The military keeps finding it did nothing wrong when it investigates itself

[Morrison71]

The military keeps finding it did nothing wrong when it investigates itself

Lack of accountability.

taskandpurpose.com

In war, things inevitably go wrong and people die as a result. But as events in Syria, Kabul, and Niger and elsewhere have shown, the military has a tendency to use its investigations to absolve itself rather than to hold senior leaders accountable for their mistakes.

The New York Times recently revealed that a U.S. airstrike in March 2019 may have killed dozens of civilians at Baghouz, Syria. However when an Air Force lawyer and an evaluator with the Defense Department Inspector General's Office tried to get military leaders to investigate whether a war crime had occurred, they were reportedly thwarted at every turn.

The New York Times details how Air Force attorney Lt. Col. Dean W. Korsak along with Gene Tate, then with the Defense Department Inspector General's Office, tried to get the incident investigated as a possible war crime but they could not overcome opposition from their superiors.

"I think the NYT captured the facts pretty well," Tate told Task & Purpose. "Korsak reported a war crime and our review of the documents and videos found him to be credible. That should have immediately required the actions mandated by DoD Directive 2311.01 (which has since been rewritten). The directive was never followed and every time we tried to remind leadership of that, they just ignored us."
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But the Syria airstrike is not an aberration, and may just be the latest example of the limitations of military investigations. An Aug. 29 drone strike by the U.S. military in Kabul accidentally killed 10 civilians, including seven children. The strike was based on intelligence that ISIS planned to attack U.S. forces using a white Toyota Corolla – a car so ubiquitous in Afghanistan that in 2015 roughly 90% of the cars registered in the country were Corollas, Stars and Stripes reported at the time.

When a reporter asked Said if the white Toyota Corolla considered a threat ever existed in the first place, Said replied: "We actually never ended up tracking the actual Toyota Corolla. We didn't. It certainly wasn't the one we did track and struck. We just didn't pick up the Toyota Corolla that we believe we should have picked up that might have been involved in something that's worth knowing."

Military investigations also sometimes find ways to shift blame from senior leaders to lower ranking service members, such as the Navy's attempts to scapegoat Capt. Brett Crozier for the deadly COVID-19 outbreak aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt in 2020.
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Likewise, the U.S. military initially tried to shield commanders from responsibility following the Oct. 4, 2017 ambush in Niger in which four soldiers were killed. Two officers involved were tapped for promotion but neither nomination succeeded.

Four years later, a documentary by ABC investigative journalist James Gordon Meek revealed that the military attempted to scapegoat the Special Forces captain in charge of the soldiers killed in Niger. The captain had strenuously objected to his troops being sent on the mission in lightly armored vehicles without any backup or the ability to evacuate any wounded members of his team, but was ultimately overruled by his superior.

"I was left with the impression that this guy was a screw-up," Arnold Wright, the father of Staff Sgt. Dustin M Wright, one of the soldiers killed in the ambush, told ABC News. "And he screwed up and carried my son off and got him killed – because that's what I was led to believe. And my anger was directed toward somebody completely innocent of what they told me he did."

 

[BelemNole]

Who do you think taught the police?

 

[Bonerfarts]