An analysis of confidential Pentagon documents by The Times’s Visual Investigations unit found that a number of allegations of civilian casualties had been dismissed as “noncredible” based on flawed reviews of evidence — oversights that Times reporters were able to detect using resources widely available to the public. That included websites like Google Maps and Wikimapia, a crowdsourced mapping platform. Typically, U.S. military assessors have access to far more robust resources, such as strike logs and video feeds of airstrikes.
“I’ll tell you what it is: That’s negligence,” said Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon senior intelligence analyst. “That is plain and simple. It is the most basic level of investigation that they should be doing, and not to do it is completely negligent.”