A barrage of accusations

[Poll_Blind]

Really worth reading the whole article at Ha'aretz. These snippets do something the profile the story but near the end it branches into a couple of different areas, making it hard to condense.

Captain Ariel, a reserve officer in the Israel Defense Forces' Artillery Corps, is furious on two counts. He is furious about one matter and absolutely furious about another. The first is the interview given by a soldier in his battalion to a British television network, in which he claimed their battalion had deliberately fired cluster rockets at towns and villages in Lebanon in order to hit civilians.

--snip--

However, despite all the precautionary measures described by Ariel and other officers, South Lebanon is full of cluster bomblets - in open fields as well as in populated areas, including the areas north of the Litani that were fired upon, as Ariel himself witnessed, and which were defined as "General Staff targets."

The program manager of the United Nations' Mine Action Coordination Centre, Southern Lebanon (MACC SL), Chris Clark, has told Haaretz that there is no difference between the areas north of the Litani and the other areas of South Lebanon. According to Clark, there are huge quantities of unexploded cluster bombs all over South Lebanon - in agricultural areas, along roadways and even close to private homes. MACC SL personnel found many duds of cluster bombs adjacent to private homes in Yuhmur, Arab al-Salim, Sujud and other parts of Lebanon north of the Litani.

--snip--

Ariel believes this might be the crux of the problem: "Perhaps our maps were inadequate and perhaps areas we thought were unpopulated were actually populated. Perhaps there were houses there."

  On one hand Ariel is just a reservist officer so he only knows his role in the action. However, even with that narrow view I find it...unconvincing that Israel, with one of the most active, invasive intelligence-gathering organizations and who filled the air with drones to coordinate strikes, would not what they were firing on.

  There's also an unusual blame game going on between the IDF and Chief of Staff and the Israeli Army which I find very strange because it entirely omits (as several of the stories I've read in the last few weeks) the role of the Israeli Air Force.

  I came across a fairly decent piece which describes not only the recent U.S. shipments of cluster munitions to Israel (during the most recent Lebanon war) but the reluctance of the U.S. to provide them given their misuse by the IDF during the last Lebanon war. Unfortunately, though the piece is fairly even handed (being a mix of work from the NY Times and Ya Libnan), it's headed by an absolutely grizzly picture of a child who has been ripped apart by some sort of blast. If I could put my thumb over that picture, which is unnecessarily gory given the actual content of the article, I would. Instead a link to the story is the period at the end of this sentence.

More detail about the history of Israeli misuse of cluster bombs in the first Lebanese war and on the relationship with the U.S. prior to, during and after their use can be found in Jane Hunter's Israeli Foreign Policy: South Africa and Central America and Andrew Hurley's Holocaust II: Saving Israel from Suicide though both books are loaned out at the moment so I don't have chapters.

PB

[Name removed]

1. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Poll_Blind]

2. Not trying to euphemize it. Pictures of dead children greatly disturb...

...some people. I have a son about that age so it is a terrifying thing to see a mutilated child and very saddening. I still think it was unfortunate to head the piece with such a grisly photo. But there are countless grisly photos of the atrocities committed in these aggressions which are viewable in their own context as a separate, intentional act.

PB

[IntiRaymi]

3. Ok, it was my post that got deleted.

I posted the picture of that kid, torn to shreds by cluster munitions in Lebanon.
I feel that it is necessary to *see* what this does to people, and that there is really no moral justification to resorting to these types of actions.
And this goes for both sides - Hez. & IDF.