Tag Archives: Collateral Damage

A “Case” You Probably Didn’t Read About, by Eric Peters

Posted on December 18, 2020 | Leave a comment

The collateral damage from the Global War on Germs will be greater than the collateral damage from many of the US’s actual shooting wars. Here’s one sad story of such damage, from Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

A friend in Georgia called to let me know a junior high school student who attends the same school as her 13-year-old son tried to kill herself the other day. She was found hanging from a cord she’d wound over the shower head in her parents’ home. She was despondent over being denied her life – and so decided to take it.

The good news is she was discovered in time and is still alive.

The bad news is there are many such “cases” – including the premature deaths-by-neglect of elderly people who haven’t got the ‘Rona but lost the will to live – and stopped eating or just faded away from depressive ennui resulting from being “locked down” in nursing homes for the past six-plus-months, by decree of the Gesundheitsfuhrers.

Mammals need the warmth and companionship of other mammals. Take that away – “lock them down”- and you sentence them to a slow but certain death, beginning with their spirit and ending with the mortification of their bodies.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Medicine, Psychology

Tagged ,

How Many Civilians Can We Kill? by Robert Koehler

Posted on March 31, 2017 | 1 comment

When collateral damage—deaths of innocent civilians—becomes just another war metric. From Robert Koehler at antiwar.com:

“The wooden carts that residents use to carry vegetables and other wares in the once busy market area instead ferried out cadavers recovered from the rubble last week.”

And so . . . another “precision” bomb strike in America’s war against terror. This was the scene in Mosul earlier this month, as reported by the Washington Post. Possibly more than 200 civilians died, buried in the rubble of several buildings, which had been jammed with terrified residents of Iraq’s second largest city who were seeking shelter from the war. Many of them – including women, children – may have died slowly, buried beneath the rubble, as rescue operations took a week to mobilize.

Words fail me. So I borrow some from Air Force Brigadier Gen. Matthew Isler, who told U.S. News and World Report in the wake of the Mosul strike: “The density of the local fighting for those ground forces has changed. What has not changed is our support, our diligence in making sure we are taking the appropriate levels to make sure we are avoiding any harm to innocent civilians.”

The article, which addresses the controversy that President Trump has “relaxed” the rules of engagement in the war against ISIS, causing an increase in civilian casualties, goes on to note: “Isler specifically said the risk calculus – the number of civilian casualties acceptable to war planners, at times including the president, when considering missions – has not changed.”

The tremor I feel in these words goes deeper than another Trump controversy: “the number of civilian casualties acceptable to war planners . . .”

Even if these words were more than just PR blather and had a core of moral integrity, they stop me in my tracks. Of course, there’s nothing surprising here. This is how war works, especially today, when battlefields are coterminous with civilian living and working space. Innocent people are unavoidably taken out along with the “enemy.” This is the collateral damage that comes with every decision to wage war.

To continue reading: How Many Civilians Can We Kill?

1 Comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Government, War

Tagged ,

US Bombs Afghanistan Hospital, Kills 9 Civilians, Injures 37; Tosses It Off As “Collateral Damage”, by Tyler Durden

Posted on October 3, 2015 | Leave a comment

From Tyler Durden, at Zero Hedge, via theburningplatform.com:

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse for US foreign policy, or for the credibility of the US state department to slide further, it got much worse.

Less than a day after US ambassador to the UN, uber-warhawk Samantha Power informed Russia of the latest US foreign policy stance by tweeter, when she called “on Russia to immediately cease attacks on Syrian opposition and civilians” in the latest desperate attempt to halt the Russian campaign against US-created ISIS which may wipe out the terrorist threat in just a few short days, it was the US itself which admitted that early on Saturday the US airforce bombed an Afghan hospital run by the medical aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors without Borders, in the Afghan city of Kunduz in an air strike that killed at least nine people [the death toll is now at 16] and wounded 37.

As the Executive Director, of Doctors without Borders Jason Cone tweeted, “all parties 2 conflict, including in Kabul & Washington, were clearly informed of precise GPS Coordinates of @MSF facilities in Kunduz” and that the “precise location of @MSF Kunduz hospital communicated to all parties on multiple occasions over past months, including on 9/29.”

In other words, this morning’s US bombing was nothing more than another example of the utter incompetence, carelessness and disregard for innocent civilian lives that has become a staple hallmark of US foreign policy, something we have already witnessed repeatedly in the past 6 years as a result of the thousands of innocent people dead as part of US drone attacks, also known as “collateral damage.”

The attack, which started at 2:15am local time, took place when almost 200 patients and employees were in the hospital, the only one in the region that can deal with major injuries, Medecins Sans Frontieres said.

To continue reading (and pictures): US Bombs Afghanistan Hospital

Leave a comment

Posted in Medicine, Other Views, War

Tagged ,