Left I on the News

First there was Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni with this preposterous assertion:

"There is no commander in the army who would deliberately direct fire at civilians or UN soldiers."

Now we have one commander contradicting that, sort of:

A top Israeli general said for the first time that the military had deliberately -- but accidentally -- hit a United Nations outpost Tuesday. The attack killed four unarmed peacekeepers.

Brig. Gen. Shuki Shahar, the deputy chief of the military's Northern Command, said soldiers in the field had accidentally called in the coordinates of the U.N. base and that the airstrike had been approved up the chain of command.

Of course this is nonsense. When you fire precision-guided missiles, as the Israelis did in this case, you fire them at known targets, like a U.N. building in this case; you don't fire them at some Hizballah fighters standing in an orchard. How did they "accidentally call in the coordinates of the U.N. base"? Did they perhaps transpose two digits in the coordinate reading? If they did (improbable, but let's suppose), what was the purpose of "approving up the chain of command"? Doesn't anyone "up the chain of command" check to verify what they are being asked to approve bombing?

Further proof that Livni and Shahar (and many others) are lying, as if any is needed, comes from the record:

Israeli fire has hit U.N. observation posts in southern Lebanon at least 10 times. The day before the fatal attack, Israeli shelling wounded four Ghanaian soldiers with the U.N. force, said Farhan Haq, an Annan representative. Earlier, another U.N. observer was missing and presumed dead after Israeli shells struck an observation post in the village of Hosh.

U.N. officials said they had tried to prevent an airstrike by making repeated calls to Israeli officials Tuesday as the military hit the outpost where the observers were killed with artillery.

The truth is that Israel doesn't want U.N. observers around to observe the crimes against humanity it is committing in Lebanon, and that these attacks against the U.N., like the attacks against ambulances, are quite deliberate, not "accidental." The precise locations of U.N. posts are perfectly well-known to the Israeli military, just as the precise location of the al Jazeerah offices in Kabul and Baghdad were known to the U.S. military.