Children of Mansouri Remembered.

Within hours the Israelis admitted that they had targeted the ambulance, but they claimed that it was owned by a member of Hezbollah and was carrying a Hezbollah guerrilla. Both charges were untrue. There were no apologies.

Among the fragments of shrapnel and twisted steel, a young UN officer soon discovered a hunk of metal bearing most of a nameplate. It contained the logo "AGM 114C" and a manufacturer's number: 04939.

...[He] duly handed over to me the fragment containing the codes. They were scratched and in some cases illegible, but they included a National Stock Number in a 42-34 digit sequence, "141001-1920293". The second section of the sequence - '01' - would prove to be of vital i...

Within hours the Israelis admitted that they had targeted the ambulance, but they claimed that it was owned by a member of Hezbollah and was carrying a Hezbollah guerrilla. Both charges were untrue. There were no apologies.

Among the fragments of shrapnel and twisted steel, a young UN officer soon discovered a hunk of metal bearing most of a nameplate. It contained the logo "AGM 114C" and a manufacturer's number: 04939.

...[He] duly handed over to me the fragment containing the codes. They were scratched and in some cases illegible, but they included a National Stock Number in a 42-34 digit sequence, "141001-1920293". The second section of the sequence - '01' - would prove to be of vital importance. The missile's Lot No. was "MG188J315534." ...

The U.N. officer knew that AGM stood for "air-to-ground missile," and the 114C coding identified the five-foot-three-inch projectile as a Hellfire anti-armor missile, jointly manufactured by Rockwell International and Martin Marietta.

It had been one of up to 300 shipped to the Gulf by the U.S. Marines in 1990 to be used against Saddam Hussein's occupation army in Kuwait. Of these, 159 were fired at Iraqi forces. But when the conflict was over, the marine officers told me, around 150 unused Hellfires - along with other ordnance - were dropped off at the Haifa munitions pier in Israel by a U.S. warship as part of a secret quid pro quo - a gift to Israel - for keeping out of the 1991 Gulf War when it was under Iraqi Scud missile attack.

If the missile had been sold to Israel, conditions on its use would have been attached. But this was a military transfer, straight from American stocks. The missile had been paid for by the marines but ultimately handed over to the Israelis, no questions asked, and - five years later - fired into the back of an ambulance."

...Robert Fisk -- Excerpted from Made in America: a lethal weapon's return policy, Harper's Magazine, August 1997; and The Great War For Civilization, Chapter 19