The Taliban took responsibility for the attack. The Farah Provincial government said all the casualties worked for the same private security company, and that there were a number of wounded.

The Afghan national police were reportedly sent to the area to track down those responsible for the attack. So far there don’t appear to have been any arrested.

The incident is the first major incident in Bakwa District since July, when Taliban forces captured a number of deminers in the area. Six of the captives were killed, and several others were eventually released.

The civilians were killed when NATO launched an air strike against a vehicle. Ground troops had previously killed six people who got out of the vehicle in the Farah Province then ordered an air strike against it. When they searched the scene they found a woman and two children had been killed in the strike.

Meanwhile in the northern Jowzjan Province NATO helicopters were called in to attack “insurgents” that the area. They fired a hellfire missile which killed at least three police and wounded several others.

In both cases NATO officials expressed “deep regret” for the killings and promised “step-by-step investigating into what went wrong.” The attacks were just the latest in a series of strikes throughout the week that left a number of civilians dead.

On Wednesday hundreds of Afghans launched a protest over the killing of three civilians in a night raid. NATO also admitted to killing a farmer in Kandahar. NATO also admitted to air strikes against a home on Sunday which killed at least five civilians

WikiLeaks has been reported to be in possession of the video in question for months, which shows the May 5 2009 US air strike against a village in Farah Province.

Afghan investigators concluded that the attack killed upwards of 140 civilians, and that more than half of them were children. The US claimed the villagers deliberately exaggerated the toll to get more compensation from the military.

While massive death tolls in air strikes have been pretty common over the course of the Afghan War, the repeated changes in official US stories on the incident (including an initial claim that the whole attack was a myth invented by the Taliban) and the secrecy surrounding the internal probe, the video could deal a massive blow to the claims about the attack.

The wildcard in all of this is comments from officials that the military “didn’t follow the rules” in the Farah killings, which given the shocking nature of the last WikiLeaks video, which the Pentagon insists shows troops acting appropriately, has sparked enormous speculation about what the video might reveal.

On May 5, 2009, US aircrafts bombed a number of homes in the Afghan village of Abdul Basir Khan, in Farah Province. The death toll according to Afghan officials was upwards of 140 civilians.

The Pentagon initially claimed that the entire incident was made up and that the Taliban had pre-killed all the civilians and stored the bodies in buildings before tricking the US into bombing those buildings. They later conceded to have killed 26 people, but insisted that “no one will ever” know the exact numbers. They also claimed that the planes had no idea any civilians were in the area.

Exactly what is on the video is unknown at present, but last week’s video showed that military claims that the Reuters employees were killed in a “battle” were shown as demonstrably false, as there was never a battle and the helicopters clearly attacked a group of people walking casually down the street.

Centcom insisted that the Iraq video was “taken out of context.” Secretary of Defense Robert Gates likewise admitted that the video was “unfortunate” but insisted that the troops had acted appropriately and that the matter would not harm the US image abroad.

Since the release of the video WikiLeaks’ profile has grown enormously, but so has the harassment it faces from the intelligence community. The group says that its employees are under growing surveillance and one of their volunteers was even detained by police for 21 hours.

Officials were quick to blame the Taliban for the strike, but a spokesman for the Taliban insurgents in the area telephoned Reuters to assure them that they had nothing to do with the attack, which killed mostly civilians.

Farah’s chief of police scoffed at the denial, saying they always deny attacks where civilians were killed. He also said police have reason to believe the attacker was a Pakistani.

The attack is the worst civilian strike the region has since since May, when US air strikes killed an estimated 140 civilians. In that case, the Pentagon too repeatedly denied the toll, but then chalked it up to “problems” with the procedure involved.

The report goes on to describe the use of B-1B bombers against the villages, which were apparently responsible for the single deadliest incident since the 2001 invasion. It also insisted that troops didn’t follow the guidance on when to call in such an air strike.

Finally, it made some recommendations, including a review of the rules governing air strikes. Admiral Michael Mullen has insisted that despite the apparently disastrous consequences of troops violating the existing rules, it is unlikely anyone will face any disciplinary action over the killings.

The March 4 air strike killed 140 civilians according to the Afghan government, with the majority of them children. Today’s CENTCOM estimate claimed “roughly 26” had died, though it said it did not discount the possibility that as many as 86 had been killed.

In the first days after the strike, US officials claimed to have “very reliable intelligence” that the entire incident had been made up by the Taliban, who supposedly had kidnapped hundreds of civilians, pre-killed them with hand grenades, dumped the bodies in houses in Farah, then tricked the US into bombing those houses so they’d take the blame.

It wasn’t long before the US admitted that claim was “thinly sourced” and that they had killed at least some of the civilians slain in the attack. But as the Afghan government began paying reparations to the families of the fallen, the US accused Afghan civilians of exaggerating the numbers to try to get more money. It was over a month after the attack that Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell admitted the US had come up with very similar numbers to what Afghan investigations had ruled in the first place. Which of course brings us back to where we are now, with CENTCOM backing off Morrell’s comments and claiming a lower toll again.

Outrage over the size of the toll, the deadliest since the 2001 US invasion, likely contributed to the repeated attempts to change its story. Up to that point, the US had adopted a tactic of quickly admitted to and apologizing for its killings.

The strikes reportedly killed 140 civilians, the majority of them children. The US denied the civilian toll entirely at first, but eventually conceded that their own estimates were roughly in line with the Afghan government’s.

An official US report regarding the incident has been repeatedly promised by the Defense Department, but internal debate about the conclusions, and the deadliest US strike since the 2001 invasion, has led to repeated delays, and questions over whether the report will be released at all.

At particular issue is an alleged video, which CENTCOM commander David Petraeus claimed vindicated the strikes, proving they were directed at Taliban. The video itself was supposed to be released with the report, and it seems possible that it too will never see the light of day.

Initially, they went with the claim that the entire incident was made up by the Taliban, who had kidnapped hundreds of civilians, killed them with hand grenade, then left them in empty houses which they tricked the US into bombing. After acknowledging that was “thinly sourced,” they claimed the toll was “extremely over-exaggerated” by Afghan civilians looking to make money.

By the end of the month, General Petraeus insisted the military had video evidence that proved the strikes were aimed at Taliban, and promised to release it soon. Now, it seems that video may never see the light of day, as the military struggles to explain the massive toll.

According to defense officials, the Pentagon is “reconsidering” its promise to make the findings of the probe into the incident public, and the video may not be released either. Officials have admitted to “mistakes” made in the attack and the Pentagon has even conceded that the final toll was roughly in line with the Afghan tolls they had previously mocked. At this point, they insist, there is not much more to say.

Except for the video, of course. The Afghan reports have suggested few if any militants were killed in the attacks, and the video was designed to vindicate the troops having at least tried to kill militants instead of massacring civilians in a random salvo. It seems that is a secondary enough concern that we may never see it.

The announcement echoed similar statements made by officials off-the-record last week, when they conceded that the toll was at least in part caused by the military’s failure to follow rules which had been put into place specifically to prevent the killing of civilians.

Perhaps an even bigger revelation was that Morrell admitted that the number of civilians killed was “very similar” to the numbers the Afghan government had presented. Afghan officials have said up to 130-150 civilians were killed in the attack, the majority of them children.

At the time those numbers were initially revealed, the US condemned them. At one point they alleged that the entire incident had been invented by the Taliban just to make them look bad, and later they claimed that the villagers were exaggerating because the government was paying $2,000 in compensation for each slain civilian. It seems that at least we’ve gotten to the end of the long, winding road of US denial and one month later they have reached the same conclusion reached by the local officials: that this is the single deadliest US attack on civilians since the war began.