Sometimes it happens this way at Channel 4 News – a cameraman or photographer calls us up and tells us he has been somewhere we have not, and asks if we want to see his footage.
So it was that we had a chance to view new pictures from the village of Granai, in western Afghanistan. Most of the images are very shaky and filmed on the hoof.
This is partly because the photographer was too close to Taliban forces to risk hanging around for long. And partly because he delegated the filming role to his inexperienced Afghan guide, allowing him to take photographic stills. But it is all too clear that something horrendous occurred there on 4 May.
Dozens of women and children were killed. The joint US-Afghan delegation sent to investigate sharply disagreed over its conclusions: around 26 civilians killed, say the Americans, while the Afghans say around 140. Though the Americans say the mass graves they were shown make it difficult to be precise.
The Americans say they didn’t know civilians were there. And they claim the movement of people into buildings, apparently tracked from the air, suggested Taliban formations regrouping for battle.
The villagers insist the Taliban did not even enter the village and that the airstrikes occurred well after fighting on the outskirts had stopped.
And the unclassified version of the Pentagon’s report does little to bridge the yawning gap between the two accounts.
I wonder whether this is what really happened: whether groups of people hiding in various buildings were identified from the air through heat-sensitive military technology; and precisely because they were a group, the airstrikes went ahead.
Whether the Taliban were even there, whether they used civilians as human shields, we may never know. The Americans say reviews of audiotapes of military conversations and video from aircraft weapon sights – which allegedly establish the Taliban were indeed there – will probably not be released.
The initial US investigation concluded that military personnel ignored a rule against bombing in a populated area in the absence of an imminent threat. Now the Americans say they are rewriting the rules of engagement. But why do they have to do this, rather than reinforce the existing rule, which sounds pretty clear to me?
There is much at stake here. Success in Afghanistan is as central to Barack Obama’s legacy as Iraq was to George W Bush. The more “own goals” like this one, the more likely the mission to drive out the Taliban could fail. The new president and his military command know this. But until we get a far clearer account from Washington of what happened in Granai, why should the Afghan people believe the Americans really have turned over a new leaf?