"To Show or Not To Show" From Charles Aldinger of Reuters News Service: Top Stories, via Yahoo: In Baghdad, the top U.S. commander, Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, said positive identification had been established through dental records and other means and that the United States would provide proof to the Iraqi people that Saddam's sons were dead. But Sanchez stopped short of saying the photographs would be released. One U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said officials were performing a "balancing act" in deciding whether to release the graphic photographs of the dead bodies. "Standards are different for different regions of the world for television. In the United States, our standards for network television are more conservative than those in other places in the world. Specifically, the Arab world has no problem at all with showing very gruesome photos of human beings," the official said. "...Our norm is that we don't do that, and that we find it offensive to see that kind of thing on television. We have to balance that with our effort to ensure that the Iraqi people know that Qusay and Uday are no longer alive."
damn straight -- the US "norm" requires the depiction of war from a safe distance, allowing the viewer the full splendor of explosions and cruise missles, while avoiding all the unpleasant side effects such as severed limbs and corpses. paying for it is one thing, having to look at it is another.
I agree, but innocent people sitting having dinner at a restaurant with their families are also killed when you bomb a city. War has its price. Their army is suicide bombers. Ours don't commit suicide, we just bomb.
I believe the difference would be that we dont target civilians, we target military targets...Suicide bombers mostly target innocent civilians....I understand casualty of war, but theirs is not... p.s. I dont consider a pilot dropping a bomb from 20,000 feet a hero either....
Firestorms In 1941 Charles Portal of the British Air Staff advocated that entire cities and towns should be bombed. Portal claimed that this would quickly bring about the collapse of civilian morale in Germany. Air Marshall Arthur Harris agreed and when he became head of RAF Bomber Command in February 1942, he introduced a policy of area bombing (known in Germany as terror bombing) where entire cities and towns were targeted. One tactic used by the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Force was the creation of firestorms. This was achieved by dropping incendiary bombs, filled with highly combustible chemicals such as magnesium, phosphorus or petroleum jelly (napalm), in clusters over a specific target. After the area caught fire, the air above the bombed area, become extremely hot and rose rapidly. Cold air then rushed in at ground level from the outside and people were sucked into the fire. The most notable examples of this tactic being used was in Hamburg (August, 1943), Dresden (February, 1945) and Tokyo (March 1945). Hamburg in July/August 1943 "The raging fires in a high wind caused terrific damage and the grievous loss of human life out-stripped any previous raids. All attempts to extinguish them proved fruitless and technically impossible. The fires spread unhindered, causing fiery storms which reached heats of 1,000°, and speeds approaching gale force. The narrow streets of Hamburg with their countless backyards were favourable to the flames and there was no escape. As the result of a dense carpet bombing, large areas of the city had been transformed into a single sea of flame within half an hour. Thousands of small fires joined up to become a giant conflagration. The fiery wind tore the roofs from the houses, uprooted large trees and flung them into the air like blazing torches. The inhabitants took refuge in the air-raid shelters, in which later they were burned to death or suffocated. In the early morning, thousands of blackened corpses could be seen in the burned-out streets. In Hamburg now one thought was uppermost in every mind to leave the city and abandon the battlefield. During the following nights, until 3rd August 1943, the British returned and dropped on the almost defenceless city about 3,000 block-busters, 1,200 land-mines, 25,000 H.E., 3,000,000 incendiaries, 80,000 phosphorus bombs and 500 phosphorus drums; 40,000 men were killed, a further 40,000 wounded and 900,000 were homeless or missing." Members of the RAF bombing crews became increasingly concerned about the morality of creating firestorms. Roy Akehurst was a wireless operator who took part in the raid on Dresden. It struck me at the time, the thought of the women and children down there. We seemed to fly for hours over a sheet of fire - a terrific red glow with thin haze over it. I found myself making comments to the crew: "Oh God, those poor people." It was completely uncalled for. You can't justify it.
Cowards huh. The Latin macho man speaks. The Allied WW2 bombing crews that conducted air raids over Germany had a 80% mortality rate. That's right. 80% of the crews were killed in action, and they knew this going into thier flights. Not the stuff of cowards. Go suck some more sugar cane, but do it before it has fermented this time.
U think that the act of killing oneself is herioc....I am talking about the act of killing innocent lives...it may have been more herioc maybe to not follow those orders which you know are wrong...And I think ur number of 80% may be too high....please furnish the link to those stats.... Like you think you are brave hiding behind your computer isulting me..I could garauntee you would not be saying these things to my face....Lil hero...
Another fantasy filled sucker. The notion that war is conducted with the intent of just killing the uniformed enemy is sanitized nonsense. We don't target civilians but a coward does. Drivel drivel drivel. Two words. "Collateral damage". If you did not notice, the US and Britain bombed the shit out of Baghdad a few months ago (and other population centers) and thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed in the conduct of Allied operations. Dummy. That's war. People get killed. There's no way around it. The smart bombs exist partly to get them on target and partly to conduct war without repulsing the public.