TEHRAN - The New York Times has published hundreds of secret pentagon reports on civilian casualties as a result of the U.S. military’s airstrikes in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. Flawed American intelligence is a term the world is getting used to by now. Other aspects of the documents are important to reflect upon.

The never seen before documents, obtained by the newspaper, shows (other than deeply flawed intelligence), how the rushed and often imprecise targeting by warplanes or drones in West Asia occurred during the attacks and the murder of thousands of innocent civilians, many of them children. More than 1,300 secret reports are in the hands of the paper (more than 5,400 pages in total) and the timeframe dates between September 2014 to January 2018. The documents expose what the Pentagon has been saying in public and what the Pentagon discloses from the public; and the difference between the two is vast.

The newspaper says it has conducted independent research of its own, and the results closely match much of the basic information from the Pentagon documents, but it found significant discrepancies and oversights by the Pentagon, including the location of the strikes or the number of people killed or injured following the attacks.

The United States pledged a war against alleged terrorists waged by “all-seeing drones” and “precision bombs.” The document's exposure of flawed intelligence, faulty targeting, years of civilian deaths and scant accountability does not match the Pentagon account.

President Barack Obama is widely known as being the pioneer of U.S. air wars. Following the disastrous invasion of Iraq and the number of American military casualties between 2003 till 2011 (nearly 4,500 troops killed, some 900 contractors killed, and 32,000 soldiers injured [not including mental injuries]). The public backlash against the Iraq war casualties was immense, with calls to bring the troops home growing louder by the day. Obama’s thought process was to heed the American publics’ demands while continuing wars and military missions from the air without the need to deploy a large number of troops on the ground. The idea was purported to be if America could precisely target and kill the “right people” while taking the greatest possible care not to harm the wrong ones, then those on the home front would have little cause for concern. In 2016, the former American President said, “with our extraordinary technology.. we’re conducting the most precise air campaign in history.”

Now that Obama was speaking a load of absolute nonsense, it has come to light now.

The document's exposure of flawed intelligence, faulty targeting, years of civilian deaths and scant accountability does not match the Pentagon account.The “extraordinary technology” is conducting the most imprecise air campaign in history. In the more than 50-thousand U.S. airstrikes between 2014 and 2019, which killed thousands and possibly tens of thousands of civilians meant Obama’s initiative made America the judge of those civilians, their jury, and executioner. In just one of the hundreds of examples documented by this research, in 2016, American Special Operations forces bombed what they allegedly believed were three Daesh “staging areas” on the outskirts of a riverside hamlet in northern Syria. The official announcement reported at the time was 85 terrorists were killed. The reality, as a result of the secret Pentagon documents and subsequent investigation shows there was more than 120 innocent villagers killed. No terrorists, just villagers and just bombs that fell on houses far from the front line, where farmers, their families and other local people sought nighttime sanctuary from the bombings and the gunfire.

The problem is Obama can’t be reached anymore to face accountability for the “peaceful” initiative he started. Other American officials in the Pentagon share the same responsibility for intentionally undercounting and underreporting civilian fatalities.

The is believed to be the tip of the iceberg. Over the past few months, revelations have slowly emerged about the nature of U.S. airstrikes and the report suggests more will be revealed; which means the U.S. State Department will be working day and night to try and prevent that from happening.

In September, The New York Times reported that a drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, which U.S. officials insisted had destroyed a vehicle laden with bombs, had instead killed 10 members of the same family. Last month, The Times reported that scores of civilians had been killed in a 2019 bombing in Syria that the American military had intentionally hidden from the public eye. Now, the Times investigation has found that these were not one-offs but rather the regular casualties of a transformed way of a secret war that has gone wrong by bad intelligence or maybe deliberately. (Nobody knows until there is an international trial of some form).

The other issue is not so much that the U.S. will be forced to spend money on compensation but more that Washington lessens the public outcry and the calls for accountability and justice of the military personnel, who are far away yet literally playing video games on a monitor by dropping bombs on civilians. This is the reality and many children have been orphaned and many parents have lost their children as a result.

Following a U.S. airstrike that killed ten Afghan civilians this summer, Amnesty International said, “the U.S. must now commit to a full, transparent, and impartial investigation into this incident. Anyone suspected of criminal responsibility should be prosecuted in a fair trial. Survivors and families of the victims should be kept informed of the progress of the investigation and be given full reparation”.

Yet no prosecution ever took place.

The right group added that “it should be noted that the U.S. military was only forced to admit to its failure in this strike because of the current global scrutiny on Afghanistan. Many similar strikes in Syria, Iraq, and Somalia have happened out of the spotlight, and the U.S. continues to deny responsibility while devastated families suffer in silence. The U.S. must ensure that it ends unlawful strikes, consistently and thoroughly investigates all allegations of civilians harmed in attacks, and publicly discloses its findings.”

Successive American administrations are very good at labeling other countries as “state sponsors of terrorism”, but the fact of the matter is America is a state sponsor of terrorism and unlike American accusations that come without evidence; there is evidence from America’s own media outlets about its acts of state sponsored terrorism.

The bombings in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria brought nothing other than death and destruction rather than the publicly stated goal of peace and security. This is while the U.S. has kept killing civilians with impunity.
The civilian murders by the American military is now widely believed to be an undercount of the actual fatality numbers and while the Pentagon repeatedly emphasizes on the notion that it’s military operations are the most “transparent,” the truth that is being exposed tells a completely different story of Washington trying to hide its own investigations and the world now knows why that is the case. The Times visited 100 casualty sites in three countries, it talked with families of the victims and has brought what analysts are saying is just a fraction of the reality.

Nevertheless, as the latest report notes, America continues this policy; U.S. service members sit in front of giant LCD screens and push buttons that drop bombs, just like in a video game. But unlike video games, their targets are very real, and their lethal strikes caused the death of many in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, among other countries. All of these crimes continue with no accountability and with the Pentagon continuing to downplay its acts of terror. Until now, fewer than 20 of the research assessments on airstrikes that have been revealed dating to late 2014 have been made public.

At the end of the day, critics argue what difference is there between a civilian being killed inhumanly by a bomb on the ground or a bomb landing inhumanly and indiscriminately from the sky. Both equate to terror, and both are against international law.