US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3377

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.

It was March 18, 2019. At the U.S. military’s busy Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, uniformed personnel watching the live drone footage looked on in stunned disbelief, according to one officer who was there.

“Who dropped that?” a confused analyst typed on a secure chat system being used by those monitoring the drone, two people who reviewed the chat log recalled. Another responded, “We just dropped on 50 women and children.”

An initial battle damage assessment quickly found that the number of dead was actually about 70.

The Baghuz strike was one of the largest civilian casualty incidents of the war against the Islamic State, but it has never been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. military. The details, reported here for the first time, show that the death toll was almost immediately apparent to military officials. 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. United States-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. And top leaders were not notified.

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.

“Leadership just seemed so set on burying this. No one wanted anything to do with it,” said Gene Tate, an evaluator who worked on the case for the inspector general’s office and agreed to discuss the aspects that were not classified. “It makes you lose faith in the system when people are trying to do what’s right but no one in positions of leadership wants to hear it.”

Mr. Tate, a former Navy officer who had worked for years as a civilian analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Counterterrorism Center before moving to the inspector general’s office, said he criticized the lack of action and was eventually forced out of his job.

On November 17 2021 21:26 EnDeR_ wrote:


I'd say it's because the US has a very different goal when it comes to law enforcement, i.e. deterrence in the form of punishment, whereas most European countries have rehabilitation as a central goal.

On November 17 2021 22:38 Simberto wrote:


I think you might be best helped here by googling something like "difference between US and German prisons" There are a bunch of good articles and videos about this.

Now, personally, i haven't been to prison, but from what i know German prisons are actually focused on rehabilitation instead of punishment. So less getting locked up in tiny cells getting raped while doing slave labor and more having a nice room that you are not allowed to leave, while getting job training during the day. Prisoners in German prisons are viewed as humans who made bad decisions and who need to get the tools to not do that again once they leave.

What certainly also helps is that we generally do not publish the full names of criminals in papers, and once people leave prison, they are once again viewed as normal members of society. They do not have to disclose that they were in prison if they do not wish to, they can vote in elections, and other similar stuff.

We also imprison a lot fewer people, and for shorter periods of time in compared to the US. A "life" sentence here usually means about 15 years, instead of actually being stuck in prison for the rest of their lives. There are some exceptions here, people who are deemed so dangerous that they are expected to always do crimes once they leave prison can be put into "Sicherheitsverwahrung" where they are actually stuck for live.

There are a lot of differences which all start from the basic difference of the whole system being designed to get people reintegrated into society as contributing members, instead of producing repeat customers. And sure, i doubt everything is perfect, but it is leaps and bounds better than the horror that is the US "justice" system.