NATO’s claim that it cannot investigate civilian casualties because it has no mandate to be in Libya is feeble and disingenuous.”
Vijay Prasad
15th May, 2012
On May 14, 2012, Human Rights Watch released an important report, Unacknowledged Deaths: Civilian Casualties in NATO’s Air Campaign in Libya. The 82-page report reveals conclusively that some of NATO’s ten thousand sorties flown over Libya resulted in the deaths of at least seventy-two civilians, including twenty-four children. These are not large numbers, largely because HRW’s analysis is based on the most obvious cases and because its work was not assisted by an investigation of NATO’s own paperwork. HRW did not conduct a comprehensive investigation. That was not possible. Its investigators went to eight sites of NATO air strikes and found here that NATO’s bombs had indeed killed civilians. The findings, then, are not comprehensive. They are illustrative.
In These New Times 