What a feat of journalism:

@nickturse unearths an archive of formerly classified U.S. military documents —many from a secret Pentagon task force investigating war crimes— exposing hundreds of civilian deaths kept secret during the U.S. war in Cambodia:
theintercept.com/2023/05/23/hen… "The interviews with more than 75 Cambodian witnesses and survivors, published here for the first time, reveal in new detail the long-term trauma borne by survivors of the American war..."

NEW: A U.S. Central Command investigation into the botched August 2021 drone strike in Kabul reveals how biases and assumptions led to the deadly blunder, and that military analysts saw possible civilian casualties within minutes of the strike:
nytimes.com/2023/01/06/us/… #FOIA Among the everyday activities of an Afghan aid worker that were misconstrued as the moves of an ISIS attacker:

A package contained explosives because of its “careful handling and size”

The driver’s “erratic route” was evidence he was trying to evade surveillance...

Exactly six years ago, I met @basimrazzo & began systematically investigating how America's 'precision strikes' are killing civilians.

Yesterday, this body of work published in @nytimes was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting:
nytimes.com/spotlight/2022…

🧵... It's my hope this reporting will spur change, not just in policies, but in newsrooms, which I hope will treat claims of precision warfare more skeptically & dedicate resources to making the human costs of our own wars an editorial priority, recognized as a public service.

So honored to see the Civilian Casualty Files awarded the @PulitzerPrizes in International reporting.

This project was born out of the belief that every American deserves to be informed about the wars waged in their names…

pulitzer.org/winners/staff-… about what our government knows about how those wars are truly going, about who is paying the human costs, and about whether claims of accountability and surgical warfare really stack up…

“The coverage was making everybody but the Taliban a good guy, when the reality was there were a lot of bad guys. People were being made heroes who had done horrible things. And I thought, ‘How much of history as we know it is like this?’” @Kathygannon

cjr.org/special_report… "Yes, bin Laden was in Afghanistan, and yes, the Taliban had allowed him to stay. But it wasn’t Taliban who brought him, it was Sayyaf & Haji Abdul Kadhir, who now were partnered w/the coalition! And no journalist was asking the coalition, “What are you doing..."
— @Kathygannon

The Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a new hearing on the legal and human costs of 20 years of airstrikes.

Starts at 10am EST, but you can watch live here: judiciary.senate.gov/meetings/targe…

With testimony from @HinaShamsi @RAlmutawakel @StephenPomper @AmbNathanSales & John P. Jumper The hearing opens with remarks from @SenatorDurbin, the voice of survivor @basimrazzo, and current & former U.S. officials stating that "We can't kill our way out of this problem."

NEW:

Syria's largest dam was on a no-strike list. Military engineers warned that hitting it with an airstrike could cause tens of thousands of civilian deaths.

But a top secret U.S. Special Operations unit struck it anyway.

The story of the Tabqa Dam:

nytimes.com/2022/01/20/us/… The story of the Syrian engineers who risked their lives to prevent an unprecedented disaster is one you need to read through the end.

We reported this from so many sides, including on the ground, and even obtained records about the strike through a FOIA lawsuit.

BIG:

@nytimes obtained previously classified surveillance video of the botched drone strike in Kabul: nytimes.com/2022/01/19/us/…

The military *rarely* releases strike footage from civilian casualty incidents. Until now, we had only the military's own descriptions of the video... Earlier today, I spoke to Emal Ahmadi, the brother of Zemari Ahmadi, whose daughter Malika was also killed in the strike. He said he wanted to view the video himself, after having only heard descriptions from the military. “It will be difficult for me, but I want to see it.”

The Civilian Casualty Files—A1 of today's @nytimes—is the culmination of 5 years of investigation: at airstrike sites in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, a years-long legal battle with the Pentagon, 1,311 military 'assessments' and scores of interviews... nytimes.com/interactive/20… It examines the promise of precision and what Americans have been told about the new way of war.

The promise was a war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs. The documents show flawed intelligence, faulty targeting, years of civilian deaths — and scant accountability.

In 2021, the world watched the Pentagon's claims about a U.S. strike in Kabul fall apart. The full investigation into the intelligence—and what went wrong—has never been made public.

It's not the first time... I saw it again and again on the ground. So, years ago, I began filing FOIA requests for the Pentagon's own confidential assessments.

Represented by @rcfp, we sued the Dep. of Defense.

What we found in 1,300+ records in this @nytimes investigation:
nytimes.com/interactive/20…

After years of reporting — more than 1,300 hidden Pentagon documents, ground investigation at the sites of 100+ U.S. airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, and scores of interviews — we present part 1 of

THE CIVILIAN CASUALTY FILES:

nytimes.com/interactive/20… Read the 9,600+ word investigation, but see the documents for yourself.

Explore the more than 1,300 Pentagon "civilian casualty assessments," published here: nytimes.com/interactive/20…

Context for #The911Wars panel:

"But in the areas where most U.S. funding was concentrated — territories that were key to winning the war — American efforts have fallen woefully short of the grand claims the government made, claims that it knew were false."

https://twitter.com/AzmatZahra/status/619045781501292544

In some cases, American efforts to provide education have actually backfired, embittering local people rather than winning their hearts and minds. ...

Throughout America's war in Afghanistan, reporters told story after story of the politicians, contractors, commanders & warlords who filled their pockets with billions meant for the Afghan people.

We've heard the numbers, but what were the true costs to Afghans?

🧵... Many who pilfered the country have now escaped to luxury homes in places like Dubai & London, where they're desperately trying to re-write their histories.

When confronted with evidence of their corruption or wrongdoing, they're telling lies that are easy to fact check.

Most of the war in Afghanistan has been fought in rural battlefields, places like Sangin and the Kandahar countryside, where Americans rarely hear the voices of women who have experienced decades of conflict.

Read this deeply reported story about women in Helmand's Sangin Valley

https://twitter.com/Anand_Gopal_/status/1434866471633625092

On a more true civilian toll:

"But the vast majority of incidents involved one or two deaths—anonymous lives that were never reported on, never recorded by official organizations, and therefore never counted as part of the war’s civilian toll."

newyorker.com/magazine/2021/…

A must-read:

"I Helped Destroy People," @janetreitman's @NYTmag cover story about @TerryAlbury, an FBI agent who provided journalists key documents about the war on terror—and went to prison for it.

Amid the Trump news cycle, many ignored the revelations from his leaks, but...

https://twitter.com/janetreitman/status/1433133575247994887

Don't ignore this now.

@TerryAlbury's firsthand account is an unvarnished view from the inside of what the FBI has been doing to Muslim and immigrant communities across the United States for two decades:

nytimes.com/2021/09/01/mag…

If there's only piece of reporting you read about Afghanistan this week, I think it should be this:

WHEN THE RAIDS CAME - by @andrewquilty: harpers.org/archive/2021/0…

He spent 2.5 years reporting it, only to have it come out the day after Kabul fell & get lost in the cycle. But... It a story that illuminates essential context about the war that Americans have missed over the last month:

from the urban-rural divide and unemployment that drove a mass exodus of young Afghans...

to the 2019 deluge of night raids/airstrikes and how the Taliban recruited...

I went on @ReliableSources with @brianstelter today to talk about U.S. media coverage of the war in Afghanistan, which has been its lowest in recent years, despite record pace.

There are many negative consequences, but one I want to emphasize the most is this...

(a thread)

https://twitter.com/ReliableSources/status/1432002165254524929

Because most Americans are only now waking up to the war, they're informing themselves about the debate over withdrawal based ​mostly on sudden coverage from Kabul over the last few weeks—not the the years of context that's essential to having an informed debate about this war.

If you weren't familiar with ISIS-K until yesterday, here's some important context:

In April 2017, the United States dropped a 21,600-pound, $170,000 bomb in a small village in Nangarhar province Afghanistan—intended to target ISIS-K.

Better known as the “Mother Of All Bombs... Here is a video CENTCOM made public of this bombing:

1. They may not be on your TV screens right now, but there’s a generation of Afghan youth in rural areas whose lives over the last 20 years were forever changed by the war playing out directly in front of them—when the American public was not watching as they are now. So while I have your attention, it’s my job as a journalist to remind you of them, too.

I met Khanzada in 2019. He and his little brother grew up in family of farmers in a small village in Nangarhar’s Khogyani district.

If I can add on to this & name some of the investigations from Afghanistan that I think helped shatter the myths of this war, here are just a few:

https://twitter.com/jefftparrott/status/1427773257290190848

After NATO sent out a press release about a mass honor killing by the Taliban, @jeromestarkey went to the scene and found out it was actually a botched night where U.S. Special Forces dug bullets out of the bodies of pregnant women to cover it up: web.archive.org/web/2010042920…

This is Khanzada. I met him in Nangarhar province in Afghanistan in 2019.

When his family found Khanzada under the rubble, they were hopeful that his grandparents survived too. An hour later, they found the bodies. #PrecisionStrike This is a baby I held in Nangarhar, who was just a few weeks old, but survived an airstrike in Hisarak district a few days earlier.

Twelve of her family members didn’t.

#precisionstrike