Karzai: Stop The Air Strikes

[festival of snickers]

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/25/60minutes/main3411230.shtml

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/25/60minutes/main3411230_page2. shtml

3pages

"In some circumstances, we will bomb the house,” says Crowder. “It is entirely dependent upon the circumstances on the ground, and the ground commander's assessment of that particular situation.”

"There's this macabre kind of calculus that the military goes through on every air strike, where they try to figure out how many dead civilians is dead bad guy worth," says Marc Garlasco, who knows the calculus of civilian casualties as well as anyone.

At the Pentagon, Garlasco was chief of high value targeting at the start of the Iraq war. He told 60 Minutes his team was authorized to kill a set number of civilians around high-value targets -- targets like Saddam Hussein and his leadership.

"Our number was 30. So, for example, Saddam Hussein. If you're gonna kill up to 29 people in a strike against Saddam Hussein, that's not a problem," Garlasco explains. "But once you hit that number 30, we actually had to go to either President Bush, or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld."

Garlasco says, before the invasion of Iraq, he recommended 50 air strikes aimed at high-value targets -- Iraqi officials.

But he says none of the targets on the list were actually killed. Instead, he says, "a couple of hundred civilians at least" were killed.

"The bombs that are dropped are really only as accurate as the intelligence behind them?" Pelley asks Crowder.

"That's true. But we have come a very long way in getting that intelligence to be more accurate," Crowder says. "We will collect human intelligence, signals intelligence, overhead full-motion video, all of that tied together, very often in real time. That gives us a better understanding and a significantly higher confidence that the targets we're engaging are in fact valid military targets."

Of course the Taliban are killing civilians too, targeting them deliberately. By contrast, 60 Minutes watched American airmen calculate how to minimize civilian casualties with the choice of timing, weapon, and direction of attack.

what sick * my country has become-tell the world we hate this nonsense too