Tangle - When we kill the innocent.

Episode Date: September 14, 2021

On August 29th, the U.S. military announced a successful retaliatory drone strike against an ISIS-K combatant who was planning a suiciding bombing. But subsequent reporting has told a much different, and much more troubling story.Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at https://www.readtangle.com/--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight.

Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast. I know that today is day number two of doing this podcast, and that makes what I'm about to do a little bit bizarre, makes what I'm about to do a little bit bizarre, which is I'm abandoning the typical Tangle format. For those of you that have been reading the newsletter for any amount of time, you know that this is something that happens every now and then. We have our usual format, and occasionally I write a kind of special edition or a piece that is just my own opinion, my own article outside that format. And today happens to be one of those days, it's just a story that I can't

ignore. And so rather than, you know, your standard podcast that you guys are going to get here, and the standard format of what the right is saying and what the left is saying in my take. This is a piece that I wrote in the last 24 hours about a news item that I think is really important. And so I'm just going to read it to you. On August 29th, just a few days after the devastating ISIS-K suicide bombing that killed more than 100 people in Afghanistan, including 13 U.S. service members, the American press began reporting a successful retaliatory strike. Here's the lead from a Reuters article that ran that day. American forces launched a drone strike in Kabul on Sunday that killed a suicide car bomber suspected of preparing to attack the airport, U.S. officials said, as the United States nears the end of its military presence in the Afghan capital. The strike, first reported by Reuters, was the second carried out by U.S. forces in Afghanistan since an Islamic State suicide bomber struck the airport on Thursday, killing 13 U.S. troops and scores of Afghan civilians trying to flee the country. One U.S. official said Sunday's strike was carried out by an unmanned aircraft and that secondary explosions following the strike

showed the vehicle had been carrying a, quote, substantial amount of explosive material. The official U.S. military story, which was repeated dutifully by much of the press in the ensuing hours after the strike, just like this Reuters piece, described a potential ISIS-K threat who had been seen loading explosives into his car and had even stopped at an ISIS-K safe house. We are now fairly certain, however, that this entire story is fiction. Instead, it appears the Reaper drone that leveled an imminent ISIS-K threat planning

to bomb the Kabul airport actually killed Zamari Ahmadi, a 43-year-old veteran aid worker for a U.S.-based company who was, in all likelihood, one of the many Afghans attempting to flee to the United States. Along with Ahmadi, nine other civilians were killed, including seven children. We know this not because the Pentagon has acknowledged its mistake, to use a word that does not fit the crime, but because of the dogged reporting of journalists on the ground and the Afghan civilians who have spoken out. Two reports, one from the Washington Post and another from the New York Times, paint a much different picture than the one we got from the U.S. military. The Post story managed to get an anonymous, quote, senior U.S. military official to admit that the strike had killed at least three

children. It also took images of the damage to a physicist and a bomb technician who examined the physical evidence and concluded the car was not carrying explosives, as the initial reports had claimed. A few days later, a 10-minute-long video investigation by the New York Times, accompanied by interviews with more than a dozen co-workers and family of Ahmadi, painted an even darker picture. Rather than visiting ISIS-K safe houses in Kabul, Ahmadi was actually giving his colleagues rides to work. Rather than loading explosives into his vehicle, Ahmadi was actually loading canisters of water into his trunk for his neighbors and family. his vehicle, Ahmadi was actually loading canisters of water into his trunk for his neighbors and family. And rather than being an ISIS-K militant, Ahmadi had been working since 2006 as an electrical engineer for Nutrition and Education International, NEI, a California-based aid group. At 8 45 a.m. that morning, Ahmadi's boss had called him and told him to pick up his laptop from work. So Ahmadi

left in his 1996 Toyota Corolla, which belonged to NEI, and which would be incinerated in front of his home a few hours later by a U.S. military drone. As the latest reports on this drone strike make their way to the people still paying attention to Afghanistan, it's tough not to see it as a microcosm of the entire war. Botched intelligence, dead civilians, an attempt to respond to terrorism with force that instead harms more innocent people, and Afghan allies being forgotten, feared, or in this case killed. And, of course, there is the sequence we've now seen so many times. The reports of an explosion, the Pentagon story to the letter being the first thing many news outlets reported,

contradictory details slowly emerging, then equivocation, hedging, promises of investigations, and the part we haven't gotten to yet, but almost surely will, a lack of any semblance of accountability for such a disastrous and deadly error. I don't intend to pretend this is easy. I've never been to war. I've never been on the ground, never commanded troops, never piloted a drone, never had to decide which intelligence was accurate and which was misleading under the shadow of dead U.S. Marines and dozens of dead innocent Afghans with a global populace demanding retribution. The fuller picture we have

now makes it even easier to see how such a mistake could happen. On Ahmadi's way to work, he stopped at the home of the NEI's country director. That house was not far from the location of a rocket attack that would come the following day and be claimed by ISIS. It was an attack that was sent from a rocket launcher concealed inside the trunk of a Toyota Corolla, not unlike the very one Ahmadi was driving. Perhaps, and this is speculation based on the available information we have, the story here is that the U.S. military was aware of an imminent threat, a rocket launcher inside a Toyota Corolla coming from a known meeting spot for militants. Perhaps Ahmadi drove his own Toyota Corolla within blocks of that meeting spot, and then,

as the MQ-9 Reaper drone shadowed him for the remainder of the day, he performed just the right number of suspicious movements and stops to get the lethal attention of the U.S. military. Perhaps the officers tracking him felt, say, 75% confident he was who they thought he was. And on the heels of a suicide bombing that had just killed so many, with a chance to prevent another mass casualty event, they decided it was a high enough confidence rate to pull the trigger. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web,

his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. Very few people have ever had to make those decisions. But here's the story we have now, based on the reports from the Times and the Washington Post. Ahmadi went to work that day. He got his laptop from the NEI director's office, then he got breakfast. He arrived at the NEI office around 9.30 in the morning, and then he drove his co-workers down to a Taliban-occupied police station where he asked permission to distribute food to refugees at a nearby park.

Around 2 p.m., he got back to his office, where he and a security guard used a hose to fill up canisters in his trunk with water. He was doing this because water deliveries had stopped in his neighborhood after the collapse of the Afghan government, so Ahmadi had been bringing water home from the office to people in his neighborhood. When he got to the courtyard of his home, Ahmadi was in a densely populated residential area. Seeing only another adult male greeting Ahmadi, a tactical commander made the decision to strike his vehicle with a Hellfire missile, assessing, quote, reasonable certainty that no women, children, or noncombatants would be killed. The next part is still unclear, but again, if we are to believe the narrative from the anonymous military officials, in the time believed when the strike was ordered and when the missile hit, which may have only been about 30 seconds, several of Ahmadi's children and his brother's children came out to greet him. Some even got inside the car, and then the rocket hit. As of

this writing, the U.S. military has continued to insist that a second blast caused by explosives that were inside the car is what caused, quote, collateral damage. But the journalists and experts who have examined the scene have found evidence of one single targeted explosion, and no signs of what you'd expect if a second blast had taken place. Only three civilian casualties have been acknowledged by the U.S. military, but Ahmadi's relatives say ten members of their family, including seven children, were killed. Neighbors and Afghan health officials confirm they removed bodies of children from the blast sites, but because, quote, fragments of human remains were strewn across the compound, it has been hard to identify them by anything other than who is missing. According to the Times, the dead include Mr. Ahmadi and three of his children,

Samir, Faisal, and Farzad, Mr. Ahmadi's cousin Nazir, three of Romal's children, Arwin, Binyamin, and Hayat, and two three-year-old girls, Malika and Samaya. I've been relieved to see the reports about this strike draw bipartisan condemnation. From stalwart anti-war columnists like Will Bunch to the Wall Street Journal editorial board, demands for answers have been far-reaching and bipartisan. But no columns or official condemnations seem sufficient. The Pentagon had the gall to call this a righteous strike in the hours after it was executed. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has committed himself to, quote, over-the-horizon anti-terrorism, which is the kind of strategy that involves acting

with these very kinds of strikes on this very kind of intelligence. This screw-up, of course, is far from novel. The most infamous now was when a U.S. airstrike on an Afghan wedding party killed 47 innocent people, including the bride, in 2008. Some estimates put the total number of dead civilians at 22,000 since 9-11, thanks to U.S. airstrikes. One of the darkest stains on President Barack Obama's time in office is just how many innocents were killed by his administration's drone program and how hard they tried to conceal those numbers. Daniel Hale, a whistleblower who is now sitting in prison, revealed the true extent of the failures and the cover-ups of that drone program. Biden, who was in the White House when Obama tarnished his own anti-war legacy,

appears to have learned little from those mistakes. Along with illuminating the laundry list of American errors during the war in Afghanistan, the strike should also remind us of the consequences of our brazen attempts at toughness. In the days after the ISIS-K suicide bombing, much as with the days and weeks and months and years after 9-11, many of us wanted revenge. Not justice, but final judgment. It's worth evaluating how well or badly that attitude has served us, and how President Biden's tough talk and chest-puffing promises that he would, quote, hunt down those responsible for the attack has played out now that we appear to have killed 10 more innocent civilians. It's also worth asking what this strike does to our own safety.

I'm far from the first to say it, but I've come to believe that every U.S. bomb drop creates dozens more anti-American radicals. And why wouldn't it? If a foreign nation fired a rocket at your brother's car as he brought home water to your family, managing to kill some of your children and your nieces and nephews along the way, would you not spend your remaining days on this earth seeking vengeance or justice in your own eyes? I imagine I would. I had a typical Tangle podcast ready to go today, but I decided it should wait, because I don't think this story can go unacknowledged and because I didn't want to try and stuff it into our normal Tangle format. There are too many important threads. The injustice of war,

the military-sourced reporting, the persistent reporting of the Times and the Post to find the truth, the bipartisan exasperation of our failed military strategies abroad, and last but certainly not least, the devastating consequences of the war on terrorism for so many innocent civilians. The only question now, the one lingering in the air, is if we'll learn anything from this. What will happen the next time there's a suicide bombing, or an unprovoked attack, or an ambush, or one of the other horrific endings so many in harm's way have faced? Will we stick our chests out and level everything in sight, and pat each other on the back for bringing justice to an unjust world, or will we think of something better?

All right, that's it for today's podcast. Thank you guys for listening, and I appreciate all of your support and subscribing. We'll be back tomorrow with a more regular edition of the newsletter and the podcast. In the meantime, if you'd like to read this piece or you want to get more from Tangle, please go to www.readtangle.com. Thanks. Today's podcast was written by me, Isaac Saul, the Tangle News founder, and it was edited and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. The music for the podcast was done by Diet75. Thank you so much for tuning in. And as always, if you want more, go to readtangle.com. book. Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness

to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+.