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 … - 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
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About David Philipps
David Philipps (born 1977) is an American journalist and author whose work has largely focused on the human impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is a national correspondent for The New York Times and is the author of three non-fiction books.
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Alternative Names:
David Nathaniel Philipps
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Additional quotes by David Philipps
There are rules for when you can hit a target. And a lot of times, the people that decide whether those rules are being followed are in some command center somewhere. And they’re going to go through it, and they’re going to give you a thumbs up or a thumbs down. But there is a way that you can skip all of that oversight very quickly by saying that you’re under imminent threat, and you need to defend yourself. Under the law of war, that is always allowed. And that allowed the task force to skip all of the officers, all of the oversight, all of the lawyers that had rule books, and talk directly to the aircraft that were going to hit their target. And so, they could hit what they wanted to, essentially, with no one second guessing them....But what people in the operation center started seeing was that Task Force 9 seemed to be using this justification almost all of the time.
I think that there are people in the military that really want there to be accountability and have worked hard to try and ensure that there’s accountability. But the system that they’ve created is still so flawed that it doesn’t really tell us anything meaningful about how many civilians were actually killed. I mean, think about it. Here was a case where 70 people were killed. And they were killed in front of a high definition color drone camera that lots of military people saw. It was immediately reported, and then it was reported again and again. And the system was unable to respond in any logical way. I mean, if the system can’t handle something as obvious as that, what can it handle?
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 ground combat experience. So it was a little bit like having a bunch of cops on a jury trying to decide the fate of a cop who is accused of an illegal killing. They certainly share a worldview, to a certain extent, with Eddie Gallagher. They did not take very long at all. This was a two-week trial. They essentially deliberated for one full day and then came back first thing in the morning and had a cup of coffee and gave their verdict. And the verdict was essentially that Eddie Gallagher was found not guilty of all of the serious charges - murder, attempted murder. And the only thing that he was convicted of was small charges that were related to taking a picture with a dead body.
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