NATO: Dragging Innocent Children From Their Beds And Murdering Them "Probably" Not Justified

This is why war should avoided at all costs:

Dec 31, 2009: American-led troops were accused yesterday of dragging innocent children from their beds and shooting them during a night raid that left ten people dead.

Afghan government investigators said that eight schoolchildren were killed, all but one of them from the same family. Locals said that some victims were handcuffed before being killed.

Western military sources said that the dead were all part of an Afghan terrorist cell responsible for manufacturing improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which have claimed the lives of countless soldiers and civilians.

“This was a joint operation that was conducted against an IED cell that Afghan and US officials had been developing information against for some time,” said a senior Nato insider. But he admitted that “the facts about what actually went down are in dispute”.

At the time NATO sources insisted that it was a legitimate operation that may have gone badly. But if this is true-if American troops are dragging children from their beds in the middle of the night and murdering them, how much longer can we continue to claim that we are on some humanitarian mission in Afghanistan? Because we clearly aren't there to fight Al Qaeda.

Let's not kid ourselves. This kind of thing happens all the time in war, and it's usually covered up or excused. The massacre at Mai Lai in Vietnam, for example, is notable only because it was publicized. But it makes it no less evil, and is not a reason to wage a more humanitarian war, but a reason to avoid war altogether.

And if we are going to pull children from their beds in the middle of the night and shoot them, we might as well print up a few hundred leaflets begging people to join Al Qaeda in their epic struggle against the evil West. And who could blame them?

What would you do, if you were in their shoes?

Today, NATO admits what they did, sort of:

(NEWSER) – When a NATO raid killed 10 children and teenagers at a remote mountain compound in Afghanistan last December, troops claimed to be targeting a “known insurgent group responsible for a series of violent attacks.” But after a lengthy investigation by the Times of London, NATO now admits that the boys killed—all of them between 12 and 18, eight of them members of the same family—were innocent civilians without connections to insurgent activity.

Innocent civilians, who were summarily executed because...we didn't bother to find out who they were? And even if they were insurgents, when did we decide that it's ok to just execute enemy combatants? I realize we've always done it, but we've also always tried to hide it. Apparently, we don't even bother with that anymore.Here's the saddest quote:

“Knowing what we know now, it would probably not have been a justifiable attack,” a NATO official said. 

It "probably" would not have been justified to drag a bunch of innocent kids out of their family home and shoot them? Really? That's the best you can do?