JSOC in Gardez, Afghanistan, in February 2010

Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning journalist for The Nation, has just come out with a new book, "Dirty Wars," and a documentary of the same name. Scahill focuses on covert operations conducted by the CIA’s Special Activities Division and the Joint Special Operations Command. At around 32:00 minutes into this interview on New York's WNYC public radio station, Scahill discusses an incident at Gardez in Afghanistan in February 2010 in which JSOC killed several civilians including two pregnant women and instead of admitting that they had made a mistake based on bad information, they dug the bullets out of the women's bodies to cover their tracks and blamed the women's deaths first on the Taliban and then on honor killings by the women's relatives. Later, the cruel facts came out and JSOC's head Admiral McRaven had to apologize.

After a Google search, all I could find was this (curiously undated) report on the ABC News web site that covers the episode as well as the gruesome cover up with the cute hook that McRaven gave the aggrieved family a gift of two sheep, following Afghan custom.

I think very few people saw even this one report at the time; I certainly did not. Many thanks to Scahill for resurrecting this atrocity from the information void.