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Yahoo! News - Flaws in U.S. Air War Left Hundreds of Civilians Dead
KABUL, Afghanistan - The New York Times -- The American air campaign in Afghanistan, based on a high-tech, out-of-harm's way strategy, has produced a pattern of mistakes that has killed hundreds of Afghan civilians.

Intentional vs. Accidental: Are we any better than the terrorists we are fighting when we kill innocent civilians in the process? As clean cut as we would like to make the issue "in our defense of our (the American) way of life", when are we as a nation and ultimately a species going to stop assigning a relative value to human life. They like to call these civilian deaths "collatoral damage". I doubt the families left behind would agree that there loss is "collatoral".

[Hagerty comment: Collateral Damage Greater Than Combat Casualties
By early March 2002, the total number of U.S. service personnel who were killed in action in Afghanistan stood at nine. Afghan civilian deaths for the same period exceeded 3,700. So much for "smart bombs" and precision strikes by the U.S. This means that for every U.S. combatant who loses her or his life, we "accidently" kill over 418 innocent civilians. Is it any wonder that the Afghan people dislike America? If the U.S. isn't able to do better at sparing civilian populations in our world-wide, never-ending war on terror, we are going to have a lot of innocent blood on our hands. At our current combat loss to civilian death ratio, if we lose as many American lives in the war on terror as we did in Viet Nam, we will have murdered over 24 Million innocent children, women, and men in the process!

posted by West 4:03 PM