I’m reading Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw by Mark Bowden. With the help of American intelligence, the Columbian authorities locate a notorious drug cartel member and decide to flatten the house with an air strike:
Embasy officials were taken aback. No one had anticipated that the Columbians would simply kill the people Centra Spike had helped them find.
As it happened, the bombing sortie never forced the issue, because the lead pilot, a Columbian colonel, noticed that just beyond the finca, over the lip of the hill, was a small village. If any of the bombs overshot by even a small margin, they were certain to hit the thirty or forty smaller houses below. To avoid a tragedy, the colonel called off the bomb run at the last minute…
It goes on to say that the pilots were accused of selling out or being in cahoots with the cartel. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were accused of wanting the extra deaths that came from leaving the drug lord alive. Anyway, the U.S. stepped in with an investigation and concluded the colonel did the right thing. How far we’ve come since 1989.
It takes a lot of effort to make the 80′s and 90′s look like decades of moral idealism. But we are doing that hard work.