War is Just a Racket

[joeallonby]

My last response may have been a bit hasty. I assume that anyone on the
P-list is aware that the New York Times is free on-line and reads it.

So for the benefit of the choir:

> Rules for the Raids
> 
> General Moseley, the top Air Force commander during the war who is now the Air
> Force vice chief of staff, said in the interview last summer that commanders
> were required to obtain advance approval from Mr. Rumsfeld if any planned
> airstrike was likely to result in the deaths of 30 more civilians. More than
> 50 such raids were proposed, and all were approved, General Moseley said.
> 
> But raids considered time-sensitive, which included all of those on the
> high-value targets, were not subject to that constraint, according to current
> and former military officials. In part for that reason, the report by Human
> Rights Watch concluded, "attacks on leadership likely resulted in the largest
> number of civilian deaths from the air war."

And here is the full NYT article.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/international/middleeast/13SADD.html?page
wanted=1&th> 

My apologies, Richard.


on 6/13/04 10:38 PM, R. Fiero at
> rfiero at pophost.com wrote:

> 
> --Counterpunch--
> Trained in Saigon, outfitted with captured enemy equipment,
> then given a "one-way ticket to Cambodia," they were sent to
> locate enemy sanctuaries. When they radioed back their position
> and that of the sanctuary, the CIA would bomb them along with the target.
> ==========
> --NY Times--
> One possibility, a senior intelligence official and a senior
> military officer said, is that Mr. Hussein was above ground in
> one of the houses that were not destroyed in the raid.
> In the raid, the Air Force primarily used deep-penetrating
> munitions because of their ability to destroy an underground
> bunker. The person who was the primary source of the
> information about the bunker was killed in the raid, according
> to intelligence officials, but had described it using an Arabic
> word, manzul, that could have been translated either as place
> of refuge or as bunker.
>