It's a shame that an escalation in civilian deaths is viewed as an evil, but that there are civilian deaths to escalate is viewed as a necessity of foreign policy.
Or, you know, the Intercept article is primarily reporting on the current state of affairs (under Trump's watch), and specifically on a spike in civilian deaths in 2019. Not every article has to cover the entire war.
> The period in which The Intercept documented the escalation of violence in Wardak falls neatly between the first round of formal U.S.-Taliban talks in late 2018 and the signing of the Doha agreement early this year. The rate of 01 night raids, and the number of civilians killed as a result, fell dramatically last winter and stopped almost entirely this spring.
The timeline of the article is December 2018 through September 2019, when Trump was Commander-in-Chief. Does it not make sense then that he would be more pertinent to the story? I think it provides the correct historical context when it makes sense in the reporting.
And why would anyone need to draw their "own conclusions" when Greenwald has been very explicit as to why he left.
From the article, it appears these death squads and their attacks occurred primarily during the Trump administration, as a result of a shift in policy: "Pompeo, then-director of the CIA, indicated that the agency, too, would pursue a more hawkish posture. The CIA, he said, “must be aggressive, vicious, unforgiving, relentless." And:
"The period in which The Intercept documented the escalation of violence in Wardak falls neatly between the first round of formal U.S.-Taliban talks in late 2018 and the signing of the Doha agreement early this year."
I can hardly say I know enough to clear Bush or Biden of using death squads, but it does seem like the major escalation and change in tactics occurred between January 21, 2017 and today.
> The period in which The Intercept documented the escalation of violence in Wardak falls neatly between the first round of formal U.S.-Taliban talks in late 2018 and the signing of the Doha agreement early this year. The rate of 01 night raids, and the number of civilians killed as a result, fell dramatically last winter and stopped almost entirely this spring.