Posted on 01/19/2022 10:41:35 PM PST by yesthatjallen
Newly declassified surveillance footage provides additional insights about the final minutes and aftermath of a botched U.S. drone strike last year in Kabul, Afghanistan, showing how the military made a life-or-death decision based on imagery that was fuzzy, hard to interpret in real time and prone to confirmation bias.
The strike on Aug. 29 killed 10 innocent people — including seven children — in a tragic blunder that punctuated the end of the 20-year war in Afghanistan.
The disclosure of the videos was a rare step by the U.S. military in any case of an airstrike that caused civilian casualties, and is the first time any footage from the Kabul strike has been seen publicly. The videos encompass about 25 minutes of silent footage from two drones — a military official said both were MQ-9 Reapers — showing the minutes before, during and after the strike.
The at-times blurry footage that operators were watching will continue to be scrutinized for new details about how the episode unfolded, while demonstrating the heightened risk of error that accompanies any decision to fire a missile in a densely populated neighborhood.
The military had been working that day under extreme pressure to head off another attack on troops and civilians in the middle of the chaotic withdrawal. It has said it believed it was tracking an ISIS-K terrorist who might imminently detonate a bomb near the Kabul airport. Three days earlier, a suicide bombing at the airport had killed at least 182 people, including 13 American troops.
SNIP
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The Biden administration has also been working on a new policy governing drone warfare away from traditional battlefields. That process was meant to last only a few months, but after a year of drafts, deliberations and high-level meetings, it remains uncompleted.
PAYWALL
Unless they were sued, why would they release this when Biden is having such a bad time? Could it be someone is throwing him under the bus?
Could be. Or just to make the military look bad. Atoning for the drone-strike of Sewer-mani? Maybe use this as a pretext to end drone strikes.
So much for over the horizon capability.
We don’t hear that term much any more
The video won’t play for me there, but here’s another link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv7hYkpTkWo
Of course, the Dems and their ignorant voters say nothing about this atrocity.
Convince me milley and co didn’t take targeting intel from the taliban thinking they could be trusted to point out their enemy to their enemy.
Think about it.
Calling this lot Keystone Cops would be an insult to the Keystone Cops.
I think I heard Biden say, in his press conference, that there were “no more body bags” coming from Afghanistan. I heard Trump saying many times that for 12 (18?) months there had been no American soldiers killed in Afghanistan because he had made a deal with the Taliban which they were respecting. As for Biden, 13 American servicemen came home in body bags during his botched withdrawal
. Did Biden forget about that? No reporters pressed him on it.
This was the "over the horizon capability" that Biden said we would use to contain the Taliban.
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