Tag: Pentagon

  • Deadly US drone strike in Kabul did not break law, says Pentagon

    Deadly US drone strike in Kabul did not break law, says Pentagon

    Following an investigation, a Pentagon inspector general said that a United States (US) airstrike that killed 10 civilians in Afghanistan was a mistake but did not violate any laws and doesn’t recommend any disciplinary action, reported Al Jazeera.

    US Air Force Lieutenant General (Lt Gen) Sami Said stated: “They all have a genuine belief based on the information they had and the interpretation, that was a threat to US forces, an imminent threat to US forces. That’s a mistake. It’s a regrettable mistake. It’s an honest mistake. I understand the consequences, but it’s not criminal conduct, random conduct, negligence.”

    Lt Gen Said admitted that there had been execution errors and communication breakdowns among the US forces at the time that led to civilian casualties.

    Said was asked to investigate the August 29 drone strike on a white Toyota Corolla Sedan, which killed nine family members, including seven children and a man who worked for a US aid group.

    According to the US air force general, the forces believed that the car they were following was an imminent threat as the US military had intelligence that Daesh militants were planning a fresh attack on the evacuation operations but they followed the wrong car.

    He revealed, “We actually never ended up tracking the actual Toyota Corolla.”

    He also admitted that the people involved in conducting the operation thought the house at the site of the target was empty.

    “They were convinced that the compound didn’t have children in it. It turns out to be wrong,” he said. None of the individuals conducting the operation noticed a child entering the target area just two minutes before the attack was launched.

    According to Dawn, Washington is working to pay financial reparations to the victims’ families but nothing has been finalised.

  • Biden returns billions Trump approved for US-Mexico border wall

    Biden returns billions Trump approved for US-Mexico border wall

    President of the United States (US) Joe Biden has decided to hold back funds of Pentagon that were directed by former President Donald Trump to build a wall on the US-Mexico border.

    The funds will be now used to fix the damages that were caused while the wall was under construction.

    According to reports, an official from the US government said that the Pentagon will begin cancelling all wall projects using the diverted funds, and the administration will take steps to return remaining unobligated military construction forms their appropriated purpose.

    The decision came when Joe Biden took over the office and signed a “proclamation” that directed the Pentagon to halt the flow of money to build the border wall, which was already ruled illegal by the federal court of US in June 2020.

    The Department of Homeland Security also announced plans to repair holes in flood levees at the Rio Grande Valley in Texas and fix soil erosion in San Diego created by border wall construction, neither of which will involve creating more barriers.

    The amount of money that the Trump administration allocated to build the wall was as high as $14 billion, says the official.

    According to the background details, the lawmakers of bipartisan put pressure on the government to make repairments against the damage caused due to the holes that drilled for wall construction.

    On this occasion, an influential American politician and attorney Ted Cruz commented that “I am pleased President Biden and the Department of Homeland Security are listening and now moving to shore up the levee wall system that had been unthoughtful. The repairs are necessary, crucial, and urgently needed.”

    In response, the chief critic senator Rick Scott uttered that “How can Biden possibly justify stopping wall construction?”, calling on Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to “immediately explain President Biden’s ridiculous order, how it is compliant with federal law and the awful consequences it will have on the current crisis.”

  • Three UFO videos by US Navy pilots released officially

    Three UFO videos by US Navy pilots released officially

    The Pentagon — headquarters of the United States (US) Department of Defense — has released three declassified videos that show US Navy pilots encountering what appear to be unidentified flying objects, The Guardian reported.

    The grainy videos, which the Pentagon says depict “unexplained aerial phenomena”, were previously leaked, with some believing they show alien UFOs.

    The Pentagon said it released the footage to “to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real or whether or not there is more to the videos,” a statement on the Department of Defense website said.

    “After a thorough review, the department has determined that the authorized release of these unclassified videos does not reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems, and does not impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena,” the statement said.

    The videos had been “circulating in the public domain after unauthorized releases in 2007 and 2017”, the statement said, adding that “the aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as ‘unidentified’”.

    The three videos show what the pilots saw during training flights in 2004 and 2015. Two of the videos were published by the New York Times in 2017. The other video was released by the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science group, a media and private science organisation.

    WATCH VIDEO:

    The 2004 video shows an incident that happened 100 miles out over the Pacific, according to the New York Times. Two Navy fighter pilots found an oblong object hovering above the water. It then flew quickly away. “It accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen,” one of the pilots, Commander David Fravor, told the NYT.

    The 2015 videos show objects moving quickly through the sky, one of them seeming to spin in the air. “Look at that thing, dude!” a pilot says. “It’s rotating!”

    The release of the videos by the Pentagon adds to the legitimacy of the videos and will spur more speculation that humans have recently interacted with extraterrestrials.