The Daily - How the U.S. Hid a Deadly Airstrike

Episode Date: November 15, 2021

This episode contains strong language.In March 2019, workers inside an Air Force combat operations center in Qatar watched as an American F-15 attack jet dropped a large bomb into a group of women and children in Syria.Assessing the damage, the workers found that there had been around 70 casualties, and a lawyer decided that it was a potential war crime.We look at how the system that was designed to bring the airstrike to light, ended up keeping it hidden.Guest: Dave Philipps, a national correspondent covering the military for The New York Times. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: The military never conducted an independent investigation into a 2019 bombing on the last bastion of the Islamic State, despite concerns about a secretive commando force.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. This is The Daily. Today, a Times investigation reveals one of the largest civilian casualty events of the war against the Islamic State. I spoke to my colleague, Dave Phillips, on how the system designed to bring this to light ended up keeping it hidden. It's Monday, November 15th. Dave, where does this story start? This story starts March 18th, 2019, in a big Air Force combat operations center in Al-Yadid in Qatar. And there we have, it almost looks like Mission Command for NASA.

You have banks of computers, big screens, all of them watching the air war against the Islamic State. The coalition had over years and thousands of airstrikes basically clawed away its territory. Once the group had controlled millions of acres, but by that day in March, they only controlled about one square mile of dirt fields pressed against the Euphrates River in Syria. And on this day, a lot of people in the command center are watching a drone that was flying up overhead. Now, what they saw was a field that was just littered with a tangle of cars and makeshift tents of debris

of the leftovers from weeks of combat. But also within there was a lot of people. And the drone hovered over and focused in on a group of women and children who had found refuge down by the river against a steep sandbank. The drone, it lingered for several minutes, slowly circling with its cameras focused on these folks, either sleeping or just laying down low to take cover from whatever combat might be coming. And the people in the operations center were calmly watching this when suddenly they saw something cross their screens that they didn't expect. An American F-15 attack jet came right through and dropped a large bomb dead center into

this group of women and children. And there was this shuddering blast that basically filled the whole view of the drone camera and engulfed all of these people, killing nearly all of them. So there's all these people in the operations center that don't know what the heck is going on, and they scramble to try and piece things together. There's chatting with each other over secure chat logs, just trying to figure it out. One of them immediately types out, who dropped that? Meaning the bomb. And another one says, we just dropped on 50 women and children. So what did those people in the room do? Well, the first thing they did was they followed their training.

They did what's called a battle damage assessment, basically a count of what got hit. And they quickly figured out that they were wrong. It wasn't 50 people that were killed. It was closer to 70. They take that information pretty quickly to an Air Force lawyer named Dean Korsak. And his job in the operations center is basically to be the one there who knows the rules of law

and can figure out what's a war crime and what isn't. And they flag it for him. And he immediately looks at the details and he decides this is potentially a war crime. And if it's a war crime, then regulations require that I report it. So Dave, why are they calling a lawyer here? What exactly about this strike is so unusual? Well, I know that probably the public thinks of war as total chaos, but it's not total chaos.

This war was fought overwhelmingly from the air. And it was done that way in order to try and minimize the loss of life, both to civilians and to coalition troops. And it relied overwhelmingly on a lot of drones with really good cameras that could study targets before they were hit to make sure we're hitting the right place, the right people, without civilians being in the way. And if there is a mistake, if civilians are killed, there's a reporting process where people count the dead and make those figures public. But what was interesting with this strike is that the Air Force lawyer, Dean Korsak, he didn't see any of those safeguards taking place.

The footage that they were looking at didn't show any clear targets that would justify killing so many women and children. And so to him, on a couple different levels, this seemed to violate those laws of armed conflict. So the first thing he does is he immediately preserves evidence. He calls into the squadron that oversees the fighter jets and has them preserve their video. He preserves the logs of chats and strikes that oversaw this so that whoever's going to investigate it

has what they need to figure out what happened. And then he does what he's supposed to do. He takes this report to his boss, the chief legal officer, who's an Air Force colonel. And that chief legal officer briefs his commander, who's a general. But from there, it just sort of fizzles out. It doesn't get the required reporting to higher authorities that it's supposed to. And the lawyer doesn't really understand why. authorities that it's supposed to. And the lawyer doesn't really understand why. And so eventually,

he goes to the Air Force's version of the FBI, which is called the Office of Special Investigations. And he asks their agents, hey, is there something that you can do with this? Can you investigate this? And the response he gets is really remarkable. We were able to get the email and I'll just read it. When he asked them, you know, is this something you would look into? They said, and I'm going to paraphrase here just for a second, not unless it's considered substantial. And then he goes on to say, examples include potentials for high media attention, concern with outcry from local government, and concern sensitive images may get out. So essentially he's saying like, unless someone's going to catch us at this, it's not our job to look into it. So the group that's supposed to look into these things for the Air Force is just saying flat out, no.

Right. So the Air Force lawyer, Dean Korsak, starts to figure out that his chain of command likely isn't going to do anything. And the criminal investigators don't seem they're going to do anything. Maybe no one's going to do anything. And so he looks around and goes to what he sees as his last resort, the independent watchdog for the military, the Department of Defense Inspector General's Office. And he reaches out through a hotline they have and sends them a message saying, essentially, I think I witnessed a war crime. I believe that it's required that we investigate.

I need your help. We'll be right back. So I want to go to the hotline. Okay. Put me where you were when you were notified about it. So Dave, what happens once Dean's tip hits the hotline at the Inspector General's office? So I was notified of it by my immediate supervisor. It lands on the desk of an experienced government employee and former Navy officer named Eugene Tate. He came in to me and said,

Gene, we received a hotline call that's related to your project. So we're going to take a look at it and see, you know. In a way, he was the perfect guy for this because not only did he have a lot of experience, but he'd already been working on a report about civilian casualty reporting in Syria and Iraq when this tip arrived. And so when this tip lands on his desk. I immediately start to try to find information that will help me support his claim or to see that it's bogus. He goes into the classified databases and he pulls up a lot of the video and other evidence that there is and he starts to watch it. When I looked at the video, my first thought was, holy shit, that was my first thought. And what he sees is, you know,

this large group of women and children huddled in a place where there doesn't seem to be a lot of action. Yes, I see people with weapons. Not a lot. I see, like, two people with weapons. There doesn't seem to be much going on. And then suddenly... Big boom.

And I mean big boom. He just describes this really big boom. And then... That takes up the whole screen? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And so he knows that he has to talk to the person who gave him this tip. So we went down and we interviewed him. Their mission is basically to decide, is this guy credible?

Because if it's a credible report, then regulations require that the military report and investigate it. I think we did about a three or four hour interview where we were just asking him questions about what he saw. And he comes away thinking that this guy is... This guy is extremely credible. Extremely credible. Everything he saw, his memory of the events, everything. And like I said, what he told us when we met with him was, I did this because I felt I had no other recourse. I'd been talking to my chain of command. I've done all this stuff, and every place I go, they try to shut me down. And very quickly, his team calls a meeting with their superiors at the inspector general's office and say, hey, this is potentially a war crime. This is big. We need to report it right away.

So how does he move forward? Well, he tries to start gathering evidence to suss that out. I immediately start using connections, and we obtained a copy of the CCAR, which is the Civilian Casualty Assessment Report. He gets his hands on some reports that look at the strike. When you read the actual narrative that was in the CCAR, it was, yeah, this doesn't make any sense at all type of stuff. And immediately he notices something odd. The number of confirmed casualty deaths doesn't match what he sees in the video. In fact, it's just a tiny fraction. of confirmed casualty deaths doesn't match what he sees in the video.

In fact, it's just a tiny fraction. And he can't figure out where the military is getting its numbers from. As an intel guy, when you're reading something, you always want to know what's the source and how did they come up with this conclusion. And they would say things in the narrative that I'm like, how did they get there? You know, because it wasn't sourced, it wasn't per this or according to this or whatever.

It was just like, it was stated as a fact. And then on the last page of the report, there was something else that really didn't make sense. There was a section that was reserved for the opinions of the operations officer and the legal officer, the military lawyer. I can't remember the way it is exactly worded, but it was basically they expressed that they had concerns with the, in this case, they called it the law of armed conflict. And there he found that both officers wrote they thought that a law of armed conflict violation, a war crime, may have happened. But then something strange happened. have happened. But then something strange happened. He got another copy of the report,

this time one that had been given to him by the command of the Special Operations Group. And that report left all of those comments out on the back page. It's not that it was redacted. It's that it's as if nothing had ever been written there. And he didn't know what to do with that. It seemed to him like someone was trying to cover something up. And so what does he do with all this contradictory information? Honestly, he doesn't know what to do because he's an experienced evaluator, but he's not a criminal investigator. He doesn't have the power to sort of dig into this and really get answers. And so he feels like what he has to do, what everyone at his organization has to do,

is just report it so that the top folks in the military can get to the bottom of it. We had a meeting where you literally go in with all the big wigs. And his team takes this information to their superiors. And we lay out everything. We explain to them that we've seen video. We explain to them all this stuff.

We think it's very serious. And they basically all just nod their heads and go, they don't really come to a decision. So there's no action? No action. So they draw up a memo that would do all of the work of notifying this and all their superior, the man who oversees their section, has to do is sign the memo and the notification will go forward.

And that memo goes unsigned. Wow. But he decides he has one more option. He's already working on that report that's broadly looking at problems with civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he figures, okay, if no one will report it, we can put it into this report because this report is going to go to Congress and it's going to go to top leaders at the Pentagon and they'll see it. But that project took over two years to complete.

For reasons that he can't really get a clear answer on, the report gets slowed, delayed. The report was written and rewritten and re-edited and edited numerous times by the leadership. and re-edited and edited numerous times by the leadership. And there was some belief that it was trying to... How do I say this? Downplay some of the issues that had occurred. I'll say it that way. And in the end, there's no mention of this strike anywhere in the report. It seems like if he was suspicious that this was a cover-up before, he's probably feeling pretty sure that it's a cover-up now. I don't know if he'd go that far, but he was

definitely confused. Things that he was trying to find answers to just weren't adding up. And he kept going to people, telling them that this needed to be reported. And he thought it was a pretty simple request to just do what the regulations say. But he kept running into roadblocks, getting the runaround, all sorts of stuff. And he did feel that by the end, no one wanted to hear what he had to say. There was one point where he said to me, man, I wish there was an inspector general for the inspector generals, you know? And so what happened to him eventually is he just grew kind of angry about it. And very vocally so. He criticized the decisions to take this stuff out.

And one day he was called into his supervisor's office and told that his contract wasn't being renewed. And very quickly after that, he was escorted out of the building by security. And does he think it has to do with him trying to push people to look into this? Of course, no one said it this way, but he feels that it's directly related to this airstrike case where he kept trying to get the office to do something and was unsuccessful. So it sounds like he's just at a dead end. Well, not quite. He figures he's got one move left. He goes to Congress and he sets up a meeting with the Senate Armed Services Committee staff, and he provides them with several pages of documentation,

you know, not giving away any classified information, but telling them where they can get it and everything that happened. And they say they'll look into it. And he feels like he's finally reached the right authorities and something's going to get done. And so he waits. And he waits.

And he waits. And three or four months go by and nothing's happening. And that's when out of the blue, I get a call from him. And the reason that he's calling me is I already knew about this strike. And I'd learned from other sources that it had been ordered by a classified special operations unit on the ground. And for months, I had been going around emailing and calling anyone I could find trying to piece this story together. And Eugene was this guy who I knew I had to get in touch with because he not only had studied it in detail, but he had written a report about it. And so I emailed him.

I called him. I never heard back for months. And then suddenly, here he is on the phone, and he's willing to talk. I mean, he was very clear. He'd tell me what he knew, but that he wasn't going to, you know, divulge any classified information or leak any classified materials, because of course, divulge any classified information or leak any classified materials because, of course, that's illegal. And it was interesting because there were a lot of things he couldn't tell me. You know, he couldn't even tell us even the name of the special operations group at the center of this because it's all classified. But my colleague Eric Schmidt and I were able to piece it together. And we figured out that the unit behind all of this was a secretive unit called Task Force 9.

And who is Task Force 9? That's kind of hard to say because so much of what they do is top secret. But, you know, basically they're a special operations force. We're pretty confident they're mostly made up of Army Delta Force commandos and Special Forces Green Berets. And their job was to basically be the ground troops that worked with local militias who are fighting the Islamic State. And most critically, their job was to call in the airstrikes from the coalition, because the coalition had this massive amount of air power that could have turned the whole ISIS caliphate into dust.

But they needed someone to take that power and essentially direct it. And that's what the group did. But, you know, we don't know much more about them than that because everything they do is classified. We were only able to patch together little parts of it. And one of them was a really intriguing report, top secret report that went through the inspector general's office. Eugene Tate refused to talk to me about it because it was so top secret, but we figured out parts of it on our own.

And in that report, the CIA had seen what Task Force Nine was doing, and they were upset about it. And they went to the inspector general and said, essentially, hey, in several airstrikes, this task force is killing a number of civilians and possibly breaking the law. And then we were able to figure out that the Air Force and other staff that were in the command center, they were seeing the same thing. They were seeing all sorts of strikes that seemed to be hitting targets where there may have been enemies, but civilians were getting hit too. And they started to notice something really odd that repeatedly in strike after strike, they were calling them in saying that these were self-defense strikes. But what does that mean?

Well, self-defense, there are rules for when you can hit a target. And a lot of times the people that decide whether those rules are being followed are in some command center somewhere. And they're going to go through it and they're going to give you a thumbs up or a thumbs down. But there is a way that you can skip all of that oversight very quickly by saying that you're under imminent threat and you need to defend yourself.

Under the law of war, that is always allowed. And that allowed the task force to skip all of the officers, all of the oversight, all of the lawyers that had rule books and talk directly to the aircraft that were going to hit their target. And so they could hit what they wanted to, essentially, with no one second-guessing them. Sort of short-circuiting directly to the airplane and skipping the lawyers and all of the steps they were supposed to go through for protection. Right. And, you know, it won't surprise you that no one in the military thinks that you shouldn't be able to do that when you need to. But what people in the operations center started seeing was that Task Force Nine seemed to be using this justification almost all of the time. Technically, they were supposed to be behind enemy lines. They're not

in the fight. And yet what we were told is that sometimes 80% of their strikes were being justified as, you know, we're under imminent harm, we need to call in self-defense. So it's essentially, this was supposed to be an extreme measure, but it had become a habit that they were relying on. It had become the status quo. And the people in the operations center would go back and sometimes review these strikes and look for evidence of self-defense. And they would never see, or at least rarely see, anything that showed that troops were under fire. And in the case of this strike that we've been talking about,

four days after it was marked down as self-defense, satellite imagery shows that coalition forces came in with a bulldozer and literally buried the evidence. In a real way, the deaths ofzer and literally buried the evidence. You know, in a real way, the deaths of women and children were covered up. So now there's really no way to get a precise count. The evidence is actually buried. I mean, the American military tried to make this the most precise and accountable air war in its history and report everything publicly and investigate every single casualty. And it held that up to show that it was being transparent and accountable.

But in fact, a lot of those processes were used to do the opposite. You know, you could hold up a report that said that nothing happened, even though it was totally clear, even to the military, that something had. And the thing is, like, all of this stuff is classified. We don't really get to see any of it. We don't know the scope. One of the few glimpses that we get into it is this one airstrike that all these guys were trying to report. Right. So what I'm taking away from this story then is that there really isn't any accountability when it comes to airstrikes in the U.S. military. Well, I think that there are people in the military that really want there to be accountability and

have worked hard to try and ensure that there's accountability. But the system that really want there to be accountability and have worked hard to try and ensure that there's accountability. But the system that they've created is still so flawed that it doesn't really tell us anything meaningful about, you know, how many civilians were actually killed. I mean, think about it. Here was a case where 70 people were killed, and they were killed in front of a high-definition colored drone camera that lots of military people saw. It was immediately reported, and then it was reported again and again, and the system was unable to respond in any logical way. I mean, if the system can't handle something as obvious as that, what can it handle? Dave, thank you. Thank you.

After the New York Times sent its findings to U.S. Central Command, which oversaw the air war in Syria, the command acknowledged the strikes for the first time. Central Command, which oversaw the air war in Syria, the command acknowledged the strikes for the first time. In a statement, they said the strikes were justified and that 80 people were killed, including 16 fighters and four civilians. As for the other 60 dead, the statement said it was not clear that they were civilians, in part because women and children in the Islamic State sometimes took up arms. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Thank you. objections, it is so decided. On Saturday, at the UN Climate Conference in Glasgow,

negotiators from nearly 200 countries struck a deal designed to speed up efforts to fight climate change. But the agreement failed to reach the breakthrough needed to keep the Earth from heating more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, a critical threshold past which scientists warn the dangers to the climate grow dramatically. In the final hours of talks, negotiators watered down their wording on fossil fuels, calling on countries to phase down the use of coal instead of phase out.

I have an intervention from Switzerland. Switzerland, I give you the floor. On behalf of the EIG, we would like to express our profound disappointment I have an intervention from Switzerland. Switzerland, I give you the floor. On behalf of the EIG, we would like to express our profound disappointment that the language that we have agreed on, on coal and fossil fuel subsidies, has been further watered down as a result of an intransparent process. Leaders rose to object to the last-minute change. And island nations said the agreement fell far short of what they need. It will be too late for the Maldives. I would like to remind us all that we have 98 months to halve global emissions. The difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees is a death sentence for us. And. On Friday, a judge in Los Angeles released pop star Britney Spears from a restrictive legal arrangement called a conservatorship that had stripped the singer of control over almost

every aspect of her life for nearly 14 years. This is a monumental day for Britney Spears. It's also a somber day for me, for Britney, and I think for a lot of us who have been following conservatorships and how they operate. Speaking outside the court, her lawyer said the agreement was terminated immediately and that her case had shined a light on abuses in the wider system. As a result of Britney, Congress has heard her at the federal level. The United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives are looking at this conservatorship and conservatorships generally with an eye toward passing legislation to ensure that people are not abused. If this happened to Britney, it can happen to anybody.

Today's episode was produced by Luke Vander Ploeg, Daniel Guimet, and Claire Tennis-Sketter. It was edited by Larissa Anderson and Michael Benoit, and features original music by Marion Lozano. It was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brumberg and Ben

Landsverk of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.