"Flaws in U.S. Air War Left Hundreds of Civilians Dead", By DEXTER FILKINS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/21/international/asia/21CIVI.html
quoting from the article:
"The American attack this month on villages in Oruzgan Province, where
airstrikes killed at least 54 civilians, has crystallized a sense of anger
here that threatens to undermine the good will the United States gained by
helping to dislodge the Taliban. That anger is threatening to frustrate
America's ability to hunt down Taliban and Qaeda forces that still survive."
[...]
"The Pentagon often relies on warlords and other local Afghans whose
loyalties are unclear in a country riven by decades of war and tribal
rivalries. Its critics say the such information is inherently unreliable,
and that the Pentagon has too often launched military strikes without a full
understanding of what it is they were targeting."
quoting from an interview quoted-from in the article:
"'We painstakingly assess the potential for injuring civilians or damaging
civilian facilities, and positively identify targets before striking,'" said
Col. Ray Shepherd, chief spokesman for the United States Central Command in
Tampa, Fla., in an interview."
'language-interface'-stuff 'two'-ness. 'language' supplanting reality re.
lost Civilian Lives [which was the thing that got U.S. 'angry' when it
happened in our own Nation, the 'blindness', inherent, constituting more
'two'-ness that, "see's" our own loss of Innocents as being 'different' from
the loss of another Nation's Innocents.]
quoting from the article:
"But for Afghans, the larger issue is what the Americans were doing there in
the first place, and why they attacked the villages with such ferocity. As
in past cases, they say the Americans relied on bad information, from an
Afghan intelligence official from another tribe, and that they fired their
guns before they were sure who they were shooting at.
"'The Americans are not from here and they don't know our traditions or our
enemies, and who has enemies,'" said Jan Muhammad, the governor of Oruzgan
Province who spent three years in jail under the Taliban. "'So they should
contact us first and check first.'"
'language-interface' stuff, is easily-manipulated to deceptive ends, and
without 'rolling-it-around' to achieve TD E/I-minimization, in all its
facets [without Thinking], forsakes reality most-likely, falling into Tragic
Consequences [not only in War].
high-tech-'two'-ness getting caught-up in low-tech 'two'-ness.
[all quotes from the article, (c) _The New York Times_.]
k. p. collins
