I understand and empathize with you disliking war and your conviction. But you aren’t going to change anyones mind by calling everything a war crime. A situation may be ugly as fukk but it doesn’t make it a war crime.
Beautiful for you to reduce the bombing of 60+ unarmed women and children to "calling everything a war crime". Let's go in order:
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.
Eugene Tate: “Yes, I see people with weapons. Not a lot. I see, like, two people with weapons.” (emphasis added)
The high-definition drone recorded a very different scene from what was described by Central Command this past week, three people who viewed the footage said. In it, two or three men — not 16 — wander through the frame near the crowd. They have rifles but do not appear to be maneuvering, engaging coalition forces or acting in a way that would seem to justify a self-defense strike with 2,000-pound bombs. A chat log used by analysts who were watching the footage noted the presence of women, children and a man with a gun, but did not mention any active combat, two people who viewed the log said.
At the US military's busy Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, uniformed personnel watching the live drone footage looked on in stunned disbelief, according to one officer who was there.
"Who dropped that?" a confused analyst typed on a secure chat system being used by those monitoring the drone, two people who reviewed the chat log recalled. Another responded, "We just dropped on 50 women and children."
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:
“In the minutes after the strike, an alarmed Air Force intelligence officer in the operations center called over an Air Force lawyer in charge of determining the legality of strikes. The lawyer ordered the F-15E squadron and the drone crew to preserve all video and other evidence, according to documents obtained by The Times. He went upstairs and reported the strike to his chain of command, saying it was a possible violation of the law of armed conflict — a war crime.”
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.
The only assessment done immediately after the strike was performed by the same ground unit that ordered the strike. It determined that the bombing was lawful because it killed only a small number of civilians while targeting Islamic State fighters in an attempt to protect coalition forces. Therefore, no formal war crime notification, criminal investigation or disciplinary action was warranted.
But the Air Force lawyer, Lt. Col. Dean Korsak, believed he had witnessed possible war crimes and repeatedly pressed his leadership and Air Force criminal investigators to act. When they did not, he alerted the Defense Department’s independent inspector general. Two years after the strike, seeing no evidence that the watchdog agency was taking action, Korsak emailed the Senate Armed Services Committee.
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.
Civilian observers who came to the area of the strike the next day found piles of dead women and children. The human rights organization Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently
posted photos of the bodies, calling it a “terrible massacre.”
Satellite images from four days later show the sheltered bank and area around it, which were in the control of the coalition, appeared to have been bulldozed.
David Eubank, a former U.S. Army Special Forces soldier who now runs the humanitarian organization
Free Burma Rangers, walked through the area about a week later. “The place had been pulverized by airstrikes,” he said in an interview. “There was a lot of freshly bulldozed earth and the stink of bodies underneath, a lot of bodies.”
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:
But the command in Baghdad failed to review and close the inquiry, and Central Command did not follow up and remind the Baghdad command to do so, Capt. Bill Urban, the Central Command spokesman, said ….
As a result, senior military officials in Iraq and Florida never reviewed the strike, and the investigation technically remained open until the Times investigation.
“Should we have followed up? Yes,” Captain Urban said in a telephone interview, blaming “an administrative oversight.”
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.....
DOD failed to report the March 18, 2019 strike in its annual civilian casualty reports to Congress
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.
But the Air Force lawyer, Lt. Col. Dean W. Korsak, believed he had witnessed possible war crimes and repeatedly pressed his leadership and Air Force criminal investigators to act. When they did not, he alerted the Defense Department’s independent inspector general. Two years after the strike, seeing no evidence that the watchdog agency was taking action, Colonel Korsak emailed the Senate Armed Services Committee, telling its staff that he had top secret material to discuss and adding, “I’m putting myself at great risk of military retaliation for sending this.”
“Senior ranking U.S. military officials intentionally and systematically circumvented the deliberate strike process,” he wrote in the email, which was obtained by The Times. Much of the material was classified and would need to be discussed through secure communications, he said. He wrote that a unit had intentionally entered false strike log entries, “clearly seeking to cover up the incidents.” Calling the classified death toll “shockingly high,” he said the military did not follow its own requirements to report and investigate the strike.
Concerned that details of the airstrike would be buried as well, Colonel Korsak alerted the Air Force’s version of the F.B.I., the Office of Special Investigations. In an email Colonel Korsak shared with the Senate Armed Services Committee, a major responded that agents probably would not look into it, saying the office typically investigated civilian casualty reports only when there was “potential for high media attention, concern with outcry from local community/government, concern sensitive images may get out.”
The Air Force Office of Special Investigations declined to comment.
Colonel Korsak again pressed his chain of command to act, informing his command’s chief legal officer in a memo in May 2019 that regulations required an investigation. He later told the Senate committee’s staff that his superiors did not open an investigation.
“The topic and incidents were dead on arrival,” he wrote. “My supervisor refused to discuss the matter with me.”
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:
“Leadership just seemed so set on burying this. No one wanted anything to do with it,” said Gene Tate, an evaluator who worked on the case for the inspector general’s office and agreed to discuss the aspects that were not classified. “It makes you lose faith in the system when people are trying to do what’s right but no one in positions of leadership wants to hear it.”
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.
But like the Air Force lawyer’s earlier effort, Mr. Tate’s team soon hit roadblocks. Central Command was slow to turn over evidence, he said. Mr. Tate obtained video from several drones flying over Baghuz that day, but could not locate the footage from the task force drone that called in the strike.
The inspector general’s office received a second complaint on the hotline about the strike, a spokeswoman said, but Mr. Tate said his team was never told.
Mr. Tate studied the task force’s casualty report, but it didn’t match what he saw on video. The civilian deaths stated in the report were “an impossibly small number,” he said.
The final section of the casualty report was reserved for the legal opinion. In one version of the report that Mr. Tate was sent by the staff at Operation Inherent Resolve, the Baghdad-based military command overseeing operations in Iraq and Syria, a task force lawyer and an operations officer wrote that a violation of the law of armed conflict may have taken place. In another copy that came from Central Command, he said, that opinion had been removed.
Mr. Tate could find no evidence that the Joint Chiefs, the defense secretary or criminal investigators had been alerted, as required.
Within days of interviewing Colonel Korsak, Mr. Tate’s team took their findings to supervisors and told them the office was required to alert those officials and criminal investigation agencies. Mr. Tate said his supervisors took no action. The team pressed leaders numerous times over the next several months, and in January 2020, Mr. Tate’s team leader drafted a memo that would formally alert authorities. It only needed to be signed by the deputy inspector general overseeing the team. Mr. Tate said the supervisor did not sign it.
Again, memory-holed. You have yet another person who was directly involved with the investigation saying that leadership tried to bury it.
plenty of stuff regarding human dignities, etc.