Tag Archives: bombing civilians

Satellites Reveal Depth of Destruction Vietnam War

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During the Vietnam War, the United States dropped more than 8 million tons of bombs and sprayed 74 million liters of Agent Orange and other herbicides in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Nearly 50 years after the war’s end, the deadly impacts of these campaigns persist: Unexploded ordnance continues to maim and kill, while hot spots of dioxin, a potent toxin in the herbicides, might still be contributing to cancers and birth defects today. Now, using declassified military satellite photos, scientists have identified the likely locations of these hidden dangers, which could help direct remediation and cleanup efforts based on research, presented on December 11, 2024 at the annual conference of the American Geophysical Union (AGU)

Identifying these risky areas in the modern landscape is challenging. Tenacious vegetation growth has long since hidden the scars of war, and historical records of bombing and herbicide spraying are both incomplete and imprecise. That’s why Philipp Barthelme, a graduate student in geoscience at the University of Edinburgh, and his colleagues turned to declassified satellite photos from the KH-9 HEXAGON and KH-4a/b CORONA missions, which were sharp enough to reveal details as small as 0.6 meters.

Although the satellite data alone cannot identify unexploded bombs, the researchers surmised they are most likely to be found in regions that were heavily bombarded. The craters from the exploded bombs stand out in the satellite images as bright white splotches. The researchers used machine learning, a kind of artificial intelligence, to pinpoint more than 500,000 such craters in Vietnam’s Quang Tri province, which was the most heavily bombed during the war, as well as a region near the borders of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

In collaboration with the nonprofit Conflict and Environment Observatory, Barthelme also used satellite data to study herbicide spraying in southern Laos. The U.S. sprayed these compounds in secretive wartime campaigns to destroy crops and improve visibility by defoliating the lush jungles. However, the dioxin in the herbicides killed and debilitated hundreds of thousands of people…The zones of defoliation from the herbicides appear in satellite data as bright, sinuous lines….

Excerpts from Maya Wei-Haas, Declassified satellite photos reveal impacts of Vietnam War, Science, Dec. 14, 2024

Killing them like Flies: the Enduring Myth of Precision Strikes

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The American-led war against the Islamic State began in August 2014. …In the effort to expel ISIS from Iraq and Syria, the coalition has conducted more than 27,500 strikes to date [Nov. 2017], deploying everything from Vietnam-era B-52 bombers to modern Predator drones. That overwhelming air power has made it possible for local ground troops to overcome heavy resistance and retake cities throughout the region. “U.S. and coalition forces work very hard to be precise in airstrikes,” Maj. Shane Huff, a spokesman for the Central Command, told us, and as a result “are conducting one of the most precise air campaigns in military history.”

The US military planners describe a target-selection process grounded in meticulously gathered intelligence, technological wizardry, carefully designed bureaucratic hurdles and extraordinary restraint. Intelligence analysts pass along proposed targets to “targeteers,” who study 3-D computer models as they calibrate the angle of attack. A team of lawyers evaluates the plan, and — if all goes well — the process concludes with a strike so precise that it can, in some cases, destroy a room full of enemy fighters and leave the rest of the house intact.

The coalition usually announces an airstrike within a few days of its completion. It also publishes a monthly report assessing allegations of civilian casualties. Those it deems credible are generally explained as unavoidable accidents — a civilian vehicle drives into the target area moments after a bomb is dropped, for example. The coalition reports that since August 2014, it has killed tens of thousands of ISIS fighters and, according to our tally of its monthly summaries, 466 civilians in Iraq.

NY Times reporting…found that one in five of the coalition strikes we identified resulted in civilian death, a rate more than 31 times that acknowledged by the coalition. It is at such a distance from official claims that, in terms of civilian deaths, this may be the least transparent war in recent American history. Our reporting, moreover, revealed a consistent failure by the coalition to investigate claims properly or to keep records that make it possible to investigate the claims at all. While some of the civilian deaths we documented were a result of proximity to a legitimate ISIS target, many others appear to be the result simply of flawed or outdated intelligence that conflated civilians with combatants. In this system, Iraqis are considered guilty until proved innocent. Those who survive the strikes, people like…remain marked as possible ISIS sympathizers, with no discernible path to clear their names.

Excerpts from AZMAT KHAN and ANAND GOPA, The Uncounted, New York Times, Nov. 16, 2017