Hypocrisy? Gen. Petraeus slams Taliban for 'indiscriminate' civilian kills in Afghanistan
News from same day:
US-led strike kills dozens of civilians
(Maybe the US strike was not 'indiscriminate' -- they simply 'discriminated' :-p )
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Hypocrisy!
(2 posts)-
Posted 1 year ago on 25 Jul 2010 9:26 #
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aftab arif
MemberPetraeus' captured 'Taliban' were civilians
During his intensive initial round of media interviews as commander in Afghanistan in August 2010, General David Petraeus released figures to the news media that claimed spectacular success for raids by Special Operations Forces (SOF): in a 90-day period from May through July, SOF units had captured 1,355 rank-and-file Taliban, killed another 1,031, and killed or captured 365 middle or high-ranking Taliban.
The claims of huge numbers of Taliban captured and killed continued through the rest of 2010. In December, Petraeus' command said a total of 4,100 Taliban rank and file had been captured in the previous six months and 2,000 had been killed.
Those figures were critical to creating a new media narrativehailing the success of SOF operations as reversing what had been a losing US strategy in Afghanistan.
But it turns out that more than 80% of those called captured Taliban fighters were released within days of having been picked up, because they were found to have been innocent civilians, according to official US military data.
Even more were later released from the main US detention facility at Bagram air base called the Detention Facility in Parwan after having their files reviewed by a panel of military officers.
The timing of Petraeus' claim of Taliban fighters captured or killed, moreover, indicates that he knew that four out of five of those he was claiming as "captured Taliban rank and file" were not Taliban fighters at all.
Checking on the claims of the number of Taliban commanders and rank-and-file killed is impossible, but the claims of Taliban captured could be checked against official data on admission of detainees added to Parwan.
Posted 11 months ago on 13 Jun 2011 10:09 #
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