UN Concludes Outpost Hit By Precision-Guided Bomb

Haven't you heard? The Decider's party declared that the UN hates the Jews and is worse than Hitler. Obviously this is a lie orchestrated by the Neo-Nazis and Gay-Hippy-Democrats to help the terrorists defeat Isreal and give the bomb to Finland.


In reality-based-reality though, I thought that this was obvious. Why would anyone doubt that it happened? What, did the UN just decide to blow up four soldiers for the heck of it? Blame-the-current-agressor? The bigger problem is making it so that countries like the U.S. and those it enables from killing people it shouldn't be.

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Original post by LessBread Comments?

I said it at the time and I say it again; it was murder.

The people, at all levels, who caused this to happen should be brought up on war crimes charges and put away for the rest of their lives.

To the best of my knowledge precision guided weaponary requires a target to be painted by a laser, this requires a team in the field, are you telling me the team didn't spot 'UN' on the side of the building in huge letters?

Ofcourse, nowt will happen, if anyone even tries the US will block all atempts (and given the recent disregard for the whole 'war crimes' laws in Iraq it's kinda a given) and it will just be swept under the carpet, Israel gets away with it, 4 families don't have people coming home and the world keeps on turning...

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Original post by phantom To the best of my knowledge precision guided weaponary requires a target to be painted by a laser, this requires a team in the field, are you telling me the team didn't spot 'UN' on the side of the building in huge letters?

It's possible for it to have been satellite-guided. But I don't know enough about the bombing to say for sure. My guess would be that it was caused by a combination bad intelligence, incompetence, and the lack of a working line of communication between the UN and Israeli troops.

If you are going to bomb a base 150 yards away from friendly troops with a 1,000 pounder, does it hurt to alert the friendlies first? Also the Israeli Air Force is one of the best trained in the world.

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Original post by Will F Quote: Original post by phantom To the best of my knowledge precision guided weaponary requires a target to be painted by a laser, this requires a team in the field, are you telling me the team didn't spot 'UN' on the side of the building in huge letters? It's possible for it to have been satellite-guided. But I don't know enough about the bombing to say for sure. My guess would be that it was caused by a combination bad intelligence, incompetence, and the lack of a working line of communication between the UN and Israeli troops.

It doesnt need a team on the ground nor a satellite. 'Modern' planes like F16 have targetting lasers on-board. However, the pilot usually has to visually identify the target before locking the laser on it. You will need a team on the ground when the target is camouflaged and difficult to spot from the air. If there is no visual identification of the target, well you just wasted a very expensive bomb, you could just have dropped some cheap slicks instead.

At any rate, I fully agree with phantom.

A big point here is dealing with what type of PGM - I don't have a clue what sort of munitions Israel has. If it was something along the lines of a Copperhead round (but a bomb instead of artillery), then it's less likely that it was an accident - the troops spotted a laser on the blue-helmeted soldiers' outpost, and it was bombed. Maybe in the heat of the moment, they lased the wrong building, but that's still a serious problem that needs to be seriously addressed. With the Israeli equivalent of court martials.

If it was a precision bomb that was targeted to a specific place on a map from a distance, then it could easily have been a screw-up with slightly out-of-date maps.

Of course, the round could have just missed, too.

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Original post by Steadtler It doesnt need a team on the ground nor a satellite. 'Modern' planes like F16 have targetting lasers on-board. However, the pilot usually has to visually identify the target before locking the laser on it. You will need a team on the ground when the target is camouflaged and difficult to spot from the air. If there is no visual identification of the target, well you just wasted a very expensive bomb, you could just have dropped some cheap slicks instead.

I was under the impression that some precision guided bombs relied solely on GPS coordinates input before the missions (though it can be changed midmission) for their targeting - for example the JDAM guidance system, which AFIAK has only recently had laser guidance added. Military munitions aren't something that i'm particularly knowledgable about, so I could be wrong.


Regardless, looking into the attack a bit more, it's pretty horrible. This CNN article from July says

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The timeline provided CNN by a U.N. officer in Lebanon showed the first bomb exploded about 200 yards from the U.N. outpost at 1:20 p.m. Tuesday, prompting the first call by the UNIFIL observers to their designated contact with the Israeli military. The officer said they were assured by the Israeli liaison that he would stop the attacks. A series of about nine more bombs hit within 100 to 400 yards from the observers over the next several hours, with a call to the Israeli military following each explosion. The U.N. base at Noqoura lost contact with the outpost at 7:40 p.m., apparently the time of the direct hit, the officer said.

I hadn't realized that the area around the outpost had been bombed 9 times in the 6 hours leading up to final one.

Even if this statement from the Israelis is correct

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Israel has blamed inaccurate maps for its mistake, and said the airplane that dropped the bomb thought it was targeting Hezbollah. Hezbollah was active in the area, with a post about 150 yards away.

It is ridiculous that the UN investigators were not allowed to speak with the operational level commanders in the IDF. Did whoever ordered the attack seriously think that bombing a position 150 yards from a UN outpost was a good idea?

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Original post by SticksandStones Haven't you heard? The Decider's party declared that the UN hates the Jews and is worse than Hitler. Obviously this is a lie orchestrated by the Neo-Nazis and Gay-Hippy-Democrats to help the terrorists defeat Isreal and give the bomb to Finland.

The first article is from AFP, so blame the French too! [smile]

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Original post by SticksandStones In reality-based-reality though, I thought that this was obvious. Why would anyone doubt that it happened? What, did the UN just decide to blow up four soldiers for the heck of it? Blame-the-current-agressor? The bigger problem is making it so that countries like the U.S. and those it enables from killing people it shouldn't be.

I thought it was obvious at the time as well, but many didn't. Even now there is haggling over the munitions used and how the target was laser painted and so on.

It's important to remember that this outpost was built 30 years ago! How could the pilots that attacked it not know what they were targetting? If Israel doesn't have something to hide then why didn't it allow UN investigators to interview operational level commanders? The AP article quotes the UN spokesmen saying this refusal made it impossible to determine why repeated calls from the UN outpost to stop firing were ignored.

Now here's a technological fix to consider. How about designing the targeting mechanisms of these weapons to include a database of illegal targets that target coordinates are checked against such that matches cause a warning light to go on for the pilot requiring the pilot to get explicit confirmation before attacking? This database could contain coordinates for hospitals, dams, UN outposts and the like for the region. Such a system wouldn't be fool proof, but it seems to me that it could prevent "tragic mistakes" and the like.

In related news, Lebanon accuses Israel of stealing Wazzani river water.

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BEIRUT, Lebanon - Mohammad Ghamlush, the engineer heading the Wazzani river pumping systems, told AFP the Israeli army sabotaged the water pumps on the river last week and installed a pipe to pump hundreds of cubic meters to Israel. ... “We did not yet get information on the water pumps from the patrols dispatched to Wazzani, upon a request from the Lebanese government,” UNIFIL spokesman Alexander Ivanko said. However, he confirmed that Israeli workers and civilians have been repairing water pipes in the nearby village of Ghajar. Ivanko said the Israelis had violated the UN-drawn border line between the two countries to fix the water pipes. ... Ghamlush said that on September 22 an Israeli patrol broke into the pumping station installed by the Lebanese ministry of electricity and hydraulic resources in Wazzani. The soldiers sabotaged the pumping machines and ordered him to leave the premises, he said. Ghamlush said the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) helped Lebanese government workers to install two new power generators to restart the pumping systems. He said the Israeli army has installed two water pumps to transport water from the Wazzani river through two pipes, which run toward villages in Israel. Ghamlush said the Israels were pumping every day between 200 and 300 cubic metres of water from the Wazzani to Ghajar and to Israeli villages. ... Meanwhile, Israeli forces, which delayed their pullout from southern Lebanon, have set up checkpoints inside a village in the area, the Lebanese army said in a statement yesterday. ... The Israeli army continues to occupy 10 positions in southern Lebanon since the July-August fierce battles with Hezbollah. ...

Back in July, I suggested that a possible motivation for the attack and invasion was an Israeli water grab. There is a history between the two nations of tension over water rights: Israel warns Lebanon to abandon water project. (September 19, 2002)

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... Israel has warned the Lebanese government it will not tolerate a controversial project to increase pumping from the Wazzani, a tributary of the Hasbani River, from about 9.1 million cubic yards annually to about 11.7 million cubic yards to serve local south Lebanese villages. The water currently flows into the Jordan River and then south to the Sea of Galilee -- the lake that is Israel's largest reservoir of fresh water, and where Jesus reputedly walked on water. ...

Anyway...