A little while ago I saw the movie Control Room, about the Al-Jazeera perspective on the Iraq war. I remember when the part where the Al-Jazeera office in Kabul was blown up by a 500 pound bomb dropped by Americans, with no warning. The movie showed the grief and shock of the Al-Jazeera reporters learning that their colleagues had been killed (I'm tempted to use the word murder, but at the time they didn't know whether it was an accident or not). Despite this, the movie remained relatively objective: they pointed out that many believed the bombing had been on purpose, yet made it clear there was no proof, and that also showed clips of the Pentagon denied it and apologizing for the accident. And when the movie was made, I think that was all that was known.
But just now I was reading a book review on the New York Times, about Al-Jazeera. Buried in the middle of the review, I find this paragraph:
As well as putting bin Laden on the air, Al Jazeera reported from the receiving end of the Afghan war: the civilian casualties, the houses and lives destroyed. Finally, as the Northern Alliance forces advanced, the Jazeera offices in Kabul were obliterated by an American 500-pound bomb. After initial denials, a Pentagon spokesman admitted that Al Jazeera had been targeted as an alleged locus of Qaeda activity. General Tommy Franks said that a bin Laden deputy, Muhammad Atef, was among the casualties in the attack. (He was killed again a few weeks later, in a completely separate incident.)
In my opinion, this was a war crime committed by the United States. The lies make it even worse -- first lying that it wasn't intentional, second lying about using Muhammad Atef as an excuse for the bombing.
Posted on March 5, 2005 09:45 AM
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Why are you so quick to assume that the target(Muhammad Atef) wasn't there earlier or happened to leave just in time?
How many other Al-Jazeera productions have you seen? How about the ones not in English? Fair and balanced... ha!
War is war. Mistakes will happen. No country goes as far out of its way to be careful than the United States.
Posted by: anonymous at March 18, 2005 02:28 PMMr. anonymous: many countries go farther out of their way to be careful by simply not starting wars and not participating in existing wars. The United States has a bad track record here, having recently started wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, and arguably Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Chad, and Haiti, while taking more limited unprovoked military action against Sudan and Libya during the same time period, and participating in an even larger number of wars that it definitely didn't start and may or may not have shortened by its involvement.
As you point out, wars kill large numbers of innocent people, no matter how hard you try to prevent it, and so it's widely considered good policy not to start them in the first place.
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