This has not been deliberate targeting, but has rather been due to tactical necessity

[rogwar]

Guns,

You're always a hoot with comments, i.e Catscan.

BTW, congrads on your new hat. If you ever get up to DFW and might have time, drop me a line before hand if you like fishing. I've got a boat and could put us on some crappie. Best eating fish around and fun to catch.

My family appreciate your service.

Take care,

rogwar

[icemaw]

The entire region needs to be nuked into whogivesacrapanymore. Problem solved.

[Suave]

Originally posted by Thrawn
"A Canadian soldier's report from South Lebanon
Updated Wed. Jul. 26 2006 5:19 PM ET


With the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, Major Hess-von Kruedener...

 

good lord

[bj229r]

Originally posted by Fishu
The big difference here is that they didn't just do one mistake in taking out neutral target, but they HAMMERED the neutral target and prevented the help from arriving. That's not the usual kind of "friendly fire" that you're talking about - that kind of friendly fire usually stops by the time someone calls to stop the totally tubular shelling, not only after 10 calls after which they're dead.




What a cheap response. Mock the other guy and tell he doesn't know squat. What do you know about me? Nothing. That's it, you don't know anything about me, what I know or what I do.

Since you seem so overly smart, why don't you enlight me of the reasons why the post was hammered regardless several calls and direct hits from artillery and precision bombs? How come the army which boasts it's skills and equiptment, managed to miss so many times right on top of a post that is on a hilltop with plenty of empty space around?

But for some of the Christians who had made it out in this convoy, it was not just privations they wanted to talk about, but their ordeal at the hands of Hezbollah — a contrast to the *****es, who make up a vast majority of the population in southern Lebanon and broadly support the militia.

“Hezbollah came to Ain Ebel to shoot its rockets,” said Fayad Hanna Amar, a young Christian man, referring to his village. “They are shooting from between our houses.”

“Please,’’ he added, “write that in your newspaper.”

 

Many Christians from Ramesh and Ain Ebel considered Hezbollah’s fighting methods as much of an outrage as the Israeli strikes. Mr. Amar said Hezbollah fighters in groups of two and three had come into Ain Ebel, less than a mile from Bint Jbail, where most of the fighting has occurred. They were using it as a base to shoot rockets, he said, and the Israelis fired back.

One woman, who would not give her name because she had a government job and feared retribution, said Hezbollah fighters had killed a man who was trying to leave Bint Jbail.

“This is what’s happening, but no one wants to say it” for fear of Hezbollah, she said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/28/world/middleeast/28refugees.html?_r=1


Hezbollah is playing the world's media like a fiddle

But instead of merely transmitting Hezbollah's unverified and unverifiable claims to the outside world, Cooper -- to his credit -- exposed the efforts by Hezbollah to manipulate CNN and other Western reporters. It's quite a contrast from the much more accommodating approach taken by his colleague, Nic Robertson, in a report that aired on a variety of CNN programs (including AC360) back on July 18, a report that Robertson himself has now conceded was put together under Hezbollah's control.

     Unlike Robertson, Cooper was explicit about how Hezbollah's operatives had set all of the rules: "Young men on motor scooters followed our every movement. They only allowed us to videotape certain streets, certain buildings," he explained. He countered Hezbollah claims that Israel targets civilians by pointing out that the group based itself in civilian areas and that Israel's air force drops leaflets warning of attacks. .........

......Cooper exposed for CNN viewers that the sight of speeding ambulances, sirens blaring, was just a phony play staged by Hezbollah: "One by one, they've been told to turn on their sirens and zoom off so that all the photographers here can get shots of ambulances rushing off to treat civilians....These ambulances aren't responding to any new bombings. The sirens are strictly for effect."

     CNN showed cameramen from other news organizations dutifully photographing the ambulances as they went by.

     Cooper had left Lebanon and was stationed in Haifa, Israel for Monday's broadcast. His report on his trip "Inside Hezbollah" appeared at about 10:40pm EDT Monday (6:40am Tuesday, local time), the first hour of his two-hour program.

     Cooper explained: "We'd come to get a look at the damage and had hoped to talk with a Hezbollah representative. Instead, we found ourselves with other foreign reporters taken on a guided tour by Hezbollah. Young men on motor scooters followed our every movement. They only allowed us to videotape certain streets, certain buildings. Once, when they thought we'd videotaped them, they asked us to erase the tape. These men are called al-Shabab, Hezbollah volunteers who are the organization's eyes and ears."
     Gesturing to racks of music CDs in a building that had lost at least one of its walls, Cooper remarked, "You see their CDs on the wall still."
     He continued: "Hezbollah representatives are with us now but don't want to be photographed. They'll point to something like that and they'll say, 'Well, look, this is a store.' The civilians lived in this building. This is a residential complex.
     "And while that may be true, what the Israelis will say is that Hezbollah has their offices, their leadership has offices and bunkers even in residential neighborhoods. And if you're trying to knock out the Hezbollah leadership with air strikes, it's very difficult to do that without killing civilians.
     "As bad as this damage is, it certainly could have been much worse in terms of civilian casualties. Before they started heavily bombing this area, Israeli warplanes did drop leaflets in this area, telling people to get out. The civilian death toll, though, has angered many Lebanese. Even those who do not support Hezbollah are outraged by the pictures they've seen on television of civilian casualties."
     As the video showed a group reporters and photographers interviewing a single woman on a blanket, Cooper explained, "Civilian casualties are clearly what Hezbollah wants foreign reporters to focus on. It keeps the attention off them â€" and questions about why Hezbollah should still be allowed to have weapons when all the other militias in Lebanon have already disarmed.
     "After letting us take pictures of a few damaged buildings, they take us to another location, where there are ambulances waiting.
     "This is a heavily orchestrated Hezbollah media event. When we got here, all the ambulances were lined up. We were allowed a few minutes to talk to the ambulance drivers. Then one by one, they've been told to turn on their sirens and zoom off so that all the photographers here can get shots of ambulances rushing off to treat civilians. That's the story that Hezbollah wants people to know about.
     "These ambulances aren't responding to any new bombings. The sirens are strictly for effect."
     Cooper concluded: "Hezbollah may not be terribly subtle about spinning a story, but it is telling perhaps that they try. Even after all this bombing, Hezbollah is still organized enough to have a public relations strategy, still in control enough to try and get its message out."

http://www.mrc.org/cyberalerts/2006/cyb20060726.asp#3

[CavemanJ]

Originally posted by Maverick

Secondly once a mission is launched it's rather hard to stop it quickly especially based on a phone call which likely isn't going direct to the HQ that launched it. There's more than one unit out there both launching air strikes and artillery. Secondly the Isreali's don't necessarily take requests at face value outside of their chain of command. The call would have to be verified THEN a command decision to act on it. That decision would then have to make it's way down the chain to the individual units actually conducting that particular mission out of the hundreds going on.

And while all the verification is going on, the shells/bombs keep falling.

What's the term for that....

OBE isn't it?  Overtaken By Events?  Something like that?

I think the UN shoulda pulled all thier observers once it was apparent a full blown shooting war was starting up.  I doubt the IDF would fire on helos sent to evac the observers, given prior notice.  Hezbollah on the other hand... they'd prolly shoot the birds down and try to make it look like the IDF did it just to stir the pot.

[bj229r]

Originally posted by Fishu
First they hammer the site dead on with an artillery strike and then they nail it dead on with a precision bomb. How much more deliberate action does it need to be?

Heres the place where Khami UN observation post was located: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&ie=UTF8&t=k&om=1&ll=33.320129,35.608594&spn=0.006374,0.009978

The grey area in the middle is a rather famous prison, where Israelis tortured people some couple of decades ago. The UN observation post is roughly 500 feet south of the prison, where the trees are.

Look at the location, theres nothing for over 500ft around the post and it's on a hilltop. You don't miss with a precision guided bomb that bad, but yet manage to nail dead on some another building. Especially not after 10 calls from the post whilst they've been under artillery fire. After the IDF realised their mistake, they decided to fire on the people coming to help!
That's as much mistake as executing a kneeling person in the neck - first person is put to kneel, then he pleads for his life, then a gun happens to be in someones hand and it accidentally discharges right in the neck of the kneeling person. Then the same gun accidentally discharges at a person running to the victim of an accidental shot.

There was a teeny extra part on the original quote in this thread that got left off...it's significant:

In one such e-mail, obtained by The New York Sun, Hess-von Kruedener wrote about heavy IDF artillery and aerial bombardment "within 2 meters of our position." The Israeli shooting, he added, "has not been deliberate targeting, but has rather been due to tactical necessity."

The correspondence between the trooper and former commander amounted to "veiled speech in the military," Mr. MacKenzie, who once commanded the U.N. troops in Bosnia, told the CBC. "What he was telling us was Hezbollah fighters were all over his position and the IDF were targeting them, and that's a favorite trick by people who don't have representation in the U.N. They use the U.N. as shields knowing that they cannot be punished for it."


http://yaakov.newsvine.com/_news/2006/07/27/302491-annans-claims-on-casualties-may-unravel

[Hangtime]

Surely, nobody is surprised... after all; blowing the hell outta 'friendlies' as a 'tactical necessity' is nothing new for Israel.



http://www.ussliberty.com/