Thread by @nickturse

“We got the wrong guy. I had just killed someone’s dad,” said Bennett Miller, an Air Force intelligence analyst. “I had watched his kids pick up the body parts. Then I had gone home and hugged my own kids.”🧵nytimes.com/2022/04/15/us/…

The Pentagon insists that it rarely kills the wrong people. Survivors of air strikes and those that plan and carry out those attacks, like Bennett Miller, often tell a very different story. theintercept.com/2021/06/03/pen…

A 2021 strike in Kabul, Afghanistan put a spotlight on the Pentagon's cavalier attitude toward killing and its penchant for dismissing civilian casualty claims --initially insisting it was a “righteous strike” before admitting that it killed 10 civilians.
nytimes.com/2021/09/17/us/…

But the Kabul strike was no anomaly. As @AzmatZahra reported, the Pentagon's own files showed that the US air war in the Middle East was "marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians" nytimes.com/spotlight/the-…

It followed a 2017 investigation by @AzmatZahra and @Anand_Gopal_ of nearly 150 U.S.-led coalition airstrikes targeting ISIS in Iraq that found that 1 in 5 of the strikes killed civilians, a rate more than 31 times that acknowledged by the coalition. nytimes.com/interactive/20…

Then there was the New York Times investigation of a 2019 airstrike in Baghuz, Syria that killed up to 64 noncombatants and was obscured through a multilayered coverup. nytimes.com/2021/11/13/us/…

But anywhere the U.S. conducts airstrikes, the story is shockingly similar. Take #Somalia, for example. In 2020, @airwars found that between 71 and 139 civilians had been killed since 2007, far exceeding AFRICOM’s then-official count of two dead.
theintercept.com/2020/02/25/afr…

That same year, @hysperbole and I reported that Abdi Farhan Mahmoud, 13, was on his way to school when a U.S. missile struck a mini-bus taxi he was riding in, decapitating him, according to his father.
theintercept.com/2020/03/19/us-…

.@hysperbole has documented countless other cases in Somalia:
vice.com/en/article/m7e…

Or take Libya where, in 2018, the U.S. killed 11 "terrorists" whom human rights groups and family members say were actually soldiers involved in the fight against al Qaeda and ISIS.
theintercept.com/2022/04/03/lib…

A 2021 report by @MwatanaEn examined 12 U.S. attacks in Yemen, 10 of them airstrikes, between January 2017 and January 2019. The authors found that at least 38 Yemeni civilians — 19 men, six women, and 13 children — were killed in the attacks theintercept.com/2021/11/30/yem…

Over seven separate attacks by the United States—six drones strikes and one raid—36 members of the al Ameri and al Taisy families were killed. A quarter of them were children between the ages of three months and 14 years old vice.com/en/article/3an…

Why does this keep happening? Almost every facet of the process is flawed. As @rdevro showed back in 2015, during during a five-month stretch of one drone campaign, "nearly 9 out of 10 people who died in airstrikes were not the Americans’ direct targets." theintercept.com/drone-papers/m…

.@PentagonPresSec says: “No military in the world works as hard as we do to avoid civilian casualties.”
Experts say it isn't true. “Civilian protection is not prioritized," @LarryLewis_ told @theintercept in 2021. "We’re not the best because we’re choosing not to be the best.”

A 2020 study by researchers from @CivCenter & @CLShumanrights of 228 U.S. military investigations of civilian harm in Afghanistan, Iraq, & Syria found interviews with civilian witnesses were conducted in just 21.5% of cases
theintercept.com/2020/02/13/us-…

"The U.S. military no longer interviews victims and witnesses, choosing instead to rely on their own intelligence information that helped develop strikes that led to civilian deaths,” said @marcgarlasco, formerly of the @DeptofDefense, now of @PAXPoC theintercept.com/2022/04/03/lib…

A US "collateral damage estimate" said that bombing a ISIS bomb factory might damage a single shed. The attack, according to a new report by @PAXPoC @UniUtrecht & @Alghad, instead killed at least 85 people, may have injured 500, and damaged 6000 homes. theintercept.com/2022/04/08/isi…

A major with the USAF Office of Special Investigations said agents looked into civilian casualty reports only when there was “potential for high media attention, concern with outcry from local community/government, concern sensitive images may get out.” theintercept.com/2021/11/30/yem…

“You need to know that someone is looking at your homework. If not, it’s easy to give it a half-effort — or worse. And this is what we saw in Iraq and Syria. We saw the same thing later in Afghanistan and in Somalia and Yemen too” said @LarryLewis_ theintercept.com/2021/11/30/yem…

Here's Bennett Miller before he was publicly remorseful for reducing an innocent man to a pile of parts that the Afghan man's kids had to gather up. stratcom.mil/Media/News/New…

Another classic on the drone war in Somalia by @hysperbole thenation.com/article/archiv…

In Somalia, the least wired country on Earth, the U.S. military asks airstrike victims to file complaints online theintercept.com/2021/06/10/som…