The Lever published a shocking report showing that the Pentagon has “lost” an entire year’s worth of records about allegations of military misconduct in the Middle East. This is shocking and worth your time to read but allow us to re-publish a summary:
“Government investigators found evidence of at least 47 allegations of U.S. military war crimes between 2012 and 2022 as the United States waged an air and ground war against the Islamic State in the Middle East and Africa. But a significant portion of information about alleged war crimes during that time was missing.
Military personnel were not able to provide records of potential war-crime allegations from the sub-command center overseeing operations in Iraq and Syria for all of 2015, when President Barack Obama oversaw thousands of airstrikes in the countries. And records that would have detailed allegations in 2017 were missing from the military’s Middle East command center.”
These allegations come from an investigation from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO).
In 2021, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin promised that the military would be more transparent about war crimes. Right.
