How US values its own! Shame, shame, shame.

"The attack on the Liberty was pre-planned, perhaps from at least a year beforehand,"

"The Liberty was sent into a very dangerous situation, where it was, in my view, placed in a position to be attacked."

clipped from news.bbc.co.uk Why did Israel attack USS Liberty? BBC News Friday, 8 June 2007 the USS Liberty came under fire, first from fighter planes, then torpedo boats without warning The attack, which lasted at least 40 minutes, resulted in the deaths of 34 of Mr Brummett's fellow crewmen, at least 170 injured and catastrophic damage to the ship. "There's been an egregious wrong done here, there's been an extreme number of lies told to the American people and the American people do not know the truth about what happened." Israeli pilots did not see any US flags (survivors say there were three) on the vessel before they opened fire. A 2003 independent commission of inquiry which reported that the attack on the Liberty "remains the only serious naval incident that has never been thoroughly investigated by Congress". the Liberty, a $40m state-of-the-art surveillance ship, was eavesdropping on an Israeli massacre of Egyptian prisoners of war. The attack was premeditated and that the truth has been suppressed.

FISK: Marwahin, 15July'06: The anatomy of a massacre

clipped from news.independent.co.uk Twenty-three of them were to die within the next 15 minutes. The tragedy of these poor young people and of their desperate attempts to survive their repeated machine-gunning from the air is as well-known in Lebanon as it is already forgotten abroad. War crimes are easy to talk about when they have been committed in Rwanda or Bosnia; less so in Lebanon, especially when the Israelis are involved. But all the evidence suggests that what happened on this blissfully lovely coastline two and a half months ago was a crime against humanity, one that is impossible to justify on any military grounds since the dead and wounded were fleeing their homes on the express orders of the Israelis themselves. While no friends of Israel, the Sunni community in Lebanon - especially the few thousand Sunnis of Marwahin who are so close to the frontier that they can see the red roofs of the nearest Jewish settlement - are no threat to Israel.

Marwahin: Lest we forget the innocent children

Human Rights Watch states that "war crimes" include "making the civilian population or individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities the object of attack".

clipped from news.independent.co.uk UNIFIL, which turned the refugees of Marwahin away on 15 July, stated that when they were removing the children's bodies, their soldiers came under fire. Human Rights Watch is still investigating the killings of civilians at Marwahin and other locations and wrote of them before the war ended. "The Israeli military," it said in its initial report, "did not follow its orders [to civilians] to evacuate with the creation of safe passage routes, and on a daily basis Israeli warplanes and helicopters struck civilians in cars who were trying to flee, many with white flags out the windows, a widely accepted sign of civilian status ... On some days, Israeli war planes hit dozens of civilian cars, showing a clear pattern of failing to distinguish between civilian and military objects." International law makes it clear that it is forbidden in any circumstances to carry out direct attacks against civilians and that to do so is a war crime. six of the children were between the ages of one and 10.