{"id":490179,"date":"2022-01-29T12:00:36","date_gmt":"2022-01-29T12:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/?p=384848"},"modified":"2022-01-29T12:00:36","modified_gmt":"2022-01-29T12:00:36","slug":"pentagon-professes-shock-that-u-s-soldiers-frequently-kill-civilians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2022\/01\/29\/pentagon-professes-shock-that-u-s-soldiers-frequently-kill-civilians\/","title":{"rendered":"Pentagon Professes Shock That U.S. Soldiers Frequently Kill Civilians"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\"DOD\n

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin speaks during a news briefing at the Pentagon in Arlington, Va., on Jan. 28, 2022.<\/p>\n

\nPhoto: Alex Wong\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

The Pentagon is<\/u> not known for staging revivals of classic movies, but it just reenacted a famous scene from \u201cCasablanca.\u201d<\/p>\n

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin \u2014 after months of news reports<\/a> about civilians killed by U.S. bombs, including the deaths of seven children and three adults in a Kabul drone attack<\/a>\u00a0\u2014\u00a0just issued a directive to reduce what the military traditionally describes as collateral damage. \u201cWe can and will improve upon efforts to protect civilians,\u201d Austin vowed this week. \u201cThe protection of innocent civilians in the conduct of our operations remains vital to the ultimate success of our operations, and as a significant strategic and moral imperative.\u201d<\/p>\n

His two-page directive<\/a> calls for the creation of a \u201cCivilian Harm and Mitigation Response Plan\u201d in 90 days that will lay out a comprehensive approach to improve the training of military personnel and the collection and sharing of data, so that the wrong people don\u2019t get killed so often. He also ordered the establishment of a hazily defined \u201ccivilian protection center of excellence\u201d to institutionalize the knowledge needed to prevent wrongful killings. The underlying idea is that military culture will be changed so that protecting civilians is a core goal.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

If you were just tuning into the catastrophe of America\u2019s forever wars, you might be impressed by Austin\u2019s directive, in the same way you might be impressed by Capt. Louis Renault in \u201cCasablanca\u201d when he shuts down<\/a> Rick\u2019s Caf\u00e9 because, shockingly, gambling was happening in the casino. Renault\u2019s horror was feigned, of course. He was a regular visitor to the cafe, and after blowing his whistle on gambling, he was handed his winnings for that night.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not as though the Pentagon is taking action \u2014 or pretending to take action, as is much more likely \u2014 because battlefield abuses have suddenly been brought to its attention. From the beginning, one of the hallmarks of the post-9\/11 wars has been the widely reported<\/a> killing of civilians<\/a> by U.S. forces<\/a>. These things have been revealed in exhaustive detail <\/a>year after year<\/a> by generations of journalists (I even did a bit of it<\/a> during the Iraq invasion), as well as nonprofit organizations<\/a> and military whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning<\/a> and Daniel Hale<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

There has even been a begrudging chorus of admissions by the Pentagon that go back more than a decade. In 2010, the Joint Chiefs of Staff completed its classified \u201cJoint Civilian Casualty Study<\/a>.\u201d In 2013, a Pentagon office called Joint and Coalition Operational Analysis published a report titled \u201cReducing and Mitigating Civilian Casualties: Enduring Lessons<\/a>.\u201d The remarkable thing about that 2013 report \u2014 other than the fact that it included most of the remedies Austin mentioned this week \u2014 was that it contained a list of a dozen other reports on civilian casualties that JCOA alone had published in the previous five years.<\/p>\n

And five years later, in 2018, the Joint Chiefs completed yet another classified report<\/a> on civilian casualties. The Washington Post, which revealed its existence, described that report<\/a> as \u201ca major examination of civilian deaths in military operations, responding to criticism that [the Pentagon] has failed to protect innocent bystanders in counterterrorism wars worldwide.\u201d Sound familiar? And that secret report came two years after President Barack Obama had\u00a0issued an executive order<\/a>\u00a0that said the military was killing too many civilians and needed to take a range of actions to change that.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The Pentagon\u2019s protestations of disappointment at what has happened, and its promises to do better, are the standard confetti of insincerity.<\/blockquote><\/p>\n

You get the point. The Pentagon\u2019s protestations of disappointment at what has happened, and its promises to do better, are the standard confetti of insincerity. In many ways, it\u2019s similar to executives at Facebook expressing dismay and regret<\/a> at some of the ways their platform has been<\/a> used and abused, and promising to do a better job<\/a>. The important thing to watch is not what powerful institutions promise to do but what they actually do. And when they do nothing after promising again and again to make changes, you would be foolish to regard their latest vow as meaningful.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile a serious Defense Department focus on civilian harm is long overdue and welcome, it\u2019s unclear that this directive will be enough,\u201d noted<\/a> Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union\u2019s national security project. \u201cWhat\u2019s needed is a truly systemic overhaul of our country\u2019s civilian harm policies to address the massive structural flaws, likely violations of international law, and probable war crimes that have occurred in the last 20 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

The best template for understanding the endurance of the Pentagon\u2019s failures on civilian casualties might be its record on curbing sexual abuse in its ranks. This is a problem that has existed forever but jumped into the public realm in a particularly strong way with the 1991 Tailhook scandal<\/a>, when 83 women and seven men were sexually assaulted at a Navy conference in Las Vegas. Since then, the military has continually promised to do everything it could to fight sexual abuse. There has been no shortage of studies and plans and hearings, but the problem persists, with nearly one in four servicewomen<\/a> reporting sexual assault in recent studies, and more than half reporting sexual harassment.<\/p>\n

There is now hope of real change after Congress finally\u00a0passed legislation<\/a> in December that transfers to independent military prosecutors the authority to pursue sexual assault cases. Under an executive order signed by President Joe Biden this week, sexual harassment has also been added as a crime<\/a> to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. These moves came more than three decades after Tailhook.<\/p>\n

It would be good if we could save ourselves another decade or two of insincere Pentagon reports and jump forward to the day when commanders no longer have the ability to protect their subordinates, and themselves, by standing in the way of prosecutions after civilians are recklessly killed. (There was no disciplinary action<\/a> taken against any soldier after the Kabul drone bombing, for instance.) But that day is probably a long way off, especially when the current defense secretary is a former general who for many years commanded U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, there is one thing Biden could do that would show the government is just a little bit serious about reducing civilian casualties. Daniel Hale, who pleaded guilty to leaking classified military documents that revealed the scale of civilian killings by U.S. drones, is currently serving a 45-month sentence for violating the Espionage Act. He should be pardoned, to\u00a0demonstrate that it was terribly wrong to punish someone who tried to stop the murder of innocent people.<\/p>\n

\u201cI stole something that was never mine to take \u2014 precious human life,\u201d Hale\u00a0said at his sentencing<\/a>. “I couldn\u2019t keep living in a world in which people pretend that things weren\u2019t happening that were. Please, your honor, forgive me for taking papers instead of human lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

The post Pentagon Professes Shock That U.S. Soldiers Frequently Kill Civilians<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on The Intercept<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s promises to curb civilian casualties are as empty as the military’s vows to stop sexual harassment.<\/p>\n

The post Pentagon Professes Shock That U.S. Soldiers Frequently Kill Civilians<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":391,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[383,29],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490179"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/391"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=490179"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":491711,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490179\/revisions\/491711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}