>Driving into a crowd driving at a high speed is recklessness, an aggravated form of negligence.
>The legal metaphors are used to analyze the war.
>The important point is whether "deliberate" (intentional) or negligent (unintentional), the U.S./NATO actions are culpable, upon analogy to torts and crimes.
>Charles Brown
>>>> James Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> 05/28/99 05:24PM >>>
> The deadly semantics of NATO bombings
>
> By Howard Zinn, 05/28/99
>
> Isn't it time we stopped using the word ''accidental'' to
> describe the NATO bombing of Yugoslavian hospitals, residential
> neighborhoods, buses, trains, trucks, and refugees on roads that has
> killed or maimed at least 1,000 civilians, including children?
>
> The word ''accident'' is not an accurate description of the mayhem we
> have caused in Yugoslavia. True, the world ''deliberate'' does not fit
> either. It is understandable that Serb leaders would call it
> ''deliberate,'' just as it is understandable that our leaders would
> call it an ''accident.'' Both words are propaganda devices that blur a
> reality more complex than that two-word vocabulary can convey.
>
> An accident implies something unforeseen. True, a recent bombing - to
> take an example of the hospital bombed in Belgrade - may have been
> unforeseen as a specific consequence of bombing the city. But it was
> foreseeable, given the magnitude and nature of the bombing, that some
> hospital, school, village, or bus would at some point be hit, and
> civilians would die.
>
> If I drive my car at 80 miles an hour down a street crowded with
> children, and 10 of them are killed, I cannot dismiss this as an
> accident, even if I had not intended to kill these particular
> children. When an action has inevitable and terrible consequences, it
> cannot be excused as ''accidental.''
>
> That is an imaginary situation, but let me describe a real one. Just
> before the end of World War II, flying as a bombardier with the Eighth
> Air Force, I dropped canisters of napalm on a French town on the
> Atlantic coast of France. I have no idea how many civilian inhabitants
> died because of what I did - my target was ''military,'' that is, a
> bunch of German soldiers waiting for the war to end. But can I claim
> that the deaths I caused - how many were children I have no way of
> knowing - were the result of an ''accident''?
>
> When Serbian troops in Kosovo kill Albanians, the proper word is
> ''deliberate.'' But when our planes drop cluster bombs on a
> residential neighborhood and children are either killed or left in
> agony because of the steel fragments penetrating their bodies, that
> should not be passed off as an accident, even if it is not
> ''deliberate'' in the same sense as Milosevic's evil deeds. Both are
> war crimes, legally and morally.
>
> I am focusing on children as victims because they are true innocents.
> We are bombing Yugoslavia every night, and citizens there report that
> their children cannot sleep and live in constant fright. Bombing a
> city at night is a form of terrorism, because even if the target hit
> is a ''military'' one, the entire population must live in fear.
> Indeed, whether in World War II or Vietnam, the terrorizing of the
> civilian population has always been an objective of bombing, no matter
> how official propaganda denies it.
>
> We can expect NATO and US officials to use language intended to
> absolve their guilt. But why do reporters, who are not supposed to
> parrot the propaganda of governments, keep using words like
> ''accidental'' and ''mistake,'' which suggest an innocence not
> appropriate to the massive bombing of towns and cities?
>
> The attempts by officials to defend the deaths of civilians border on
> the absurd. In defending an airstrike on a village, the administration
> said that Kosovars were used as ''human shields.'' Do ordinary
> civilians not live in villages? Were the patients who died in the
> devastated hospital forced into their beds? Were the civilians killed
> on the bombed train deliberately sent on that trip?
>
> That explanation brought back the ugliest of memories of My Lai and
> other Vietnam massacres, justified by ''the Vietnamese babies are
> concealing hand grenades.'' It also brought Secretary of State
> Madeleine Albright's response afer Pakistani troops had fired into a
> crowd of Somali citizens: ''They are using civilians as shields.''
>
> Another explanation used by the administration is that the deaths
> caused by NATO bombings don't compare to the numbers that Milosevic
> has killed. Does one horror excuse another? In the simplest of moral
> mottoes told to all of us as children: Two wrongs do not make a right.
>
> For us to react to violence with more violence is especially
> reprehensible when our violence has no effect in stopping a
> catastrophe and, indeed, makes it worse, as it is clear our bombing
> has made things worse for the Kosovars we claim to care about.
>
> If we cannot deny culpability in the killing of large numbers of
> innocent people by claiming ''accident,'' if these deaths are the
> inevitable result of our policy, the conclusion should be clear: We
> must stop our bombing. And we must go to the negotiating table - not
> deliver ultimatums with the arrogance of a superpower - to end the
> horrors committed by both sides in Yugoslavia.
>
> Howard Zinn is professor emeritus at Boston University and author of
> ''A People's History of the United States.''
>
> This story ran on page A19 of the Boston Globe on 05/28/99.
> * Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.
> ]
>
> * Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company Boston Globe Extranet
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