US kills 47 Afghan cillians including 39 women and children

CptStern

CptStern

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A US air strike in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday killed 47 civilians, 39 of them women and children, an Afghan government investigating team says.

Reports at the time said that 20 people were killed in the airstrike in Nangarhar province. The US military said they were militants.

But local people said the dead were wedding party guests.
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someone is lying here


"There are 39 women and children" among those killed, he said. The eight other people who died were "between the ages of 14 and 18".

A spokeswoman for the US coalition, Lt Rumi Nielson-Green told the AFP news agency that the force was also investigating the incident and regretted any loss of civilian life. "We never target non-combatants. We do go to great length to avoid civilian casualties," she said.

At the time the US said that those killed were militants involved in previous mortar attacks on a Nato base.
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women and children were involved in mortar attacks?


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7501538.stm
 
Hmm. I wonder who is telling the truth.
 
"dead men tell no lies ...better bomb them again just to be sure"
 
I guess this shit's sad but it's not like they're proper humans like Americans are.
 
Who cares if a few Afghans die? It's all worth it as long as we get Osama.
 
Qonfused said:
Who cares if a few Afghans die? It's all worth it as long as we get Osama.
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That was a joke, right?

If not, I'm sure you'd be willing to die as a civilian yourself if a fugitive happened to originate from your home country. Wouldn't you?
 
Citadel said:
That was a joke, right?

If not, I'm sure you'd be willing to die as a civilian yourself if a fugitive happened to originate from your home country. Wouldn't you?
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If I got killed in an attempt on Bush's life, I'd say it's all fair game!
 
Qonfused said:
Closer and closer. If we keep killing civilians, the only person left will be Osama. You'll see.
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pretty sure he's in pakistan ..guess you'll have to kill them too ..hope he doesnt come to canada :O
 
I think we'll just have to go all WarGames on the world in order to kill him. It's for the greater good.
 
for one man? meh sooner or later he'll die, his message will get deluded to the point where we'll easily co-opt them with promises of cocacola and photos of britney spears' patootie .....just like the rest of us

<beats ak-47 into ploughshare>
 
what makes you think women and children cant be in mortar attacks?
 
Just like the countless Japanese civilians that were lost in WW2.

War sucks.

a lot.
 
well that certainly makes it alright then



<throws grenade into afghan orphanage>
 
Qonfused said:
They bombed us first.
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I made a couple of attempts at writing nice long paragraphs explaining how much is wrong with what you said and the unbelievably amounts of ignorance that must be required to write such a statement, but it's really not at all necessary.
 
Psst, I'm not being serious. But it makes me feel good that you felt it was necessary.
 
Thank God for that. You always came across smart, I was disappointed and drinking excessively.
 
While supportive of the US policy of blowing everything up, I never understood it.
 
Some Americans like to say, "better if it's in their backyard and not ours".

War is hell.
 
EDIT: No, this is the politics forum. I don't even want to start anything here haha.
 
"...to have and to hold, for ever and ever, till death do you part."

"...errr"

"Rest in Peace"
 
The age of Kali has begun
The song of Kali is now sung
 
someone is lying here
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I find the charge that we intentionally bombed over 47 Afghan Civilians a little bit bogus.

Still, no way to prove it either way; so until more comes of it, then I'll just be on this middle fence. Hanging out.
 
Whether they were militants or not isn't very important. Such terrible mistakes will always happen in a conventional war. However civilians will die if we continue to protect democracy in the middle east or if we abandon them. The fight against fascism and Islamic terrorism is clearly a very nasty one but it is nessecary to prevent the Taliban ever ruling a country again. It's in our interest and the interest of the Afgani people.
 
K e r b e r o s said:
I find the charge that we intentionally bombed over 47 Afghan Civilians a little bit bogus.

Still, no way to prove it either way; so until more comes of it, then I'll just be on this middle fence. Hanging out.
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not that I'm saying they intentionally bombed the civilians it really wouldnt be that surprising ..it definately wouldnt be the first time

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?do...mbs+civilians&ei=Jz-HSPLUJ4ri4QLir9WECA&hl=en

and it wont be the last.

the US intentionally bombed water treatment plants during desert storm. It was ordered by centcom with the intention of doing harm to the civillian populace through disease and malnourishment, the death toll was in the hundreds of thousands. then there's the use of torture, pow's murdered during interrogation, secret prisons, the use of banned phospherous, cluster mines etc etc etc ..so if they're capable of that they're more than capable of intentionally killing civilians
 
K e r b e r o s said:
I find the charge that we intentionally bombed over 47 Afghan Civilians a little bit bogus.
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Are you joking?

For the last two years, the US, working with Britain, China and Russia, has been attempting to wriggle its way out of proposed international regulations forbidding the use of cluster bombs, like the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel landmines.

Cluster bombs spread out across a wide area, making it impossible to know who exactly who will get hit. Arguably, this already makes them illegal; Protocol 1 to the Geneva conventions forbids attacks which ?are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction?. A report published in 2006 by Handicap International estimated that around 100,000 people have been killed or wounded by cluster munitions, and that 98% of all known casualties are civilians. It's clear indeed that the US and the UK governments know their use is wrong; during the collection of that report, Handicap found that the Coalition Provisiona Authority "strongly discouraged casualty data collection, especially in relation to cluster munitions."

As it happens, most victims of cluster bombs are not immediate because many of them don't detonate when they hit. Officially, the failure rate is between 5 and 7%. But it is really rather higher. 20-25% of NATO's cluster bombs dropped during the Kosovo conflict failed to go off when they landed. The failure rate of US bombs in Indochina was about 30%. And 40% of the cluster bomblets that Israel scattered over Lebanon did not detonate.

So the undetonated bomblets sit there waiting to be stepped on. They're worse than landmines, because far more of them have been dropped, and even years after they land they can be detonated by the merest impact. Many of them blow up in the faces of families that are trying to clear the rubble that is piled where their homes used to be; many other victims are children (1 in 4 it's claimed), because the bombs are brightly coloured and easily mistaken for toys. The US and UK drop these things on the world, and kids try to play catch with them. One of their officially-acknowledged purposes is "area denial", and, sure enough, they render entire agricultural swathes out of bounds, and make reconstruction slow and dangerous.

These are grave humanitarian concerns. Even though the UK has now signed up to the treaty, and politely asked the US to remove its stockpiled cluster bombs from UK airbases, it continues to try and cheat its way out. We've got rid of the RBL755 and the M26, but they were already being phased out when the regulations were proposed. We're seeking an exemption on "smart" submunitions like the M85, the failure rate of which is 2% according to manufacturer tests but 10% according to Norwegian researchers in Lebanon - a figure supported by campaign groups and the UN team responsible for Lebanese bomb clearance. And we've made sure that the treaty will define a cluster bomb as having ten or more bomblets - when we know that our primary cluster munition, the CR7. has nine.

The numbers dropped are mindboggling. Landmine Action estimates that in 2003 the UK and US together used 13,000 such bombs containing 1.8-2.0 million bomblets. The US air forced released 19 million over Cambodia, 70 million over Vietname=, 208 million in Laos. Over a much shorter period, we both dropped 54 million in the first Gulf War. Israel dropped 4 million on Lebanon during its latest invasion, and almost all of them were deployed during the final 72 hours - which looks, to me, rather like revenge, or an attempt to cripple Lebanon's economy (like the deliberate Jiyeh power plant bombing, which caused an oil spill that has been disasterous both for the environment and for the tourist industry). Since that invasion, an average of 2.5 Lebanese civilians a day have been blown up by these things, and some say that cluster munitions caused more civilian casualties in Iraq in 2003 than any other weapon. They continue to be dropped despite the obvious fact that their use results in repeated and terrible civilian casualty tolls.

What other nations have used cluster bombs extensively since WW2? Russia dropped loads of them in Afghanistan and they scatter them in Chechnya too, sometimes deliberately attacking marketplaces and similar civilian targets. Other than that? Sudan, Libya, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Nigeria, Serb forces, Hezbollah and warring factions in Tajakistan. See? We keep excellent company.

Do you catch my drift? Are you picking up what I'm putting down? You're seriously incredulous that the armed forces killed a mere 47 Aghanis? Well, there are plenty of things we can conclude from the information I have provided on cluster bombs and their use, but probably the simplest conclusion, and the one most relevant to your post, is this:

Yes.
The United States and its foreign policy has intentionally killed civilians.
The United States and its foreign policy still intentionally kills civilians.
The United States and its foreign policy will continue to intentionally kill civilians.

You sit on the fence, saying there's "no way to prove it either way", despite the evidence that these people were killed deliberately. You find the charge "bogus" because it is unbelievable to you - out of prejudice, because you have a general, unthinking belief in the default beneficience of your country's foreign policy. That belief is utterly without foundation when we are talking about a nation that routinely and knowingly commits mass murder against noncombatants.
 
you're pretty sexy when beating someone over the head with facts, you go sulky! :)
 
Sulkdodds needs to show that the cluster bombs were dropped in modern Iraq and not veitnam and also that they were intentionally designed to kill civiliians.
 
Sulkdodds said:
Since that invasion, an average of 2.5 Lebanese civilians a day have been blown up by these things, and some say that cluster munitions caused more civilian casualties in Iraq in 2003 than any other weapon.
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I'd hate to be those half people.... :dozey:
 
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