NATO has disclosed that six of the civilians killed by rockets which crashed into their home outside the southern Afghan town of Marjah were children.
NATO said Monday the rockets missed their target by about 600 meters, or about a third of a mile.
The official story would be bad enough, even if it weren’t literally incredible.
One of Lockheed Martin’s high-tech High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems “missing” its target by as much as 600 meters is bizarrely unlikely; two missiles “missing” by exactly the same distance and hitting exactly the same target is about as unlikely as two meteors hitting exactly the same military genius on his pointy little head.
This obviously wasn’t a technological failure, which everybody could simply shrug off as “shit happens.”
This was a failure of what passes for “intelligence” in our far-flung war-zones, from Yemen to Iraq to Pakistan to Afghanistan and wherever else we may be killing “suspected jihadis” or “suspected insurgents” or “suspected al Qaeda operatives” all over the world, and this particular “mistake” in Marjah was just an unusually blatant demonstation that the CIA and Pentagon and Barack Obama don’t have a fucking clue who they are killing.
So our official story puts the stink on technology, but it wasn’t fucked-up electronics that killed those children in Marjah.
It was fucked-up Americans.
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The official story remains that the missiles missed their target.
A relatively informed reconstruction on al Sahwa draws the same conclusion as my diary:
So the Marines didn’t “miss” what they were shooting at; they hit the wrong target, because of “inaccurate reporting,” a phrase which is synonymous in this context with what I called a “failure of intelligence.”