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.