Public Comment

In a painstaking investigation, the New York Times reported the US military killed dozens of civilians in an airstrike in the town of Baghuz, Syria on March of 2019, then ferkeleyverishly spent the next two-and-a-half years covering up evidence of war crimes. The bombing was carried out by a classified special operations unit known as Task Force 9 but its sordid activities were never investigated. The U.S. military downplayed the death toll and classified civilian deaths after which it bulldozed the blast site but was unable to remove the stench of rotting bodies.

The Defense Department’s independent inspector general began an inquiry, but the report was heavily redacted to downplay culpability.

In a complete mockery of lack of accountability and justice, the only assessment done immediately after the strike was performed by the same ground unit that ordered the strike.

A conscientious Navy officer who worked for years as a civilian analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Counterterrorism Center was forced out of his job in a desperate effort to halt the investigation which never occurred. 

As the New York Times report suggests this only the tip of the iceberg of massive abuses by the U.S. military. Human rights organizations reported that the U.S. military caused thousands of civilian deaths during the war. Hundreds of military assessment reports show that Task Force 9 was implicated in nearly one in five civilian incidents in the region. 

Even the C.I.A., which has a long history of human rights abuses, grew so alarmed over the task force’s strikes that agents reported their concerns alleging that in 1 in about 10 incidents, Task Force 9 hit targets knowing civilians would be killed. 

David Eubank, a former U.S. Army Special Forces soldier who now runs the humanitarian organization Free Burma Rangers, walked through the area about a week after the strike. “The place had been pulverized by airstrikes,” he said in an interview. “There was a lot of freshly bulldozed earth and the stink of bodies underneath, a lot of bodies.” The New York Times deserves credit for exposing U.S. military war crimes but one can only wonder why it gained privy to classified documents while Julian Assange WikiLeaks founder, who exposed other U.S. war crimes earlier has been silenced and locked in U.K. ‘s high-security Belmarsh Priso