Fuck me, what a whitewash.
The Central Command review found that U.S. forces tracked the car for about eight hours and launched the strike in an “earnest belief” — based on a standard of “reasonable certainty” — that it posed an imminent threat to American troops at Kabul airport.
If nothing else, if something that met your ‘reasonable certainty’ standard turned out to be false in nearly every respect, doesn’t that mean your ‘reasonable certainty’ standard doesn’t actually produce reasonable certainty?
For a definition of reasonable that says, “we can do whatever we want”, it fits.
Killings will continue until imminent threats disapear.
If scientists used this scale for determining acceptable levels of confidence (rather than the 95% or P of 0.05 that they tend to use), hell, every drug that was ever tested would have been a miracle treatment!
So disappointing. You would have to imagine a higher standard of care if you’re going to target a car in the middle of the city. Basically the US saying that it can act without accountability.
schurem
1890
Or, more in keeping with the mindset of the middle aged white males driving the institutions that drop the bombs, when it comes to brown people in faraway lands, the standards of care are… different.
Just an accident, folks. Nothing to see here.
Well, obviously, otherwise one of these days you order an airstrike on someone and you’ll get questions of “If this is wrong, I’m going to get in trouble”.
It is what it is.
You avoid that by punishing the officers whose responsibility it was to insure this didn’t happen. The rank and file, sure, they have to act in the moment without undue hesitation, but officers supposedly are not just automatons. Regardless of the specifics of this situation, there seems to be a trend over the last couple of decades in the US military away from any sort of accountability or introspection after the fact and towards a more corporate CYA culture. Even more than was in place before.
rowe33
1894
Nothing more “defense” spending won’t cure!
Menzo
1895
Your wish is Congress’ command!
Timex
1896
Wasn’t the war in Afghanistan funded through the overseas contingency operations fund, which was separate from the DOD funding? I believe that the OCO is being eliminated.
It all comes from the same bucket in the end, though.
Timex
1898
I thought that the OCO was actually a separate bucket from what is normally considered “the DOD budget” or “defense spending” in most budgetary discussions, which is part of why the costs of things like the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were actually larger than they might initially appear.
In the context of this discussion, I had believed that the OCO was a separate item from the pentagons budget, which is what the mother Jones article is taking about. While the pentagons budget is going up in the new budget, they are cutting out the OCO entirely, so the actual total spending is significantly lower. At least that’s what I believe to be the case, but I may be mistaken.
You are probably right, but my comment is referring to the big bucket of taxpayer dollars. We still pay our money for this stuff regardless of much bureaucratic legerdemain goes on in the shell game of hiding it.
If there is a war, we must budget more money for the military.
If there is not a war, we must budget more money for the military.
And if there is a period of tension between war and not-war, we must budget twice as much!
