Category Archives: Drones

NYTIMES: THE UNSEEN SCARS OF THOSE WHO KILL VIA REMOTE CONTROL

By Dave Philipps,

original link

 

REDWOOD VALLEY, Calif. — “After hiding all night in the mountains, Air Force Capt. Kevin Larson crouched behind a boulder and watched the forest through his breath, waiting for the police he knew would come. It was Jan. 19, 2020. He was clinging to an assault rifle with 30 rounds and a conviction that, after all he had been through, there was no way he was going to prison.

Captain Larson was a drone pilot — one of the best. He flew the heavily armed MQ-9 Reaper, and in 650 combat missions between 2013 and 2018, he had launched at least 188 airstrikes, earned 20 medals for achievement and killed a top man on the United States’ most-wanted-terrorist list.

The 32-year-old pilot kept a handwritten thank-you note on his refrigerator from the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He was proud of it but would not say what for, because like nearly everything he did in the drone program, it was a secret. He had to keep the details locked behind the high-security doors at Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nev.

There were also things he was not proud of locked behind those doors — things his family believes eventually left him cornered in the mountains, gripping a rifle.

 

In the Air Force, drone pilots did not pick the targets. That was the job of someone pilots called “the customer.” The customer might be a conventional ground force commander, the C.I.A. or a classified Special Operations strike cell. It did not matter. The customer got what the customer wanted.

And sometimes what the customer wanted did not seem right. There were missile strikes so hasty that they hit women and children, attacks built on such flimsy intelligence that they made targets of ordinary villagers, and classified rules of engagement that allowed the customer to knowingly kill up to 20 civilians when taking out an enemy. Crews had to watch it all in color and high definition.

Captain Larson tried to bury his doubts. At home in Las Vegas, he exuded a carefree confidence. He loved to go out dancing and was so strikingly handsome that he did side work as a model. He drove an electric-blue Corvette convertible and a tricked-out blue Jeep and had a beautiful new wife.

But tendrils of distress would occasionally poke up, in a comment before bed or a grim joke at the bar. Once, in 2017, his father pressed him about his work, and Captain Larson described a mission in which the customer told him to track and kill a suspected Al Qaeda member. Then, he said, the customer told him to use the Reaper’s high-definition camera to follow the man’s body to the cemetery and kill everyone who attended the funeral.

“He never really talked about what he did — he couldn’t,” said his father, Darold Larson. “But he would say things like that, and it made you know it was bothering him. He said he was being forced to do things that went against his moral compass.”

Drones were billed as a better way to wage war — a tool that could kill with precision from thousands of miles away, keep American service members safe and often get them home in time for dinner. The drone program started in 2001 as a small, tightly controlled operation hunting high-level terrorist targets. But during the past decade, as the battle against the Islamic State intensified and the Afghanistan war dragged on, the fleet grew larger, the targets more numerous and more commonplace. Over time, the rules meant to protect civilians broke down, recent investigations by The New York Times have shown, and the number of innocent people killed in America’s air wars grew to be far larger than the Pentagon would publicly admit.

Captain Larson’s story, woven together with those of other drone crew members, reveals an unseen toll on the other end of those remote-controlled strikes.

Drone crews have launched more missiles and killed more people than nearly anyone else in the military in the past decade, but the military did not count them as combat troops. Because they were not deployed, they seldom got the same recovery periods or mental-health screenings as other fighters. Instead they were treated as office workers, expected to show up for endless shifts in a forever war.

Under unrelenting stress, several former crew members said, people broke down. Drinking and divorce became common. Some left the operations floor in tears. Others attempted suicide. And the military failed to recognize the full impact. Despite hundreds of missions, Captain Larson’s personnel file, under the heading “COMBAT SERVICE,” offers only a single word: “none.”

Drone crew members said in interviews that, while killing remotely is different from killing on the ground, it still carves deep scars.

“In many ways it’s more intense,” said Neal Scheuneman, a drone sensor operator who retired as a master sergeant from the Air Force in 2019. “A fighter jet might see a target for 20 minutes. We had to watch a target for days, weeks and even months. We saw him play with his kids. We saw him interact with his family. We watched his whole life unfold. You are remote but also very much connected. Then one day, when all parameters are met, you kill him. Then you watch the death. You see the remorse and the burial. People often think that this job is going to be like a video game, and I have to warn them, there is no reset button.”

In the wake of The Times’s investigations, the Pentagon has vowed to strengthen controls on airstrikes and improve how it investigates claims of civilian deaths. The Air Force is also providing more mental-health services for drone crews to address the lapses of the past, said the commander of the 432nd Wing at Creech, Col. Eric Schmidt.

“We are not physically in harm’s way, and yet at the same time we are observing a battlefield, and we are seeing some scenes or being part of them. We have seen the effects that can have on people,” Colonel Schmidt said. In the past, he said, remote warfare was not seen as real combat, and there was a stigma against seeking help. “I’m proud to say, we have come a long way,” he added. “It’s sad that we had to.”

Captain Larson tried to cope with the trauma by using psychedelic drugs. That became another secret he had to keep. Eventually the Air Force found out. He was charged with using and distributing illegal drugs and stripped of his flight status. His marriage fell apart, and he was put on trial, facing a possible prison term of more than 20 years.

The invasive symptoms of PTSD can affect combat veterans and civilians alike. Early intervention is critical for managing the condition.

Because he was not a conventional combat veteran, there was no required psychological evaluation to see what influence his war-fighting experience might have had on his misconduct. At his trial, no one mentioned the 188 classified missile strikes or the funeral he had targeted. In January 2020, he was quickly convicted.

Desperate to avoid prison, reeling from what he saw as a betrayal by the military he had dedicated his life to, Captain Larson ran.

Captain Larson grew up in Yakima, Wash., the son of police officers. He was a straight-and-narrow Eagle Scout who went to church nearly every Sunday and once admonished a longtime friend to stay away from marijuana. At the University of Washington, where he was an honors student, he joined R.O.T.C. and the Civil Air Patrol, set on becoming a fighter pilot.

The Air Force had other plans. By the time he was commissioned in 2012, the Pentagon had a developed seemingly insatiable appetite for drones, and the Air Force was struggling to keep up. That year it turned out more drone pilots than traditional fighter pilots and still could not meet the demand.

“He was sobbing when he got the news. So disappointed. He wanted to fly,” his mother, Laura Larson, said in an interview. “But once he started, he enjoyed it. He really felt like he was doing something important.”

Captain Larson was assigned to the 867th Attack Squadron at Creech — a unit that pilots say worked largely with the C.I.A. and Joint Special Operations Command. The drone crews operated out of a cluster of shipping containers in a remote patch of desert. Each crew had three members: a sensor operator to guide the surveillance camera and targeting laser, an intelligence analyst to interpret and document the video feeds, and a pilot to fly the Reaper and push the red button that launched its Hellfire missiles.

The specifics of Captain Larson’s missions are largely a mystery. He kept the classified details hidden from his parents and former wife. His closest friends in the attack squadron and dozens of other current and former crew members did not respond to requests for interviews; secrecy laws and nondisclosure agreements make it a crime to discuss classified details.

But several pilots, sensor operators and intelligence analysts who did the same type of work in other squadrons spoke with The Times about unclassified details and described their struggles with the same punishing workload and vexing moral landscape.

More than 2,300 service members are currently assigned to drone crews. Early in the program, they said, missions seemed well run. Officials carefully chose their targets and took steps to minimize civilian deaths.

“We would watch a high-value target for months, gathering intelligence and waiting for the exact right time to strike,” said James Klein, a former Air Force captain who flew Reapers at Creech from 2014 to 2018. “It was the right way to use the weapon.”

But in December 2016, the Obama administration loosened the rules amid the escalating fight against the Islamic State, pushing the authority to approve airstrikes deep down into the ranks. The next year, the Trump administration secretly loosened them further. Decisions on high-value targets that once had been reserved for generals or even the president were effectively handed off to enlisted Special Operations soldiers. The customer increasingly turned drones on low-level combatants. Strikes once carried out only after rigorous intelligence-gathering and approval processes were often ordered up on the fly, hitting schools, markets and large groups of women and children.

Before the rules changed, Mr. Klein said, his squadron launched about 16 airstrikes in two years. Afterward, it conducted them almost daily.

Once, Mr. Klein said, the customer pressed him to fire on two men walking by a river in Syria, saying they were carrying weapons over their shoulders. The weapons turned out to be fishing poles, Mr. Klein said, and though the customer argued that the men could still be a threat, he persuaded the customer not to strike.

In another instance, he said, a fellow pilot was ordered to attack a suspected Islamic State fighter who was pushing another man in a wheelchair on a busy city street. The strike killed one of the men; it also killed three passers-by.

“There was no reason to take that shot,” Mr. Klein said. “I talked to the pilot after, and she was in tears. She didn’t fly again for a long time and ended up leaving for good.”

Squadrons did little to address bad strikes if there was no pilot error. It was seen as the customer’s problem. Crews filed civilian casualty reports, but the investigative process was so faulty that they rarely saw any impact; often they would not even get a response.

Over time, Mr. Klein grew angry and depressed. His marriage began to crumble.

“I started to dread going in to work,” he said. “Everyone kind of expects you to do that stuff and just be fine, but it ate away at us.”

Eventually, he refused to fire any more missiles. The Air Force moved him to a noncombat role, and a few years later, in 2020, he retired, one of many disillusioned drone operators who quietly dropped out, he said.

“We were so isolated, that I’m not sure anyone saw it,’ he said. “The biggest tell is that very few people stayed in the field. They just couldn’t take it.”

In her job as a police officer, Captain Larson’s mother conducted stress debriefings after traumatic events. When officers in her department shot someone, they were required to take time off and meet with a psychologist. As part of the healing process, everyone present at the scene was required to sit down and talk through what had happened. She was not aware of any of that happening with her son.

“At one point I pulled him aside and told him, ‘If things start bothering you, you and your friends need to talk about it,’” Ms. Larson said. “He just smiled and said he was fine. But I think he was struggling more than he ever let on.”

The Air Force has no requirement to give drone crews the mental health evaluations mandated for deployed troops, but it has surveyed the drone force for more than a decade and consistently found high levels of stress, cynicism and emotional exhaustion. In one study, 20 percent of crew members reported clinical levels of emotional distress — twice the rate among noncombat Air Force personnel. The proportion of crew members reporting post-traumatic stress disorder and thoughts of suicide was higher than in traditional aircrews.

Several factors contribute — workload, constantly changing shifts, leadership issues and combat exposure. But the most damaging, according to Wayne Chappelle, the Air Force psychologist leading the studies, is civilian deaths.

Seeing just one strike that causes unexpected civilian deaths can increase the risk of PTSD six to eight times, he said. A survey published in 2020, several years after the strike rules changed, found that 40 percent of drone crew members reported witnessing between one and five civilian killings. Seven percent had witnessed six or more.

“After something like that, people can have unresolved, disruptive emotional reactions,” Dr. Chappelle said. “We would assume that’s unhealthy — having intrusive thoughts, intrusive memories. I call that healthy and normal. What do you call someone who is OK with it?”

Having time off to process the trauma is vital, he said. But during the years when America was simultaneously fighting the Taliban, the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, that was nearly impossible.

Starting in 2015, the Air Force began embedding what it called human performance teams in some squadrons, staffed with chaplains, psychologists and operational physiologists offering a sympathetic ear, coping strategies and healthy practices to optimize performance.

“It’s a holistic team approach: mind, body and spirit,” said Capt. James Taylor, a chaplain at Creech. “I try to address the soul fatigue, the existential questions many people have to wrestle with in this work.”

But crews said the teams were only modestly effective. The stigma of seeking help keeps many crew members away, and there is a perception that the teams are too focused on keeping crews flying to address the root causes of trauma. Indeed, a 2018 survey found that only 8 percent of drone operators used the teams, and two-thirds of those experiencing emotional distress did not.

Instead, crew members said, they tend to work quietly, hoping to avoid a breakdown.

Bennett Miller was an intelligence analyst, trained to study the Reaper’s video feed. Working Special Operations missions in Syria and Afghanistan in 2019 and 2020 from Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, the former technical sergeant saw civilian casualties “almost monthly.”

“At first it didn’t bother me that much,” he said. “I thought it was part of going after the bad guys.”

Then, in late 2019, he said, his team tracked a man in Afghanistan who the customer said was a high-level Taliban financier. For a week, the crew watched the man feed his animals, eat with family in his courtyard and walk to a nearby village. Then the customer ordered the crew to kill him, and the pilot fired a missile as the man walked down the path from his house. Watching the video feed afterward, Mr. Miller saw the family gather the pieces of the man and bury them.

A week later, the Taliban financier’s name appeared again on the target list.

“We got the wrong guy. I had just killed someone’s dad,” Mr. Miller said. “I had watched his kids pick up the body parts. Then I had gone home and hugged my own kids.”

The same pattern occurred twice more, he said, yet the squadron leadership did nothing to address what was seen as the customer’s mistakes. Two years later, Mr. Miller was near tears when he described the strikes in an interview at his home. “What we had done was murder, and no one seemed to notice,” he said. “We just were told to move on.”

Mr. Miller grew sleepless and angry. “I couldn’t deal with the guilt or the anxiety of knowing that it was going to probably happen again,” he said. “I was caught in this trap where if I care about what is happening, it’s devastating. And if I don’t care, I lose who I am as a person.”

At Shaw, he said, his squadron did not have a human performance team. “We just had a squadron bar.”

In February 2020, he got home from a 15-hour night shift, locked himself in his bedroom, put a cocked revolver to his head and through the door told his wife that he could not take it anymore. He was hospitalized, diagnosed with PTSD and medically retired.

Beyond their modest standard pensions, veterans with combat-related injuries, even injuries suffered in training, get special compensation worth about $1,000 per month. Mr. Miller does not qualify, because the Department of Veterans Affairs does not consider drone missions combat.

“It’s like they are saying all the people we killed somehow don’t really count,” he said. “And neither do we.”

In February 2018, Captain Larson and his wife, Bree Larson, got into an argument. She was angry at him for staying out all night and smashed his phone, she recalled in an interview. He dragged her out of the house and locked her out, barely clothed. The Las Vegas police came, and when they asked if there were any drugs or weapons in the house, Ms. Larson told them about the bag of psilocybin mushrooms her husband kept in the garage.

When she and Captain Larson had met in 2016, she said, he was already taking mushrooms once every few months, often with other pilots. He also took MDMA — known as ecstasy or molly — a few times a year. The drugs might have been illegal, but, he told her, they offered relief.

“He would just say he had a very stressful job and he needed it,” Ms. Larson said. “And you could tell. For weeks after, he was more relaxed, more focused, more loving. It seemed therapeutic.”

A growing number of combat veterans use the psychedelic drugs illicitly, amid mounting evidence that they are potent treatments for the psychological wounds of war. Both MDMA and psilocybin are expected to soon be approved for limited medical use by the Food and Drug Administration.

“It gave me a clarity and an honesty that allowed me to rewrite the narrative of my life,” according to a former Air Force officer who said he suffered from depression and moral injury after hundreds of Reaper missions; he asked not to be named in order to discuss the use of illegal drugs. “It led to some self-forgiveness. That was a huge first step.”

In Las Vegas, the civilian authorities were willing to forgive Captain Larson, but the Air Force charged him with a litany of crimes — drug possession and distribution, making false statements to Air Force investigators and a charge unique to the armed forces: conduct unbecoming of an officer. His squadron grounded him, forbade him to wear a flight suit and told him not to talk to fellow pilots. No one screened him for PTSD or other psychological injuries from his service, Ms. Larson said, adding, “I don’t think anyone realized it might be connected.”

As the prosecution plodded forward over two years, Captain Larson worked at the base gym and organized volunteer groups to do community service. He and his wife divorced. Struggling with his mental health, seeking productive ways to cope with the trauma, he read book after book on positive thinking and set up a special meditation room in his house, according to his girlfriend at the time, Becca Triano.

“I don’t know what he saw, what he dealt with,” she said. “What I did see toward the end was him really working hard to try to stay sane.”

The trial finally came in January, 2020. His former wife and a pilot friend testified about his drug use. The police produced the evidence. That was all.

After deliberating for a few hours on the morning of Jan. 17, the jury returned with guilty verdicts on nearly every count.

The pilot would be sentenced after a break for lunch. His lawyer told him to be back in an hour. Instead he took off.

He loaded his Jeep with food and clothes and sped away, convinced that he was facing a long prison sentence, Ms. Triano said. Within hours, the Air Force had a warrant out for his arrest.

Captain Larson headed southwest to Los Angeles and stayed the night with a friend, then started heading north. By the afternoon of Saturday, Jan. 18, he was driving by vineyards and redwood groves on U.S. Route 101 in Mendocino County, north of San Francisco, when the California Highway Patrol spotted his Jeep and pulled him over.

Captain Larson stopped and waited calmly for the officer to walk up to his window. Then he gunned it — down the highway and onto a narrow dirt logging road that snaked up into the mountains. After several miles, he pulled off into the trees and hid. The police could not find him, but they knew something he did not: All the roads in the canyon were dead ends, and officers were blocking the only way out.

Night fell. Nothing to do but wait.

In the morning, during a briefing at the bottom of the canyon, records show, Air Force agents explained to the Mendocino County sheriff’s deputies that the wanted man was a deserter who had fled a drug conviction, was probably armed and possibly suicidal.

The officers drove up the canyon and spotted tire tracks on a narrow turnoff. Agents crept up on foot until they spotted the blue Jeep in the trees, but did not risk going farther. The deputies had a better option, something that could get a view of the Jeep without any danger. A small drone soon launched into the sky.

Captain Larson was hiding behind a mossy boulder. There was no phone service deep in the canyon, no way to call for whatever hope or solace he might have conjured. He could only record a video message for his family members. One by one, he told them that he loved them. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I won’t go to prison, so I’m going to end this. This was always the plan.”

There was a lot he did not explain — things that have kept his family and friends wondering in the years since. He did not talk about the hundreds of secret missions or their impact. He did not say what it had felt like to have his commanders stand by quietly as civilian deaths became routine, then stay just as quiet when a decorated pilot was prosecuted for drug possession. He did not talk about the other pilots who had done the same drugs and then avoided him like a virus after he got caught.

Perhaps he was planning to say more, but as he spoke into the phone camera, he was interrupted by an angry buzzing, like a swarm of bees.

“I can hear the drones,” he said. “They’re looking for me.”

Had they found him alive, his pursuers would have been able to tell him this: In the end, the Air Force had decided not to sentence him to prison, only to dismissal.

But now, just as Captain Larson had done countless times, the officers could only study the drone footage and parse the evidence — slumped behind the boulder, shot with his own assault rifle — of another unintended death.

originally New York Times

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). You can find a list of additional resources at SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.

Drone Related Posts

Links

  1. Ban Killer Drones
  2. Drones at Courage to Resist
  3. Shut Down Creech
  4. Drone Papers from the Intercept
  5. Air Wars
  6. National Bird (documentary)

Daniel Hale Deserves Credit for Exposing Crimes by Drone

SAM CARLINER

Original Article Link

New York Times Reporting on Airstrikes Should Give Daniel Hale More Credit – Common Dreams

“The New York Times should give Daniel Hale proper credit and call for Biden to immediately pardon him. As long as he’s in prison, there is no justice.”

“The New York Times recently came through with a display of reporting that should be commended. On December 18, the paper announced its release of hundreds of the Pentagon’s confidential reports of civilian casualties caused by U.S. airstrikes in the Middle East. This followsits high profile investigations into the U.S. drone murder of the Ahmadi family during the Afghanistan withdrawal, and an American strike cell in Syria that killed dozens of civilians with airstrikes.

Many journalists will, rightfully, praise the New York Times for its reporting on U.S. airstrikes and the civilian cost. Far fewer will point out how the inhumanity of U.S. airstrikes were first revealed in 2013 by whistleblower Daniel Hale.

Hale used his first hand experience identifying targets for the drone program to highlight how it relies on faulty criteria, and as a result, kills civilians. Later, Hale worked for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, where he had access to documents on how the drone program operates. Hale provided those documents to the Intercept which published them as The Drone Papers in 2015. While Hale’s documents were not as comprehensive as the trove recently published by the New York Times, they did provide much of the same core revelations, particularly the faulty nature of how intelligence is gathered and the high civilian-toll of air campaigns. Most notably, Hale’s documents revealed that 90% of the drone program’s victims were not the intended targets. Up until the recent reporting by the New York Times, Hale’s revelations were the most comprehensive proof of how U.S. air warfare functions.

To be fair, the Times’ reporting on the brutal nature and high civilian cost of U.S. airstrikes is not insignificant. Americans could have easily ignored the Pentagon’s violence now that the “boots on the ground” approach to intervention has largely ended with Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal. In fact, the use of airstrikes was championed by Obama so as to avoid anti-war sentiments from Americans. The Times actually highlights this, writing:

“The air campaign represents a fundamental transformation of warfare that took shape in the final years of the Obama administration, amid the deepening unpopularity of the forever wars that had claimed more than 6,000 American service members. The United States traded many of its boots on the ground for an arsenal of aircraft directed by controllers sitting at computers, often thousands of miles away.”

Still, as much as the Times’ reporting already seems to be provoking conversation around U.S. air warfare, it is concerning that this conversation comes with the risk of Hale’s own heroic actions being disregarded. The Times makes no mention of Hale’s actions, even as they receive accolades for supposedly breaking to the world the violence of U.S. airstrikes. More damning is how little the Times has commented on the fact that Hale was sentenced to nearly four years in prison earlier this year for exposing the drone program. Aside from a standard article about his sentencing published in July, Daniel Hale is absent from the New York Times’ pages. Azmat Khan, the reporter behind the “Civilian Casualty Files” has not mentioned Daniel Hale once on Twitter.

It’s not like there have not been updates in Hale’s story since he was sentenced. After his sentencing, Hale was kept languishing in a jail for over two months even though he was supposed to be transferred in a matter of weeks. Once finally transferred, Hale’s situation was made worse. He was supposed to be sent to a prison that would provide care for his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder diagnosis, but instead he is now being held in a communication management unit (CMU). CMU’s are designed for terrorists and “high-risk inmates” and detainees have highly restricted contact with the outside world. The American Civil Liberties Union has called on the U.S. government to end its use of CMUs, arguing that these “secretive housing units inside federal prisons in which prisoners are condemned to live in stark isolation from the outside world are unconstitutional, violate the religious rights of prisoners and are at odds with U.S. treaty obligations.”

Daniel Hale deserves freedom for revealing proof of the very crimes the New York Times is now being praised for exposing. His support team and anti-war activists have been working hard to grow concern and action for his cause, but that is a daunting task considering Hale is a person who the U.S. government, and U.S. military in particular, want silenced. But as the Times has shown with its own reporting of U.S. airstrikes, they have a platform that can cut through Pentagon-imposed silence. A single editorial calling for Hale’s release would do wonders for his cause.

Presumably, the Times reporters who have been investigating the violence of U.S. airstrikes are doing so because they believe the victims of U.S. air campaigns deserve justice. The Pentagon’s refusal to hold anyone accountable for their deadly Kabul airstrike in August signals that it will be an uphill battle holding anyone accountable for the newly-exposed airstrikes. Daniel Hale joined the fight to hold the Pentagon seriously accountable. He joined years before the New York Times did, and was treated like a criminal for it. The New York Times should give Daniel Hale proper credit and call for Biden to immediately pardon him. As long as he’s in prison, there is no justice.”

Sam Carliner is a journalist based in New Jersey. His writing focuses on US imperialism and the climate crisis. He is also the Weekend Social Media Manager at CodePink.

 

Daniel Hale Explains Why

Stop Drone Crimes, It’s No Accident.

What modern drone warfare means for both civilians and soldiers

“Last week, the Pentagon announced that no one would be disciplined for the U.S. drone airstrike that killed ten Afghan civilians in August.

New reporting suggests that decision follows a pattern. Locals in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria are killed by U.S. drones and there’s little accountability after. But for many higher ups in the military, the civilian death toll is simply a cost of war. The benefits outweigh the collateral damage.”

GUESTS

Azmat Khan

investigative journalist, The New York Times

Christopher Aaron

former intelligence analyst for the CIA’s drone program

Wayne Phelps

retired Lieutenant Colonel, the Marine Corps; author, “On Killing Remotely: The Psychology of Killing with Drones”

 

What modern drone warfare means for both civilians and soldiers

“…Biden’s withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan is substantially less meaningful when analyzed in light of his administration’s pledge to mount “over-the-horizon” attacks in that country from afar even though we won’t have troops on the ground.” 

Marjorie Cohn

 

“Our troops are not coming home. We need to be honest about that. They are merely moving to other bases in the same region to conduct the same counterterrorism missions, including in Afghanistan.”

Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-New Jersey)

Drones  

People gather around a crater caused by an air strike in Amran province, northwest of Yemen’s capital Sanaa April 12, 2015. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah

Ban Killer Drones

In solidarity with struggles for political, cultural, and economic liberation around the world, we are an international grassroots campaign committed to banning aerial weaponized drones and military and police drone surveillance.

Courage to Resist supports the troops who refuse to fight, or who face consequences for acting on conscience, in opposition to illegal wars, occupations, the policies of empire abroad and martial law at home.

Shut Down Creech

A national campaign to “shut down” the criminal U.S. drone terror program.  The campaign is a call for coast to coast mobilization for bi-annual week-long resistance in the spring and fall, at Creech Air Force Base, a principal drone control base in Indian Springs, Nevada, an hour north of Las Vegas. Using the powerful tool of nonviolent Gandhian resistance and peaceful protest, we uncover the lies and misinformation, educate, break the silence and put our bodies on the line for the global defenseless living under the daily terror of  remotely controlled U.S. militarized drones.  We invite other organizations to join this important campaign.

Photos from Shut Down Creech

Drone Papers from the Intercept

A cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. 

Air Wars

Tracking, assessing and archiving military actions and related civilian harm claims in conflict zones such as Iraq, Syria and Libya. We also work with militaries, where practicable, to help improve understanding of civilian harm allegations – with the aim of reducing battlefield casualties.

Divest from the Machine

NY Times: Hidden Drones – Hazmat Khan

VFP No Drones Working Group – Sign up

 

NY Times: HIDDEN PENTAGON RECORDS REVEAL PATTERNS OF FAILURE IN DEADLY AIRSTRIKES

BY AZMAT KHAN
18 December 2021

  • Note:  the NY Times has often promoted US propaganda when it comes to war profiteering, corporate rulers and US “foreign policy.”

Original Article Link  

What to Know About Civilian Casualty Files Link

Civilian Casualty Files

“The promise was a war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs. The documents show flawed intelligence, faulty targeting, years of civilian deaths — and scant accountability.”

This is the first part of a series. Part 2 will examine the air war’s human toll.

“Shortly before 3 a.m. on July 19, 2016, American Special Operations forces bombed what they believed were three ISIS “staging areas” on the outskirts of Tokhar, a riverside hamlet in northern Syria. They reported 85 fighters killed. In fact, they hit houses far from the front line, where farmers, their families and other local people sought nighttime sanctuary from bombing and gunfire. More than 120 villagers were killed.

In early 2017 in Iraq, an American war plane struck a dark-colored vehicle, believed to be a car bomb, stopped at an intersection in the Wadi Hajar neighborhood of West Mosul. Actually, the car had been bearing not a bomb but a man named Majid Mahmoud Ahmed, his wife and their two children, who were fleeing the fighting nearby. They and three other civilians were killed.

In November 2015, after observing a man dragging an “unknown heavy object” into an ISIS “defensive fighting position,” American forces struck a building in Ramadi, Iraq. A military review found that the object was actually “a person of small stature” — a child — who died in the strike.

None of these deadly failures resulted in a finding of wrongdoing.

These cases are drawn from a hidden Pentagon archive of the American air war in the Middle East since 2014.

The trove of documents — the military’s own confidential assessments of more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties, obtained by The New York Times — lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.

The documents show, too, that despite the Pentagon’s highly codified system for examining civilian casualties, pledges of transparency and accountability have given way to opacity and impunity. In only a handful of cases were the assessments made public. Not a single record provided includes a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action. Fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made, even though many survivors were left with disabilities requiring expensive medical care. Documented efforts to identify root causes or lessons learned are rare.

The air campaign represents a fundamental transformation of warfare that took shape in the final years of the Obama administration, amid the deepening unpopularity of the forever wars that had claimed more than 6,000 American service members. The United States traded many of its boots on the ground for an arsenal of aircraft directed by controllers sitting at computers, often thousands of miles away. President Barack Obama called it “the most precise air campaign in history.”

This was the promise: America’s “extraordinary technology” would allow the military to kill the right people while taking the greatest possible care not to harm the wrong ones.

The ISIS caliphate ultimately crumbled under the weight of American bombing. For years, American air power was crucial to the beleaguered Afghan government’s survival. And as U.S. combat deaths dwindled, the faraway wars, and their civilian tolls, receded from most Americans’ sights and minds.

On occasion, stunning revelations have pierced the silence. A Times investigation found that a Kabul drone strike in August, which American officials said had destroyed a vehicle laden with bombs, had instead killed 10 members of one Afghan family. The Times recently reported that dozens of civilians had been killed in a 2019 bombing in Syria that the military had hidden from public view. That strike was ordered by a top-secret strike cell called Talon Anvil that, according to people who worked with it, frequently sidestepped procedures meant to protect civilians. Talon Anvil executed a significant portion of the air war against ISIS in Syria.

The Pentagon regularly publishes bare-bones summaries of civilian casualty incidents, and it recently ordered a new, high-level investigation of the 2019 Syria airstrike. But in the rare cases where failings are publicly acknowledged, they tend to be characterized as unfortunate, unavoidable and uncommon.

In response to questions from The Times, Capt. Bill Urban, the spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, said that “even with the best technology in the world, mistakes do happen, whether based on incomplete information or misinterpretation of the information available. And we try to learn from those mistakes.” He added: “We work diligently to avoid such harm. We investigate each credible instance. And we regret each loss of innocent life.”

He described minimizing the risk of harm to civilians as “a strategic necessity as well as a legal and moral imperative,” driven by the way these casualties are used “to feed the ideological hatred espoused by our enemies in the post 9/11 conflicts and supercharge the recruiting of the next generation of violent extremists.”

Yet what the hidden documents show is that civilians have become the regular collateral casualties of a way of war gone badly wrong.

To understand how this happened, The Times did what military officials admit they have not done: analyzed the casualty assessments in aggregate to discern patterns of failed intelligence, decision-making and execution. It also visited more than 100 casualty sites and interviewed scores of surviving residents and current and former American officials. In the coming days, the second part of this series will trace those journeys through the war zones of Iraq and Syria.

Taken together, the reporting offers the most sweeping, and also the most granular, portrait of how the air war was prosecuted and investigated — and of its civilian toll.

There is no way to determine that full toll, but one thing is certain: It is far higher than the Pentagon has acknowledged. According to the military’s count, 1,417 civilians have died in airstrikes in the campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria; since 2018 in Afghanistan, U.S. air operations have killed at least 188 civilians. But The Times’s analysis of the documents found that many allegations of civilian casualties had been summarily discounted, with scant evaluation. And the on-the-ground reporting — involving a sampling of cases dismissed, cases deemed “credible” and, in Afghanistan, cases not included in the trove of Pentagon documents — found hundreds of deaths uncounted.

The war of precision did not promise that civilians would not die. But before a strike is approved, the military must undertake elaborate protocols to estimate and avoid civilian harm; any expected civilian casualties must be proportional to the military advantage gained. And America’s precision bombs are indeed precise: They hit their targets with near-unerring accuracy.

The documents, along with The Times’s ground reporting, illustrate the many, often disastrous ways the military’s predictions of the peril to civilians turn out to be wrong. Their lessons rarely learned, these breakdowns of intelligence and surveillance occur again and again.

Repeatedly the documents point to the psychological phenomenon of “confirmation bias” — the tendency to search for and interpret information in a way that confirms a pre-existing belief. People streaming toward a fresh bombing site were assumed to be ISIS fighters, not civilian rescuers.

Men on motorcycles moving “in formation,” displaying the “signature” of an imminent attack, were just men on motorcycles.

Often, the danger to civilians is lost in the cultural gulf separating American soldiers and the local populace. “No civilian presence” was detected when, in fact, families were sleeping through the days of the Ramadan fast, sheltering inside against the midsummer swelter or gathering in a single house for protection when the fighting intensified.

In many cases, civilians were visible in surveillance footage, but their presence was either not observed by analysts or was not noted in the communications before a strike. In chat logs accompanying some assessments, soldiers can sound as if they are playing video games, in one case expressing glee over getting to fire in an area ostensibly “poppin” with ISIS fighters — without spotting the children in their midst.

The military spokesman, Captain Urban, pointed out that, “In many combat situations, where targeteers face credible threat streams and do not have the luxury of time, the fog of war can lead to decisions that tragically result in civilian harm.”

Indeed, the Pentagon records detail how in Mosul in 2016, three civilians were killed when a bomb aimed at one car instead struck three — in part because the military official approving the strike had decided to save more-precise weapons for other, imminent strikes. Yet The Times’s analysis of the documents and ground reporting showed that civilians were frequently killed in airstrikes planned well in advance.

Military officials often speak of their “over the horizon” long-range surveillance capabilities. But the documents repeatedly identify deficiencies in the quality and quantity of the video footage guiding intelligence.

Sometimes, only seconds’ worth of footage was taken before a strike, hardly enough to assess civilians’ presence. Often video shot from the air does not show people inside buildings, people under foliage, people under the aluminum or tarpaulin covers known as “quamaria” that shield cars and market stalls from the sun.

In more than half of the cases deemed credible by the military, one or two civilians were killed entering the target area after a weapon was fired. Officials often describe these as awful but inescapable accidents. But while many might have been averted through additional precautions — widening the surveillance camera’s field of view or deploying additional drones — the phenomenon continued unabated, amid the intense pace of battle and a shortage of surveillance aircraft.

And sometimes, for reasons redacted in the documents, the weapons simply miss. In April 2016 the military reported that it had killed a notorious Australian ISIS recruiter, Neil Prakash, in a strike on a house in East Mosul. Months later, very much alive, he was arrested crossing from Syria into Turkey. Four civilians died in the strike, according to the Pentagon.

Yet despite this unrelenting toll, the military’s system for examining civilian casualties rarely functions as a tool to teach or assess blame.

Not only do the records contain no findings of wrongdoing or disciplinary action, but in only one instance is there is a “possible violation” of the rules of engagement. That stemmed from a breach in the procedure for identifying a target. Full investigations were recommended in fewer than 12 percent of the credible cases.

In many cases, the command that approved a strike was responsible for examining it, too. And those examinations were often based on incorrect or incomplete evidence. Military officials interviewed survivors or witnesses in only two cases. Civilian-casualty reports were regularly dismissed because video showed no bodies in the rubble, yet the footage was often too brief to make a true determination.

In his response to The Times, Captain Urban said, “An honest mistake, on a strike taken with the best available information and in keeping with mission requirements that results in civilian casualties, is not, in and of itself, a cause for disciplinary actions as set forth in the law of armed conflict.”

American officials had an opportunity to mine the documents for root causes and patterns of error in 2018, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Defense University undertook a study of civilian deaths. But one of the researchers who sought to analyze the documents in aggregate told The Times that almost all of his findings had been cut from the report. Another high-level study of the air campaign has never been made public.

In the end, what emerges from the more than 5,400 pages of records is an institutional acceptance of an inevitable collateral toll. In the logic of the military, a strike, however deadly to civilians, is acceptable as long as it has been properly decided and approved — the proportionality of military gain to civilian danger weighed — in accordance with the chain of command.

Lawrence Lewis, the former Pentagon and State Department adviser whose analysis for the 2018 study was quashed, said in an interview that the military’s technological prowess, and the highly bureaucratized system for assessing how it is employed, may actually serve an unspoken purpose: to create greater legal and moral space for greater risk.

“Now we can take strikes in city streets, because we have Hellfire missiles, and we have fancy things with blades,” he said. “We develop all these capabilities, but we don’t use them to buy down risk for civilians. We just use them so we can make attacks that maybe we couldn’t do before.”

The Promise of Precision

The new way of war came to fruition in the wake of the 2009 surge of American troops into Afghanistan, which brought some stability but never turned the war around.

By the end of 2014, with NATO’s mission also ending, President Obama declared America’s ground war essentially done. Henceforth, the United States would primarily provide air support and advice for Afghan forces battling the Taliban.

At roughly the same time, as Islamic State fighters swept through Mosul and massacred thousands of Yazidi Kurds at Mount Sinjar, Mr. Obama authorized a campaign of airstrikes against ISIS targets and in support of allied forces in Iraq and Syria.

The weaponry was hardly untested. This high-tech arsenal, increasingly sophisticated, had been critical to success in the 1991 Persian Gulf war, in NATO’s 1999 campaign in the Balkans, and more recently in Yemen and Somalia. By the time of the wars in the Middle East, the MQ-9 Reaper drone, outfitted with laser-guided Hellfire missiles, had become the surveillance and attack vehicle of choice.

At an ever-quickening pace over the next five years, and as the administration of Mr. Obama gave way to that of Donald J. Trump, American forces would execute more than 50,000 airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, in accordance with a rigorous approval process that prized being “discriminate,” “proportional” and in compliance with the law of armed conflict. Not only would this be the most precise air campaign ever; it would be the most transparent.

The only official accounting of that promise is the hidden Pentagon documents.

They were obtained through Freedom of Information requests beginning in March 2017 and lawsuits filed against the Defense Department and U.S. Central Command. To date, The Times has received 1,311 out of at least 2,866 reports — known as credibility assessments — examining airstrikes in Iraq and Syria between September 2014 and January 2018. Requests for records from Afghanistan are the subject of a new lawsuit.

Each report is the fruit of a review process that begins when a potential civilian-casualty incident is identified by the military or, more frequently, alleged by an outside source — a nongovernmental organization, a news outlet or social media.

Assessment experts classify allegations into two categories. A case is “credible” if it is deemed “more likely than not” that the airstrike caused civilian casualties. In the reports examined by The Times, 216 cases were deemed credible. “Noncredible” cases fail to meet that standard — often because there is no record of a strike at the place and time in question, or because the available evidence is considered insufficiently specific or simply weak.

Until now, fewer than 20 of these assessments dating to late 2014 have been made public.

To assess the military’s assessments, between late 2016 and this past June, The Times visited the sites of 60 incidents deemed credible in Iraq and Syria, as well as three dozen others deemed noncredible or not yet assessed. (It also visited dozens of strike sites in Afghanistan.) In 35 credible cases, it was possible to locate the precise impact area and find survivors and witnesses on the ground. Then the reporting included touring wreckage; collecting photo and video evidence; and verifying casualties through death certificates, government IDs and hospital records.

Frequently the reporting closely matched basic information from the documents. But the detailed accounts that ultimately emerged from the rubbled ground were often in stark contrast to what had been assessed from the air.

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The war against ISIS heralded the dawn of “strike cells” — remote operations centers from which most airstrikes were directed and controlled. These war rooms synergized the myriad players — pilots, sensor operators, intelligence experts, ground forces, weaponeering specialists, civilian-casualty-mitigation analysts, lawyers, even weather officers. Strike cells boasted at times that, with their video feeds and surveillance aircraft, they could understand what was happening on the battlefield as well as if they were there themselves.

As the war intensified and ground commanders won greater authority to call in strikes, the cells expanded, with a small number of Americans embedded with allies on the battlefield. The cells were seen as so successful that they made their way to Afghanistan, too. And as the Trump administration sought to pressure the Taliban into a deal, decision-making authority for airstrikes was often pushed further down the chain of command.

The cells conducted “dynamic strikes” — identified and executed within minutes or hours in the flow of war, accounting for an overwhelming majority of the air campaign. “Deliberate” strikes, which were preplanned — extensively vetted, often filmed over weeks or months and analyzed by several working groups — decreased over time.

In both scenarios, the targeting process essentially boiled down to two questions: Could the presumed enemy target be positively identified? And would any harm to civilians be proportional, in line with the law of armed conflict — or would it exceed the “expected military advantage gained”?

For positive identification, the officer designated with strike approval needed “reasonable certainty” that the target performed a function for the adversary. That could be relatively straightforward, as when the target was a fighter firing directly on friendly forces. But a more ambiguous target, like a suspected ISIS headquarters, might require further surveillance.

To determine proportionality, analysts evaluated whether the target was used exclusively by the enemy or might also be used by civilians, then assessed civilians’ “pattern of life.” Ultimately, they would calculate how many civilians were likely to be killed or wounded.

For deliberate strikes, this generally entailed an exhaustive “collateral damage estimate,” a computer calculation of the expected civilian casualty count, based on a mix of factors: the pattern of life, the population density, the specific weapon being used, the kind of structure being targeted — a concrete building, an aluminum shed, a mud hut. The officer approving the strike would weigh that estimate with other factors, such as the potential for secondary blasts from explosive materials nearby.

For dynamic strikes, the process could be vastly compressed. Especially if there was a threat to friendly forces or some other urgency, strike cells were more likely to rely on an impromptu assessment of a video feed.

Either way, based on that calculation, the military was required to take “feasible precautions” to mitigate civilian harm. The greater the likelihood of someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the more precautions taken — say, by deploying more-precise weaponry to limit the blast radius or by attacking when the fewest civilians were predicted to be present.

The military does not provide a precise definition of what is proportional. Essentially, the expected civilian toll was proportional if the officer making that determination reasonably believed it to be so, and if it did not exceed a “noncombatant cutoff value.” Otherwise, officials say, the target would be discarded.

The final official step was a legal review. But efforts to protect civilians could continue until moments before a weapon was fired. From the cockpit, pilots could select how a weapon detonated — upon impact or with a delayed fuse. Or they could call an “abort,” if, for example, a civilian was spotted walking into the target area.

Under the right circumstances, this process could result in a strike so precise that it would destroy the section of a house filled with enemy fighters and leave the rest of the building intact.

As Iraqi forces approached Qusay Saad’s home in East Mosul on Jan. 12, 2017, ISIS forced his family to move to an area still under its control. They found refuge in his brother’s abandoned house in al-Faisaliya.

Through a night of gunfire and explosions, Mr. Saad and his wife, Zuhour, comforted their three children and prayed that Iraqi forces would reach them. Then ISIS ordered them to move again, into an abandoned school next door with two other families. That was the building observed in the chat on Jan. 13, 2017.

The first airstrike hit as the Saad family sat down to breakfast. Mr. Saad recalls concrete blocks pressing down on his head, and his wife screaming. A man from one of the other families lifted away the blocks, and he quickly wrested his 14-month-old daughter, Aisha, from the rubble and handed her to his wife.

The second strike came just as he turned to free his 7-year-old son, Muhammad.

“The strike was unbelievable,” he said. “An entire three-story house was just crushed.”

Three members of another family escaped. Mr. Saad could not find his wife, their 4-year-old son, Abdulrahman, or Aisha. But Muhammad was alive, his thigh split open. Bleeding from the head, Mr. Saad picked up the boy and fled.

It would be two months before he could recover the bodies. The Iraqi government offered no help. So the family paid to excavate the site. Mr. Saad watched as his wife and two youngest children were lifted out. Aisha’s head was missing, but her little body was in her mother’s arms.

They were buried not far from their home, which Mr. Saad has kept as it was when they all lived there. Sometimes, his brother said, he spends whole nights at the graveyard.

Last month, The Times told him of the findings of the military’s assessment. It offers this account:

The target was a building assessed as harboring four ISIS fighters. A review of the imagery revealed that after the first strike, which because of a “weapon malfunction” only partly collapsed the building, four adults and four children could be seen moving in its center. The building was hit again and fully collapsed. Later, three people emerged. The strike team did not report any civilians in the vicinity, and because of the drone’s angle, a view of the eight people in the building after the first strike “was obscured.”

The allegation was deemed credible, with eight civilians killed, but no further investigation was ordered. Eight “enemies” were also killed, the document said.

When told of the Army’s findings, Mr. Saad could not understand how a military with such a wealth of information could have failed to see them — or how the pursuit of fighters he never saw could justify leveling a building full of families. If the Americans would show him the video, he said, he would show them Mosul.

“They have to come here and see with their own eyes,” he said, adding, “What happened wasn’t liberation. It was the destruction of humanity.”

How Deadly Failures Happen

Last May, the Pentagon’s inspector general completed a classified report evaluating the policies for ensuring that “only valid military targets are struck,” and that “damage to property and loss of civilian life is mitigated to the maximum extent possible.”

A redacted version, echoing similar studies by other agencies in recent years, declares the targeting process to be sound.

The Pentagon’s own assessments tell a far richer story.

The documents often do not articulate precise causes, and in many cases, several factors coalesced into a deadly failure. But The Times’s analysis of the 216 cases deemed credible, together with its reporting on the ground, reveals several distinct patterns of failure.

Misidentifying Civilians

Positive identification of the enemy is one of the pillars of the targeting process, yet ordinary citizens were routinely mistaken for combatants.

In a dissenting footnote to the 2018 Joint Chiefs’ study, Mr. Lewis and a colleague cited research showing that misidentification was one of the two leading causes of civilian casualties in American military operations. With few troops on the ground, they wrote, “it is reasonable to expect a systematic undercounting of misidentifications in U.S. military reports.”

Indeed, according to the Pentagon records, misidentification was involved in only 4 percent of cases. At the casualty sites visited by The Times, misidentification was a major factor in 17 percent of incidents, but accounted for nearly a third of civilian deaths and injuries.

At times, the error involved quicksilver intelligence of an imminent threat. In The Times’s ground sample, though, misidentification occurred just as frequently in strikes planned far in advance — as in a January 2017 strike on an ISIS “foreign fighter headquarters” in East Mosul that killed 16 people in what turned out to be three civilian homes. Three ISIS buildings down the street were untouched.

Yet in case after case, the misidentification appears to be less a matter of confusion than of confirmation bias.

That was what happened on Nov. 20, 2016, after a Special Operations task force received a report of an ISIS explosives factory in a Syrian village north of Raqqa. In a walled compound, operators spotted “white bags,” assessed to be ammonium nitrate. Two trucks with a dozen men departed, stopped at various ISIS checkpoints, drove to a building “associated with previous ISIS activity,” then returned to the compound. The first strike targeted one truck, which caused “secondary explosions.” On the evidence of those blasts and the “white bags,” operators received approval to strike three buildings. After impact, two “squirters” fled the westernmost building. That building and another were struck again.

The findings of the military’s review, begun after online reports that a strike in the same area had killed nine civilians and injured more than a dozen, contradicted nearly all of the original intelligence.

Examining scans of the compound, analysts detected no ammonium nitrate. The presumed secondary explosions were actually reflections from a nearby building, and one of the “squirters” was a child. Finally, a six-month time lapse of imagery showed that the compound was “more likely a cotton gin than a factory” for explosives. Two civilians were killed, the report said. (The task force continued to call the gin a legitimate target, citing a news report that ISIS controlled three-quarters of Syria’s cotton production.)

Several months later, in Iraq, American forces received intelligence about a suspected car bomb — a dark-colored, heavily armored vehicle moving through the Wadi Hajar neighborhood of West Mosul.

Scanning a surveillance feed, an air-support coordinator quickly homed in on a possible match: a green vehicle whose windows appeared to be covered over. He did not see any signs of reinforced armor, but positively identified both the green car and a closely trailing white vehicle as car bombs.

Both vehicles traveled away from the front line and stopped at an intersection where several people were gathered on a covered section of sidewalk. The driver of the first car got out and joined the group. The target authority approved the strike.

The targeted vehicle “sustained a direct hit,” according to the military assessment. The group on the sidewalk “sustained weapons effects.”

But the review of the footage found no evidence that the vehicle was a car bomb. There was no telltale secondary explosion. Nor was the car heavily armored. And though the people on the sidewalk were visible in the footage, they were never mentioned in the pre-strike chat.

The full picture, which the targeting team involved in the strike failed to see, emerged when The Times visited Wadi Hajar earlier this year.

Ordered by ISIS to leave the neighborhood, Majid Mahmoud Ahmed, his wife and two children had piled into their blue — not green — Opel Astra station wagon. Following close behind in a white car were his brother, Firas, and his family. At an intersection where other fleeing residents had gathered, Mr. Ahmed spotted his friend Muhammad Jamaal Muhammad waving and got out to say hello. As another neighbor approached, the airstrike hit.

“I remember there was a big explosion, and I fainted,” recalled Abdul Hakeem Abdullah Hamash Al Aqidi, an elderly man who had been standing by his door at the intersection. He lost an eye and had to have a plate implanted in his injured left leg. His son’s left leg had to be amputated.

In all, seven local people — including the four members of the Ahmed family — were killed. Mr. Mohamed, who had waved to Mr. Ahmed, cannot banish from his mind the image of his friend’s wife, Hiba Bashir, burned into the seat, still holding her infant son in her lap.

The military spokesman, Captain Urban, acknowledged that “confirmation bias is a real concern,” citing the Kabul airstrike in August that killed the 10 members of a family. “There is more work to do on this,” he said.

Failing to Detect Civilians

If the military often mistook civilians for enemy fighters, frequently it simply failed to see or understand that they were there. That was a factor in a fifth of the cases in the Pentagon documents, and a slightly smaller fraction of the casualties. However, it accounted for 37 percent of credible cases, and nearly three-fourths of the total civilian deaths and injuries at the sites visited by The Times.

Captain Urban said the targeting process had been vastly complicated by enemies who “plan, resource and base themselves in and among local populace.”

“They do not present themselves in large formations,” he added, “do not fight coalition forces with conventional tactics, and use geography and terrain in ways not conducive in every way to easy targeting solutions. Moreover, they often and deliberately use civilians as human shields, and they do not subscribe to anything remotely like the law of armed conflict to which we subscribe.”

Even so, the documents show that frequently, instead of extended surveillance, analysts relied on brief “collateral scans” — as little as 11 seconds long — in determining that civilians were not in the area. The footage was often limited by shortages of surveillance drones, particularly during the battles to retake Mosul and Raqqa.

In a number of cases, targets that had been placed on “no-strike lists” because attacking them would violate laws of war — a school, a bakery, a civilian hospital — were removed after the military mistakenly judged that they were now used exclusively by the enemy.

In Mosul in February 2017, a hospital was taken off the list after the military concluded that civilians had left the area, and that the building was being used only as an ISIS headquarters and propaganda center. The week before the strike, according to the report, analysts had examined still images of children “interacting” with the hospital but had determined that striking at night would “alleviate collateral concerns.” Four civilians were killed and six injured.

For the military’s analysts, studying the “pattern of life” is a crucial step in predicting collateral damage. But to examine the documents and interview local people is to understand how often unseen civilians might have been seen, or their presence at least suspected, had the military had a more intimate knowledge of the war-torn fabric of everyday life.

In some documents, as evidence of no civilian presence, military officials state that people would leave their homes at the sound of approaching aircraft. The reality is starkly different: Neighbors would huddle together, seeking communal sanctuary in a house or group of houses, invisible to surveillance drones.

Many of the deadliest airstrikes happened this way. Among them was the strike at the Syrian hamlet of Tokhar.

In July 2016, a Special Operations task force identified a large group of ISIS fighters two kilometers from where U.S.-backed forces were fighting ISIS. They observed the fighters traveling in pickups known as “bongo trucks” to three “staging areas” where no civilians were present. The fighters, they concluded, were assembling for a counterattack. Shortly before 3 a.m., they bombed the three staging sites and five vehicles, confident of killing 85 ISIS fighters.

Almost immediately, reports of a vast civilian death toll surfaced online. The task force conducted a full investigation and determined that between seven and 24 civilians “intermixed with the fighters” might have been killed.

The Times visited Tokhar in December 2018. Surviving villagers gave this account:

That night, as they had every night for a month, some 200 villagers had trekked to the outer edge of the hamlet and taken shelter in four homes at the farthest remove from the quickening battle.

There was no evidence, they said, that ISIS had been near any of the four houses. In fact, residents said drones had been flying overhead for weeks, giving them solace that coalition forces knew they were there.

The Times documented the names of civilians killed in each of the four houses, corroborating details with open-source information, local journalists and others on the ground, and determined that more than 120 people died. There were few young men left to pull bodies from the rubble. It took nearly two weeks, and still some were never found. If the full death toll were acknowledged, Tokhar would be the largest civilian casualty incident the United States has admitted to in the air war against ISIS.

Saif Saleh, 8 years old at the time, awoke that early morning to the collapsing walls, his arm trapped under debris. His parents used up every favor to collect $6,000 for surgery to graft skin from his leg.

Asked what he would like to tell the American military, Saif’s father said, “We want to say that you should be sure the area is empty or that there are no civilians before you bomb.”

The military investigation found that there was no evidence of negligence or wrongdoing; that the “policies, procedures and practices” were “sufficient for continued operations”; and that “no further action” was necessary. No condolence payments were authorized.

Overlooking Flawed Intelligence

Often, civilians were killed in strikes executed in the face of incomplete, outdated or ambiguous intelligence. Several such factors came together in a strike that killed at least 10 civilians in Tabqa, Syria, in March 2017.

As American-backed forces prepared to recapture the city, west of Raqqa, military officials approved strikes on a group of ISIS targets: two headquarters, a police station and a weapons factory. Each strike went as planned, according to initial assessments. Then came reports of civilian casualties.

The military review found that the intelligence for both headquarters was based on single reports from months before. (The targets had been identified earlier, but for strategic advantage, commanders had decided to wait until Syrian Democratic Forces were pushing into Tabqa.) The intelligence package on the first building warned that there was “insufficient” evidence to corroborate the judgment, relied on to remove the building from a restricted-targeting list, that it was used solely by ISIS; the report said simply that an ISIS emir had frequented the site.

Similarly, the review found that the intelligence did not support the view that the second headquarters was used exclusively by ISIS. What’s more, even though both headquarters were in densely populated areas with residential structures nearby, there was insufficient footage to assess the presence of civilians — one minute of video of the first target and less than two of the second.

The review also raised serious questions about the quality of intelligence for the two other targets.

Flawed Video

Sometimes, the problem was less the quantity of video than the quality

Analysts at the military’s Combined Air Operations Center in Qatar saw this clearly when they reviewed 17 minutes of grainy footage that preceded a Nov. 13, 2015, strike on an ISIS “defensive fighting position” in Ramadi. Using the center’s 62-inch high-definition TV, they concluded that what had been identified as an “unknown heavy object” being dragged into a building was actually “a person of small stature,” “consistent with how a child would appear standing next to an adult.”

Often the overhead surveillance camera missed people simply sitting or standing under something, doing the most quotidian things.

June 15, 2016: An ISIS fighter on a motorcycle turned onto a secondary road near Mosul University. It was Ramadan; the shops and stalls were teeming with people. Among the five civilians also killed and four wounded in the strike:

Abdul Wahab Adnan Qassim, killed by shrapnel, had been standing in the tree-filled courtyard of his house.

A father and daughter, killed by glass and shrapnel, had been sitting in a car nearby.

Nashwan Abdul Majeed Abdul Hakeem Al Radwani, killed by shrapnel, had been standing under the awning of the popular Hammurabi Ice Cream Shop.

Walking Into Danger

More than half of the cases the military deemed credible involved someone entering the target frame in the moments between a weapon’s firing and impact, as in a March 2017 strike in Mosul when shrapnel killed a man pushing a cart down a road near an ISIS mortar tube.

These deaths, which account for 10 percent of acknowledged civilian casualties, are often framed as unavoidable accidents. In the Mosul strike that killed the man with the cart, operators had already twice aborted weapons releases because civilians had entered the frame — demonstrating concerted efforts to avert danger. Yet the systematic nature of the problem suggests the military could be doing more.

Indeed, the review of a February 2017 strike on a “high value individual” at a funeral in Mosul that injured two civilians includes some recommendations. While noting that the civilians’ presence “could not be predicted to reasonable certainty,” it adds that an additional surveillance aircraft could have provided a more encompassing view. (Because of the target’s importance, two aircraft were used to zoom in, rather than out, on the wider scene.) Yet again surveillance drones were in short supply.

Secondary Explosions

In the late spring of 2015, as ISIS continued to prove resilient in carrying out attacks and retaining territory, American targeteers and weapons specialists prepared a nighttime airstrike on a car-bomb factory in the industrial district of Hawija, north of Baghdad. Occupied apartment houses ringed the area. But the nearest “collateral concern” was assessed to be a “shed.”

Not long before, dozens of displaced families, unable to afford rent, had also begun squatting in the abandoned houses scattered through the industrial zone. Among them were Khadijah Yaseen and her family, who had fled the fighting in their hometown, Yathrib.

The night of June 2 was particularly hot, so the family slept outside. They woke to screaming and the sound of the jets.

“There was fire everywhere,” Ms. Yaseen recalled when The Times met her at a displaced persons camp in October 2016. Most of those killed were from squatter families like hers. “You couldn’t count them. There were so many people that died.”

As many as 70, a military investigation found. Ms. Yaseen lost three grandchildren: 13-year-old Muhammad, 12-year-old Ahmed and a 3-year-old girl, Zahra.

Hawija is among the deadliest examples of the failure to predict the collateral consequences of striking weapons caches or other targets with the potential for secondary explosions. Such explosions often reached far beyond the expected blast radius; they accounted for nearly a third of all civilian casualties acknowledged by the military and half of all civilian deaths and injuries at the sites visited by The Times.

Although the American military planned the Hawija strike, the bombs were dropped by the air force of the Netherlands. There, the case became a cause célèbre after it emerged that the defense minister had worked to suppress the findings of the military investigation.

In the report of the investigation, targeteers and weapons experts describe the ultimately disastrous calculations taken to win approval for the strike. They worked and reworked the target, carefully calculating what kinds of munitions to use until their model concluded — despite the fact that they would be striking a car-bomb factory with apartment buildings nearby — that there would be no civilian deaths. (The Dutch military would only carry out strikes with an expected civilian-casualty rate of zero.)

The document describes a secondary explosion that produced a “visible shock wave” extending more than 750 feet from the target.

“That is massive, to be able to see a shock wave like that on a video,” said a former high-level official involved in the air campaign against ISIS, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. The only comparable explosion he’d seen, he said, was the 2020 blast that devastated the port of Beirut.

Among the sites visited by The Times, at least half of the strikes with secondary explosions involved targets — like a power station or a factory for improvised explosive devices — that the military could have predicted would produce such blasts.

However, at other times it was unaware of both a weapons cache and a civilian presence. That was the case in the largest civilian casualty incident the military has admitted in the war, the March 17, 2017, airstrike on two ISIS snipers in the Mosul al-Jadida neighborhood that killed at least 103 civilians.

Failures of Accountability

On Jan. 6, 2017, Rafi Al Iraqi woke to the sound of a bomb close by. Another hit next door. Moments later, his own house was struck. He could hear his oldest son, Hamoody, screaming in the wreckage. “I just gave him to some people to take him to the hospital,” Mr. Al Iraqi recalled. “Then I went back in to find my other children.”

What happened next was captured on video taken by ISIS’ media agency, which often visited blast sites for propaganda.

Rescuers emerged holding limp bodies. Mr. Al Iraqi’s daughter, Nour, was alive. “I took her with my own hands to the hospital,” he recalled this past June, in his most recent interview with The Times. “But by then, she had died.” A nearby house for ISIS fighters was untouched.

Soon, via the ISIS video and news reports, word spread online that three families had been targeted in the Zerai neighborhood near Mosul’s Grand Mosque. In all, 16 civilians were killed, including three of Mr. Al Iraqi’s children and his mother-in-law. Hamoody’s leg was lacerated.

The military began a civilian-casualty assessment, which found that there had been a single strike in Zerai that day — on a house assessed to be used exclusively as an ISIS “foreign fighter headquarters” and “artillery staging location.” The strike had been preplanned, with no expected civilian casualties.

The post-strike footage showed no civilians killed or injured. The post-strike chat did not indicate the presence of civilians, though it did mention a wounded man — judged to be an ISIS fighter — being helped from the ruins.

The footage was 1 minute and 22 seconds long. The allegation was deemed noncredible. Officially, 16 people had not died that day in Zerai. (The Pentagon finally acknowledged the casualties in September 2020, after years of follow-up by The Times.)

Except for the rare instances of revelation and subsequent outcry, the Pentagon’s brief published reports on the minority of cases it finds credible are the only public acknowledgment of the air war’s civilian toll.

The Times’s reporting in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan points to the broader truth.

In addition to the finding that many allegations of civilian casualties were erroneously dismissed, The Times discovered that even when civilian deaths were acknowledged, they were often significantly undercounted.

Roughly 37 percent of the allegations deemed credible stemmed from prior ground investigations by journalists or nongovernmental organizations; in those cases, the acknowledged death tolls roughly tracked outside reporting. But in the other cases, The Times’s own reporting found that the civilian toll was nearly double that acknowledged by the military. (That did not include ISIS fighters’ wives and children, whose information was difficult to verify.)

The documents identify children killed or injured in 27 percent of cases; in The Times’s ground reporting it was 62 percent. In 40 percent of the sites visited, survivors had been left with significant disabilities, which were not tracked by the military.

Beyond the casualty count, the structure and execution of the assessments do not encourage the regular examination of immediate lessons or deeper trends.

The records obtained by The Times, some significantly redacted, range from short first-impression reports to more formal credibility assessments. The reports generally contain a narrative drawn from the strike’s “target package” — including intelligence about the target, the civilian-casualty estimate, actions to mitigate civilian harm, video footage and chat logs tracking each step of the process.

Not only was there no record of disciplinary action, or full investigations in roughly 9 of every 10 cases, but only a quarter included any further review, recommendations or lessons learned. Even the architecture of the forms makes it difficult to analyze causes in aggregate; they do not have specific boxes for specific factors involved in a fatal error. There are a few places to record proximate causes or lessons learned, but those fields are mostly empty or redacted. Records are often incomplete, missing attachments or were only partially entered into shared databases.

In many cases, the unit that executed a strike also ended up investigating it; their assessments often included minimal information. For example, a Special Operations unit’s rationale for rejecting allegations that a December 2016 airstrike near Raqqa had killed as many as nine civilians consisted of a single paragraph stating that it had reviewed its strikes in the area and found “no evidence of possible civilian casualties.” There was no further information or detail from the footage.

The Times found that such omissions, as well as redactions and missing documents, were often associated with Talon Anvil, the Special Operations unit that carried out the recently revealed airstrike that killed dozens of civilians in Syria in 2019.

The Video Evidence

Of the 1,311 assessments from the Pentagon, in only one did investigators visit the site of a strike. In only two did they interview witnesses or survivors.

Captain Urban, the military spokesman, said that in hostile territory, investigators might be unable to visit a blast site and interview “personnel on the ground.”

Instead, often the resounding piece of evidence studied was video recorded in the wake of a strike. Yet just as poor or insufficient footage frequently contributed to deadly targeting failures, so did it hamstring efforts to examine them.

Often, the footage was only seconds or minutes long, in many cases too brief to see rescuers carrying survivors from a collapsed building. (Frequently, rescuers would wait before approaching a bombed area, for fear of being misidentified and provoking a second strike, known in the military as a “double tap.”) Often, images were obscured by the smoke of the blast.

In an interview — speaking anonymously because of a nondisclosure agreement — an analyst who captures strike imagery said superior officers would often “tell the cameras to look somewhere else” because “they knew if they’d just hit a bad target.”

And at times, there was simply no footage for review, which became the basis for rejecting the allegation. That was often because of “equipment error,” because no aircraft had “observed or recorded the strike,” or because the unit could not or would not find the footage or had not preserved it as required.

In a number of cases, compelling allegations were dismissed because the claim’s details did not precisely match the imagery.

For example, when Airwars — the leading source of civilian casualty allegations referred to the military — reported that a strike in East Mosul in April 2015 had killed dozens of civilian rescuers, the allegation was rejected because of “discrepancies in eyewitness accounts.” Despite accurately testifying that three bombs had struck an electric substation, a witness said the third had come a quarter-hour after the second and had not exploded; the document described that as “inconsistent” with the military’s imagery and strike report. (The allegation was later deemed credible after The Times visited the site and told the military that at least 18 civilians had been killed and more than a dozen wounded.)

Even when allegations were deemed credible, the military often undercounted the toll because victims, unseen by the overhead camera before the strike, remained invisible in the aftermath. Case in point: the 2016 Ramadan bombing near Mosul University that killed five civilians and wounded four. The military reported injuries to two civilians who had been in the pre-strike footage.

Cases Closed

When the military receives an allegation of civilian casualties, it runs through a checklist to determine whether the case merits further inquiry. Most never reach the point of video review. About a quarter of the noncredible cases were summarily closed because they lacked sufficient information or detail, such as a specific location or 48-hour time frame. But more than half were rejected, in some cases erroneously, because the military could find no record of corroborating strikes in the geographic area identified in the allegation — or because there were too many potential matches, and too little detailed information.

That information would be found in official logs maintained by different strike authorities. But The Times found numerous instances in which the logs were incomplete or inaccurate: Often, records show, the coalition knew its logs were flawed.

Frequently, cases were closed because the military said it lacked the information to pinpoint the neighborhood in question. Sometimes that conclusion was rooted in misunderstandings of local custom and culture.

Caskets for the dead are carried toward a gravesite as relatives and friends attend a mass funeral for members of a family that is said to have been killed in a U.S. drone airstrike, in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 30, 2021. (MARCUS YAM/LOS ANGELES TIMES/TNS)

In January 2017, citing insufficient information, an officer quickly closed a case based on social media reports that civilians had been killed in a strike on a funeral in the al Shifaa neighborhood of West Mosul. Fruitlessly, the officer had searched logs for potentially corroborating strikes in the cemetery closest to that neighborhood.

However, as reflected in a graphic video accompanying the initial reports, the strike had not taken place at a cemetery: A thumbnail depicted the entrance to a house. In fact, Muslim funerals are rarely held at cemeteries. What’s more, Muslims bury the dead quickly, and it had been four days since this man, Col. Aziz Ahmed Aziz Sanjari, had died.

The colonel’s death had brought many members of the Sanjari family’s tribe to their home to mourn. It was a sunny afternoon, so more than a dozen people sat outside. They could hear a drone humming above, but were unworried. It was a common occurrence. A few minutes later, the bomb hit. Eleven people were killed, The Times found.

‘Sometimes Bad Things Happen’

Captain Urban acknowledged that, “In some cases our assessment of the numbers of civilian casualties does not always match that of outside groups, and we acknowledge that those numbers may change over time as well.

“We do the best we can, given the circumstances, to understand fully the effects of our operations and the harm done to innocent life. That we sometimes do not always arrive at the same conclusion of outside groups does not diminish the sincerity with which we strive to get it right.”

Several Pentagon studies, rendered in military bureaucratese, have observed some of the failures of accountability. The April 2018 Joint Chiefs of Staff examination of civilian deaths from airstrikes in the Middle East and Africa found that “feedback to subordinate commands on the cause and/or lessons learned from a civilian casualty incident is inconsistent.” The recent Pentagon Inspector General report spoke of “omissions.”

Yet for the most part, these reports do not speak to questions of how airstrikes repeatedly go wrong.

Mr. Lewis, the co-author whose efforts to analyze the assessments in aggregate were excised from the Joint Chiefs’ study, said the report instead relied primarily on interviews with assessment officers. They were able to detect certain patterns — especially casualties from secondary explosions and from people entering the target frame after a weapon’s firing — but few of the systematic reasons behind the bulk of civilian deaths.

The Times asked him why the military would develop such intricate procedures to prevent civilian casualties, and then assess them, but not prioritize documenting or studying causes and lessons learned. Not only does the system provide legitimacy for the military’s actions, he said; it also allows the United States to boast of a process that is a global model of accountability.

The former high-level American official in the campaign against ISIS said the procedures served an additional purpose — to provide a “psychological veneer” for the people involved: “We did the process. We did what we needed to do. Sometimes bad things happen.”

He said that after returning from his post, anguished by what he had seen, he had started therapy. He pointed to Raqqa, rendered a necropolis by American-led airstrikes, and compared it to the ruins of Aleppo, which was bombed by the Russians without the American military’s sophisticated considerations of proportionality — the collateral damage estimates, no-strike lists or rules of engagement.

“Eventually I stopped saying that this was the most precise bombing campaign in the history of warfare,” he said. “So what? It doesn’t matter that this was the most precise bombing campaign and the city looks like this.”

In Afghanistan

All the boys and men of Band-e-Timor knew that when the Toyota Hiluxes came, you should run for your life.

People called them wegos. At the wheel were Afghan paramilitary forces who usually set out on full-moon nights at the fork in the road before Lashkar Gah, charging through the village of Barang straddling the Kandahar-Helmand border and into other parts of Band-e-Timor, “capturing everyone: old men, young men, everyone,” said a resident named Matiullah.

 

It did not matter if you were not Taliban, people said. If you were male, the Afghan forces would arrest you, simply to collect a bounty for your release. If you were old or feeble, the price was just over $500; a man in his prime would fetch twice that. “You would have to sell your cow or your land to get your relatives released,” said Rahmatullah, a village resident. Often, it was the poorest who would run.

On the night of Jan. 31, 2018, the moon was especially bright. The wegos, as usual, came accompanied by what villagers said were American aircraft. Hidayatullah, a driver by profession, three days from marrying, knew he could not afford the bounty and the wedding, so he drove out into the desert. Then an airstrike found him, said Matiullah, who is his cousin. Dozens of other civilians, mistaken for Taliban as they fled on foot and motorbike across Band-e-Timor, died in the raid as well.

The August drone strike in Kabul that killed an Afghan aid worker and nine of his relatives grabbed the world’s attention. But most American airstrikes in Afghanistan took place far from the cities, in remote areas where cameras were not filming, mobile lines were often cut and the internet was nonexistent.

America’s longest war was, in many ways, its least transparent. For years, these rural battlefields were largely off-limits to American reporters. But after the Taliban returned to power in August, Afghanistan’s hinterlands opened up.

The Times arrived in Barang a little over a month later, visiting 15 households in this hamlet of mud homes and farmland, and also interviewing tribal elders and others across Band-e-Timor. Most said they had never spoken to a journalist before. The accounts they gave — consistently and reliably, in hourslong interviews — help explain how America lost the country, how its war of airstrikes and support of corrupt security forces paved the way for the Taliban’s return.

On average, each household lost five civilian family members. An overwhelming majority of these deaths were caused by airstrikes, most during wego raids. Many people admitted they had relatives who were Taliban fighters, but civilians accounted for most of those lost:

A father killed in an airstrike while running for the forest. A nephew killed as he slept with his flock of sheep. An uncle shot by American soldiers as he went to the bazaar to buy okra for dinner.

At the sound of helicopters, Hajji Muhammad Ismail Agha’s sons had bounded for the desert. The “foreign helicopters” fired on them. One son, Nour Muhammad, was killed; the other, Hajji Muhammad, survived. “How could the planes tell the difference between a civilian and a Taliban?” the father asked. “He was killed just a little far from here. I watched it happen.”

None of these incidents were mentioned in Pentagon press releases. Few were tallied in United Nations counts. So isolated from the Afghan government were residents that when asked for their loved ones’ death certificates, they asked where they might obtain them. Instead, to verify deaths, The Times visited tombstones, in graveyards littered across the desert.”