As you can see, I received quite a response to the previous post, and some of the comments were quite good. There is a similar discussion on The Spoons Experience which is worth reading as well.

Here are some of the points which have led me to reconsider:

i'm having a discussion about legal targets with my brother on my webpage. maybe you should check it out. it could answer some of your questions about whether america would have done it.. we would have. i know.. i have been to the joint targeting school.

http://www.thedabneyfamily.net/archive/2002_07_01_archive.html#85278674

Wesley Dabney

I've read Wesley's link and I have to defer to a guy who's actually been to the joint targeting school. I'm happy to take him at his word and acknowledge that yes, the US military probably would have taken that shot. This is an important point, and directly contradicts my statement in the previous post.

Nikita, a Spoons reader, offered this comment:

Yoram Ettinger, Israel's former liaison to the U.S. Congress, has prepared a list of United States attacks in which civilian lives were not taken into consideration:

"The list actually goes beyond Afghanistan..For instance, in 1989, the US invaded Panama City in order to free [the ruling strongman] Noriega, using jets and helicopters. Six hundred civilians were killed in that raid, according to American estimates, and thousands were wounded. Then U.S-Chief of Staff, whose name was Colin Powell, said at the time that the appropriate amount of force was used 'and we have no need to apologize.' The Attorney General at the time, Dick Thornburg, said that the U.S. was operating according to the UN's clause 51 allowing self-defense...

"In 1993, in response to the killing and mutilation of 15 US soldiers, the USAF bombed Somalia, turning an entire area basically into a parking lot, killing over 1,000 citizens. Again the U.S. said that it was self-defense.

"In this current war against Al-Qaeda [in which sources say 400-800 civilians have been killed - ed. note], when Rumsfeld was asked about the American attack on Red Cross offices and on other civilian areas in Afghanistan, he said, and I agree with him, 'This is a war that has been forced upon us by terrorists... We are making great efforts not to hurt civilians, but if civilians are hurt, the entire responsibility for such is upon the terrorists who use them as cover...'"

http://www.israelnn.com/news.php3?id=27222

Of course, I am well aware that civilians almost always die in war; from the WWII era of "total war" that involved the incineration of cities and P-51s destroying anything with wheels, to our most recent actions in Afghanistan, perhaps the most careful in military history, bystanders are killed and that's just the way it is. I really do understand that.

I went to bed on Thursday night with the realization that I had really not thought this topic though. It seemed as if it were very complex, almost impossible to reduce to a managable size. I've since given this a lot of thought and I'm pretty happy with my conclusions.

I think it's quite simple, really. In the modern era, the good guys do make an effort to protect bystanders. Partly this is political, partly this is of actual military benefit (people may fight less fiercely if they do not fear for what happens after surrender), and partly this is because it is "the right thing to do" and it reflect the very values we are fighting to uphold. I think we all agree on this.

I think we would also agree that there are limits to the protection you can offer to non-combatants, and they the bottom line is that your military operations must continue, and must be successful, one way or another. Furthermore, mistakes will happen, and things will get out of control sometimes, and that's not necessarily anybody's fault. War is a difficult business.

I think it is quite accurate to compare this to the concept of "due diligence" that manufacturers face when making a product for sale. If you want to sell chainsaws for a living, you have to live with the fact that some people are going to get hurt using your product. You are not required to choose between making the perfect chainsaw or going out of business, but you are required to make an effort - a real, and sometimes very costly effort - to do everything to can to design, manufacture, and document that product so it is as safe to use as you can make it. Furthermore, these standards do evolve with time, and you are expected to keep up.

So, how much diligence is due diligence? How careful do you have to be not to drop a bomb on somebody's house?

One answer is to say that it has to do with how well you've done in the past, and how well other armies like yours have done. If you are doing at least a good a job as you did before, and if your army remains about average with respect to how comparable armies are doing, then you've done enough.

Another answer is to act as if it was your best friend's house that was going to be destroyed. If you can imagine saying to him, "Look, I did my best, I really did", and you can imagining him understanding and forgiving you, then you did enough. I have never served in the military, but I imagine that officers hold themselves to a similar standard when they send their own men into harm's way. They work very hard to minimize unnecessary deaths.

You can see where I'm going with this. Israel is usually quite good about this stuff, but they really screwed the pooch with this last operation. Dropping a 2000 pound bomb into a residential area demonstrates a flat-out disregard for civilian losses. They were not going out of their way to kill civilians, of course, but this is a text-book example of a failure to exercise due diligence.

Maybe they had a compelling reason to do it. Maybe we'll learn that this guy was so dangerous, and the need to take him out was so urgent, that it justified this unusually heavy-handed approach. Or, maybe, Israel lowered her standards just a bit too much that day, and needs to be yelled at by her friends so that she doesn't do it again.

But, guys, let's face it. This was fucked, and they should not have taken him out this way.

I do believe there is a good general test we can apply to determine if civilian losses have been properly considered:

1) The avoidance of civilian casualties should present a difficult and challenging problem to everyone involved in the planning stages, even to the point of effecting strategy and logistics, and it should significantly limit the operation of forces on the ground. In general, it should be a big, unending pain in the ass for everybody who's going to be involved with throwing metal through the air.

2) You should win anyway.

This clarity is important. A selfless concern for the lives of noncombatants is a costly burden to carry, but a necessary one (necessary, if we don't want to be like them). That cost, unfortunately, is carried by the people we ask to do our fighting for us, so it is essential that we keep that burden to an absolute minimum. This burden threatens not only their lives, but also the success of the missions which are of such vital importance to our nation that they justified all the killing to begin with.

I think we agree on the basics, and it's just a judgement call to determine the level of degree. I've called it like I see it.

Thanks for the feedback.

(I'd also like to qualify some of the derogatory terms I used. When an army disregards civilian losses, they have become "uncivilized bastards", and when they go out of the way to target civilians, they are "fucking savages". In my opinion, the Israelis lowered themselves to the "uncivilized bastards" level with this recent action, whereas the Palestinians have been operating as certified savages for quite some time. Just wanted to make that clear.)

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Israel killed a high-ranking, piece-of-shit terrorist leader today, and that's good.

The bad news is that they killed him by dropping a one-ton bomb on an occupied, three story apartment building in the middle of the night. Current reports are 15 dead, mostly children, and "hundreds" wounded.

They say they had several chances to get him recently, but held off because they didn't want to kill too many civilians. I believe that.

They are also claiming that they were surprised that so many civilians were hurt, claiming an "intelligence failure". I think they are full of shit.

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt; they must have had a compelling reason to hit him, right now, regardless of the cost, because they normally don't do stuff like this.

Well, I hope they had a goddamn good reason, because this was fucked up. This was the sort of thing I'd expect from their enemies, not from them.

If Bin Laden himself was in a building like that, sipping wine and watching the Lakers on TV, would we have taken this shot? Not on your life. And why not? Because we're the good guys, goddamnit. We are better than the savages we fight.

Let's not fucking forget it.

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Here's an interesting overview that you probably won't see in your morning paper:

Excerpted from Gun Laws Around The World: Do They Work? (October, 1997)

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Yesterday, the market continued to fall like a stone, with the Dow briefly touching the 7000s before closing at about 8020. People have been losing a shitload of money lately and they are not happy. Monday morning we'll probably break into the 7000s for sure.

The following graphs (shamelessly lifted from www.LowRisk.com, the first site I could find via google that offered this data) shows the Dow in an historical perspective. This first image is plotted on a linear scale.

This second image is probably more interesting; it's the same data plotted on a logarithmic scale. (The log scale can be a more honest way of looking at data like this, because it shows the relative value of a given percentage change. A 40-point drop was a big deal in 1930, but it's almost invisible in 1990):

Suppose the Dow were to totally melt down and fall another thousand points, all the way to 6999. People would freak, but what would it really mean?

Well, on the one hand, it would mean your stocks lost well over a third of their value since the morning of 9/11. That's bad, and no pretty words are going to change that.

On the other hand, it wouldn't mean much of anything in the long term. If you look at that second chart again, and try to imagine the graph continuing to 2002 / 6999 (about the 1997 levels) you'll see it's still perfectly in line with the nice, long-term, logarithmic growth of the market.

On the short term, it'd be a disaster. On the long term, it's a blip.

Everything I've read by people I trust suggests that the important things about the economy are solid; we remain productive, employed, and innovative, with growing markets and new products in the pipeline. Once the last of the accounting crimes have come to light, we'll still have solid companies to invest in and we'll know, finally, what they are really worth. And they will continue to grow.

The economy is sound. Sit tight and don't sweat it.

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Maybe it's just me, but these plans suck.

(via FR)

I mean, this stuff is about as inspiring as those welded, rusted, metal-plate sculptures they put in parks now.

I want something more like this:

With a real live anti-aircraft battery on top, goddamnit, crewed by a 24-hour-a-day honor guard.

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So far as I can tell, the FBI does not consider a killing to be a terrorist act unless they can prove a connection to a terrorist group. While they are certainly free to use whatever definition of the word "terrorist" that they like, this word does have a specific and generally understood meaning to the rest of us, a meaning which is important in our understanding of events as they unfold.

With this in mind, today's excellent Post editorial by Daniel Pipes (via YOB) hits the nail right square dead-center on the head. Consider the following real life examples:

Rashid Baz, a Lebanese cab driver with a known hatred for all things Israeli and Jewish, armed himself to the teeth in March 1994 and drove around the city looking for a Jewish target. He found his victims - a van full of Hassidic boys - on the Brooklyn Bridge and fired a hail of bullets against them, killing one boy. And how did the FBI classify this crime? As "road rage." [...]

Ali Hasan Abu Kamal, a Palestinian gunman hailing from militant Islamic circles in Florida, took a gun to the top of the Empire State building in February 1997 and shot a tourist there. His suicide note accused the United States of using Israel as its "instrument" against the Palestinians, but city officials ignored this evidence and instead dismissed Abu Kamal as either "one deranged individual working on his own" (Police Commissioner Howard Safir) or a "man who had many, many enemies in his mind" (Mayor Rudolph Giuliani).

Gamil al-Batouti, an EgyptAir copilot, yelled "I put my faith in God's hands" as he crashed a plane leaving Kennedy airport in October 1999, killing 217. Under Egyptian pressure, the National Transportation Safety Board report shied away from once mentioning Batouti's possible terrorist motives.

Damir Igric, a Croat immigrant from the former Yugoslavia, used a boxcutter to slash the neck of a Greyhound bus driver in Tennessee last October, causing the bus to roll over, killing six passengers and himself. Although this bus-hijacking scenario echoed similar attacks by Palestinians on Israeli buses, the FBI immediately classified it "an isolated incident" and not an act of terrorism. The media attributed the violence to post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Hassan Jandoubi, an Islamist with possible connections to al Qaeda, had started working at the AZF fertilizer factory in suburban Toulouse, France, just days before a massive explosion took place there last Sept. 21. This, the worst catastrophe ever in a French chemical plant, killed Jandoubi and 29 others, injured 2,000, destroyed 600 dwellings, and damaged 10,000 buildings.

The autopsy revealed that Jandoubi was wearing two pairs of trousers and four pairs of underpants, which the coroner compared to what is worn by "Islamic militants going into battle or on suicide missions." Also, the chemical plant was processing ammonium nitrate, a stable chemical that requires a substantial infusion of energy to explode.

Ignoring these signs, the French authorities declared there was "no shred of evidence" of the explosion being a terrorist act and ruled it an accident. They even prosecuted two publications merely for calling Jandoubi a "radical Islamist," making them pay tens of thousands of dollars in fines to Jandoubi's heirs, a mosque and a Muslim organization for their "defamation" of Jandoubi.

I have no idea if all of these men were really terrorists or not, but I am certain that some of them were. Does it matter what we call it? Is there really a difference between a lone terrorist act and a lone hate crime?

You bet your ass it matters. If the KKK started encouraging whites to start killing blacks again, would we write off each incident as a independent, random event, or would we recognize the pattern and deal abruptly with the source of the violence? If radical Christians began killing gays in ones and twos across America, preaching the glory of such actions to one another and encouraging other members to do the same, would we pretend that there was nothing behind it, or would we call things by their proper names and get the truth out into the open? If we were to establish law enforcement priorities, public policy, and security doctrines, should we do it with this knowledge, or without it?

Names matter, for the same reasons that honesty and fairness matters. It's time to leave the sensitivity bullshit behind.

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First, we have breaking news from FOX about an Afghan man arrested today near Reading, PA. The man had been wanted for five years.

"When I saw a Middle Eastern man driving a heavily loaded pickup towards Limerick [nuclear power plant] I became a little suspicious," [arresting officer] Unterkoefler said. "The bumper was almost touching the ground."

[...] agents searched Popal's truck, which appeared to be loaded with about a dozen cases of soda, Unterkoefler said. He said he found several car batteries, adhesive solvents and electrical wiring under the soda.

FOX and CNN are also reporting that mens' wigs, binoculars, two cell phones, cameras, $3600 in cash, and a video camera were also found.

Now look at this report, from just this morning:

Four men who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent were videotaping, taking notes and talking on cellphones during two round trips June 24 on the ferry Spokane between Edmonds and Kingston [...]

"They seemed to be filming more of the interior of the cabin rather than the normal tourist filming, which is always the exterior," she said.

They became agitated when told to leave the vessel at each terminal as required, she said. The captain went home and decided to report the incident the next day.

On July 3, a different group of men appearing to be of Middle Eastern descent took extensive videotapes on the ferry Tacoma between Bainbridge and Seattle, she said. "They were filming all over the place" even before boarding the ferry [...]

And this report, from last month:

A frightening sequence of events and clues gleaned by U.S. intelligence has some in law enforcement believing that a maritime terrorist attack against San Francisco could be imminent.

Local ferry operators became alarmed last week when someone described as Middle Eastern man boarded a ferry to Alcatraz but did not leave the boat when it reached the island. Instead, the man videotaped boat traffic and used a stopwatch to time the route.

"He got on the boat to go to the island, but never got off when the other tourists did. Instead, he asked unusual questions about the timing and frequency of the trips, all the while videotaping and using the stopwatch," a source told The Examiner.

The frequency of suspicious activity in San Francisco became apparent to the feds and local law enforcement in October when three men, described as Middle Eastern, boarded a ferry at Pier 41 for a trip to Alameda.

The boat's crew became alarmed when one of the men made his way to the upper deck to observe the captain piloting the ferry, another man used a stopwatch to time the route and a third man videotaped the Anchorage 9 terminal, a source said.

The crew noted the men did not appear interested in filming standard tourist attractions like bridges or other known sites. The report stated in part: "While it is not an overt act of terrorism, it is not (considered) normal passenger activity."

This was preceded by an alarming incident that occurred in Daly City on Oct. 20. Six Blue and Gold Fleet and Golden Gate Transit uniforms were stolen from a ferry employee's car, in addition to ferry schedules, maritime maps and a copy of the U.S. Coast Guard's Rules of the Road.

Anyone wearing the uniforms is automatically granted unlimited access to "all the ferry boats and buses in the Bay Area."

The employee told authorities the thieves didn't bother to take money or a cache of CDs left inside the car.

According to a report of the theft:

"Maybe it's nothing, but when you put it all together, it starts to add up," a source said.

[...] "We have good reason to believe that something is being planned," said another law enforcement source. "When you begin putting pieces of the puzzle together, it starts to make sense."

Now, I realize they make medication for this sort of thing, but goddamnit, this monkey smells a rat.

I'm not the only one:

State troopers have launched an aggressive campaign to boost security on Washington State Ferries by randomly searching vehicles while their owners wait to board. The searches are ostensibly voluntary, but motorists who refuse can be denied passage by the captain of the boat.

How many of you remember the Achille Lauro?

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Terrorists look like this:

In fact, almost all of them look like this. Really.

These are the sorts of people who commit terrorist acts. If someone who looks like this does something suspicious, you should be extra careful about it.

These photos are from the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists, Seeking Information, and 9/11 Archive pages.

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1) Just because an incident is "isolated" doesn't mean it's not a terrorist act.

Lots of terrorist acts are isolated incidents. Many are committed by individuals who act under their own initiative; others are committed by individuals who have been encouraged and even trained by others, but who are acting on their own at the time of the incident.

We hear about suicide bombers all the time in Israel, but we pay much less attention to the small-scale shooting attacks, which are nearly as common. Terrorists, either alone or in small groups, will attack Israeli soldiers and civilians with rifles or handguns. Sometimes they shoot up cars on the road, or soldiers at checkpoints. Sometimes they shoot into people's homes, or even break in and shoot the people inside.

Doesn't mean they aren't terrorists, for chrissake.

2) The ethnicity - even the apparent ethnicity - of an attacker matters now. It's news, it's an important part of the story, and we shouldn't be shy about mentioning it.

If you've watched CNN TV, you'll know that three separate law enforcement sources described the appearance of today's suspect as an "Arab male". If you've read only the webpages of CNN, Fox News, or MSNBC, you'd think the shooting was committed by Casper the Friendly Ghost.

The FBI knows this guy is exactly 52 years old, but they won't mention his name. I'll give three-to-one odds to the first taker it's something along the lines of Mohammed or Akbar. Enough, already, with the cuteness and the sensitivities. If this guy was white they'd have been shouting it from the rooftops, to help reassure us that this was not a terrorist attack. Why? Because his appearance matters.

Imagine you need to drop by the local feed store to pick up some fertilizer for your garden. The guy ahead of you in line is asking lots of questions about Ammonium Nitrate, and he obviously has no idea what he is doing and he looks like he's never held a shovel in his life. If this guy looked like an Arab, would you take a moment to write down his license plate number? You goddamn well should. Would you bother if he looked like a Norwegian? Probably not. I certainly wouldn't.

Let's just cut the crap here. Three thousand dead is enough.

3) Is there anybody in America who thought, "Gee, if that guy has shot up the American Airlines ticket counter, our security guys would have done a much better job taking care of him"?

Of course not. The Israelis know what the fuck they are doing, and their people dealt with this threat superbly. Unless I am greatly mistaken, we are nowhere near as capable.

This is not rocket science. We know exactly what needs to be done, and it's about fucking time we started doing it. Why are we not recruiting and training thousands of people right now to staff these sorts of security positions, instead of having National Guardsmen with empty rifles wandering around? It's been nine months. I've seen companies founded, have an IPO, and crash in less time than this.

4)What the fuck do you mean, "no evidence that this was a terrorist attack?"

You want evidence? I got evidence: it was an Arab-looking man, killing random Jews in public, for no apparent reason, on July fourth. That's not evidence?

Sure, it's not proof - we'll need to find out a whole bunch of stuff before we really know what happened here - but it's sure as shit evidence. So stop talking to us like we're retarded or something.

4) And finally, if you are going to run a headline that reads "Moslem-Americans avoid July 4th festivities for fear of being victimized by a racist hate-crime", please have the decency to add "just like hundreds of millions of other Americans".

To our great credit, there have been very few acts of retaliatory violence here in America, and let's face it, it's not innocent Arabs who are most likely to get slaughtered by the thousands anytime soon in our cities. Let's try and keep a little perspective, OK?

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Believe it or not, the Fourth of July is actually my second favorite holiday, right after Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is all family and great food, Independence Day is fireworks, grilled meat and beer.

What's not to like?

A slightly deeper element in each of these occasions is gratitude. Gratitude - or, in my internal language, "knowing what you want, and being smart enough to recognize it" - is something worth making an effort for. It actually improves your life. I would not be diminished if I failed to mark the birthday of god's first kid or the nation's first president, or if I neglect to consider the Easter Bunny or the yearly Jack-o-lantern in it's proper light. But if I managed to go a whole year without getting fat and happy and thinking about how fucking lucky I am, and how happy I am to mark another year in the prosperity to which I have, incredibly, become accustomed, well, I'd be an idiot.

Especially if I took it all for granted and let it slip away.

This year's celebration will be somewhat complicated by the fact that we may be getting shot at before it is over. I'd propose that we make it a point of national pride to rise to this challenge rather than shrink from it.

We are going to have to live with this sort of risk for a long time. We can cover up and lose a little every day, bleed ourselves dry over time with worry and with fear; we can get all childlike and stupid and pretend that nothing bad will ever happen, and get really surprised and hurt when it does; or we can be brave and united and face down danger with indignation and with pride.

Use the Fourth as an opportunity to advertise to your friends and your neighbors that you are one of the folks who can be counted on over the coming years. You're not going to hide under the bed, and you'll be damned if a bunch of ignorant savages are going to screw up a good barbecue, or take the fun out of blowing some shit up in the backyard with some contraband fireworks.

You're going to be the sort of American Citizen that doesn't worry about every goddamn little thing, because you know you can deal with what happens. You get a flat tire, you can fix it. Your neighbor gets tangled up in his mower, you patch him up and run him to the hospital. And if somebody is trying to build an ANFO bomb in a Ryder truck, they'd better hope they don't let you catch a glimpse of it because you're just itching for the chance to personally blow their cover and fuck up their whole day.

We'll use the day to show everyone that we have made our choice and we are sticking with it, unbowed, unintimidated, and unafraid. We don't need to ask permission to be free, we take our freedom, thank you very much, and we manage it, and defend it, ourselves.

You know. Independence Day. A chance to celebrate what we have, and to demonstrate that we intend to keep it.

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