If the victims of a bomb were “suspects” of Al Queda or some other group, how can that fact be corroboratted if they’re dead
and not talking? Is there a photo-lineup of all known & unknown dues-paying members?
How can these questionable facts change so instantly to hardcore proof to justify killing these FKA suspects.
They may be justifiable goat farmers that are dressed to the 9’s, but on what evidence are they deemed otherwise?
As much of a skeptic I am of the military and its actions, I would hesitate to say that we just started bombing eveyrthing we saw.
From all reports, the attacks we did were concentrated against known encampments. Otherwise, patrols were set out to search for evidence. There are numberous reports of these types of patrols in the media. They most frequently found weapons caches, not members, and part of their purpose was to flush the suspects out from the civilians.
Generally, one of the upswings of a civilian military is that they are fairly civilian in nature and wouldn’t be the type walking around killing anyone they saw - I’d imagine that the average American grunt would be more afraid of having to live with killing civilians… not to mention how much of a PR asswhooping the military would get if they were exposed in something like that.
On the other hand, we did unintentionally bomb several civilians and friendlies (including the Red Cross building. Twice.). Whether you think this was intentional or not is up for debate, but burden of proof is on you.
I’m pretty convinced that we inflicted a good number of civilian casualties, and various human rights groups have been crying this since virtually before anyone died. This is the unfortunate affect of any war, just or unjust… go ahead and compare the casualty numbers from WWII. The real losers of that war were anyone caught in between the armies and air forces.
On the other hand, things like Dresden, Tokyo, Nanking, anywhere between Russia and Germany, etc would be unimaginable today. Maybe we learned something.
I agree that a bit more specificity would be helpful, however I’ll take a crack at an answer.
Many terrorist attacks are followed up by phone calls to a newspaper, TV or radio station, or even a government office with one group or another claiming “credit.”
In such cases, there is a presumption that the attackers were members of the group claiming responsibility. However, since it is always possible that Group B is claiming credit for the actions of Group A (so as, for example, to garner more publicity so as to increase recruiting efforts among the disaffected), the notified agency (private or governmental) is safer reporting the culprits as “suspected” members or “alleged” members of the group claiming responsibility. In this way, they do not compromise any subsequent trials with the suspicion that they created the whole mess, even scripting the capture and trial of the leaders of the group that plotted the act.
(They also cover their butts and don’t look like complete idiots when it turns out that the “suspects” were not involved and the real culprits were from Group C.)
Another possibility is that there is evidence of who actually committed the act (farewell letters written to relatives or friends, security camera photos of the perpetrators, personal IDs in wallets, etc.) and it turns out that they are, indeed, already on a list of potential terrorists. The U.S. had a fair amount of evidence regarding Atta–the various U.S. agencies simply did not put together the evidence quickly enough prior to the WTC/Pentagon attacks.
As to killing the suspects, you’ll need to provide a bit more information.
