Never Happened.

[infrogmation]

If a Pentagon official says that the death of your family never happened, are they alive or dead?

International Herald Tribune Article:
Villagers Dying Under U.S. Bombs, Anti-Taliban Forces Say

"Despite the Pentagon's denials, hundreds of innocent civilians are being killed and wounded in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, the Afghan commanders who rule this region said Sunday.
The anti-Taliban, pro-American commanders blame bad intelligence and what they perceive as American indifference to civilian casualties in the campaign against terrorism." [...]
"Why are they hitting civilians?" said Haji Mohammed Zaman, the military commander in Jalalabad for the Eastern Shura, the regime that took power from the Taliban in Jalalabad last month. "This is very bad. These are innocent people. Hundreds have been killed and injured."
A Pentagon spokesman said Saturday that the bombing of civilians near Tora Bora "never happened."

Some other non-Pentagon sources under the unpatriotic delusion that this happened:
The Independant
Washington Post/Associated Press
CNN plays it safe, running Pentagon denial text alongside photograph of one of the wounded

Comments

[pootrootbeer.livejournal.com]

Most of the denials coming from American mouthpieces are of the nature "...we are not targetting civilians".

OF COURSE YOU'RE NOT! But the question was whether civilians are getting killed, and that's a different answer entirely.

Fuck the military spokespeople, and fuck the media representatives who let them get away with concealing the truth.

"Why are they hitting civilians?"

[ernunnos.livejournal.com]

Because bombs are not precision weapons.

If this is an issue, we shouldn't be using bombs at all.

Re: "Why are they hitting civilians?"

[infrogmation.livejournal.com]

"Because bombs are not precision weapons"

On NPR I heard another MiniPax Spokesman announce simply "all bombs hit their target".

Not said is how hitting their target is defined; possibly that means "landed somewhere in Afganistan".

"If this is an issue, we shouldn't be using bombs at all."

No arguement from me on that one.

Moral issues aside for a moment, I can't even see how saying 'this never happened' is a reasonable strategy from a pure Public Relations standpoint.

[six2.livejournal.com]

We sidestep the issue and try to make shortcuts in logic to hide that fact that, in the end, we're killing people, plenty of people that had nothing to do with this war and plenty of people who have just been struggling to live for many years. Poor poor people. It's not different than WTC - no matter how we rationalize it, someone's mother/father/sister/brother isn't coming home. Some orphaned kids won't have parents to fend for them. And that's happening far to much in this war on terrorism (whatever it really means, anyway).