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| US Military Clears Itself of Blame in Syria Strike That Killed 'Piles' of Women and Children | |
| 2022-05-21 | |
| [Common Dreams] "It's the standard government line: Mistakes were made but there was no wrongdoing. But if the same mistakes were being made over and over again for years, shouldn't someone have done something about it?" No U.S. personnel will be held accountable for a March 2019 airstrike that killed scores of Syrian civilians including women and children, the Pentagon said Tuesday in announcing that an internal investigation into the massacre found that no laws of war were broken and that there was no cover-up of the incident as alleged in a New York Times exposé. An executive summary of a classified investigation led by U.S. Army Gen. Michael Garrett stated that "no rules of engagement (ROE) or law of war (LOW) violations occurred" in connection with the March 18, 2019 strike near the Syrian town of Baghuz
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| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #21 I would not make we buy with bird dogs ass. |
| Posted by: swksvolFF 2022-05-21 19:05 |
| #20 I assume our #17 POS uses "our" and "we" like most of the recent UK-RUS trolls: a foreign language |
| Posted by: Frank G 2022-05-21 18:35 |
| #19 If "don't murder children" is something that's dead-set wrong, then I really don't know what to say. Your argument ignores that in war civilians die. Period. It hasn't changed in 4000+ years. You also ignore that in Western Civilization they made an attempt to reduce that by drawing up rule of warfare, which you completely ignore, in that when a combatant uses civilians as shields then the one doing that is at fault not the other combatant. We don't live in your make believe world but in reality. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2022-05-21 15:58 |
| #18 Mods should scrub this last nutter’s comment. |
| Posted by: Remoteman 2022-05-21 15:28 |
| #17 Any American that participated in military activities in Syria needs to be prosecuted and killed. This scum do not represent me or the American peoples. That scum are mercenaries for the jews industrialist . Kill them all! U is welkom hier Boerboel, but take that type of rhetoric elswhere please. |
| Posted by: Boerboel 2022-05-21 14:43 |
| #16 Never happen with the current crop of Uniparty pols. Too much MIC money to be made Billy. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2022-05-21 14:25 |
| #15 Why the fuck did we stick our noses into Syria in the first place? What if anything did we accomplish there? The ultimate cause of these fuck-ups is our globalists' foolish insistence on intervening into nearly every brutal civil war on the planet. When will our policymakers learn how to stay the fuck out of these hellholes? |
| Posted by: Billy Budd 2022-05-21 13:25 |
| #14 If "don't murder children" is something that's dead-set wrong, then I really don't know what to say. Ye have gazed too long into the abyss; and yea the abyss has gazed into you. Ye have become what ye set out to fight: murderers of innocents. |
| Posted by: Blackbeard Unereck7174 2022-05-21 13:18 |
| #13 No American set out to kill innocents. They were targeting ISIS thugs -- who surrounded themselves with women and children. |
| Posted by: Rob Crawford 2022-05-21 12:46 |
| #12 Those innocents, given the opportunity, would be quite happy to lop off your head Blackbeard. |
| Posted by: Xyz 2022-05-21 12:35 |
| #11 P2K's spot on =- camp followers are just the sea the terrorist sharks hide in. Self-owned human shields. Don't be naive |
| Posted by: Frank G 2022-05-21 12:32 |
| #10 Because we're the good guys? How's that so hard to understand? We're not supposed to murder piles of women and children. And if this was so justified and righteous, why did they immediately act like guilty criminals and go straight to the cover-up? ISIS, we can't control. But we can control "our" side. Let's all get behind the idea that the US military shouldn't mass murder children. Crazy, I know, but how about we give it a try? "Protecting innocent civilians is fundamental to our operational success and is a strategic and moral imperative." -- U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin But I'm sure we'll get some blowback on this controversial statement. There's a lot of room for nuance on the murdering the innocent issue. A lot of people in this world are pro-murder of innocents, it's just that we usually expect them to be waving the star and crescent rather than the Old Glory. |
| Posted by: Blackbeard Unereck7174 2022-05-21 12:27 |
| #9 If they have nothing to hide, then why are they hiding? Why do you keep avoiding to acknowledge ISIS combatants among them? |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2022-05-21 11:56 |
| #8 Common Dreams is from the Bernie Bro left end of the journalistic spectrum. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2022-05-21 11:37 |
| #7 If you witnessed it going down, you just had to assume you were going to be hung out to dry. |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2022-05-21 11:34 |
| #6 If they have nothing to hide, then why are they hiding? The officials' claim stands in stark contrast with what U.S. personnel quoted in the Times exposé reported seeing at the time of the attack. According to the report, U.S. troops watching real-time footage of the strike "looked on in stunned disbelief," according to an officer who was there, with one military analyst stating that "we just dropped on 50 women and children." After the strike, civilian observers "found piles of dead women and children," according to Times reporters Dave Philipps and Eric Schmitt, who spent months investigating the attack. "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 pair explained. "The death toll was downplayed. Reports were delayed, sanitized, and classified. United States-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. And top leaders were not notified." Remember when Bhutto was assassinated in Pakistan, and they destroyed the evidence at the crime scene with fire hoses? Boy, destroying evidence with bulldozers just doesn't scream "we committed no war crime here." It's the sort of thing third world shitholes do. Anyone getting the idea that people who murder children and then cover it up aren't on our side? That they are, in fact, our enemy? |
| Posted by: Blackbeard Unereck7174 2022-05-21 11:18 |
| #5 Targeting children is a war crime - yes Targeting ISIS members hiding among the civilians - no Go read the conventions rather than making stuff up because you want them that way |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2022-05-21 10:51 |
| #4 "However, a former evaluator in the Defense Department inspector general's office who attempted to investigate the Baghuz strike said he personally witnessed Pentagon brass trying to bury reports of the bombing. "The investigation says the reporting was delayed," Tate added. "None of the worker bees involved believe it was delayed. We believe there was no reporting." The airstrike remained concealed from the public until the publication of a November 2021 Times investigation, which also revealed that a secretive Special Forces unit, Task Force 9, was responsible for the attack. One strike cell within the task force known as Talon Anvil reportedly killed and wounded Syrian civilians at 10 times the rate of similar units' airstrikes." |
| Posted by: Blackbeard Unereck7174 2022-05-21 08:47 |
| #3 Targeting children is a war crime. If Russia did this, would we be insisting on investigations from The Hague? Come on, nobody can possibly believe the "we investigated ourselves and found ourselves are not at fault" line. It's an obvious lie. If they weren't to blame, why'd they immediately engage in a cover-up? Use your brains, people. |
| Posted by: Blackbeard Unereck7174 2022-05-21 08:45 |
| #2 Using civilians as human shields is the violation of the war conventions and not those who take out the military target therein. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2022-05-21 08:28 |
| #1 The first "mistake made" was being there. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2022-05-21 03:07 |