| Number 376 | June 8, 2007 |
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This Week: Update on the Secret U.S. Air Wars
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Greetings, It was back in February of 2006 that I first wrote in any depth about what I call the "secret" air wars being conducted by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. There may well be other air wars underway, but they are so secret that I don't know about them yet. For example, a headline in the Voice of America on January 9th of this year read: "US Air Strikes in Somalia Have Political Ramifications." They were referring to strikes in January after which "Witnesses reported many dead." I did an extensive update on the air wars in March of this year, and this edition is another update. I don't normally revisit a subject so frequently, but this seems to be one of the biggest untold stories related to the so-called "War On Terror," so I have been following it closely. I hope that readers will take to heart the information in this issue and call or write your local and national media and demand that they begin to report on it. Yours for peace, Nygaard |
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A front-page article in the May 8th USA Today ran with the headline, "General: Air Fleet Wearing Down; Warplanes Have Cracked Wings." The lead paragraph read: "The Air Force's fleet of warplanes is older than ever and wearing out faster because of heavy use in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the service's top combat commander. Gen. Ronald Keys, who leads the Air Combat Command, points to cracked wings on A-10 attack planes and frayed electrical cables on U-2 spy planes." Heavy use of A-10 attack planes in Iraq and Afghanistan? Sounds like an "air war" is going on, doesn't it?
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Back in March I wrote at some length about what I called the "secret" air wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I called them "secret" due to the almost-total failure of the U.S. media to report on the air war, or even to acknowledge that there is such a thing. Here's an update on this huge story. Air War In Iraq An article was sent out on Tuesday of this week (June 5th) by the Associated Press, headlined "U.S. Doubles Air Attacks in Iraq." The AP reported that "U.S. warplanes have again stepped up attacks in Iraq, dropping bombs at more than twice the rate of a year ago." The AP story goes on to mention that the air escalation "appears to be accompanied by a rise in Iraqi civilian casualties." And, as always, the AP report that "The U.S. military itself says it doesn't track civilian casualties." The story was not very well-done, as it was poorly-sourced, the figures cited were ultra-conservative, and AP's interpretation of the numbers is suspect. But, still, it was SOMETHING. For anyone to benefit from a news wire story, of course, some news outlets have to pick it up and run it. This AP story, however, was completely ignored by the daily corporate media in this country. (The International Herald Tribune ran it, but their audience is mostly not in the U.S.) I wouldn't even have noticed the piece it if it were not for alert reader Ed, who saw it on Yahoo! News, and sent it along. Thanks, Ed! The final sentence from the AP story was this one: "Air attacks in Iraq are still relatively low compared with the numbers of weapons dropped in Afghanistan – 929 this year as of May 15." Air War In Afghanistan It's hard to tell if there actually are fewer weapons being dropped in Iraq than in Afghanistan, but the AP's claim that "the numbers of weapons dropped in Afghanistan [was] 929 this year as of May 15" is a bit hard to believe. That would amount to an average of less than 7 "weapons dropped" per day. A look at the official Air Force reports from a couple of recent days—May 25th and 31st—leads one to believe that the true total is higher. First, May 31st: "In Afghanistan, an Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle dropped a guided bomb unit-38 on an enemy compound reported to have been the origin of a mortar attack on coalition troops in Musa Qal'eh."; "Two F-15Es dropped GBU-38s...in Sangin..."; "An F-15E fired a GBU-38 at an insurgent building in Qawryah"; "Also in Sangin, Royal Air Force GR-9 Harriers fired enhanced Paveway II munitions..."; "An A-10 dropped a general-purpose 500-pound bomb..." "The B-1 also dropped a GBU-31 on an insurgent compound in Garmsir." A "GBU" is a "guided bomb unit." That is, a so-called "smart bomb." "Paveway II munitions" are laser-guided weapons, and could be bombs, rockets, missiles, or something else. I'm not an expert in these matters, but the important thing to see here is that there were a MINIMUM of eight "weapons dropped" on this single day. A look at May 25th revealed a similar list, this time with a minimum of 14 "weapons dropped," including a couple from British planes. As I said in March, you can see all this yourself by going online to http://www.af.mil/news/ . For the week ending June 4th, official Air Force numbers have a total of 281 "close-air-support missions" being flown by the Air Force in Afghanistan, while the number for Iraq in the same period was 427. If those are "average" weeks, then the U.S. Air Force had conducted more than 57,000 such missions this year as of May 15. If the AP's report of 929 "weapons dropped" is true, then that means that about one weapon was dropped for every 62 missions. The AP story quotes an Army Lieutenant Colonel saying that "close air support" missions "usually involve a flyover show of force or surveillance work, rather than bombing," that is not at all clear. If any Nygaard Notes readers want to do a little research project—a tedious and time-consuming one—you could go day by day and count the "weapons dropped" so far in 2007, and we could tell the Associated Press about it. This is supposed to be what "the media" does, but I think the ongoing budget cuts in the industry are making this kind of research increasingly unlikely. |
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I recently did a Lexis/Nexis database search of the electronic news media (including ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, CNN, Fox, and more) for the three months since I last reported on this issue. Looking for the words "Afghanistan" and "air war," I found a total of ZERO citations. The same search, focusing on "major newspapers" in the United States found ONE citation. That was a very interesting one, found in a front-page article in USA Today of April 2nd. It was a short article and was mostly about Pakistan, but after noting that "U.S. and NATO forces are making progress" in Afghanistan, the article concluded with these words: "Coalition aircraft have increased their attacks on Taliban forces, Air Force records show. In 2005, coalition aircraft dropped bombs on enemy forces 176 times. Last year they did so 1,770 times. ‘Now we are there with a persistent presence,' said Air Force Lt. Gen. Gary North, commander of Central Air Forces, which oversees the air war in Afghanistan." And that—a single sentence in the final paragraph of a single story in USA Today—is the ONLY time so far in 2007 that the phrase "air war" has been seen in U.S. newspapers in reference to Afghanistan, as far as I can determine. This is despite the fact that there have been more than 50 U.S. missions flown by the U.S. air force every day for the past who-knows-how-many months. When I changed "air war" to "air strikes" and added the word "civilians," I came up with 40 articles, but only one appeared in the U.S. press. That was the May 4th Washington Post, in a story headlined "U.S. Reviews Afghan Claims Of Civilian Toll in Airstrikes." Look Not for Air "War" Despite the refusal to refer by name to the remote-control violence that is the ongoing air war, there has been quite a bit of reporting on civilian deaths in both Iraq and Afghanistan recently. I saw this when I changed my database search terms from "Afghanistan" and "air war" to "Afghanistan," "air strikes" and "civilians." Suddenly I came up with for the same period turned up 40 articles in English-language newspapers. Only one of them was in the United States, however. The search results change again when the word "air" is avoided. Searching for "Afghanistan" and "U.S. forces" and "civilians," one suddenly comes up with 90 articles. A number of these have appeared in the U.S. press, likely because of "the military's growing concern that recent civilian casualties have led to widespread ill will among Afghans and could jeopardize military operations," as the NY Times reported on May 9th. Perhaps 78,000 Iraqis were killed by bombs, missiles, rockets, or cannon rounds from coalition aircraft in the first three years of the war, and the killing continues. I don't know of any estimates of civilian deaths in Afghanistan. The devastation caused by U.S. air power is one of the major stories of the current U.S. wars. Yet searches like the ones reported here show that, while this story is reported to some extent around the world, it is not being reported in the country that conducts the attacks. |
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The article reported on "a series of recent U.S.-led military attacks that have resulted in civilian casualties, provoking angry public protests." The "protests" are news. And the U.S. killing of civilians, to some extent, has been news, as well. But the article parrots the standard U.S. response to their killings when it says that "The airstrikes and casualties are a direct result of the stepped-up Taliban insurgency..." The sixth paragraph of the Post article was tremendously interesting to me, as it was a 100-word summary of U.S. air attacks so far in 2007. Here it is: "Almost every day, warplanes drop bombs, shoot rockets and fire cannon rounds into suspected enemy locations in southern and eastern Afghanistan. Generally, there tend to be more airstrikes in Afghanistan than in the war in Iraq. Since the beginning of this month, according to data released by Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for Afghanistan, Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, B-1 heavy bombers have struck Afghanistan four times, F-15 fighters have done so twice, and A-10 ground-attack jets have fired their cannons three times. Also, a British Royal Air Force Harrier jet carried out bombing." That summary is wrong or misleading in every particular. As I never tire of pointing out, the Air Force publishes a "Daily Airpower Summary" (DAS) five days a week, access to which is available to anyone in the world with access to the internet. Certainly the Washington Post could find it. I examined what these reports said in the period referenced by the Post, May 1 to May12, and here's what I found. The Post: "B-1 heavy bombers have struck Afghanistan four times." The DAS details at least 7 strikes by B-1s. The Post: "F-15 fighters have done so twice." The DAS reports at least 4 strikes by F-15s. The Post: "A-10 ground-attack jets have fired their cannons three times." That number accurately reflects what was reported in the DAS, but the Post implies that this is all the A-10s were up to. The DAS tells us that the A-10s also dropped at least 7 bombs during the period. In summary, the Post's summary lists four bomb attacks on Afghanistan from May 1 to May 12. The official Air Force summary lists at least 18. There is no particular reason to think that these official reports are accurate, since there is an obvious political motivation for the Air Force to under-report their activities. But it seems unlikely that they would report strikes that never happened and, in any case, the Post should have checked the public record against the press release they apparently got, and attempted to reconcile them. That could have been revealing. The General Pattern I don't mean to pick on the Post. It is fairly widespread throughout the media to see Pentagon handouts reported as fact. For example, let's look briefly at the Associated Press story on the air war that I talk about elsewhere in this issue (the one that was not picked up by the Washington Post or anyone else in the U.S. besides Yahoo! News). The AP story said that "In the first 4 1/2 months of 2007, American aircraft dropped 237 bombs and missiles in support of ground forces in Iraq." Since a very conservative estimate of the total number of missions flown is 10,000, that would mean that U.S. aircraft dropped only one bomb or fired one missile for every 42 missions they flew last year. I suppose that is possible, but this writer wouldn't report it without verification, as the AP did, citing only "U.S. Air Force figures." The AP reported the 2007 number of bomb and missile attacks as "already surpassing the 229 expended in all of 2006." 229 attacks would be an average of 2 bombs or missiles every three days. Again, this is hard to reconcile with other reports, and, again, the AP's only source is "U.S. Air Force figures." The AP reports that "Air Force and Navy ‘close air support' missions ... usually involve a flyover show of force or surveillance work, rather than bombing." Again, the source for this questionable claim is Army Lt. Col. Bryan Cox, who has an obvious interest in understating any civilian casualties caused by U.S. actions. Yet his uncorroborated statement is reported as fact. And so it goes.
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