Wrenching accounts such as this (from Britain's Independent) of the recent destruction of a marketplace in northern Baghdad are hard enough to read; possibly more unpleasant is the concern that it will be tough to get a straight answer out of the U.S. commanders: was it a misdirected American missile which incinerated a bunch of the people we are supposedly liberating?

General Vincent Brooks's answer was not heartening. The Times reports his response as follows:

"We don't know that they were ours. We can't say that we had anything to do with that." He acknowledged that "mistakes can occur," but said that it was too early to know whether an American strike had hit the wrong target. "Right now, we simply don't know," he said.

The counterpoint, General Brooks suggested, was also true — that nobody could be sure that the explosions had not been set off by Iraqis assigned by Mr. Hussein to plant a bomb in a public place and blame the United States for it.

I don't put much past Hussein, but the fact that the General would reflexively trot this out as a balancing possibility is frustrating, if only because it seems so much more likely that, out of the dozens of air strikes on Baghdad carried out in the past days, we'd screw one up. But it's also worrisome, because it suggests a strategy for controlling the narrative about how the war unfolds that could carry into the future. How open and thorough will the process of investigating this event be? Will the Bush administration be willing to own up to the truth, whatever it might be?

Considering that the administration is now rolling back the declassification of documents from a quarter-century ago, and has managed to be so aggressive with regard to secrecy that the response to this move by critics seems to be "well, we were expecting worse," I'm particularly unconfident that we'll get Team Bush to admit to any specific mistakes that lead to civilian deaths.