Reply #42: You are correct....

[FrenchieCat]

And Wes Clark did not want to bomb from up as high and wanted to put in ground troops to keep civilian loss of life at a minimu....but because of the Cohen and Shelton bunch....he had to do the best that he could based on using cowardly techniques that put more in danger...

But NATO governments and diplomats in Washington felt Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic would yield after only a few bombs and cruise missiles, as he had in Bosnia. They were wrong. Clark, who was part of the delegation that negotiated the Dayton accords with Milosevic, knew Kosovo was integral to Serb identity and to Milosevic's rise to power. He would not give it up easily.
>snip
Clark also was right about readying troops for an invasion. The preparations for a ground war helped persuade Milosevic to surrender.
>snip
Kosovo show that Clark's bosses in the Pentagon and White House still don't get it. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Henry Shelton, rebuked Clark in February for using 350 American soldiers to reinforce French troops who were unable to quell violence between Albanians and Serbs. After the American reinforcements were pelted with rocks and bottles, Shelton and the White House, panicky about potential casualties, told Clark not to volunteer U.S. troops again.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A51403-2000May1¬Found=true


Details on Chinese Embassy bombing.....
http://www.un.org/icty/pressreal/nato061300.htm
V.The Attack on the Chinese Embassy on 7/5/99
80. On 7/5/99, at 2350, NATO aircraft fired several missiles which hit the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing 3 Chinese citizens, injuring an estimated 15 others, and causing extensive damage to the embassy building and other buildings in the immediate surrounds. At the moment of the attack, fifty people were reported to have been in the embassy buildings. By the admission of US Government sources, the Chinese Embassy compound was mistakenly hit. The bombing occurred because at no stage in the process was it realised that the bombs were aimed at the Chinese Embassy. The Embassy had been wrongly identified as the Yugoslav Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement (Yugoimport FDSP) at 2 Umetnosti Boulevard in New Belgrade. The FDSP was deemed by the CIA to be a legitimate target due to its role in military procurement: it was selected for its role in support of the Yugoslav military effort.

81. Under Secretary of State Thomas Pickering offered the following explanation for what occurred:

"The bombing resulted from three basic failures. First, the technique used to locate the intended target – the headquarters of the Yugoslav Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement (FDSP) – was severely flawed. Second, none of the military or intelligence databases used to verify target information contained the correct location of the Chinese Embassy. Third, nowhere in the target review process was either of the first two mistakes detected. No one who might have known that the targeted building was not the FDSP headquarters – but was in fact the Chinese Embassy – was ever consulted."

According to US Government sources, the street address of the intended target, the FDSP headquarters was known as Bulevar Umetnosti 2 in New Belgrade. During a mid-April "work-up" of the target to prepare a mission folder for the B-2 bomber crew, three maps were used in an attempt to physically locate this address within the neighborhood: two local commercial maps from 1989 and 1996, and one US government (National Imagery and Mapping Agency or NIMA) map produced in 1997. None of these maps had any reference to the FDSP building and none accurately identified the current location of the Chinese Embassy.

82. The root of the failures in target location appears to stem from the land navigation techniques employed by an intelligence officer in an effort to pinpoint the location of the FDSP building at Bulevar Umetnosti 2. The officer used techniques known as "intersection" and "resection" which, while appropriate to locate distant or inaccessible points or objects, are inappropriate for use in aerial targeting as they provide only an approximate location. Using this process, the individual mistakenly determined that the building which we now know to be the Chinese Embassy was the FDSP headquarters. This method of identification was not questioned or reviewed and hence this flaw in the address location process went undetected by all the others who evaluated the FDSP headquarters as a military target. It also appears that very late in the process, an intelligence officer serendipitously came to suspect that the target had been wrongly identified and sought to raise the concern that the building had been mislocated. However, throughout a series of missed opportunities, the problem of identification was not brought to the attention of the senior managers who may have been able to intervene in time to prevent the strike.

83. Finally, reviewing elements in, inter alia, the Joint Staff did not uncover either the inaccurate location of the FDSP headquarters or the correct location of the Chinese Embassy. The data base reviews were limited to validating the target data sheet geographic coordinates and the information put into the data base by the NIMA analyst. Such a circular process did not serve to uncover the original error and highlighted the system’s susceptibility to a single point of data base failure. The critical linchpin for both the error in identification of the building and the failure of the review mechanisms was thus the inadequacy of the supporting data bases and the mistaken assumption the information they contained would necessarily be accurate.

84. The building hit was clearly a civilian object and not a legitimate military objective. NATO, and subsequently various organs of the US Government, including the CIA, issued a formal apology, accepted full responsibility for the incident and asserted that the intended target, the Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement, would have been a legitimate military objective. The USA has formally apologized to the Chinese Government and agreed to pay $28 million in compensation to the Chinese Government and $4.5 million to the families of those killed or injured. The CIA has also dismissed one intelligence officer and reprimanded six senior managers. The US Government also claims to have taken corrective actions in order to assign individual responsibility and to prevent mistakes such as this from occurring in the future.

85. It is the opinion of the committee that the aircrew involved in the attack should not be assigned any responsibility for the fact they were given the wrong target and that it is inappropriate to attempt to assign criminal responsibility for the incident to senior leaders because they were provided with wrong information by officials of another agency. Based on the information available to it, the committee is of the opinion that the OTP should not undertake an investigation concerning the bombing of the Chinese Embassy.