Not a Surprise

The New York Times has done a deep dive on the Pentagon's review of allegations of civilian casualties that it caused, and discovered that the reviews were designed and run in a way to systematically under-report civilian deaths.

This is not a surprise.  The reviews were driven by a the needs of the Pentagon public relations operations, and not an attempt to draw lessons from the violence and mayhem inflicted by its policies:

The report that came to the attention of the United States military in April 2017 relayed devastating news from Iraq: More than 30 people, among them women and children, had been killed when aircraft from the American-led coalition fighting the Islamic State in Mosul struck a neighborhood known as Siha.

A civilian casualty cell of the U.S. military, which was charged with assessing reports of civilians killed or wounded in coalition operations, learned of the claim in a Facebook post published on April 11 by the news outlet, the Iraqi Spring Media Center.

The Pentagon began an inquiry, but only a week later its assessment officers couldn’t confirm whether coalition aircraft had targeted that location, and they dismissed the claim, saying Siha was not among “known districts of West Mosul.” There would be no further review.

………

Reporters from The New York Times were able to locate the west Mosul neighborhood using just Google Maps. The name appeared slightly different, as “Sihah” instead of “Siha,” a spelling variation that is common when Arabic words are written in English.

Additionally, a simple Google search revealed several news reports published before April 2017, verifying the existence of Siha and its approximate location.

An analysis of confidential Pentagon documents by The Times’s Visual Investigations unit found that a number of allegations of civilian casualties had been dismissed as “noncredible” based on flawed reviews of evidence — oversights that Times reporters were able to detect using resources widely available to the public. That included websites like Google Maps and Wikimapia, a crowdsourced mapping platform. Typically, U.S. military assessors have access to far more robust resources, such as strike logs and video feeds of airstrikes.

“I’ll tell you what it is: That’s negligence,” said Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon senior intelligence analyst. “That is plain and simple. It is the most basic level of investigation that they should be doing, and not to do it is completely negligent.”

It was not negligent.  It is a deliberate coverup.

The whole chain of command behind this is culpable, and should be relieved of duty pending an investigation.