Are there really people who believe there are no civilian causalities in LIbya?

[Puregonzo1188]

Please don't respond by asking me if I believe Gaddafi' government, because quite frankly I don't. And please don't respond by telling me how many civilians Gaddafi has killed or would have killed if we had not intervened. And I absolutely don't want to hear about the Holocaust or Rwanda. Ok? All of those things are irrelevant to my question. This isn't a topic about the merits of the intervention in Libya or whether or not it was a good thing or a bad thing. It's a very narrow question.

I'm curious are there people who do not believe there have been a single civilian causality in Libya and/or that's it's possible to conduct airstrikes without killing any civilians?

Just curious.

[aquart]

1. Lotta causality there. But as for casualties, you betcha.

Poor spelling really botches self-righteous snark.

[GreenStormCloud]

2. Some civilians will always be killed. That is the nature of war.

However, modern ultra-precision strikes do much to greatly reduce the civilian death toll.

[ixion]

3. yeah, sorta kinda not-so-much

[niyad]

5. dear goddess, please tell me you forgot the sarcasm icon with that statement

google civilian casualties and do a little research before uttering such statements

Civilian casualty ratio
Main article: Civilian casualty ratio

The civilian casualty ratio in an armed conflict is the ratio of civilian casualties to combatant casualties or total casualties. The measurement can apply either to casualties inflicted by a particular belligerent or to casualties in the conflict as a whole.

According to a 2001 study by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the civilian to soldier death ratio in wars fought since the mid-20th century has been 10:1, meaning ten civilian deaths for every soldier death.<8> Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, the number of civilian casualties as a proportion of total casualties has been rising.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties

[Forkboy]

14. I'm sure the dead civilians appreciate that we killed them with better technology..

[joshcryer]

25. As if the dead civilians that Gaddafi killed appreciated antiquated technology...

...ie, grad rockets, howetzer shells, AA bullets, etc.

[Name removed]

36. Deleted message

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

[Union Scribe]

33. I thought this wasn't "war" though.

[ReggieVeggie]

34. yeah "Woops! Sorry!"

We tried to save you but you had to die in order to save others!

[Distant Observer]

4. If they get killed, they could not have been civilians. THAT IS THE RULE.

[joshcryer]

22. Which is why the US has admitted killing civilians two times this month in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Gaddafi never admits to killing civilians.

[BOG PERSON]

6. as somebody who is sitting safely in front of a glowing computer screen

in an air conditioned palace, contributing absolutely nothing to society... you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette. and war is hell.

[sharp_stick]

7. Has anybody

actually claimed that there are no civilian casualties?

[OregonBlue]

8. My question exactly. I haven't seen anyone of DU say that so I'm wondering why the question.

[Hugabear]

9. Typically, reports of civilian casualties are questioned since they come from Gadhaffi's government

Haven't seen anyone actually deny that we've caused any civilian casualties...however, reports of civilian casualties usually get dismissed because of who's reporting them.

Which I can understand, but at the same time, it would be incredibly naive for anyone to think that we aren't killing civilians.

[joshcryer]

23. I would be inclined to believe Gaddafi's government if it didn't do such a poor showing of staged...

...deaths. We know that the first "round" of deaths were in fact rotting bullet riddled corpses and that the second round were charred remains that aren't consistent with the airstrikes that we've observed elsewhere on actual human military targets.

We also know that an "airstrike on civilian populations" led first to an inablity to actually find the location of the dead bodies, along with a second attempt to pass off a bullet ridden home as shrapnel from a bomb that dug a hole in the ground and misleading information about the age of the child that was "injured" by the bomb.

It's easy enough to cast doubt on the Gaddafi regime, because they're fucking liars.

When did the Gaddafi regime ever admit to killing civilians? Oh? It didn't? But it has shooters in Misrata even as we speak and both Misrata and Ajbadiya were indiscriminately shelled, both of which had claims of deaths, and now the liberated Ajbadiya is littered with corpses from those very acts.

[JoePhilly]

12. I have not seen anyone make that claim.

[joshcryer]

24. No, I believe there are probably some, what I don't believe is Gaddafi's lying propaganda.

Nor the reposts of his propaganda here on these forums.

[Modern_Matthew]

10. Gone are the days of armies running at each other in the middle of nowhere. Sigh. nt

[reorg]

11. what you need to understand

is that these are good bombs. Good bombs don't kill, they eliminate legitimate targets, and since civilians aren't legitimate targets, it is implicit that they cannot be killed by those bombs.

In addition, everybody knows that the bombs used today by advanced nations are high precision weapons, their targetting systems can be programmed with pinpoint accuracy and never fail. When in rare instances our highly trained professionals pick the wrong targets it's only because they are being misled by outdated information such as old maps. It has happened, yes, but we cannot put the blame for that on our good professionals, it's obviously the fault of the targetted nation that they cannot keep their stuff up to date. In some exceptional cases our highly trained pilots may even accidentally mistake a refugee column for a military convoy. Okay, that has happened too but, again, what if it had been a military convoy in the process of exterminating many thousands of innocents? Accidentally killing just a few hundred refugees seems a fair price to pay for making sure that genocide doesn't happen.

So, whether it be military columns, airports and air defense facilities, or even infrastructure like roads and bridges, power stations, factories, government buildings, TV stations - as we know from the prevention of genocide in Kosovo it is necessary to eliminate such targets during a humanitarian invervention - any and all civilians accidently hit because stay in the vicinity of such legitimate targets are dead because of their own actions. Obviously, they should have known better. Nobody is stopping them to hide out in a safe distance or in bomb shelters. And don't tell me that bomb shelters will be hit by pinpoint accurate high precision weapons of US origin. Okay, okay, it has happened as well, but people pointing that out are obviously psychopaths suffering from the "anti-Americanism" syndrome. We don't need to listen to such people.

[Catherina]

20. Perfectly understood. Wish I could rec this. n/t

[Gravel Democrat]

30. Old maps-- thanks for the reminder (how could one forget)- Chinese Embassy bombing "accidental"

On May 7, 1999, during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia (Operation Allied Force), five US JDAM bombs hit the People's Republic of China embassy in the Belgrade district of New Belgrade, killing three PRC citizens and outraging the Chinese public. President Bill Clinton later apologized for the bombing, stating it was accidental. Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet testified before a congressional committee that the bombing was the only one in the campaign organized and directed by his agency.<1><2>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._bombing_of_the_Chinese_embassy_in_Belgrade

they actually said they were using old maps, however there was a dirt lot before the Embassy was built so that "excuse" was nailed right away


Nato hit embassy on purpose
Kosovo: special report

Nato deliberately bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the war in Kosovo after discovering it was being used to transmit Yugoslav army communications.

According to senior military and intelligence sources in Europe and the US the Chinese embassy was removed from a prohibited targets list after Nato electronic intelligence (Elint) detected it sending army signals to Milosevic's forces.

The story is confirmed in detail by three other Nato officers - a flight controller operating in Naples, an intelligence officer monitoring Yugoslav radio traffic from Macedonia and a senior headquarters officer in Brussels. They all confirm that they knew in April that the Chinese embassy was acting as a 'rebro' station for the Yugoslav army (VJ) after alliance jets had successfully silenced Milosevic's own transmitters.




The Chinese were also suspected of monitoring the cruise missile attacks on Belgrade, with a view to developing effective counter-measures against US missiles.

The intelligence officer, who was based in Macedonia during the bombing, said: 'Nato had been hunting the radio transmitters in Belgrade. When the President's residence was bombed on 23 April, the signals disappeared for 24 hours. When they came on the air again, we discovered they came from the embassy compound.' The success of previous strikes had forced the VJ to use Milosevic's residence as a rebroadcast station. After that was knocked out, it was moved to the Chinese embassy. The air controller said: 'The Chinese embassy had an electronic profile, which Nato located and pinpointed.'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/1999/oct/17/balkans


***

http://costofwar.com

[fittosurvive]

13. The bombing of radar installations, anti-aircraft batteries, missile sites and airfields

will do doubt result in civilian casualties. However, according the UN, they must avoid making Gaddafi one of them.

Brilliant strategy, eh?

[Amonester]

31. Gawd-awfull uses his followers to protect his own billionaire ass, so...

apparently, you wouldn't mind blowing them up with him?

Wow. I'm glad we have UN resolutions instead of your drivel.


Sleep time.

[fittosurvive]

35. Were you glad when the UN appointed Libya to the Human Rights Council?

Apparently, you comforted by the whimsical decisions of an APPOINTED council whose morally bankrupt policies are demonstrated by the fact that they viewed Ghaddafi as a champion of human rights one day and a homicidal maniac the next.





.

[Amonester]

37. Hey, it's not their fault if he '$omehow' managed to 'get' the support of...

South Africa's Mgr. Tutu. Gawd-awful is a rich manipulator who has always 'bought' sympathies, but never stopped terrifying, torturing and killing his own people, and that's when he could not find a way to blow up airplanes or night-clubs...

But, he made a BIG mistake on the day he chose NOT TO NEGOTIATE and QUIT to some billionaire resort anywhere. Like always, he thought he would still be able to maintain his dictatorship on the Libyan people who disagree with him and, like always, he started to use violence and war crimes to try to crush them, instead of ACCEPTING TO NEGOTIATE.

He FULLY deserves ANYTHING BAD that may happen to him now.

[Ozymanithrax]

15. There is a difference between civilian casualties and targeting civilians...

This is not a television or movie war where the energy in an explosion stops at the edge of the object destroyed, or a Science Fiction epic where pin point lasers kill only combatants. Physics is a harsh task master.

The UN's decided to protect civilians who were being targeted by their government, which is a war crime.

[reorg]

18. actually, it's not a war crime to crack down on an armed insurgency

on the contrary, it's what every government would do.

There were claims that the Libyan army used disproportionate force in Benghazi, but these were never verified by neutral observers or judicial authorities. Instead we saw Youtube videos with insurgents proudly displaying black soldiers they had lynched.

Many unarmed and largely peaceful protesters and some journalists were shot in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain - why didn't the "UN" ie the Security Council (US, UK, France plus such bright shining lights of humanity as Nigeria and Colombia) decide to help these civilians which did not bear arms as opposed to those in eastern Libya?

[joshcryer]

26. No western government would allow their citizens to be massacred wholesale...

...while claiming that they were terrorists because they defended themselves.

[joshcryer]

28. BTW, do you believe that indiscriminate shelling of cities equates a crackdown on armed insurgency?

[Distant Observer]

16. I believe that KILLING soldiers that are NOT trying to KILL US is immoral.

After stopping the pro-Gaddafi attack on Benghazi, with some possible moral basis of preventing a
"blood-bath" that we "believed" would happen, the actions of the West have been along the usual pattern
of disproportionate destruction and indifference to the lives of the "enemy."

There is no moral basis for a massacre of a national armed force in a desperate civil war with
another set of combatants.

There is no moral basis the Western powers to be "planning for the future of Libya," as being not laid out as the priority.

If there was, then we can imagine ALIEN FORCES morally annihilating Yankee armies from spaceships in the skies
during the American civil war.

[silver10]

17. +1

[joshcryer]

27. Ajbadiya was under seige and it was within the UN resolution to stop that seige.

The same is true for Misrata. What Gaddafi needs to stop doing is shelling his own people.

[sabrina 1]

29. Good post.

As for the OP's question, the European press has reported casualties caused by the NATO bombings and I saw footage of ambulances and women screaming at the site of a recent bombing on RT this week.

But the U.S. never reports casualties when we bomb from the sky. Not until other sources report them first. Everyone in America thinks we have 'smart bombs' that can travel through tunnels and wind through corridors, avoiding all innocent by-standers, so precise that they will not harm anyone or anything until they reach their intended targets :eyes:

[pampango]

32. Disagree. Killing soldiers who are killing civilians is moral, even if the civilians don't look like

me or talk like me. I don't worship to the god of "national sovereignty" to the point that I can turn off the "caring switch" when I realize that "those people" live on the other side of some line.

The US should not take it upon itself to intervene unilaterally (and thankfully did not) but the United Nations should stand for something. I'm glad they adopted the Responsibility to Protect in 2005 and have tried to use it in Burma in 2007 and Libya now.

[ZombieHorde]

19. If you quit listening to Gaddafi, consider the people he has killed, and the Holocaust and Rwanda,

you will see I am a total smart ass.

[joshcryer]

21. I believe that Gaddafi's regime has failed to establish civilian casualties as part of the strikes.

Therefore yes, in that context there is no evidence of civilian casualties as stated by Gaddafi.

However, there are plenty of civilian deaths due to Gaddafi's indiscriminate shelling of Misrata and Ajbadiya, not to count the thousands killed by his slaughter machine during, after, and continuing from the protests of Feb. 17.

[Skidmore]

38. Name me a war or act of aggression in which there are no civilian casualties.

I don't think anyone is claiming that.