The New York Times ran this story in two slightly different versions, on March 26, 2010…
“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,” said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who became the senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan last year.
And then on April 12, 2010…
“However, to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I’ve been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it.”
I don’t know exactly what to think about General McChrystal’s amazing confession, and it quickly disappeared in the usual hurricane of media noise about nothing…
But it somehow reminded me of another summation which was almost entirely overlooked by American media.
US forces were reported to have killed 106 Afghan civilians when they dropped bombs on the village of Qalaye Naizi, in eastern Afghanistan.
And of course…
Military authorities denied having mistakenly bombed a village, and said the warplanes had targeted a compound used by al-Qaeda.
And it would have been just another story like so many others, except that was the day when…
The number of Afghan civilians killed by US bombs has surpassed the death toll of the 11 September attacks.
We passed that milestone on January 2, 2002.
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