Word: targets
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...Bint Jbeil was a prime target for the Israeli army. The largest Shi'a town in the border district, Bint Jbeil is populated with staunch supporters of Hizballah, whose fighters are battling Israeli forces. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, Hizballah's secretary-general, gave his victory speech here in May 2000 after Hizballah succeeded in driving Israeli troops out of their occupation zone in south Lebanon. Then, Nasrallah had described Israel as being as weak as a spider's web. Yet while Hizballah's anti-tank-missile-wielding guerrillas had inflicted high casualties on the attacking Israelis, the battle had left...
...twice the speed of sound? That is the excruciating dilemma that Israeli pilots say they face dozens of times every day during air raids over Lebanon. If a fighter pilot sees the fiery blob of rockets being launched toward Israeli cities, should he go ahead and blast the target - even though it might kill Lebanese women and children near the site where Hizballah militiamen are launching their rockets...
...says that in every mission, a pilot tries to check and double-check that a target is free of civilians before he presses the trigger on his weapons. Before firing, the pilot must first get clearance from a superior officer tapped into intelligence data and in radio contact with ground troops. Still, the decision to fire ultimately rests with the fighter pilot. "We've had many cases of canceling missions, returning with our bombs, because at the last minute the pilot saw people who weren't Hizballah," says Col. A, who points out that in the dozens of daily sorties...
...fighter jet hit a rocket launcher once, but the pilot wasn't sure that the launcher was destroyed. When he put his jet into a dive for a second attack, he pulled out at the last second when he saw that many civilians had come running to the target after his first attack. The strike was called...
...support the Taliban's enemies--went unheeded. (Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush appear only in news clips.) Over six hours, we see the signals missed, the officials obsessed with protocol and covering their backsides and the best intentions stymied by bureaucracy, fate and the complexity of the target. One of the few things that go right is the foiling of the millennium bombing plot in 1999, and that gets only a few minutes; the rebellion on Flight 93, maybe a minute...