So this jury was all military, of course, because it's a court-martial. But more striking than that, it was all men, and nearly all of them had groun… - David Philipps

In the last days of the battle against the Islamic State in Syria, when members of the once-fierce caliphate were cornered in a dirt field next to a town called Baghuz, a U.S. military drone circled high overhead, hunting for military targets. But it saw only a large crowd of women and children]] huddled against a river bank. Without warning, an American F-15E attack jet streaked across the drone’s high-definition field of vision and dropped a 500-pound bomb on the crowd, swallowing it in a shuddering blast. As the smoke cleared, a few people stumbled away in search of cover. Then a jet tracking them dropped one 2,000-pound bomb, then another, killing most of the survivors.... a legal officer flagged the strike as a possible war crime that required an investigation. But at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike. The death toll was downplayed...Reports were delayed, sanitized and classified. The Defense Department’s independent inspector general began an inquiry, but the report containing its findings was stalled and stripped of any mention of the strike. American-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. Civilian observers who came to the area of the strike the next day described finding piles of dead women and children

You know, what was striking about this case is it's not only did they never find out who the captive was or what his name was, they never even acknowledged in the Navy that he had a name. In the case, he was never referred to as John Doe or anything else. He was just the terrorist, the fighter, the captive, the victim. And that really sort of, I thought when I was watching it, denied a humanity to him that made it easier for the jury to find Eddie Gallagher not guilty because there was no consequence. There was no mother and father who are sitting in the courtroom.
I think that within the military, that was the great tragedy that they saw in this trial. It wasn't so much who the victims were because the victims never even had names in this trial. It was, how will this affect the culture? How can - you know, if someone decides to be a rogue operator and go out and kill people beyond the rules and then essentially go to the president, make the entire issue political and get off and get around the rules that way, that is so damaging to the good order and discipline of the ranks because it lets everyone else who's serving know that they might be able to do the same thing

Dille quickly learned that his chief had no interest in taking the time to establish who was who. The first morning the snipers arrived at the Towers, the chief climbed up the curving stairway to the top floor of the north building and set up a tripod and a small folding chair in the middle of a room with a blown-out wall. He almost immediately started shooting one round after another. Boom. Boom. Boom. Dille scrambled to his own rifle and checked the chief ’s angle to try to line up his scope so he could see what Eddie was shooting at. He spotted a sandbank along the river where a narrow alley came down to the water. About fifty people had gathered to wash in the water. Dille saw the crowd scatter amid the shooting and sprint back into the city. Dille’s angle didn’t give him a full view of ground level on the riverbank, so he wasn’t sure if Eddie had hit anyone, but about one thing he had no doubt: These people weren’t legit targets.