Cheers, Ken Hanly
P.S Even if the US does not deliberately target civilians it manages to kill them anyway in large numbers. For example:
U.N. finds 'more misses than hits' by U.S. bombs in Kabul 30 civilians reported killed by air strikes
James Rupert, Newsday Saturday, November 24, 2001
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Kabul, Afghanistan -- In the sprawling, mud-brick slum of Qala-ye-Khatir, most men were kneeling in the mosques at morning prayer on Nov. 6 when a quarter-ton of steel and high explosives hurtled from the sky into the home of Gul Ahmed, a carpet weaver.
The American bomb detonated, killing Ahmed, his five daughters, one of his wives and a son. Next door, it demolished the home of Sahib Dad and killed two of his children.
Sahib Dad and his neighbors gathered yesterday at their ground zero, a gaping hole in the one-story skyline of this neighborhood of Kabul's poor. They surveyed the fragments of walls standing over jumbled heaps of khaki- colored bricks. And Sahib Dad quietly recalled the scenes he cannot forget: the boiling, choking cloud of dust, the screams of the wounded, the neighbors' frantic, bare-handed scramble to pull survivors and bodies from the rubble.
Sahib Dad, a man in his 30s who has been unable to find work, has had less time to recover from his disaster than New Yorkers have from theirs. His voice is weary, his face pinched with pain. His boy, Ali, had been 1 year old, and his girl, Fereshta, was 9. His wife and two surviving children have moved from a hospital to a relative's home.
They cry every day, Sahib Dad said. "We must go on with our lives," he said,
"but this destruction is something we cannot understand."
While the Pentagon has acknowledged a few individual bombing errors that killed a handful of civilians, U.N. ordnance specialists say they find evidence of a broad pattern of erroneous bombing that killed 30 civilians over the 37 days of air raids on this city.
"The Pentagon likes to show the impressive videos" -- the ones that display U.S. jets launching bombs that find and destroy a target without killing the neighbors, said Ross Chamberlain, coordinator for the U.N. mine-clearing operations in much of Afghanistan. But the lesson of the U.S. bombing of Kabul,
he said, is this: While any given bomb may find its mark accurately, only a percentage of them will do so.
"There's really no such thing as precision bombing," he said.
Chamberlain and his colleagues have been inspecting the sites, such as Sahib Dad's house, where U.S. bombs landed in Kabul. Having examined 12 of 15 sites reported to his office so far, Chamberlain said, "We are finding more cases of errant targeting than accurate targeting, more misses than hits."
Last month, U.S. planes twice hit U.N.-backed mine-clearing operations, killing four security guards, and twice bombed a Red Cross warehouse for relief supplies.
The U.S. Central Command said yesterday that it was checking into the reports of errant bombs in Kabul. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said casualties of innocent civilians have always been a part of war, blaming them on the terrorists who attacked the United States.
"The Americans clearly were trying to be very precise," said Peter Le Sueur,
a technical adviser to U.N. mine-clearing operations in Afghanistan. "But they were bombing in a city, and there wasn't much margin for error."
Chamberlain and Le Sueur, who are British, showed journalists a place where U.S. high-tech weapons had performed as promised. On a street in the well-to- do neighborhood of Wazir Akbar Khan, one villa was crushed and the flanking houses badly damaged. The middle house, neighbors said, had been that of Abdul Niyazi, the Taliban commander of Kabul's security forces. The neighboring villas had sheltered ethnic Arab fighters of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization, Chamberlain said.
Bomb fragments and other evidence suggested the Americans had dropped a 500- pound, laser-guided weapon -- a GBU-12 -- onto the roof, perhaps with a delayed fuse to allow it to crash through to the ground before exploding, a way of confining damage to a smaller area, Le Sueur said. A block from the bombed villa, a large hospital stood undamaged by the explosion.
"This is an example of the technology working as it's supposed to," said Chamberlain.
Nearby, though, another bomb crashed through the roof of a house and plowed through floors before burying itself, tail-first and unexploded, in the ground under the kitchen. U.N. officials cordoned off the house and were weighing how a disposal team might defuse or move the bomb.
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----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Monday, November 26, 2001 4:31 PM Subject: Re: Holy Shit! Civil War in Nepal
> Michael Perelman wrote:
>
> >What about the bombing of Al Jezeera and also the bombing of the BBC?
>
> I was talking about the larger point, which is that the Soviets
> allegedly flattened whole cities and the U.S. has allegedly tried to
> avoid civilian targets. I'm perfectly willing to believe either or
> both are false, but I'm wondering if there's any evidence on either
> side that contradicts these assertions.
>
> Doug