Re: Coincidence?
"Also, the MSF hospital bombing was an ACCIDENT, m'kay?"
I really get tired of people who sprout this kind of thing.
1 AC-130s don't bomb a damn thing. They don't carry bombs. They're _gunships_. They shoot the living hell out of things with 105mm, 40mm, and 20mm cannon. In this particular case, the AC-130 made five gun runs over a period of about an hour.
2 damn right it wasn't an accident. Someone called in a gunship to make a strike on that building. The aircrew (probably) didn't know (or care) what the target was, just that they'd been ordered to drop the hammer on it. They did know that gunship targets in an urban area have to be cleared all the way up at least the local air officer commanding, possibly to the level of the theatre commander. Someone with stars on their shoulders said that that building was a target. The aircrew didn't stop to ask any damn foolish questions, they just flew the strike.
3 allegedly the MSF guys screamed over the radio to the US command echelon while the strike was going on. (Remember, five gun runs over around an hour...) If someone in the command group even thought that there was the slightest chance that the strike was going into the wrong target, they'd have fallen over themselves aborting the mission. They didn't.
4 it is just barely possible that there was some incompetence involved. Remember, this _is_ the US Air Force here, the boyz who managed to kill the highest ranking American officer to die in the Second World War by (ahem!) accident. (They bombed short. Very short. And got themselves a lieutenant general. Pity that it wasn't a German lieutenant general.) And they've had _lots_ more accidents since then. (I'm thinking particularly of certain incidents in Iraq and in Yugoslavia...) However, it is much more likely that for whatever reason someone highly placed wanted to flatten that building, or, more likely, someone inside that building, and didn't care who got whacked in the process.
There are only two things which are clear about this incident:
1 the aircrew are blameless, though they're the ones currently left holding the sack of shit
2 there's a lot more happening than has been made public.
Frankly, I suspect that the AC-130 was used because the "Oops! My _five_ GPS-guided bombs just accidentally happened to hit you! Sorry, my error! Let me kiss it and make it all better!" excuse was already tried in Yugoslavia.