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I thought you might be interested in the article from the FAIR web site. The following article will be appended to your message: Killing Civilians: Behind The Reassuring Words By Norman Solomon The Bush administration has vowed that it will not aim the Pentagon's firepower at civilian targets in Afghanistan. Such assurances are supposed to make us think that innocent bystanders will be spared when the missiles fly and the warheads explode. Don't believe it. Back in early August 1945, President Truman had this to say: "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians." Actually, the U.S. government went out of its way to select Japanese cities of sufficient size to showcase the extent of the A-bomb's deadly power. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hundreds of thousands of civilians died — immediately or eventually — as a result of the atomic bombings. In the past several decades, presidents have routinely expressed their reverence for civilian lives while trying to justify orders that inevitably destroyed civilian lives. Denial is key to the success of public-relations campaigns that always accompany war. While top U.S. officials spoke of fervent desires to protect civilians from harm in Southeast Asia, the Pentagon inflicted massive carnage on the populations of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon tirelessly proclaimed their eagerness for "peace with honor." Most of those who died were civilians. When U.S. troops invaded Panama in December 1989, the USA's major media and policymakers in Washington ignored the hundreds of civilians who died in the assault. Scarcely more than a year later, during the Gulf War, most of the people killed by Uncle Sam were civilians and frantically retreating soldiers. Pentagon officials quietly estimated that 200,000 Iraqis had died in six weeks. During the past decade, damage to Iraq's civilian infrastructure and ongoing sanctions have cost the lives of at least several hundred thousand children. To read the rest of the article, please click on the link below. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2150 This article was published on Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting's Website (http://www.fair.org).

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