She first went to sinclair then fox...one of trump's loyal defenders, constantly attacking "main stream media".
Frankly, after hundreds of thousands of dead due to the war on terror this doesn’t really resonate. Just another mistake with grave consequences.
Terrorists have used civilians killing as justifications for their terrorists attack against the US. The hundreds of thousands of dead are because of the two wars, not because of drone strikes. Drone strikes suppose to be our way out of massive land-based war and to very specifically target terrorists. It is the future against terrorists but if we don't have a handle on it and just trust the military and admin to do the right thing resulting in more civilian death, it will be used against us. Here are the drone strikes mistakes admitted by the US. 2008 - dozens of civilians at an Afghan wedding. 2009 - 100 civilians in Afghanistan Trump years - no idea as the Trump admin changed the rules to a) allow strike withOUT a threat standard, b) leave the decision to the military as they see fit, and c) revoke rule on the requirement to summarize annual drone strikes and how many died, including civilians (*** the limited data of drone strikes from the Trump years is from 3rd party and other countries reporting, including terrorist organizations ***) 2021 - 10 civilians in Afghanistan I don't see it happening but I want to see the Biden Admin and Congress enact real oversight and not leave the rules to whatever the admin wants to do.
This goes again to there is no such thing as a clean war and this strike is just another in a long list of tragedies that will likely to continue to happen. It is good that the US military is admitting a horrible mistake will be made and clearly intel needs to be better vetted and more patience shown but dropping even the smartest bomb will still likely kill civilians.
Hopefully, it'll be the last in Afghanistan for awhile. I know Biden must have felt a lot of political pressure to do something as a retributive strike without endangering any US military further. We screwed it up so he's catching heat for that, but he'd have caught heat for doing nothing had he played it safe. So it sucks and it's not acceptable and all that, but I also understand how we got there. Let's have it be the last. I know our military and counter-terrorism folks will want to keep a presence in Afghanistan and launch the occasional drone strike to disrupt terrorist organizations or to retaliate for whatever. Let's just not do that. Sure, some president may some day be criticized for allowing a terror attack to be launched against the US from Afghan soil. But, it's not worth the cost of terrorizing them just to some day avoid some tragedy here.
Once again . . ..obscuring facts is more useful than transparency Trump can lie and say never happened on his watch no one can say he lying can claim the moral high ground Rocket River
the distinction between this incident and civilian 'collateral damage' casualties of the past twenty years discussed: DID BIDEN’S POLITICAL NEEDS LEAD TO TRAGICALLY MISTAKEN DRONE STRIKE? https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/09/did-bidens-political-needs-lead-to-tragically-mistaken-drone-strike.php excerpt: But there’s a second distinction. This particular attack might well have resulted from Joe Biden attempting to save a little face over our disastrous exit from Afghanistan and, in particular, the killing of American forces at the Kabul airport. Charles Cooke makes that case: [The killings] happened because Biden felt that it was politically necessary to hit someone in order to change the narrative, and so he hit someone in order to change the narrative. Presumably, it did not help matters that, by August 29, the United States had become reliant upon the Taliban for intelligence. Cooke isn’t saying that Biden deliberately decided to kill innocent people in order to change the narrative. I think he’s suggesting — as I am — that Biden’s political needs caused his team to be less discriminate than normal in picking and vetting a target. These political needs included changing the narrative, as Cooke says. They also included being able to claim some measure of revenge for the terrorist killings of Americans at the Kabul airport. In addition, this seems to have been an attempt to demonstrate to Americans that, even with our troops gone, we still have the “over-the-horizon” capability to kill terrorists (as we thought the target was) in Afghanistan. Biden had promised that, post-withdrawal, we would have “counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on any direct threats.” After the drone attack that killed the innocents, Biden touted the strike as a successful example of his over-the-horizon strategy. Scott has observed that the claim that this was an over-the-horizon attack is highly dubious, but the point here is that Biden believed he could sell this attack as evidence of that capability. The key question, then, is whether Biden’s political need to kill suspected terrorists, and the military’s related desire to save some face and to impress the commander-in-chief, resulted in less care than normal in selecting this target and in going through with the attack. There’s good reason to suspect that it did, but suspicion is not proof. more at the link
"Biden’s political need to kill suspected terrorists, and the military’s related desire to save some face and to impress the commander-in-chief" As if both are true. Author could make the points without making a stupid statement like that. It crossed my mind that this is a possibility and part of the reason I wanted an investigation.
Another shiny example of the US military hiding without consequences. ~70 civilian death, children and women. How the U.S. hid an airstrike that killed dozens of civilians in Syria | The Seattle Times By Eric Schmitt and Dave Philipps The New York Times In the last days of the battle against the Islamic State group in Syria, when members of the once-fierce caliphate were cornered in a dirt field next to a town called Baghuz, a U.S. military drone circled high overhead, hunting for military targets. But it saw only a large crowd of women and children huddled against a river bank. Without warning, a U.S. F-15E attack jet streaked across the drone’s high-definition field of vision and dropped a 500-pound bomb on the crowd. Then a jet dropped one 2,000-pound bomb, then another. It was March 18, 2019. At the U.S. 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. “Who dropped that?” a confused analyst typed on a secure chat system being used by those monitoring the drone. Another responded, “We just dropped on 50 women and children.” An initial battle damage assessment quickly found that the number of dead was actually about 70. The Baghuz strike was one of the largest civilian casualty incidents of the war against the Islamic State, but it has never been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. military. The details, reported here for the first time, show that the death toll was almost immediately apparent to military officials. A legal officer flagged the strike as a possible war crime that required an investigation. But at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike. The death toll was downplayed. Reports were delayed, sanitized and classified. U.S.-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. And top leaders were not notified. The Defense Department’s independent inspector general began an inquiry, but the report containing its findings was stalled and stripped of any mention of the strike. “Leadership just seemed so set on burying this,” 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. 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. ...
I read the NYT article and it paints an even worse picture. The airstrike was called by a special ground unit that has a history of playing fast and loose with the rules of engagement. Often claiming they are under threat and often without coordinating with others in the military.
More reason to get out countries that aren't friendly to us or we aren't trying completely take over.
