Yesterday, as many as 150 people were killed by US warplanes while they were huddled in their houses in Farah, Afghanistan.

So today, as Afghan President Hamid Karzai meets with President Obama, US officials in Afghanistan are heading to the site of the latest US massacre.

That's not a word we often use to describe the mass killing of

civilians by US forces. Instead, reports of Afghan civilian casualties

are followed by a now-routine pattern of official denials, self-investigations and apologies.

Yesterday's killings are now in the self-investigation phase, in case

you're wondering. The denial phase was short because villagers who

survived the attack trucked about 30 mangled corpses of children, women

and other non-combatants to their local governor's office in order to

prove that civilians had been killed.

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Soon enough we'll be hearing the official "regrets." I don't want to

hear them. I'm sick of the twisted logic that allows the US military to

drop bombs on people and then claim it was a mistake when the bombs

land on people. You don't deliberately do something with a known

outcome and then get to call the result a mistake.

A massacre is a large-scale, indiscriminate killing; which is precisely

the known outcome of the US air strikes in Afghanistan. So let's call

this a massacre. And let's work to end the air strikes before another

Afghan family has to hear how sorry the US military is.

Yifat Susskind is MADRE's Policy and Communications Director.

