As RDKirk mentions, the use of unguided bombs in a city is a 'bad practice'. I would use the word 'indiscriminate' -- Israel is not doing 'everything it can' to limit strikes to legitimate targets. Israel is not only using the calculus that a Hamas figure is worth enough to justify killing his family athome, but also that the neighbors can be considered collateral damage.
I don't know how Israel is calculating their targeting. None of us sees enough of that picture to discern that accurately.
I do know that with all the care I
know we took, and that I personally took, during the Persian Gulf and Bosnian War, that we could not avoid accidents and some genuinely regretful-but-militarily necessary circumstances...and I won't say the same isn't happening within Israeli targeting cells.
I've mentioned a couple of those circumstances. Here is another that has personally haunted me until now: Check out this Wikipedia article on the
Amiriyah Shelter bombing during the Persian Gulf War. This line -- "electronic signals from the locality had been reported as coming from the site"-- refers in part to me. The COMINT people told me what kind of signals they were intercepting, and I located the building that had the applicable types of antennas.
Now, this is
not true: "There's not a single soul in the American military who believes that this was a command-and-control bunker." The people in the room I was in certainly did think it was command and control, because it was not merely a bunker. It was an office-type building that we believed had a bunker beneath it...rather like SAC Headquarters at Offutt AFB or the Pentagon itself.
But this part
is true. "We thought it was a military personnel bunker. Any military bunker is assumed to have some civilians in it. We have attacked bunkers where we assume there are women and children who are members of the families of military personnel who are allowed in the military bunkers." There are more civilians than military working in the Pentagon. For Pete's sake, we have a
childcare center in the
Pentagon. Yet who would claim the Pentagon would not be a valid target if the US was engaged in war?
There is some obfuscatory wordplay going on here. Sources that intend to criminally implicate US targeting use the word "shelter." Those who intend to vindicate US targeting use the word "bunker." But in fact, it was a "building," not essentially different in outer appearance than many other nondescript office buildings.
But as I've stated before, the Geneva Conventions (and the US LOAC) does not prohibit such a facility from being a legal target.
On the morning after the bombing, I got up and, as usual, listened to Peter Arnett's reporting on CNN. I was shocked and aghast as I watched the video of the bodies of women and children being removed from the rubble. I spent that day going through all the reconnaissance imagery we had of the facility to see if there was any evidence I or anyone else could have seen to determine that the facility was being used to that extent as a shelter for families. I couldn't find that evidence from the data that we had available to us in that room...by cruel coincidence, the periods that families would have been entering and leaving the facility in large numbers (dawn and dusk) were the very periods of the day that our surveillance capabilities at the time were weakest.
I will also testify, though, that General Glosson is a detestable liar.
