Amnesty International: U.S. committed war crimes in Raqqa
It's become a pattern. Wherever our enemies have dug into an urban area, we've bombed that city to rubble regardless of the people living there.
During its campaign to recapture the group’s Syrian capital, the coalition did not take enough account of civilians or take the precautions necessary to minimise harm to them, Amnesty said in a report.It documented the cases of four families whose experiences it said were emblematic of wider patterns and provided “prima facie evidence that several coalition attacks which killed and injured civilians violated international humanitarian law”.
...
It focused on the Aswad family, which it said lost eight members in a single air strike, the Hashish family, which it said lost 18 members, the Badran family which it said lost 39 members, and the Fayad family which it said lost 16 members.“Witnesses reported that there were no fighters in the vicinity at the time of the attacks. Such attacks could be either direct attacks on civilians or civilian objects or indiscriminate attacks,” the report said of the four cases studied, adding that such attacks amounted to war crimes.
Amnesty's report was titled "War of Annihilation," based on Pentagon rhetoric at the time. The U.S. blamed ISIS for our bombs killing innocent civilians.
Benjamin Walsby, another investigator on the Amnesty team, said the coalition should have adjusted its strategy accordingly."If you rely on long-range tactics like artillery and airstrikes, then civilians are very likely to pay the price, and that appears to be what happened in Raqqa," he said.
...Command Sgt. John Wayne Troxell of the U.S. Army said in January that U.S. Marines had fired 30,000 artillery shells on the city.
... Civil workers had pulled nearly 500 corpses from the rubble and were still finding more six months after the fighting.Residents complained that the coalition bombing was indiscriminate and demanded compensation. According to the Raqqa Civil Council, which took over the administration of the city, 65 percent of homes had been destroyed.
Airwars says it has evidence of 1,400 fatalities.
If this sounds familiar, it's because we did the same thing, but on an even larger scale in Mosul.
Just a few months after the U.S. declared ISIS in Iraq “defeated,” a new study has concluded that the U.S.-led battle to remove Daesh (ISIS) from Mosul, once Iraq’s second-largest city, ultimately killed nearly 12 times the number of civilians than were killed by the infamous terror group.
So why then have we not seen a bigger outcry about our mass slaughter of civilians in Mosul? Because the Iraqi government was both complicit and helped cover it up.
Like Syria and Iraq, we are killing civilians by the score in Yemen.
In 2017, the United States military said that it carried out more than 120 strikes in Yemen, more than three times as many as strikes as 2016. For many years, we at the Mwatana Organization for Human Rights documented the impact of U.S. drone strikes in Yemen through detailed field research. In 2017 we investigated eight drone strikes and ground operations and found that U.S. operations were responsible for the deaths of at least 32 civilians – including 16 children and six women – and injured ten others, including five children.
Ironically, Trump is holding up an official investigation of war crimes in Syria by Assad.
Equally ironic is this headline from Time: Can the U.S. Deter War Crimes Without Going to War with Syria?
Uh, too late. Someone tell Time. We already committed those war crimes.
Equally unbelievable is this headline from the NY Times just last year: Did America Commit War Crimes in Vietnam?
Can anyone answer that question?
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Related: Some possible good news from Syria
Manbij flashpoint
Updated anti-war song
Meanwhile, there's stupid
Seems more likely that the usual is occuring
and this is being to set up to attack Russia on the pretext of a 'preemptive strike' (war-crime), (and, using allies, likely other targeted countries from the lengthy list) as planned, to trigger WW3... remember that TPTB, lackeys and other hyper-wealthy having luxury bunkers apparently believe that they themselves will comfortably survive a 'limited nuclear war' as long as they plan to try to explode nukes over targets, rather than upon impact, and thereby throwing up less debris to less drastically shut out sunlight... being beyond stupid and having long since boldly ventured into vacant space where no sane person could consider ever going.
And the US President has been Obama-gifted the 'right' to shut down the internet in any emergency, so that nothing but the approved story will get through, in any such event, assuming that TV/phone transmission still exists.
Not to mention war-crime censorship coming into effect - another desirable effect in TPTB, et al's, view. This also prior to a series of elections which Progs stand a chance of winning...
Might be something to keep in mind as a possibility, at any rate. The Empire Strikes Out, in both senses.
Edit to adjust the tense of a word left unchanged during sentence reconstruction, probably because of being a bit tense myself...
Re-edited to say that it might backfire, as so much already has for the US PTB:
https://www.rt.com/news/428847-german-lawmakers-us-ambassador-expulsion/
People are getting tired of being used for injustice.
https://www.rt.com/news/428509-us-veto-unsc-palestine/
And the US PTB has given itself away very freely as to its real motives and intent.
https://www.rt.com/usa/416419-mattis-new-national-defense-strategy/
Nothing says democracy like globally-enforced corporate-monopoly/military/surveillance-state rule. It's just not very popular among anyone but a very, very few, who are beginning to realize that they will, eventually, be next..
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Definite lack of concern for dead civilians
Yes General, that seems like a no brainer that you are putting civilian's lives in danger when you lob 30,000 bombs into their cities. Weren't we told that we were trying to save those civilians from ISIS? Funny how bombing them never seems to accomplish that goal.
Then to add insult to injury, many ISIS members and their families were allowed to leave. So what was that reason for knowingly killing that many civilians?
Here's another article about Raqqa and the many civilian deaths. Possible war crimes? I'd just go ahead and say that "Yes the US committed war crimes. Again!
Amnesty Says US Annihilation of Raqqa Possible War Crime
Looks like they missed the annihilation of ISIS and annihilated civilians instead. Is there any country that our military was involved with that didn't see the USA commit war crimes? Will there ever be a reckoning for the millions that this country has killed? Will anyone in this country ever be held accountable for its war crimes?
“When out of fear you twist the lesser evil into the lie that it is something good, you eventually rob people of the capacity to distinguish between good and evil.”
~ Hannah Arendt
The United States is a sociopathic nation
We (the United States) does not care about "collateral damage" as long as this country can promote the spread of corporatacracy.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
Yes it is
Did you read the article in tonight's EBs about America's cruelty? Boy did that guy nail it. The UN has been writing about how our poverty is getting worse because of how congress keeps cutting taxes on the rich and then makes the poor people pay for it by gutting social programs. This was the second article that the UN has written about this country and its government.
“When out of fear you twist the lesser evil into the lie that it is something good, you eventually rob people of the capacity to distinguish between good and evil.”
~ Hannah Arendt
Yes, gg and sd, the evil empire r us. eom
A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.
It goes back at least as far as the bombing of Dresden in 1945.
https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/world-war-two/the-bombing-campaign...
Kurt Vonnegut was there, as a POW of the Germans, sheltering in the basement of a slaughterhouse for pigs (going by the catchy name of Number 5.) The intensity of the firestorm caused by the incendiary bombs created an updraft for the flames which sucked in oxygen from all around the city, turning it into a giant blast furnace. When Vonnegut was able to emerge from the basement, he witnessed people actually melted into the asphalt streets.
We were just warming up for Hiroshima.
"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X