Afghanistan: US Troops Accidentally Kill Local Soldiers Outside Embassy.

Isn't a group of non-US mililtary gathered outside the US Embassy kind of suspicious? What were they doing there?

 

Oh, okay, but you called it an "incident" not an "accident."

This was your comment: "Questions: Do you expect any significant local backlash due to this event? How tense are things when troops are <b>firing on local friendlies</b> because of tension...especially if it's outside the Embassy? I'm not being argumentative...I had heard that things were pretty calm there.

Bold emphasis is mine.

 

"Firing on local friendlies" is vastly differrent from "friendly fire." Nowhere in your original post are they reported as "friendly fire" casualties.

I don't think your words conveyed what you meant to say. Iif I misunderstood, blame it on "high tension and a breakdown in communication."

 

We have killed plenty of civilians in Afghanistan, why is this such a big deal?

Edit
Also, we killed lots of civilians in Iraq, nobody in American cares.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0522/p01s02-woiq.html

 

5,000 to 10,000 civilian deaths? That's a pretty big range they got there. I assume by civilians they are referring to people who did not retaliate against Coalition forces...or are they also including non-military personnel who participated in the fighting?

I would say 5,000 civilian deaths would be enough to consider the war a military failure, as that surely had to dwarf any pre-war estimates of civilian casualties. However, that sounds extremely high. I'm gonna have to throw a flag on your source until I hear otherwise.

And don't give me that "nobody in America cares about civilians dying"crap.

 

A May 15 Associated Press report gives an estimate of 2,100 to 2,600 civilian deaths, without citing sources.

The Los Angeles Times reported on May 18 that probably between 1,700 and 2,700 civilians were killed in and around Baghdad. The Knight Ridder agency published an estimate of between 1,100 and 2,355 on May 4.

(from the link Woofer gave)

 

OK, how about not enough care to affect any election. It's something one hears in passing and is just a statistic for most people, as opposed to say, the Jessica Lynch miniseries we're about to get for one POW who got rescued from Iraqi doctors. We are not going to see a special on 60 minutes or even a 30 second blurb on network news or McNeil/Lehrer.

 

If we didn't care, then why did the military invest billions of dollars in precision guided bombs that minimize civilian casualties as much as possible? Why did the US military take as many steps as possible to avoid killing civilians and damaging their infrastructure?

We may not care about worrying about it all day and reading about it, but we care where it matters.

 

A May 15 Associated Press report gives an estimate of 2,100 to 2,600 civilian deaths, without citing sources.

This was offered to show that it was no big deal, just inconsequential loss.

Now contrast that with the just slightly number killed in 9/11.

Arab life is chief to the US. Fool yourself. The problem is that the rest of the world world knows this and hates us because they don't buy the propaganda that we care so much about Iraqi and other Arab lives.

We care so much that the US military has supposedly made no estimate as to the number of Iraqi casualties. We know they are lying about this. Of course we consider such lies to be no big thing.

 

Comparing it to 9/11? That is wrong. They were targeting civilians. It was murder. The US did not intend to kill Iraqi civilians.

And yes, Arab life was a huge concern for the US. Again, why would the US be so careful in their bombing strategies and in the weapons they used? Why did they risk the life of US soldiers in order to lower the number of civilian deaths?

Crying about it on American media is one thing. Spending the billions of dollars to make accurate weapons and formulating complicated war strategies to make the war as quick and painless as possible is another. Which do you think is more important?

 

I don't know you personally, and I don't usually get involved in this new forum....but if profanity were allowed on this BBS, I'd call you every derogatory name I could come up with for saying what you said above.

Who the hell are you to be able to speak for me, or any other member of this BBS, much less the damn country??? How the hell could you even begin to say something so baseless? You're an ass.

Venting is good. Carry on.

 

he-he.... there, I've vented too.

 

How do we know they are lying if they haven't made an estimate?

 

Hayes, haven't seen you around in awhile. How is the ?Bahmas?

I think you have only a couple of possibilities.

1) They didn't care enough to make an estimate. This shows the unimportance to them.

2) They didn't make an estimate because they don't want one to exist.

3) They made one, but they won't release it.

4) They were too dumb to even think of making one.

What do you think?

 

Virgin Islands. Blue sky, warm breeze, sunny. Too nice to sit at a computer all day.

Only #3 would support your claim that they are lying. They could also have decided that estimates from neutral sources would be evaluated more fairly. Or they could have chosen not to make an estimate because it would derided as propaganda.