Posted on 06/29/2002 9:31:13 PM PDT by Clive
To no one's surprise, a joint Canadian-American inquiry into the accidental bombing of Canadian troops in Afghanistan reached the same conclusions yesterday as a Canadian inquiry that was simultaneously released.
That is, that two American pilots were "the direct cause" of the incident in which four members of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry died and eight others were wounded.
The American inquiry - with a Canadian brigadier-general as its co-chairman - reached the same conclusion as that of a separate Canadian panel headed by retired general Maurice Baril.
Both reports said the lead American pilot mistook for hostile fire what turned out to be a live fire training exercise by Canadian troops, who were following the appropriate procedures.
The lead pilot asked and received permission to determine the co-ordinates of the ground fire.
The second pilot - identified earlier this month by The New York Times as Maj. Harry Schmidt of the Illinois Air National Guard - then asked permission to fire his 20 mm cannon at the target. Despite being instructed to "hold fire" by a nearby AWACS plane, he declared he was "rolling in self-defence" and dropped a 250-kilogram laser-guided bomb on the Canadian troops.
Taken together, the reports criticized the pilots for a failure of discipline, technique and leadership. Little of this is new.
The New York Times reported most of it earlier this month, after obtaining a leak from the U.S.-led inquiry. In addition, the day after the bombing in April, the media had already uncovered the basic chain of events.
While we never saw the need for more than one inquiry, this should, at least, help assure Canadians that nothing has been covered up.
While it's true accidents in war are inevitable, let's remember this one could apparently have been avoided had a pilot simply obeyed the instruction to "hold fire." We're sure he'll regret his mistake for the rest of his life, but as for the issue of disciplining one or both pilots, that should be left to the U.S. military, not the criminal courts. Clearly, this was an awful accident.
But not a crime.
Friendly fire really s_cks the worst. It is so insulting.
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