Afghan airstrike triggered by single informant
The Washington Post reported yesterday that the NATO airstrike that killed numerous Afghan civilians was based on intelligence received from a single informant, in violation of command policy. According to the Post:
The decision to bomb the tankers based largely on a single human intelligence source appears to violate the spirit of a tactical directive aimed at reducing civilian casualties that was recently issued by U.S. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the new commander of the NATO mission in Afghanistan. The directive states that NATO forces cannot bomb residential buildings based on a sole source of information.
The civilian equivalent to the McChrystal directive is the corroboration requirement, which comes in a variety of forms. A dozen or so states have an accomplice corroboration requirement stating that no defendant can be convicted based solely on the uncorroborated testimony of an accomplice. Texas has a relatively new and important informant corroboration requirement which prohibits the conviction of any drug defendant based solely on the testimony of a single informant. Texas promulgated its rule after the 1999 Tulia debacle, in which a single undercover narcotics agent falsely charged a large percentage of the town's black population, many of whom were convicted without any corroborating witnesses or evidence. The California legislature has twice passed legislation that would require corroboration for jailhouse informants--Governor Schwarzenegger has vetoed it both times. And while criminal snitches have unique problems that distinguish them from military, national security, and other kinds of informants, all classes of informants share deep unreliability risks. The NATO airstrike provides yet more evidence of the value of having and honoring corroboration requirements.
Comments
I don\\\'t believe that the assessment that the airstrike was \\\"triggered by [a] single informant\\\" is
entirely accurate. According to the Washington Post article, two NATO fuel trucks were
hijacked by the Taliban, but became stuck in the mud outside an Afghan village. A point that the
Washington Post article does not discuss, but which the New York Times
picked up (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/world/europe/08afghan.html), was the statement
of the German defense ministry spokesman that the strike was based not just on the informant\\\'s
information, but from surveillance by a B-1 bomber and two F-15s, as well as an additional
unnamed classified intelligence source. (Given some of the past releases about \\\"classified
sources,\\\" there is certainly some basis for skepticism about the existence of this additional
source. If, however, the spokesman was lying or exaggerating about this additional source, then
arguing about the corroboration doctrine becomes merely an intellectual exercise. If the
government will falsify or exaggerate evidence to facially satisfy the corroboration doctrine, then
such a doctrine provides no real restriction on the government\\\'s activities in the first place.)
The Post article also makes careful (and strategic) use of qualifiers: that the decision was based
\\\"largely\\\" on a single informant\\\'s testimony; that it \\\"appears\\\" to violate \\\"the spirit\\\" of the
directive. These qualifiers indicate to me that these assessments are the Post reporter\\\'s bare
opinion; neither the Post nor the NYT cite any of the relevant authorities as making a similar
assessment. Indeed, based on the reported facts in both articles, the strike did not violate the
corroboration doctrine in letter or in spirit. Taliban fighters hijacked valuable fuel trucks, but
they became stuck. An informant notified NATO commanders that the Taliban was trying to
move the truck. Aerial surveillance from three planes, as well as another intelligence source,
corroborated the information from the informant.
Nor was this a case in which the informant\\\'s tip bore no resemblance to reality--the survivors of
the attack agreed that Taliban fighters had in fact hijacked the trucks and were trying to move
them when the airstrike came. The reason that the airstrike also killed innocent villagers was that
the Taliban had conscripted the villagers to assist in moving the trucks. The informant, from an
unknown vantage point, saw dozens of people helping the hijackers to get the fuel trucks moving.
It is not difficult to understand how the informant could conclude that the people in question
were in league with the hijackers.
Other factors contributed to this incident as well. There is little doubt that the commanders made
a quick decision to try to bomb the truck before the Taliban could free it--in retrospect, an overly
quick decision. Also, according to the New York Times article, the sector in question was
patrolled by German troops, and Germany has placed \\\"strict limits on the operations of its troops,
which, in practice, means they can move around only during certain hours of the day, whether in
convoys or on foot.\\\" Thus, even though it would have been preferable to rush German troops to
the site to investigate, the German commander did not have the authority to do so.
Based on the articles, it seems to me that placing the majority of the blame for this decision on
the informant -- or on the corroboration doctrine -- oversimplifies the point. There are multiple
causes for the loss of innocent life in this incident: the Taliban\\\'s lack of any compunction for
putting civilians in the line of fire; information that was accurate, but only partially so; a hasty
decision process; and an inability (or unwillingness) to send ground forces to investigate the
situation.
To anonymous -- I accept your qualifications, and was not suggesting that the informant was the only problem here. Rather, I was interested in the fact that NATO restricts reliance on a single human source, in ways that are informative for civilian criminal law. It is also true more generally that informants are often just one piece of a larger puzzle, for example making other weak information look stronger.