>>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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