"jps" wrote in message

Ex post facto reports of civilian casualties must of necessity be
looked upon with a jaundiced eye.

Whew, that's a pretty sick perspective. What do you think the time
limit should be on dead children?

We spend thousands of man hours looking for a pretty girl in N. Dakota
and don't blink an eye when 9 kids and then another 6 are killed by
mistake.

It just doesn't matter as much when they're brown, does it?

I know it is always convenient for you to try to play a race card in
political arguments, thinking you can preempt the moral high ground, but you
really ought to be careful. When a miserable little **** makes an insulting
and presumptuous statement like yours, you have no idea of the background of
the person to whom you're directing your remarks. Suffice it to say that
you simply don't know what you're talking about.

But that's really not the point of the original post. There have been
numerous documented cases in several countries in the mid-east of
governments using their own people, including children, as human shields.
When these people get killed, news outlets, including American sources, are
more than willing to blast the story ad nauseam, with little or no reference
to the fact that these people were likely placed in harm's way by their own
government, by force. There have been cases in both Iraq wars wherein there
were civilian casualties resulting from explosions with which US tactical
operations had no connection. In virtually all these cases there was video
feed available within minutes from al Jazeera or al Arabiya of injured
children being rushed to hospitals, blood soaked, wailing adults, etc.
Injuries and deaths very real and very tragic, but no one, including US news
sources, asks how the local Arab news crews happened to be in exactly the
right spot so quickly, and no one, including US news sources, gives any
credence to the US Forces' statements that this was not a result of their
operations.

History has shown, for the benefit of those who care to pay attention, that
these governments and military forces will create their own "collateral
damage" for consumption by the ever-gluttonous international news agencies.
Anyone who *does not* look upon these reports with at least some initial
skepticism is being naive in the extreme.