Seth Ackerman wrote:
>
>
> Here's last night's Jim Miklaszewski, NBC's slavish Pentagon correspondent:
>
> NBC News Transcripts
> SHOW: NBC Nightly News (6:30 PM ET) - NBC
> October 29, 2001 Monday
> LENGTH: 326 words
>
> HEADLINE: War in Afghanistan ground to stalemate as Tabliban digging in
>
> [...]
>
> MIKLASZEWSKI: As for that Red Cross food warehouse in Kabul bombed twice
> last Friday, a senior US military official now says it was bombed on purpose
> because the food was being stolen by Taliban troops.
>
It has probably occurred to the Pentagon that (following standard U.S. strategic planning of the last 60 years) they are going to be doing a lot more bombing of civilian targets, so they had better dream up a defense of what they are doing. My post did not deny that the U.S. Air Force attacked civilian targets. That is their main occupation. I argued that one couldn't legitimately cite "unlikely coincidences" as adequate evidence for such.
This is in line with what I think should be a core principle of anti-X movements: base their case on the obvious and the widely acknowledged, not on complex empirical claims of the hidden or the possible or the probable either. A complex empirical argument does not fit on a leaflet or a two-minute speech.
To shift to another tactical question. It is obvious and generally acknowledged that the U.S. flag has been used for 50 years primarily (almost exclusively) as the symbol under which one massive crime against humanity after another has been committedf. Therefore it is mere scholasticism to make up elaborate fancies of how it might be turned against itself.
Carrol