Attacks in Paris Stadium, concert hall

I don't expect the number of wars to be reduced.

I want people to see the people they kill. I want people who want to fight wars be the ones who are going out and fighting and killing.

Someone declares war? they go out and fight. they don't get to stay home. they don't get to keep their family at home.

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Many of my public school teachers fought/served in WWII. One of them taught us the Battle of New Orleans and told us this was the most important part




looking your enemy in the eyes was considered a matter of honour

I'm still in that place.

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Separately, I've been thinking about the length of wars a lot lately.

yup

pretty much all of your post

with emphasis on these two sections

my main connection to Lockerbie is being in a house that got a phone call advising a diplomat to reschedule his daughter's flight from Europe as the US had information about a bombing that was going to happen shortly - and did

our friend rescheduled his daughter's flight in time

I've always held Lockerbie against the US defense community

Yeah, because those Libyan terrorists had nothing to do with it. Sheesh!

it appears you need to review the definition of hawk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_hawk



I do not favour war.

I do not favour continuing any war.

I do not favour escalating any war.

It's pretty simple.

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I do not favour war BUT if there is a war I want the people who do favour it to be the ones fighting. And I want them fighting it in person.

Whoever thinks war is the right thing is IMNSHO required to be in the battle.

It was 100% preventable.

The US knew when. They knew where. They knew the flight.

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I haven't forgiven the diplomat either. He should have passed on the information.

There are two threads running on this topic so it's hard to know in which one my comments lie. In any case, clearly you are not a hawk. I was being facetious in calling you and osso Hawks because of your, in my opinion, foolish assertion that hand to hand combat is preferable to drone attacks.

More than once you've declined to retract your foolish statement so it's rich that you might take umbrage at being called a hawk.

Evidence please

My boss was supposed to be on that plane, he and his wife took a earlier flight. He called us from the plane to let us know they were alright. Both my boss and I are retired from the US Department of Defense. When that plane blew up there were quite a few DOD people onboard. I was actually working that day. Imagine my shock to hear you claim you have knowledge that we blew ourselves up. Who got the phone call, a Libyan diplomat? And apparently the caller knew which flight to avoid. Wish we had that information, could have avoided losing an entire planeload of people.

Evidence of a conversation in my parents house in 1988? that could be a bit tricky since we didn't have a tape recorder running during the Advent party.

You can believe me or not. I know what happened. I know that the consul and his family were never again welcome in my parents home.

I can tell you he was a European consul, stationed in my home town. His daughter was going to university in England, scheduled to travel to North America for Christmas. She arrived after Christmas.

I'm sure someone/somewhere has records of diplomats' families flights having been rescheduled. I don't have that kind of access to information.

oralloy wrote: "Drones usually employ weapons with a very small blast radius."

Reaper drones carry a combination of Hellfire missiles and 500 pound bombs. The U.S. military likes to understate the damage by using the measure "effective blast radius", which only means that half of the people within 200 feet are statistically expected to die, though many more will be wounded and disfigured. The actual blast radius, which includes the distance that shrapnel is likely to travel, is much larger: casualties (dead and wounded) gradually decrease with distance.

Even Predator drones are lethal. A Hellfire missile with a 20 pound warhead surrounded by 80 pounds of steel shrapnel is not a particularly discriminating weapon, government and media assurances to the contrary.

The Boston Marathon bomb which caused 283 casualties (some disfigured for life) used a pressure cooker filled with low grade black powder taken from fireworks. The cooker could hold about eight pounds of powder but probably held less since it was also filled with nails used as shrapnel.

Now imagine 20 pounds of military grade high-explosives which pound for pound are several times as powerful as TNT, surrounded by 80 pounds of steel professionally designed to maximize fragmentation, whether or not with thermobaric or other enhancement.

Used as an anti-tank weapon, such missiles might be discriminatory, but only because tanks contain a lot of the blast, being made of thick armor.

the consul was told that no family should fly through London on a specific date

I actually think there is one piece of evidence my father would have had at one point. The consul asked to use my parents' phone to call his daughter to tell her not to travel as scheduled. If he dialed direct, it would have been on a phone bill.

Many

That's slim information to make such an allegation. An unidentified diplomat from "Europe" knew about this plan and HE/SHE stayed quiet??? You may think you remember correctly, but I think you may have misremembered. I will have to drop out of this for awhile, at least until the steam stops coming out my ears.

money

Stuff going on too fast here - I need to reply to this one

My reluctance to war is war, but that can be broken down.

oralloy wrote: "There is a bit of a difference between a civilian situation involving police and criminals and a wartime attack conducted in a country not under US control."

Yes there is. Police are authorized by the laws of the states and localities that (at least nominally) oversee them, and local media have access to the scene, to witnesses and to records, as do lawyers.

A military attack on the citizens of another country which we haven't even declared war against, which kills out of sight half a world away, in an area where western journalists don't go because they might be kidnapped by the local militants, with operations protected by military secrecy, is something entirely different.

There might also be a psychological difference important to the civilian bystanders. A proportional, authorized police action by their own law enforcement personnel in which accidental casualties occur, is not the same as a drone strike (or bombing, since air strikes are more common than drone strikes), which is conducted by an arrogant foreign government which regards civilian casualties as statistically acceptable side-effects which are both known and expected even though civilians are not the targets.

oralloy: " Western governments do not target innocents."

Word games. They conduct military air strikes in campaigns of harassment knowing that these will not achieve the strategic objective of eliminating militant groups or of retaking control of territory from them; also knowing that these bombing campaigns will cause civilian casualties (often more than militant casualties, since militants have tunnels, shelters and fortified positions as well as the training and situational awareness to take cover effectively).

They do this for political reasons because the public and the media screams "do something". The civilian casualties, though not the technical targets of the bombing, are expected and it is known in advance that their deaths and injuries will occur as a direct consequence of the air strike.

Tangent -

meantime, some guy has rescued photos back then and is showing them in art galleries.

I'm not against him, he had a right. My ex but also pal noticed it, and clued me in. I tried to get in touch, to tell them that he might visit, with my approval, but somehow messed up. In any case, J. couldn't get there, bigfish weather going on.

I tried at one point to talk to the atomic museum here in Abq. My cousins took me there, him in the army in white sands, so interested, and I managed to talk with the director, who was brand new. He was a nice man and listened. I ended up with some papers to fill out to be allowed to donate. I also tripped, the appropriate light for the place bad for me. Not their problem, but part of my experience with my odd eyes. At the same time, the director, who didn't see that, was probably figuring out how to deal with about something he didn't know about.

I liked the director but never filled out the papers.

Tangent -

meantime, some guy has rescued bomb test photos back then and is showing them in art galleries.

I'm not against him, he had a right, used proper procedures. My ex but also pal noticed it, and clued me in. I tried to get in touch, to tell them that he might visit, with my approval, but somehow messed up. In any case, J. couldn't get there, bigfish weather going on. I might have liked the guy. eh. I remember the gallery being rude but might have been wrong.

earlier,
I tried at one point to talk to the atomic museum here in Abq. My cousins took me there, he in the army in white sands in years past, so interested, and I managed to talk with the director, who was brand new. He was a nice man and listened. He hadn't heard of Bikini. I ended up with some papers to fill out to be allowed to donate. I also tripped, the appropriate light for the place bad for me. Not their problem, but part of my experience with my odd eyes. At the same time, the director, who didn't see me doing that wallapaloo, was probably figuring out how to deal with something he didn't know about.

I liked the director but never filled out the papers.

oralloy wrote: "The US certainly did no such thing (target civilian populations in the Second World War). And I seriously doubt that any of the allies did."

Britain and Germany deliberately targeted each other's civilian population. William L. Shirer in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (chapter 22) explains how this began. On the night of August 23, 1940, German bombers targeting aircraft factories and oil tanks on the outskirts of London suffered "a minor navigational error" (Shirer) and dropped bombs in central London. The British thought it was deliberate and as retaliation bombed Berlin the next night. The tit for tat accelerated and thus was born "the blitz".

That Britain undertook the deliberate bombing of German civilians to break German war morale is known from declassified British war records drafted at the highest level:

"A few weeks before the end of World War Two, Winston Churchill drafted a memorandum to the British Chiefs of Staff:

" 'It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed ... The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing.' "

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/area_bombing_01.shtml

The architect of the U.S. firebombing of Tokyo, Curtis LeMay:

"There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn't bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders."

" Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.... Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier."

https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay