You may recall my complaints here and here about the U.S military’s footdragging and evasions regarding the question of whether American air strikes on August 22 on an Afghan village killed “5-7” civilians, as the U.S. said, or 90, as the civilians themselves said. Well, now U.S. Air Force investigators have concluded that the civilian death toll was around 30. The New York Times has the goods here.
The Times also discusses the back story to the original estimate of 5-7 dead. “We were wrong on the number of civilian casualties partly because the initial review was operating under real limitations,” according to a “military official”—the “limitations” being that the Afghans wanted the troops out.
Yet when the villagers came up with a higher count, the U.S. didn’t admit that their original estimate was dubious. Instead, military officials claimed that “militants” or “extremists” had convinced the villagers to lie about the number killed, a story that clearly was made up out of whole cloth. Will we ever learn the identities of these liars in uniform? I’m guessing, no.
Oh, and when Sen. Obama had the temerity to point out that slaughtering the innocent isn’t a good way to establish trust, Sen. McCain called him “dishonorable.”