thrift server 'MutateRow' operation gives no indication of success / failure

Issuing an invalid MutateRow request, eg. to create a new (row,column) value when
no column qualifier is specified, does not result in an exception being thrown .
Buried in the thrift server log is the line:
2013-11-15 10:49:53,808 WARN [thrift-worker-1] thrift.ThriftServerRunner$HBaseHandler: No column qualifier specified. Delete is the only mutation supported over the whole column family.
But the client gets no exception and continues in the belief the operation succeeded.
Thus it is not possible to use the HBASE thrift server for reliable database operations.