I suspect that even if all of the targets hit were purely military, the Taliban would claim they were all civilian. I don't think surgical strikes are possible without errors, but if you believe Saddam and meanoldman, there has never been a cruise missile that has hit a justifiable target. I'm not saying that you should believe the US media all the time, however you should take both claims with a grain of salt.
As usual, some of you are already off on your extreme rants... "holocaust", "war criminals"... and you wonder why the mainstream media ignores you? Sheesh, even the video from bin Laden seemed more reasonable than some of you. If you ignore his "struck by God" and "infidel" crap (I just replace that with "struck by kamikaze religious extremists with their heads up their asses" and "powerful, unjust country with different beliefs than us"), the rest was almost reasonable in comparison.
I understand that some of you are so anti-US that it does not matter what proof against bin Laden comes out, no matter what the response of the US, no matter what country sponsors terrorism, you will always be against anything the US does until it falls from power, and probably even after that. And though you may believe that once this happens the world will come to its senses, unfortunately that is highly unlikely, and if anything things will go from bad to worse.
I hope this shite stops as quickly as it has begun, however I fear this is only the beginning. I don't think this was the wisest course to take, nor was it the worst, but regardless any reaction (even no reaction) would have had negative consequences. Even if the US had completely withdrawn support from Israel and left the Middle East (highly unlikely in any case) the shit would still be hitting the fan as Israel fights for its life and every Tom, Dick and Hussein dictator takes off their gloves and starts battling for domination in the Middle East.
For those of you that think it makes no sense to bomb Afghanistan while sending food and medicine... I don't know what happened to your common sense synapses, but the reason is to minimize the impact on civilians as much as possible. Would you prefer they just bomb away and let the poor Afghans die of starvation and disease? Yes, of course it would be better not to bomb at all, but if they are going to bomb the least they can do is try to help the innocents as much as possible.
[ 07 October 2001: Message edited by: Myshkin ]