{"id":198960,"date":"2021-11-08T12:00:36","date_gmt":"2021-11-08T12:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=198960"},"modified":"2021-11-06T06:39:14","modified_gmt":"2021-11-06T06:39:14","slug":"u-s-absolves-drone-killers-and-persecutes-whistleblowers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/11\/u-s-absolves-drone-killers-and-persecutes-whistleblowers\/","title":{"rendered":"U.S. Absolves Drone Killers and Persecutes Whistleblowers"},"content":{"rendered":"

4 Nov 2021 – A Pentagon report treats the killing of an Afghan family as an innocent mistake \u2014 and upholds a U.S. tradition of excusing war crimes.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

A man weeps during a mass funeral for the 10 members of a family killed in a U.S. drone strike, in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 30, 2021.
Photo: Marcus Yam\/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

After the terrorist attack on the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan\u2019s capital, that killed more than 170 Afghan civilians and 13 U.S. soldiers, President Joe Biden issued a warning to fighters from the Islamic State. \u201cWe will hunt you down and make you pay,\u201d he said on August 26. Three days later,\u00a0<\/span>Biden\u00a0authorized a\u00a0drone\u00a0strike that the U.S. claimed took out a dangerous cell of ISIS fighters intent on staging another attack on the Kabul airport.<\/p>\n

Biden held up\u00a0this strike, and another one a day earlier,\u00a0as evidence of his commitment to take the fight to the terrorists in Afghanistan even as he declared an end to the 20-year war there. \u201cWe struck ISIS-K remotely, days after they murdered 13 of our service members and dozens of innocent Afghans,\u201d\u00a0he\u00a0said<\/a> in a White House speech. \u201cAnd to ISIS-K: We are not done with you yet.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But the Kabul strike, which targeted a white Toyota Corolla, did not kill any members of ISIS. The victims were 10 civilians, seven of them children. The driver of the car, Zemari Ahmadi, was a respected employee of a U.S. aid organization. Following a New York Times investigation<\/a> that fully exposed the\u00a0lie<\/a>\u00a0of the U.S. version of events, the Pentagon and the White House admitted that they had killed innocent civilians, calling it \u201ca horrible tragedy of war.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

This week, the Pentagon\u00a0released<\/a>\u00a0a summary of its\u00a0classified review into the attack, which it originally hailed as a \u201crighteous strike\u201d that had thwarted an imminent terror plot. The results were predictable. The report\u00a0recommended that no personnel be held responsible for the murder of 10 civilians; there was no \u201ccriminal negligence,\u201d as the report put it. The fact that the U.S. military spent\u00a0eight hours surveilling the \u201ctargets,\u201d that a child could be seen in its own footage\u00a0minutes<\/a>\u00a0before the strike \u2014 this was written off as a fog-of-war moment. The operators conducting the strike\u00a0\u201chad a genuine belief that there was an imminent threat to U.S. forces,\u201d asserted the Air Force\u2019s inspector general, Lt. Gen. Sami D. Said.<\/p>\n

They\u00a0committed a mistake, he said, not a crime.<\/p>\n

The U.S. has\u00a0promised to pay restitution to the survivors of the drone strike. This is part of a long-standing U.S. tradition to treat its widespread killings of civilians in the so-called war on terror as innocent mistakes made in pursuit of peace and security. The general who\u00a0conducted the review says he has made recommendations on how to tinker with targeted killing operations to reduce the likelihood of other honest mistakes (as the Pentagon regards them) that wipe out entire families.<\/p>\n

None of this<\/u> is new. It is a cycle that got into high gear under\u00a0President Barack Obama (when Biden was vice president), continued\u00a0during the Donald Trump presidency, and is not relenting in the Biden era.<\/p>\n

As the Pentagon absolves itself of this crime, the Biden administration is pushing ahead with its persecution of whistleblowers who exposed this system of killing innocents. Daniel Hale, a military veteran who pleaded guilty to\u00a0disclosing classified documents that exposed lethal\u00a0weaknesses in the drone program, is serving four years in prison. (Prosecutors\u00a0said those documents formed the basis\u00a0for The Drone Papers<\/a>,\u00a0a series of investigative articles published by The Intercept.) Among other revelations, Hale\u2019s documents exposed how as many as\u00a0nine out of\u00a010 victims of U.S. drone strikes in Afghanistan were not the intended targets. In Biden\u2019s recent drone strike, 10 of 10 were innocent civilians.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"Drone<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Read our Complete Coverage – <\/span>Drone Wars<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

\n

While Hale was indicted under the Espionage Act during Trump\u2019s tenure, Biden\u2019s Justice Department\u00a0has gone after\u00a0him with a vengeance<\/a>. In October, Hale was inexplicably transferred<\/a> to a \u201cCommunications Management Unit\u201d at the U.S.\u00a0Penitentiary at Marion in southern Illinois. CMUs are used to severely limit a prisoner\u2019s ability to communicate with the outside world, subject them to extreme periods of isolation, and allow for intensified surveillance of their communications and visits. CMUs are\u00a0regularly<\/a>\u00a0labeled as \u201cterrorist units.\u201d<\/p>\n

And as the Pentagon\u2019s mountain of lies about the August drone strike in Afghanistan came tumbling down, the Biden administration continued its quest to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, being held in the U.K., for the\u00a0offense of publishing evidence of U.S. war crimes. The Biden administration has made clear that it will uphold the long U.S. tradition of exonerating its killers and punishing those who expose them.<\/p>\n

____________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Jeremy Scahill<\/a> is an investigative reporter, war correspondent and author of the international bestselling books <\/em>Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield\u00a0<\/em>and <\/em>Blackwater: The Rise of the World\u2019s Most Powerful Mercenary Army<\/em>.\u00a0He has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Nigeria, the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere across the globe. Scahill has served as the National Security Correspondent for <\/em>The Nation Magazine <\/em>and <\/em>Democracy Now!.<\/em> His work has sparked several Congressional investigations and won some of journalism\u2019s highest honors. He was twice awarded the prestigious George Polk Award, in 1998 for foreign reporting and in 2008 for his book <\/em>Blackwater.<\/em>\u00a0Scahill is a producer and writer of the award-winning film <\/em>Dirty Wars<\/em>, which premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and has been nominated for an Academy Award. jeremy.scahill@\u200btheintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theintercept.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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