So he's the person who really led this effort to turn people in or get some accountability but did not speak directly to us. But when he tried to talk to criminal investigators at the Air Force, he sent them an email saying, this strike happened. I think it needs to be looked into. Is that the job of the criminal investigators? They said, well, maybe. And I'm paraphrasing here. But they said, essentially, we only look into that stuff if there's a lot of public attention. And in this case, since no one knows about it, we won't look at it. And that's where it ended for them.
And I think that he was shocked about it and, you know, wouldn't let it rest and tried to take it to anyone within the military that he could think of that would actually do something. And when that failed, he took it to Congress. And ultimately, I don't think anyone ever acted on any of the stuff that he brought forward.
at you trying to make Ukraine supporters feel guilty for extending the war. Have you lost your fukking mind?
