I’d like to see the citation that our people in power can’t explain what happened. Of course they won’t say how they found the terrorists, otherwise the terrorists would be able to hide better. They could explain this if we forced them too.
No doubt this event was tragic, something went terribly wrong. I have complete confidence the air crew aboard the AC-130 were following their plans and procedures to the letter. There is a problem with these, and yes, the military is looking in to this and fixing it. It’s not like the USA is beheading innocent Arabs on YouTube like the terrorists are doing.
I have complete faith in the US Military, unquestionably … it is the US Congress I have no faith in, they could pull us out within the [del]hour[/del] month.
My Lai was initially announced as a successful operation in which 120 enemy combatants were killed. I have no reason to believe that the action against al-Shabab shares any other similarities with that massacre, but the My Lai story held up for more than a year until Seymour Hersh’s story broke.
The Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch stories were only covered up for weeks, but it still took a while for the truth to come out. Even as to the Kunduz hospital, where, as Ravenman notes, the news was out immediately, the military was still criticized for telling four stories over four days.
We still don’t know what really happened with the bombing of what was allegedly a civilian Yemeni wedding in 2013. I’m not sure that we have ever learned more about the alleged thousands of previously-unreported civilian Iraqi deaths that Wikileaks, at least a few thousand of which the Iraq Body Count added to its list. I believe that Wikileaks also alleged that a few journalist deaths had been listed as enemy combatants, and I don’t know that any investigation of those allegations has ever been publicly announced.
Not sure what you mean by the reference to Abu Ghraib – that came out through Amnesty International, the AP, and FOIA, although there was an Army criminal investigation underway. Moreover, Wikileaks alleged that hundreds of reports of continuing abuses there even after the scandal broke went uninvestigated.
I fully agree with you that the military can do a great job of investigating. But it can also sometimes do a good job of not investigating, at least until it is pressured to. I also fully agree that action against al-Shabab is warranted. I just don’t think I’m obliged to take the military’s initial descriptions as the final word on the subject, and I think it’s reasonable to expect to be provided with more detail and corroboration as time goes on.
The military concluded otherwise, finding that they made navigational errors and failed to consult their no-strike list. It seems we know how it happened, but not why.
I don’t think you’re getting the burden of proof: the world doesn’t have to show the US military it’s not a US defined terrorist. It’s for the attacker to justify the attack.
Don’t bother. You will only get nonsense like “They hate us cause they ain’t us.” or “they hate us because our freedom.”
If you then point out the shit the US has actually done, it’s “Realpolitik” or “Other nations do that too.” or you’re simply engaged in America bashing or believe anti-American propaganda. US propaganda is, of course, simply ‘news’.
Only the governments of other countries lie and have nefarious reasons for their actions.
Like whom? The UK? Russia? France? China? This whole “The US is bad!” “But what about…” “DON’T LOOK AT WHAT ANY OTHER COUNTRY IS DOING, THE US IS THE WORSTEST EVER!” thing is a bit tiring.
Yes, the US has done and continues to do violent, morally questionable things. And it is right that we attempt to put in place as much accountability for it as we can. But if you think doing violent, morally questionable things makes it exceptional, I’m afraid you’re engaged in some spectacular denial about the state of the world. And in fact while the US does these things it also gets a lot more internal and external scrutiny than most other countries do.
Yes, because that’s what we’ve been saying, oh wait, no it isn’t.
I think you’re confusing us with someone else who handwaves away any criticisms and ignores all actual substantive responses. I’m sure an example will come to mind shortly…
The US government has given its side of the story. If it were fabricated, I think it is reasonable to expect that the press would have some whiff of wrongdoing by now.
But in fact, the Guardian story linked earlier contains quotes from Somalis that back up the US account. The very same story quotes an unnamed Al Shabaab spokesman saying that his group was attacked, but that the US was exaggerating the number killed.
War isn’t a judicial process. There’s no burden of proof to carry out an air strike. The law of armed conflict simply requires discrimination and proportionality, which has been the legal standard for generations. You’re simply poorly informed on international humanitarian law, but if you surf around the Red Cross website, they have lots of legal resources to help educate you.
Then help me out. In which countries do presidential candidates propose torture or carpet bombing as a policy because they think it will appeal to the electorate? Which countries bomb as standard policy, which countries killed 150 people involved in a civil war - at anytime - and didn’t bother explaining why?
etc, etc. If you don’t think this policy of drone, missile and drone attacks from Pakistan to Afghanistan, to Syria, down to Yemen and across to East Africa isn’t exceptional, which other countries do that across a big chunk of the world.
Killing civilians in a civil war and saying that those women and children were ISIL. Campaigning on making war in Ukraine, Gerogia, Chechnya, and Syria. Printing up rd baseball caps that read, “Make Russia Great Again.”
So there are no mature country governments, and the US is no different from anyone else.
I don’t know what dots you want to connect. You claim that the US should fall, because they bombed some terrorists, and didn’t explain why. Yes, they did bomb some terrorists, but they did explain why, and their explanation makes sense. Your notion of the US media going tamely along with whatever they hear from the government/mililtary-industrial complex/Illuminati/international banking conspiracy/shape-shifting lizards from the fourth dimension is wrong. If there were any indication that this was a horrible atrocity, the media would be on it like a duck on a June bug.
You will notice (or perhaps not) that even the spokesman from al-Shaboob only disputed the number of his nasty henchmen who had been sent to their eternal reward - not that they were linked to al-Queda, or that they weren’t anti-Crusader revolutionaries working for a world subject to the rule of the latest Islamic fuckjob, or any of the rest of it.
The notion that there is a sinister conspiracy to foment war because we use drones instead of court orders to cease and desist is kind of silly. (No offense).