Monday, November 20, 2017

Editorial: Bombs don't bring peace

An investigation of 150 US airstrike sites in found civilian death rates 31 times higher than official US government claims & that civilians are repeatedly being classified as ISIS ht :



She's referring to Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal "The Uncounted" (THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE) which explained that the bombings of the US-led coalitions, the ones killing all those terrorists, were, in fact, killing a lot of civilians:



   
Around midnight, Basim heard a thump from the second floor. He peeked out of his office and saw a sliver of light under the door to the bedroom of his daughter, Tuqa. He called out for her to go to bed. At 21, Tuqa would often stay up late, and though Basim knew that he wasn’t a good example himself and that the current conditions afforded little reason to be up early, he believed in the calming power of an early-to-bed, early-to-rise routine. He waited at the foot of the stairs, called out again, and the sliver went dark.
It was 1 a.m. when Basim finally shut down the computer and headed upstairs to bed. He settled in next to Mayada, who was fast asleep.
Some time later, he snapped awake. His shirt was drenched, and there was a strange taste — blood? — on his tongue. The air was thick and acrid. He looked up. He was in the bedroom, but the roof was nearly gone. He could see the night sky, the stars over Mosul. Basim reached out and found his legs pressed just inches from his face by what remained of his bed. He began to panic. He turned to his left, and there was a heap of rubble. “Mayada!” he screamed. “Mayada!” It was then that he noticed the silence. “Mayada!” he shouted. “Tuqa!” The bedroom walls were missing, leaving only the bare supports. He could see the dark outlines of treetops. He began to hear the faraway, unmistakable sound of a woman’s voice. He cried out, and the voice shouted back, “Where are you?” It was Azza, his sister-in-law, somewhere outside.
“Mayada’s gone!” he shouted.
“No, no, I’ll find her!”


“No, no, no, she’s gone,” he cried back. “They’re all gone!” 


That's just one example of what the reporters found.  Overall?


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. There, we were given access to the main operations floor and interviewed senior commanders, intelligence officials, legal advisers and civilian-casualty assessment experts. We provided their analysts with the coordinates and date ranges of every airstrike — 103 in all — in three ISIS-controlled areas and examined their responses. The result is the first systematic, ground-based sample of airstrikes in Iraq since this latest military action began in 2014.


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.




On Friday's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED (NPR), Kelly McEvers discussed the report with its co-author Azmat Khan:

MCEVERS: How many other people are there like Basim that you documented, people who had lost relatives, who are not classified as civilians?

KHAN: So in the 103 airstrikes that we found, there were 75 civilian deaths and none of them that - by any accounts we could tell matched with numbers that had been acknowledged by the coalition.

MCEVERS: Of those 75, how many had been reported as civilian deaths by the coalition?

KHAN: Zero.


In August of 2014, these bombings began under President Barack Obama.

No real objection was lodged by most.

These bombings have continued under President Donald Trump.

Maybe now we can get upset?

Maybe now we can object?

Because bombs don't bring peace.