Joe the Plumber thinks reporters shouldn't cover wars

[Darion]

Here's my point illustrated nicely once again:

Headline: Israeli forces shell UN headquarters

Why, I'm outraged just reading the headline! Let's investigate the article itself:

GAZA City, Gaza Strip - Israel shelled the United Nations headquarters in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, engulfing the compound and a warehouse in fire and destroying thousands of pounds of food and humanitarian supplies intended for Palestinian refugees.

UN workers and Palestinian firefighters, some wearing bulletproof jackets, struggled to douse the flames and pull bags of food from the debris after the Israeli attack, which was another blow to efforts to ease the humaniarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. Dense smoke billowed from the compound.

Those dicks! Nice, inflammatory imagery, right? Right.

Then we get into a UN spokesman bitching, an Israeli spokesman saying "We got shot at from there, so STFU and GBTW", and the UN spokesman saying "YOU LIE ZIONIST PIG!" or words to that effect. Then we get some statistics on how many have died in the conflict.

Buried way at the end of the article is this:

The UN compound struck Thursday houses the UN Works and Relief Agency

Seems like this was a nice, big, white warehouse with a red cross on top of it that the Israeli Defense Force just inhumanly and deliberately used for target practice, doesn't it? And yet...

It had only that morning become a makeshift shelter for 700 Gaza City residents seeking sanctuary from relentless Israeli shelling, UN officials in Gaza said."

Whoops. Now, so I don't presume that we're all sharing the same level of knowledge, here is how slimy this article has come off to me:

In the military, a "headquarters" can be anything from a nice, big office building with a nice lawn and a sign out front all the way down to a bombed out building that your unit has temporarily occuped to centralize command and control over subordinate units. This is almost certainly a case of the latter, and while the UN was in the process of establishing a central location to get their groove on, they got shelled.

Now, this begs a few more questions: the UN keeps repeating that they have provided "their locations" to the IDF and that the IDF is being naughty indeed to continue to try and kill the hard-done-by boys in powder blue. If the setup on this HQ had only begun just today, how is this possible? And even if the UN had transmitted the location of this under-construction HQ to the mysterious "them" at the IDF, does anyone really beileve that just because somebody in a given military has a piece of information that it is immediately disseminated to all field commanders everywhere? My point is that far too much blame is being assigned over things that are essentially blameless due to the simple friction of waging war.