Friday, July 11, 2008

Incident?

The MSNBC crawl caught my eye this morning. Civilian casualties from a US air strike in Nuristan Provence, Afghanistan, now number 47, all members of a wedding party -- including the bride. The US military is investigating the incident.

Incident? Incident? We used to refer to collateral damage, e.g., when we dropped bombs on a wedding party in western Iraq in the first year of the war and tried to white wash it. Now, it seems, civilian casualties have been downgraded to "an incident" ...

If this had happened on a college campus in the US or to a Christian wedding party in Lebanon, it would be reported as a massacre. The press would be all over it for days with a CNN reporter rushing to the scene.

Incident? How cheap other peoples lives have become.