How could the bombing of the Chinese embassy have been a mistake?
After two days of varied official accounts, the least credible explanation for Friday night’s NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade is that it was a pure accident. On Sunday, a US official in Washington told news agencies that the CIA had simply supplied inaccurate information, wrongly identifying the embassy as a Yugoslav weapons warehouse. It was the fourth version of events produced within several hours. Initially NATO’s spokesman Jamie Shea told reporters on Saturday that NATO pilots had mistaken the building for a legitimate military target and then hit it with precision-guided weapons. But several hours later, at possibly the most hostile NATO news briefing in Brussels since the bombing began, Major General Walter Jertz said the error had been made in the initial target selection process. Jertz said the embassy had been mistaken for the Yugoslav Directorate of Supply and Procurement, a military supply facility. When pressed, he said there was no evidence that NATO maps
