Very disturbing videos from wikileaks:
They engaged several Reuters photographers, claiming the cameras were weapons, giggling the whole time. Then, when a van came to pick up the wounded, they claimed they were going for weapons and got permission to shoot the people picking up victims.
Fog of war, bitches. Fog of war.
TooManyJens
Fuck.
They were begging the wounded man crawling along the ground to pick up a weapon so they’d have an excuse to shoot him again. Then they just did it anyway.
pharniel
I read about this.
Encapsulates the entire war for me. one gigantic cockup the entire way.
psycholinguist
Good god. that was horrific. And CNN has tiger woods as the lead story of the day.
Bret
This will never get any mainstream coverage on any news channel, newspaper, or mainstream media site.
But Joe Biden will say something dumb, but true, and it’ll be a 2 minute story on every news cast.
What the fuck happened to this country?
Ugh
Wait, who is “they”? Can’t watch the video at work (and sounds like I don’t want to).
Evinfuilt
This is pretty much proof, we are the bad guys now. You’d hope some people come to the realization before you shoot unarmed reporters for fun. To lighten the mood, maybe we’d know we’re the baddies a bit earlier.
Scott
What the fuck happened to this country?
Rich megacorps decided war would be good for business, and purchased media companies that would look the other way when things got troublesome for the rich megacorps.
slag
I couldn’t watch past the “free to engage” part. I’m weak.
Here’s the part where I have respect for journalists. These are the people that are worthy of my empathy and compassion. These are the people doing the job. Not hairdos like Howard Fineman and even Jake Tapper. How do we keep these real journalists (the ones left, anyway) and not the hairdos?
flukebucket
It is the giggling that bothers me the most.
I think this should be required viewing for all of the tree-of-liberty bullshitters.
The United States government can kill your ass and you won’t even know they are up there aiming at you.
And somebody will be getting a big laugh out of it in real time.
Midnight Marauder
Of course you create a new thread about this right after I post this in a different, non-related thread.
I’ve been following this story for a while now, and I’ve been looking forward to the release of this video for quite some time now. Here a couple of primers from Gawker, which has done some outstanding work following this story, on the background behind the video released today by Wikileaks:
Exclusive: Secret-Sharing Website Wikileaks Offers New Details On Alleged U.S. Surveillance
Wikileaks.org to Screen Classified U.S. Air Strike Video Monday
Even though it turns out the video is from an attack in Baghdad on July 12, 2007, there’s still a lot of good information in those article about the bigger picture battle Wikileaks has been engaged in with the United States government/military over the past few months.
slag
“This will never get any mainstream coverage on any news channel, newspaper, or mainstream media site.”
Exactly right. If only these people worked as hard and had done as much good as Tim Russert did. If only.
jncc
I got as far as the intro: “several of the people were armed but they appeared to be relaxed.”
If you’re carrying arms in a war zone, or are near someone who is, you are a legitimate target.
TooManyJens
You might consider going further than the intro.
EthylEster
that snark adds so much.
you must be proud.
Punchy
Any way to qualify these ambiguous pronouns for those of us whose firewalls wont let us watch said vid? More specifically: who the fuck are “they”?
Markeros
From the Huffington Post story that’s underneath the TIGER WOODS story:
I watched the video hours ago and I’m still shaking.
Every American should be forced to watch this video the way we forced the German townies to walk through the concentration camps when they were liberated.
The wars would be over by Halloween.
Citizen_X
I watched the whole, harrowing thing. Damn.
When getting ready to fire, they blew up the threat into “five or six individuals with AK-47s.” Only one of them had one (not an unusual thing in Iraq then), and the whole group was completely relaxed.
Also, they lit up the van because it was “picking up wounded.” Even if they actually were insurgents, how is shooting up a van that’s picking up wounded the slightest bit different from targeting military ambulances? How the hell is that acceptable under any rules of engagement?
David in NY
“I got as far as the intro”
That was certainly thorough of you, dumbass. Don’t even bother to look at the evidence before drawing your conclusion. That’s the American way, apparently.
BR
Is it just me or did they just make up the AK-47s they talk about? I don’t see shit.
aimai
Being “armed in a war zone” doesn’t count as provocation. And certainly being “near someone who is armed” doesn’t make you a “legitimate target?” Journalists, children, unarmed women–the list of people who are not a legitimate target is rather extensive. Under your reading both red crescent/cross workers and children are legitimate targets–hell, diplomats are legitimate targets.
aimai
Radon Chong
I like how you slipped “or are near someone who is” like that, so reasonable sounding. And complete horseshit. Jackass.
stuckinred
So you think there is something new about all this huh? Remember “How can you shoot women and children? You aim a little lower and don’t lead them as much”.
El Cid
Watching this video means you hate the troops.
Bret
Huffington Post just posted it. Guess what’s above it in priority?
Tiger Woods.
Awesome.
ed
We can’t look into the past. We must move forward.
Fucking monsters.
Meanderthal
God, that’s chilling. As if I needed more proof that I never had any business being in the military (never joined, though it was a close thing at one time).
kommrade reproductive vigor
Bu-but! A few rotten apples. And everything was going so well until Black Jimmy Carter took office. Also!
(Bet you $100.)
SteveinSC
America’s snuff movie! Probably Cheney, Rumsfeld, Yoo and Dershowitz jerking off to this unspeakable horror. As someone posted at Huffpo, “We, are the fucking terrorists!” Link this video around the net. Murderers all! Fuck the MSM.
Citizen_X
Keerist onna crutch, “carrying arms in a war zone, or…near someone who is” describes every goddam civilian in Iraq. Shall we nuke the whole place, then?
TooManyJens
BR, it sure looked to me like they made them up, but honestly, it’s hard to see. I think they saw what they were looking for.
For everyone asking: “they” = U.S. troops. There’s a transcript here, but it doesn’t convey the cold brutality of what happened as much as watching the video.
scav
Radon Chong @ 20
Yeah, I liked that too. Because if you’re here and not in a warzone and carrying a weapon in a bloody church you’re a patriot and a citizen showing just and reasonable caution protecting their lives and property. I guess as soon as the Tree of Liberty starts getting watered for real round ’bout here, all the local true patriots are going to immediately beat them all them freedom wands into plowshares.
Annie
@jncc
Really? Clearly you haven’t been in a war zone. I have twice. A father carrying a rifle to protect his family from looters doesn’t deserve to be a target. A journalist going into a community to talk with locals, and carrying a gun for his own protection, doesn’t deserve to be a target. I have walked next to locals with guns — was I a legitimate target?
The most amazing and horrifying part of this video is how these men were just walking and talking — absolutely no threatening behavior. Aid workers could easily have been walking with them — I have.
stuckinred
TooManyJens
Uh, that’s right. Reading about shit like that isn’t quite like seeing it now is it?
stuckinred
The story about the Special Ops dudes digging the rounds out of the Afghan women they had just killed to cover up the shooting is far worse than this and a lot more recent.
liberal
jncc wrote, If you’re carrying arms in a war zone, or are near someone who is, you are a legitimate target.
Since the initial invasion was an illegal war of aggression, not so much.
Aaron
I would venture a good 27% of the population would say “yes”
Midnight Marauder
Yep, not too hard to guess which story is the screaming headline on the front page right now.
jncc
Okey dokey, watched the whole thing. That was some good shooting and a good kills in the first part.
I saw two easily identifiable AKs, two guys carrying something with straps over their shoulders (cameras? guns? couldn’t tell) and then there is the guy with the RPG. The chatter makes clear that the Americans thought those were weapons. Mistakes happen.
Anyway, did everyone see the RPG?
They guy with the rpg hunkers behind the corner of a building trying to get a shot at either helicopter or the drone – whatever is carrying the camera. The drone/chopper swings around the building and all of the guys are standing right there about 5 feet from where the guy with the RPG was.
Look, if you are some camera guy, here’s a tip: Don’t stand 5 feet away from some dirtbag who’s trying to light up a chopper with an RPG. Cause if you do, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re going to get tenderized.
As for the last part, I don’t know what the rules of engagement are about shooting vehicles who are transporting the wounded out of a battle scene.
celticdragonchick
As a former helicopter crewchif in the Cavalry, I paid real, real close attention to this.
I didn’t see a fucking thing that looked like any threat. I saw a possible weapon that could have been a satchel, a pouch or another piece of clothing if it was anything at all. I saw nothing that looked like an RPG launcher.
Nobody appeared to burying an IED or preparing an ambush.
Shooting up that van picking up the wounded was flat out murder. Bring kids to a battle? What fucking battle?? I saw no battle. The only rounds fired were from the Apache chain gun. The pilot and gunner knew they had done that and were tying to pass it off. I hope those bastards never have a good night’s sleep again.
Not every cav gunship pilot is like that. I knew one Cobra gunship pilot in Somalia who told me he refused to fire on a bunch of Somalis running out of a building that was being raided by Delta operators and the SEALs. He was within his ROE if he had wanted to kill all of them it seems since they were not surrendering to the commandos in the building, but he saw no point in shooting twenty unarmed people in the back. He watched them to see if they did anything dangerous, but they were busy running for their lives.
These clowns wanted trigger time, and they got it.
God damn.
Joey
You don’t know the rules regarding transporting the wounded? Let me clue you in: You don’t fucking kill them. Ambulances, hospitals, and wounded are not legitimate targets.
PartyLikeIts1990
Heh heh, obvious troll is obvious, but I like jncc’s chipper tough-guy attitude, like he would have totally shot those guys too if only he’d been lucky enough to be there. Cause he’s a big tough guy who understands how the world really IS, man!
I also like how he doesn’t even mention the part where they shoot the families trying to rescue the survivors.
Martin
At 3:41 (where the subtitle says ‘He’s got a weapon too’) there’s 2 guys that are carrying something long, and one looks closer to 4′ long that from the shitty video I’d mistake for an RPG. Gunsight video is pretty crappy though. It could be a baseball bat for all I can tell.
The cameramen are mistaked for being armed because you can see the camera strap that looks like a weapon slung over the back, even though there’s no view of a weapon. At 4:18 It looks like Namir peeks around the corner with his camera with a long lens on, trying to take a picture down the street. They appear to mistake that for an RPG even though in the video (with time to replay it) it’s clearly too short to be that.
Yeah, I can almost see the decision making that led this group to be deemed a threat (not having been in combat I won’t say how much you time you should risk verifying sketchy info like that), but once that assessment is made by the troops, it’s pretty clear they’re going to play it out without much effort to second-guess. Sad that it started and horrified how it all played out. I don’t see any rationale at all for opening up on the van, though. They just got tarred by the original faulty assessment.
eyepaddle
For those who have the video blocked: “They” are American helicopter gunship crews, and their ground controllers talking about a gathering or people in a street. “They” ID’d several “weapons” in the group (which turned out to be cameras–to me they looked like purses–certainly not AK-47s or a claimed RPG).
The gunship crews received clearance to fire, and then they pretty lowered the hammer. A few minutes pass in which one injured Reueters photographer is trying to crawl away and the gunship crews are exhorting the wounded man to “pick up a weapon” so that they can engage again. The man does not. Then a van pulls up and tries to pull up the bodies.
The audio is of the gunship crews agitatedly requesting permission to fire and some more chatter about weapons. Then they lower the hammer again (30 mm automatic cannon fire–not missiles). The van contained a few children among others.
For the record, the video is pretty clear so the “weapons” talk is pretty fraudulent, and the children can be just seen in the van prior to firing–but the children aren’t really clearly seen until the enhanced footage at the end.
In other words, this looks pretty damn bad for the Americans.
Comrade javafascist
Disgusting.
Guess they got to suck on it after all. How’s that feel, little Tommy Friedman?
The Moar You Know
Well, luckily for them, they were only carrying cameras!
But somehow, they are dead just the same. And the guys are laughing about it over the radio, having a great time.
I especially liked the part where they drove over the body of the one Reuters guy with the Bradley. That was a laugh riot.
jncc, you win today’s “Piece Of Shit” award.
Joseph Nobles
@jncc:
I saw the RPG. I saw one AK-47, carried by someone with the guy that had the RPG. I didn’t see the other one.
I saw the group take what appeared to be a tactical position against the helicopter.
I’m thinking they were hot to hit the van because insurgents were scrubbing a kill zone free of evidence like wounded insurgents and weapons. The van was very likely not that here, but I think that it happens enough that the soldiers were anxious to preserve their reasons for engagement. Regardless, they asked for and received permission to engage the van.
None of this excuses the incorrect statements about the incident made later. Anybody watching the video knows how the kids got hurt. We shot the hell out of the van they were in.
Midnight Marauder
Opening fire on some journalists carrying cameras around their shoulders, and then subsequently opening fire on their rescuers, is a little more than a mistake. He wasn’t some “camera guy.” He was a Reuters employee operating in a war zone, which apparently makes him Public Enemy #1 in your crazy little world.
Third Eye Open
jncc,
As the son of a person who is, “…near someone who is [carrying a weapon]” I would like to pile on and tell you to shove your contrarianism up your ass, sideways. I only wish you lived near me so that I could visit your house and let the stump you call a family tree know just how much of a flaming douche-bag you are.
jncc
What was the long cylindrical object the guy at the corner of the building at 4:04 pointing up at the helicopter?
scav
and it’s made the BBC News site although I don’t see the video itself on the beeb yet.
Mnemosyne
Shooting a vehicle that is transporting enemy wounded is what is generally termed a “war crime.”
Undercover FBI Agent DougJ
This could easily have been photoshopped.
Mnemosyne
A camera.
flukebucket
Yeah and as the song says, “you should have seen it in color”
Martin
No doubt liberal ratfuckers trying to make Bush look bad. I think Code Pink was probably behind the whole incident.
Dog is My Copilot
Don’t know what else to say about this video except that it’s very depressing. I’d rather be a weenie and read about the dog rescue stories, and other stories related to dogs…
BR
Anyone know this stuff well enough to speak to it?
http://www.metafilter.com/90734/Collateral-Murder#3026598
Morbo
This would imply rather strongly to me that it wasn’t an RPG at all…
Dave
jncc:
Seriously? It’s a camera with a long lens. No RPG is that short. The pilot wanted to see weapons. Ergo, he saw weapons.
catclub
Wikileaks at slashdot:
Note the last sentence.
“Today Wikileaks released a video of the US military firing large caliber weapons into a crowd that included a photojournalist and a driver for Reuters, and at a van containing two children who were involved in a rescue. Wikileaks maintains that this video was covered up by the US military when Reuters asked for an official investigation. This is the same video that has supposedly made the editors of Wikileaks a target of the State Department and/or the CIA, as was discussed a couple weeks ago.”
Martin
It’s pretty clearly a camera. Of course, going in I knew that two guys were carrying cameras so I was primed to look for them. The guys in the helicopter are primed to see RPGs and so they saw RPGs. And as celticdragonchick notes, even if they weren’t primed to see RPGs, the giggling suggests that they *really* wanted to see RPGs.
But if you look at the video, you can see the flare of the lens shield and even the back of the camera for a very brief moment.
Chuck Butcher
There are a couple things that need to be said, you are watching this video in comfort and safety – not seeing it in real time where a couple seconds is the difference between going home and a flaming crash, the processing of information is entirely different. You also have the advantage of previous information – you know what you are about to see.
Nasty dangerous situations require coping methods and I assure you that the worse the situation the more “inappropriate” humor will be as a coping mechanism. One minute you’re joking about crappy food or girlfriends and the next you’re killing people or having someone try to kill you. What you’re going to hear is going to suck for someone not there. It is going to get joked about or laughed at.
This is what happens in warfare and it is why you do not “play” at it. This is why chest beating dumbasses shouldn’t be taken in the least seriously. People act as though it is a goddam video game and it isn’t. It is nasty brutal business and it is probably a good thing it is … as much as we seem to like it.
Because it did not happen, you miss that everyone on board that chopper knew that at any second something nasty could come flying through it or at it. Odds were on the side of something trying to take it down. What happened was nasty and brutal – going farther than that … throwing murderer at the chopper team, going nuts over the language is bullshit. Our government (and by extension all of us) told these guys to go do this.
Jude
If the info about the distance the helo was from the site is accurate, then it’s all bullshit about self-preservation. No AK or RPG ever made has a 1500-yard effective range.
eric
What you saw was the “successful” conditioning of war. Soldiers believed that they were doing the right thing or convinced themselves they were doing the right thing as a means toward a perceived legitimate end.
For many, once they return home and begin to relearn normal human engagement and the rules and ethics of a civil society, they will suffer PTSD as their subconsciousness try to make sense of what they did and what they saw and, in some instances, what they did not do to stop the horror.
garage mahal
Doug
Yep, could have been some liberal plants in those helicopters too, trying to make the military look bad.
Radon Chong
Code Pink? No way they could pull off something like this. It has to be ACORN.
licensed to kill time
I can’t watch this on my old creaky laptop but it really is interesting reading what people with actual war zone experience have to say about it. I don’t think this kind of thing is at all uncommon, unfortunately. I don’t know what else you expect when you train people to kill and put them in a dangerous place where other people are trying to kill them. People get jumpy, do stupid shit, try to cover it up, and so it goes.
War is fucked up. For everybody. This just makes me so sad.
Dollared
Wow. They can put this one on Colin Powell’s gravestone. This is “you break it, you bought it,” at 30fps and with a soundtrack.
The detachment of those f#$k%rs sitting up in their helicopter, lighting up a group of humans with 30mm explosive shells, and telling each other “good shooting.”
Then begging a guy, crawling, and bleeding, in the last seconds of his life, to “pick up a weapon,” so they can explode what’s left of his broken body, like a two kids with a frog and an M-80.
We’ve turned war into a video game. No courage, no understanding of what we are doing to human beings.
I”m sorry. I’m not proud of my country if this is what we do. If this doesn’t make you resolve to do whatever you can to make it stop, you don’t believe in America.
Martin
I’d say a mile is in the ballpark. I don’t know how clear their video is. From local news, I know that the news copters with their HD cameras can pretty much tell if you’re drinking a tall or a venti from about 3 miles out.
celticdragonchick
The thing about the size of my forearm without a pineapple sized rocket on the front??
A camera.
Did you notice that nobody seemed to be, well…preparing to fight?? Nobody scurring for fighting positions or scrambling to shoulder weapons? People just walking around like they are not get ready to get it on with a nasty piece of aviation hardware designed to knock the shit out of Soviet armor coming throught the Fulda Gap?
These, ahem, overeager gentlemen in the cockpit seem to think that somebody with a long camera lens taking a picture of them over one thousand meters away is an RPG getting ready to fire.
Yeah.
Then they beg the wounded cameraman to pick up a weapon that seems to be nowhere in sight so they can splatter his body across the street with some 30mm rounds. Nice.
If you believe in any notion of God, judgement or an afterlife, I would hate to be in their position.
stuckinred
We’ve turned war into a video game. No courage, no understanding of what we are doing to human beings.
Yea, arc light strikes were a lot better.
george
As horrific as that scene is, THAT is exactly what war is like and the problem is that these event occur each day where they followed their rules of engagement and asked permission to fire, several times.
The issue isn’t with the soldiers themselves, it is with the fact that we should not be there. Anyone who sees this and is horrified now, but has ever said or thought “we should go over there and kill them” should now understand what that ignorant statement really means in terms of real people in real situations.
This is sad on many fronts, but it IS what war is. Never glamorous and never clean cut and rarely worth it.
Little Dreamer
“Well it’s their fault for bringing their kids into battle”
“That’s right”
::smacks head on desk::
Oh, FUCK! This world experiment is just a complete flop.
DecidedFenceSitter
Chuck, that’s precisely my thought. I, honestly, don’t blame them for the initial shooting. (Shooting the van requires me to get an actual copy of the RoE before condemning or not.) They saw what they expected to see because they are biased to see it. I’ve done too many research projects regarding expectation bias to be shocked by this result.
However, this is the sort of thing we (the public) should be made aware of, cause this is what WE are ordering, WE are requesting that OUR soldiers are doing.
stuckinred
Martin
They are awfully low to be shooting that video from a mile away.
wenchacha
Fuck this fucking war.
eric
There are two elements to the video: one is the shooting of perceived “armed” combatants with the means to take out the helicopter (RPG). We can debate the cognitive processes and perceptions that occured in real time.
The second element is the shooting of the van. There is no resonable real time justification for the use of deadly force.
The abject brutality and inhumanity of latter colors our own opinions of the former as to whether the “perception” of danger was manufactured as a justification to simply “light” those people up independent of a real danger.
scarshapedstar
That “RPG” is a fucking camera. Notice how it’s about a foot long and gets real wide at the far end? That’s called a lens.
There was one guy carrying something longish, but he’s not the one crouching behind the building, and it was more likely a stick.
Dave
An RPG has a max range of around 900-950 meters. If the Apache was over a mile away (and the math sounds right), then even if there WAS a RPG (which there clearly is not), it posed no threat.
Still waiting to hear apologists explain away lighting up a van with kids in the front seat.
Jim Pharo
Why is this footage classified? Do I now know something “secret?” Other than being embarassing for the soldiers and their commanders, and other than the reverence for the dead and injured and their families, is there some reason the government should be able to prevent us from seeing what ordinary Iraqis see?
Surely I’m missing something…
flukebucket
It’s getting pretty close Chuck.
stuckinred
DecidedFenceSitter
And “We” are funding it so when we start getting posts of outrage from people who are in prison for not paying there taxes in protest the outrage will seem a bit more genuine.
Lee
Those they killed were not in any way engaged or about to be engaged in combat, that was very clear from their demeanor.
But once they went hot, they were going to kill everything that moved. The problem was the initial decision to engage.
How do they differentiate picking up the weapons versus picking up the wounded/killed in regards to the van? I find the most disturbing part of the video.
Joel
Given that the army concluded their investigation, (and determined that they followed the rules of engagement) is there any way to try these guys for murder?
MattR
General McChrystal last month:
kdaug
My Lai, anyone?
Erik Vanderhoff
jncc@12.
1) Iraq is not a war zone. It was not in 2003, it was not in 2007, it is not now in 2010. A war zone has a very specific legal meaning. You might arguably state that it met that definition in March, April, and maybe May of 2003. But as soon as President Bush announced that the major offensive was over (remember “Mission Accomplished?”), that argument was moot.
2) The Rules of Engagement are FAR more strict than that, most importantly BECAUSE it is so hard to determine who is who in a country where every third adult male has a fucking Kalashnikov.
LarsThorwald
I’m not weighing in on whether this was murder, a bad situation where judgment calls were made appropriately, or something in between or something else entirely. i don’t know.
What I do know is that you know these things happen in war, and still our President was damnably cavalier in taking us into it.
More evidence, in my view, that the American Century closed right around 1950, and we have been in decline ever since.
Scott P.
I saw 1 guy with an AK-47. He was pointing it at the ground, not at anyone. There certainly weren’t “5-6 guys with AK-47s” as the helicopter crew reports. The “RPG” I am pretty certain wasn’t one. It was hard to see from the angle they were at when they note it, but before and after they circle the entire group and no one is holding anything that could be an RPG. Just before he moves back behind the corner you can see it was a camera.
Thus far you could chalk it up to FOW. Of course, relying on soldiers in a helicopter 1.3 miles away, looking for excuses to fire, to ID enemy combatants is pretty much guaranteed to increase FOW. I don’t see any justification at all for firing on the wounded guy and the van.
Taylor
If this is an indication of the mentality of the people in the chopper, this is all horribly understandable.
At least in Patriot Games, Jack Ryan could be quietly horrified at that kind of cool detachment from his colleagues.
Some people have confused Predator with Real Life. We used to call people like that psychopaths.
Joel
You might want to watch the video. The Orwell quote is one you should pay. very. deep. attention. to.
Little Dreamer
__
Yeah, why is it that we haven’t heard about this until we see it? This video is over two years old? Maybe closer to three?
celticdragonchick
**Given that the army concluded their investigation, (and determined that they followed the rules of engagement) is there any way to try these guys for murder?**
Very, very unlikely. They thought they saw weapons because that is what they wanted to see, and you can clearly hear them ask permission before opening fire even though they are misrepresenting what the van is doing.
Any investigator will want to error on the side of actual warfighters and conclude that they had reasonable suspicion and acted properly within the ROE, but we saw what happened.
I would not be surprised to hear calls for prosecution in Iraq or elsewhere, though.
Chuck Butcher
DFS,
What you’re looking at is situational awareness, a video doesn’t have that, it is entirely uninvolved. It has no mission and no consequence regarding its filming, the video camera knows nothing and has no opinions.
The people from the van saw their neighbors, clansmen, citizens hurt and tried to help.
The chopper saw a van to collect weapons and enemy.
There was no red cross or red crescent on the van – it was not an ambulance.
We know what it was because we are told and see later what it was.
I hunt, I see a deer with its head obscured by a tree and I repeat to myself, step out – please step out. I know that deer’s life hinges on what it does because I won’t take the bad shot. That is what you’re hearing and it is about humans that are supposed to be hunted. Yes, it sucks and exactly what the fuck do any of you think is the outcome of doing warfare?
Bnut
Blood lust is real. I’ve had to talk another Marine down from doing something stupid. Being an officer, a pilot, an American or a jihadist, it does not matter. Some people want to kill no matter the situation. The military has institutionalized violence. It’s become like the church and sex abuse. The church doesn’t make people pedophile rapists, they just make it easier.
Midnight Marauder
I think there’s another point that needs to be kept in mind here as we continue to discuss this matter. There’s an awful lot of focus on the particulars of the atrocities that occurred in this video (and with good reason), but let’s keep in mind that the real crime here is the egregious cover-up the United States military has engaged in over the past 2 1/2-3 years with this situation and coutless others. That’s the reason Wikileaks is relasing this video.
If the US had accepted fault and behaved in a humane fashion when this first happened, instead of styming any and all attempts at an investigation, then there would be no need for Wikileaks to even go down this route. Yes, it’s unconscionable that they opened fire on that van and the rescuers and children inside; but the military’s reponse to all of this is an even greater travesty, I think.
mattt
I don’t know what the rules of engagement were at this time and place, but the Apaches ask for and get permission to fire at armed people in the open. I see at least two AK-47s in the video, and other comments suggest the pilots are seeing things that are out of the video frame (that I don’t think they’re making up). So maybe there was an RPG. The first shoot seems defensible – if a powerful reminder of the brutality of war, and of the risks that journalists take in the war zone.
Once the van comes in, the pilots are pretty clearly misrepresenting what they’re seeing in order to get permission to shoot. It’s obvious they know perfectly well it’s not a case of “insurgents scrubbing the scene,” but that the van is trying to evacuate a wounded (and, the pilots admit, unarmed) man. They say “wounded crawling around” over the intercoms, but “picking up bodies and weapons” to their controller. The shoot of the van is straight up murder.
[edit: changed “reasonable” in reference to the first shoot to “defensible.”]
Egypt Steve
Just did a search for stories on this thru Google News, using the keywords “wikileaks, apache, baghdad.” Not one US news source popped up.
Violet
Wow. That’s pretty incredible. “We don’t know how the children were hurt.” Holy cow. He flat out lied.
This reminds me of grainy footage of some of the Vietnam war – horrible, full of lies, tragic.
Sigh.
celticdragonchick
**Yes, it sucks and exactly what the fuck do any of you think is the outcome of doing warfare?**
Indeed. Given that we are fighting in a culture that has institutionalized blood vengeance mores, what do you think the outcome is when we shoot up unarmed people trying to come to the aid of other wounded and unarmed people?
Somebody’s son, uncle or nephew will pick up an AK or get ahold of a Dragunov rifle, or maybe get behind the steering wheel of a toyota truck paked with two thousand pounds of old artillery shells and Katyusha rockets.
The fun just keeps on going, doesn’t it?
stuckinred
The shit happened three years ago and this un-biased news source releases a video titled “Collateral Murder” and ya’ll think it should be the headline on every major news organization? right
JM
That actually wasn’t the rule in Baghdad, but whatever helps you sleep at night.
Filth.
The Moar You Know
No.
Violet
@ Midnight Marauder:
Exactly. When the quote the US Military representative says, “I don’t know how the children were hurt,” when it’s completely clear on the video how the children were hurt, that’s nothing but a lie and cover up. That’s what should be investigated.
Mistakes happen. Cover ups happen deliberately.
Bob L
Surreal. It’s like the pilots of the helicopters were in a world of their own. From the dialog it is quite clear the pilots were convinced these guys on the ground were out to shoot at the copters and equally clear they guys they were shooting at were unarmed. I guess Chuck is right; you think people are about to shoot you, you will see people about to shoot you.
Though 30mm cannon rounds into a city quite disturbing in itself. Anymore information on the situation this happened?
Lee
To those who see AK-47’s….
Where? Do you know what an AK-47 is?
Joel
@ stuckinred
The source is WikiLeaks, and it looks like you haven’t actually, you know, watched the video. But like JM said, whatever lets you sleep at night.
mattt
It sure does suck. Some degree of dehuminization of the enemy seems a necessary element of the fighting mentality. I’m sure that shit like this happens pretty regularly in any armed conflict, and that our soldiers really are a lot less likely to act on blood lust and commit atrocites than most.
The real lesson here, is how absurd and evil it is to choose war before any other option at resolving a conflict. The Bush Doctrine of preventive war is as evil as it is counterproductive.
ibid
Interesting how they can identify AK-47’s and RPGs, but they can’t see two children in the front seat of the van. The most disgusting comment in the whole thing was: “Their fault for bringing their kids into a war zone.” No, asshole, it’s your fault for creating a war zone where their kids were.
There’s this notion, perpetuated by the likes of jncc, that somehow these people are all morons who like to hang out next to combatants while they point RPGs at U.S. helicopters, or who bring their kids along when they go into combat. The more obvious explanation is that, you know, maybe those guys standing calmly in the street aren’t combatants, or maybe those people driving their kids around don’t think that picking wounded men up off the street will result in their van getting shot up. But that would force them to acknowledge that some of our hero troops are actually assholes with itchy trigger fingers. We can’t have that, so it must be those dumb Iraqis’ fault for walking around their own neighborhood while we’re trying to keep America safe by killing some Arab guys who might be carrying guns halfway around the world.
jncc
“Of course, relying on soldiers in a helicopter 1.3 miles away, looking for excuses to fire, to ID enemy combatants is pretty much guaranteed to increase FOW.”
Don’t the Apaches carry 30MM chain guns, good out to about 1500M? Where does this 1.3 miles stuff come from?
When I saw the guy at the corner, my first thought was RPG, even before the guys on the video said it. I’ve looked at the 2-3 seconds where you can see him several times and it still does _not_ look like a camera to me. If it is a camera, but must have an 800 or 1000MM lens on it because my 600MM lenses are nowhere near that long. Anyway, it if is in fact a camera, I guess the lesson here is not to point telephotos up at choppers while in the presence of guys carrying around AKs and RPGs.
As for lighting up the van. I’m not so sure that is a “war crime.” Don’t the wounded have to have evidenced a cessation of hostilities and don’t the medical vehicles have to be clearly marked for it to fall into that category. I don'[t know. Haven’t looked into it. I agree with Eric above that peoples anger at the second shooting seems to be coloring how they view the entire sequence.
ajr22
This was hard to watch, and brutal because the killing was done with bullets. However, with drone attacks it is accepted that things like this happen all the time. We have chosen this method of fighting to reduce American kia. The pilot’s attitude towards the killings, and the fact that they fired on what appeared to be equal to an ambulance is disgusting. However, it is pretty clear mass casualty attacks like this have become common place, but normally a bomb just takes out the entire group. If this video was a bomb it would not generate the same feeling, but watching our soldiers itching to kill a wounded unarmed man is hard to watch.
stuckinred
Joel
I can read the fucking source, the title and the five minute slide show and I watched the video. So what? You in the slammer for not paying the taxes that pay for these wars? If not you are just as guilty as anyone else. sweet dreams
Scott P.
Well, there are a couple of ways to deal with that.
One is to shoot first and ask questions later.
The other is to order in the Bradleys to see if they are civilians or not. If you do that, you are risking the ambush of U.S. soldiers and perhaps they will be killed.
Is it better to kill unarmed civilians rather than risk the lives of U.S. soldiers? Or is it better to risk the lives of U.S. soldiers rather than run the risk of shooting civilians? If your answer is the former, then there is no reason for us to be in Iraq, because we cannot do any good there.
drlemur
If you put 150,000 armed soldiers in a country like Iraq, you are guaranteed to have events like this whether they are protocol mistakes, trigger-happy cowboys or whatever. If you were for the war and didn’t realize many such events are an automatic consequence, you are an idiot.
Shit happens in every war zone: murder, rape, theft/looting. It happens regardless how disciplined you think your troops are (you have thousands of armed young mostly-men hopped up fear for their lives, there are going to be “mistakes” and kids who crack). If you have even the slightest clue about history, if you care about this, it’s why you don’t fucking go to war in the first place.
I’ll probably be told I hate the troops, but I don’t. I have plenty of friends who went through Iraq (lots of warcraft players in the army). The answer isn’t to hate on the troops, it’s to keep them out of these situations where they might crack under pressure and do something like this. Don’t go to war. But if you have to, have a clear mission goal, get in, do the job (accept the “collateral damage”) and get out. As a country, we knew this once.
Paris
Maybe I should contact Bart Stupak and express my displeasure that my tax dollars are being used to murder of brown people.
james
I’m pretty sure that Iraqi’s are allowed to own an ak-47 for home defense. It was law under Saddam and I’m pretty sure the policy was continued on by the US government.
Scott P.
Well, there were no hostilities to cease, so the first part is irrelevant. Medical vehicles need to be clearly marked? These are civilians! We’re not talking about uniformed combatants.
I mean, by these standards, Al Quaeda would have been perfectly justified in gunning down civilians coming to the aid of the victims on 9/11.
MattR
FWIW – Glenn Greenwald will be on MSNBC during the 4 pm hour to discuss this and the “honor killing” story. So at least someone in the MSM is talking about this.
mattt
Look, the shoot on the van made these guys assholes, but blame should be apportioned appropriately. Multiple AKs are easy to see in the first video, but I could only see the kids when the Wikileaks editor zoomed in on them. As for rules of engagement: the Apaches are given permission to fire at armed people in the open, regardless of how many weapons there are or if they pose an actual threat.
These pilots signed up to serve their country. I’ve never been to war, but I’ve been close to men who have and seen them wrestle with the impossible demands it makes on a thinking person’s mind, often years after the fact. I’m not giving them a pass for shooting up the van, but suggesting some perspective.
The lion’s share of blame for the whole damn mess belongs with the leaders who abused these young mens’ trust and patriotism, and who misled the whole nation to war.
Ed Marshall
I didn’t even watch the thing because I know too many people who have served over there.
I’ll tell you what happened without looking at it!
If you are on a battlefield and have a camera while they are fighting they will kill you. They don’t know who you are and don’t know what you are going to do with that film. They don’t have much reason to want to find out.
The RPG talk is probably a black joke: They didn’t see a camera, they saw an RPG. Then you laugh after you say it if you aren’t talking to an investigation or the media.
FormerSwingVoter
This is an important part of the modern wingnut’s psychology. My wingnut roommate has a newspaper article on the fridge about a man who killed three unarmed robbers on a neighboring (not his own) abandoned property, and often lauds similar actions as “awesome”. To the modern wingnut, violence and killing are inherently positive ends in and of themselves.
They are not necessary evils, or things that happen in bad situations, or even punishments that should be brought upon those who honestly deserve them. It is sociopathy, pure and simple.
You can see this on full display by paying attention to their arguments. Whether the victims in question deserve what happened has no place in the conversation; it is completely and entirely a search for any possible justification for the violence in question, which is then immediately celebrated. Violence is not a necessary means to an end – it is an end in and of itself, to be justified as circumstances dictate.
flukebucket
Reckon why that is? Or is it?
Linda Featheringill
I watched the video. Damn. Sigh.
Little Dreamer
@ mattt:
__
Who said anything about bloodlust? This is a generation of soldiers brought up on Nintendo and “Modern Warfare”. This is simply “make sure all the targets on the screen are dead” because that’s the only way you advance to the next level.
I have far more respect for Iraqis who are trying to protect their homeland and their families than I do for the American video game soldier.
Citizen_X
Fuckin’ ay, pal, quit digging. The guy is known. His name was Namir Noor-Eldeen, aged 22, and he was a photographer for Reuters. He did not have some secret identity as a super-insurgent, lobbing RPGs at the Yankee invader on his off hours from work.
BR
1-1.3 miles was an estimate based on velocity and delay from the link above. 1500m is about a mile.
stuckinred
Citizen_X
yea, the dudes in the chopper were supposed to know that!
Calouste
Most popular story now on the BBC even without a video, a still or even a link to wikileaks. It’s also hitting other European news sites.
America? Nada. Not even on Reuters.
Citizen_X
@stuckinred:
No. The guy commenting here is supposed to know that.
Chuck Butcher
If you want a justification for not going to war, a video like this is what is called for. It shows what happens.
If you want to call this crew out as murderers, you have to start to make things up. Does somebody here suppose that crew was unaware they’re being filmed by their own camera? This isn’t a bystander video of a cop beating, the crew knows.
Nobody here watching this is being shot at or hunting humans. My eyes are watching a film on my computer in my home – my eyes are not darting around looking here and there for threats, I can stop and look at the object held next to the building and I know there is a photographer there. I don’t just see a cylinder in a guy’s hand and I know what to look for.
It isn’t a conspiracy that the military doesn’t want something like this released – it’s simple – you’re not going to like it and you’re not sitting in the “danger seat.” And – you’re going to make judgements that are based on something other than the reality of those making the judgements. They don’t want that and they don’t want to feed the “warporn” industry. These guys are doing just exactly what we pay them to do and what BushCo sent them to do and they do in a place where there are no uniforms and damn near everybody and everything is ready to blow you up as far as you can tell.
I hate that our folks wind up having to do this shit, I hate that my neighbor’s kid may not come home or if he does he’ll be a mess and that Iraqis or whatever face the same thing. That doesn’t make these guys fuckers and scum. Why doesn’t the military want you watching this?
celticdragonchick
**When I saw the guy at the corner, my first thought was RPG, even before the guys on the video said it. I’ve looked at the 2-3 seconds where you can see him several times and it still does not look like a camera to me. If it is a camera, but must have an 800 or 1000MM lens on it because my 600MM lenses are nowhere near that long. Anyway, it if is in fact a camera, I guess the lesson here is not to point telephotos up at choppers while in the presence of guys carrying around AKs and RPGs.**
You mean doing their fucking job as reporters?
You know, I would agree with you if these guys were visibly doing something suspicious beyond actually standing around and talking and generally not paying much attnetion to the gunship roaming around.
And I still don’t see any damned RPG’s anywhere.
So, just being alive and in the open and carring objects on your body is sufficient cause to be lit up by a gunship and ergo declared an insurgent, since our official policy is we only shoot at insrgents.
Hey, this is easy! Anybody can play!
By the way, it is legal to own a Kalshnikov in Iraq, and news teams usually have one or more conspicuously armed guards.
Not that it matters.
Lee
Please screencap where you think you see AK-47’s.
liberal
stuckinred wrote,
Not really.
Just like any of us could “protest” by not paying taxes, no one currently in Iraq has to be there. They could disobey orders and “protest” from a military prison.
The onus on the soldiers is actually stronger. Paying taxes isn’t voluntary. Joining the armed forces these days is voluntary, and has been so for decades, and the US hasn’t fought a truely defensive war in decades, if not longer.
minachica
Question for the military people out there: What happens to the troops involved in something like this? Do they get pulled from combat duty (given a desk job perhaps)? Or is it just considered no big deal?
I can understand seeing certain situations as mistakes rather than “war crimes”, but do they at least trigger a retraining or cool-off period?
I’m asking because I know less than nothing about how the military works.
garage mahal
By the way, it is legal to own a Kalshnikov in Iraq,
The one freedom the right wing cherishes here, being able to open carry to defend yourself in a shopping mall. Over there, where you really might need one, not so much.
stuckinred
liberal
what bullshit
Scott P.
The justification presented above for firing on the van was that it might have been ‘scrubbing’ the scene. Implying that we might want to have the information as to who was shot and what they were doing.
And yet it is the U.S. military who ‘scrubbed’ the record. If the soldiers didn’t know at the time that he was a journalist with a camera, and not an RPG, they knew as soon as the Bradleys got onto the scene. And yet not a word of explanation to his family.
If the shooters in the helicopter made an honest mistake, the least they should do is admit it to the journalist’s wife face-to-face.
SGEW
I feel like I’m going to throw up.
I feel like rending my clothes and covering myself with ashes and wailing my contrition for being a U.S. citizen and taxpayer; for not doing enough to stop the war in the first place, for being culpable, in some tiny way.
How can war supporters live with themselves?
Scott P.
Nobody here has called them “fuckers” or “scum.”
celticdragonchick
turn on msnbc right now
GregB
Locked and loaded and armed citizens in public in America is patriotic.
Locked and loaded and armed citizens in Iraq? Send in the gunships.
MattR
@garage mahal – So in America, carrying a gun in the open makes you a patriot who refuses to give up their Second Ammendment rights, but in Iraq it makes you a target. Why am I not surprised by the cognitive dissonance
kdaug
This isn’t war.
This isn’t battle.
This is pulling the wings off flies.
This is roasting ants with a magnifying glass.
This is sitting a mile away in a chopper and unloading on a group of human beings.
Innocent? Guilty? Who knows?
Threat? Hell, no.
(Similarly, sitting in the Arizona desert piloting a drone, bombing people on the other side of the earth, and still making it home in time for dinner.)
To paraphrase Bill Mahr – that doesn’t make us brave warriors… (fill in the rest).
Sacco
It’s high time the lie was put to the tired “soldiers as heroes” trope. These “warriors” willingly agreed to kill brown people – many of which present no threat – for the U.S. government without much aforethought. These people aren’t “heroes,” but obedient authority-loving sociopaths. Fuck ’em.
brantl
“Our government (and by extension all of us) told these guys to go do this.” No, “we” didn’t, Chuck. Many of us fought like hell against doing ANY of this, before it ever started, many of us railed in every legal way against this disgusting excuse we have been forced to become, instead of the decent thing we’d always intended to be.
We got lied into this by Bush, and Cheney, and Bolton, and Feith, and Perle, and Wolfowitz and Rove, and every other one of those scummy bastards that decided that they could read the tea leaves (due to their obvious genius) and ignore all of the stronger evidence that went contrary to what they wanted to believe. And the responsibility lies with the sons-of-bitches that lied us into this crap in the first place and the bloodthirsty bastards that knew that their case was weak, and went with it anyway.
And I want those sons-of-bitches to go to prison, Chuck, as long as they live. I want examples made out of them, good enough examples to give the next monsters from OUR country, pause. I want them taken before the Hague, I want them tried, and I want them to do all the time that’s coming to them. Because at this point, it’s the only right thing (to start with) that is left to do, that we could actually start with.
As citizens of this country, we all owe them this. But when you say all of us are responsible for this, Chuck, you lie, whether you meant to, or not.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
I really don’t know what to say with this. I think this was during a period in 2007 when things were very hot in Iraq, and a lot of GI’s were getting blown up daily by IED’s. Urban guerilla warfare makes this sort of cluster fuck possible on a daily basis. Some of the calls by the Apache crew on weapons was bullshit and obvious they made it just from seeing a shoulder strap, and I did not see an rpg. There was at least one AK 47/
iI sounds and looks like to me that this area had pretty much been declared a free fire zone for whatever reason, and the clear eagerness of the pilots to start shooting and see what they wanted as far as weapons go, may well have been due to the high number of US casualties caused mostly by unseen enemies detonating IED’s.
And I am certain that this sort of thing happened every day in Iraq, and I tend not to blame soldiers unless it is clear they broke standing ROE at the time.
This is nearly all on GWB, Cheney and the rest of the ghoul neocons, may they rot in hell for their bloody sins.
Comrade Kevin
Because, to the wingnut warmonger mind, brown people and reporters, when they are killed, deserve it, always, and forever.
JUST A NORMAL GUY (THE ORIGINAL)
WELL I DEFINATELY AGREE WITH JJNC
IF YOU ABJECT TO WHAT HAPPEN’S IN THIS VIDEO THEN YOUR WITH THE TERRORITS. ARE FIGHTING BOY’S HAVE THE RIGHT TO KEEP AMERICA SAFE, AND THATS JUST WHAT WE DID. THESE PARTICULIAR IRAQIES WO’NT THREATEN US ANY MORE. IF RUETER’S DOES’NT LIKE IT THEN THEY SHOUDL’NT LET THEY’RE CAMERA-MAN CREW CARRY RPG’S.
WELL LIKE JJNC I AM A WEAPON’S EXCPERT
stuckinred
fought like hell when, where?
Lesley
Soldiers made brutal and indifferent to human suffering eventually have to face what they did. This is also the stuff PTSD is made of.
And we wonder why they have nightmares, commit suicide, or alternately become even more hardened and turn to crime once they are home.
bkny
ratigan is showing clips of it on msnbc with no sound; and has one guy rationalizing it and ratigan asking another guy what the rules of engagement are who is critical of the actions.
mattt
3:40 and following.
On the other hand, now I agree with the people who think the camera was mistaken for an RPG, and there was no actual RPG out of frame.
I want to give our troops every benefit of the doubt, but they do seem to be fishing for reasons even for the first shoot.
bkny
glennzilla’s on too; ratigan’s devoting several minutes to this.
TooManyJens
@Paris: Stupak voted against the war, so he probably shares your displeasure.
Why oh why
At least Obama does it with drones, and doesn’t get stuff leaked. Competence!
Chyron HR
@stuckinred:
An incoherent, semi-literate teabagger post? He must be a liberal plant! Or perhaps somebody has photoshopped it.
PartyLikeIts1990
Actually it makes them mass murderers.
Joe L.
Sickening. The people who do these things have given away their humanity – so have the soulless dumbfucks who appoint themselves as apologists. Cowardly.
gwangung
This. This. A thousand times this.
TooManyJens
@SGEW:
In many cases, by not giving a shit, which is why they were war supporters to start with. The ones with consciences, I dunno.
croatoan
Then why the fuck can’t you see them on the ground next to the bodies after they killed everyone?
Midnight Marauder
@Chuck Butcher:
But these things are not mutually exclusive, Chuck. There are clear-cut instances in this case of military officials blatantly lying about things that can be empirically documented. And the source of this empirical documentation is the aforementioned video that the military and the government fought like hell to ever prevent from seeing the light of day.
The fact that the public isn’t going to like it is not a good enough reason for the actions taken by the United States military in this matter over the past 2 1/2-3 years. There’s no excuse for some of the intimidation and heavy handed threats US government officials have applied towards the good people at Wikileaks over the past few months, if not years.
And I’m sorry to say, but there are realities other than those of the individuals who are making judgements at that moment in time that play in a role in this matter. Yes, there are other mitigating factors into why this kind of behavior is outrageous, and most of them have to do with the United States military’s tendency to cover-up these kinds of egregious crimes and make them disappear from the record.
So it may not be a conspiracy that’s driving them in cases like this, but whatever it is, it damn sure isn’t anything pure of heart.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Greenwald is sounding actually thoughtful and reflective on this seg.
Violet
@ JUST A NORMAL GUY (THE ORIGINAL):
Why are you shouting?
LT
Giggling? I heard nothing of the sort. And nothing here tells me for sure they didn’t know they were weapons. And the presentation by Wikileaks, they never mention that the pilot says repeatedly that he thinks he sees weapons, is unfair. It ain’t straight. The pilot could be lying, but you’ve got to at least say that to tell the story right.
LT
Giggling? I heard nothing of the sort. And nothing here tells me for sure they didn’t know they were weapons. And the presentation by Wikileaks, they never mention that the pilot says repeatedly that he thinks he sees weapons, is unfair. It ain’t straight. The pilot could be lying, but you’ve got to at least say that to tell the story right.
garage mahal
So in America, carrying a gun in the open makes you a patriot who refuses to give up their Second Ammendment rights, but in Iraq it makes you a target.
Sadly, yes.
brantl
And no, Chuck, praying for a wounded man to pick up a gun, so you can shoot him isn’t the same as wishing the deer to come out from behind a tree, so you can kill him to eat him.
Grow a brain.
Pasquinade
@jncc, what’s your FReeper name?
james
Dylan Ratigan: “Nobody in this conversation I hope is blaming the soldiers”
How can he not smell the bullshit when it’s coming out of a hole half an inch below his nose?
Honus
“I see at least two AK-47s in the video”
I don’t know how, because there aren’t any AK 47s in the video. The one thing could possibly be a weapon, especially given what we now know are cameras, is too long to be an AK, and probably isn’t a weapon. Most of the men in that group they shot up were clearly and evidently unarmed.
I’m not making a judgment on whether the helicopter crew thought they saw guns, but anybody that has a knowledge of weapons watching this video after that fact can’t be excuse for seeing AK 47s and RPGs where there sure as fuck aren’t any.
celticdragonchick
**Then why the fuck can’t you see them on the ground next to the bodies after they killed everyone?**
I am wondering about that myself.
I guess the street urchin children are preternaturally fast in picking up all the discarded weapons and evidence, and can avoid the FLIR and other sensors on the Apache.
I hear that Acorn hired them after this to rig the elections here in the US.
elftx
I was just discussing this with my 24yr old son and realize just how angry I am that our military has been so very unjustly used.
As he stated, the soldiers are trained to kill..period.
And all I can think of is how so very well Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush knew that.
meh
@JUST A NORMAL GUY (THE ORIGINAL)
Doug, quit trollin’ the board…
gwangung
Who the frak cares? Folks should THINK. If you LIVE in Iraq, why SHOULDN’T you be armed?
licensed to kill time
@Violet
He’s fallen on his JESUS CAPS and he can’t get up!
Citizen_X
@mattt:
You’re right; now I see the second AK (the two “bodyguards” are hanging together). But there are certainly not “five or six” rifles.
Anyone who sees more than two AKs, tell us where.
Dollared
@ Matt.
One thing we are definitedly agreed upon: It really is about the bastards who thought this elective war was the best way to get GWB re-elected.
Those guys in the chopper? Normal humans. Bad situation. Suboptimal response, but easily and fully within the predicted range of outcomes.
The people on the ground? Steak tartare a la Cheney.
I’m willing be a deist just to contemplate that sunovabitch roasting in hell for all eternity.
gwangung
Yeah, that’s the point of the military.
Which means we, as a country, should be very thoughtful about when we use our military. IMAO, these incidents are almost inevitable in a prolonged occupation of a country.
celticdragonchick
**As he stated, the soldiers are trained to kill..period.**
Exactly. We were trained to rain the Wrath of God and bring unholy bloody ruin to whatever place the civilian leadership designated.
The nuances of COIN warfare were not discussed when I was in the army, and COIN was not really a subject of training until well after 2003. The things that are what you need to win a force on force engagment in a set piece battle are absolutely disasterous in counter insurgency.
Mark S.
Maybe the original attack was justified, but blowing away the van that was trying to pick up survivors sure as hell wasn’t. And I don’t give a fuck whether the van was marked; you’re in the middle of a fucking city.
Joe L.
Shooting into a van with zero knowledge of who is in it? Our tax dollars at work. The only likely accountability will be nightmares, something that only happens to those who have a conscience to begin with.
Citizen_X
@Violet:
BEKUZ I KANT SPEL ENGLITCH DAM LIBIRUL!
Fax Paladin
The sickest irony here: You realize, of course, that the reason they shot up the van was so they wouldn’t be accused of shooting at civilians?
Fern
Other possibility is they knew it was a camera and they have something against journalists.
Wouldn’t be the first time journalists were targeted in a “war zone”.
SGEW
From the transcript summary of a conversation between Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, November 21st, 1969:
(cf.</a>)
Cain
@ajr22
Yes, but to tehse people they represent the enemy. Once you’ve determined they are enemy combatants it would be hard to not emotionally pull back from teh situation. After all they represent the people who have shot and killed fallen comrades.
War is complicated shit. The method we got into this war is, and how cavalierly we got into it and the whole approach is just wrong. It hurts everyone.
I haven’t watched the video.. I don’t want to do sit in judgement. I’d just get very angry.
cain
Egypt Steve
@jncc:
Hey, you’ve got 2 600mm lenses? That’s impressive.
If you don’t have the time or wherewithal to head out to a war zone, you can see a 1000mm lense on the sidelines of any football game. I would’ve thought that an ace photog and man’s man like you had seen a thousand of ’em, and would recognize one instantly.
delosgatos
Right around 3:40, after the camera shifts to the group a bit further from the wall, I see one guy carrying what appears to be a shirt or cloth, and one guy carrying what might kind of look like an RPG launcher or something – which he then appears to brace on the ground with his head right above what would be the business end, which kinda suggests it may not be what it looks like.
What I called a shirt did look initially like it might be a weapon, but when I looked very closely it appears to swing like fabric as he walks.
maskling
was in balad, iraq as a civilian contractor. it is a huge airbase in farmland. first day there i was very surprised to see iraqis with AK-47’s milling around the fence, on the outside, talking to the tower guard. this was an everyday thing, no big deal. balad was in the heart of the sunni triangle. conclusion: armed iraqi? no biggy. of course, these were farmers. on the other hand, we got mortared every night.
an armed iraqi in the city should not be such a big deal either. of course, i did not drive around iraq every damn day. and i really don’t know. i guess these guys followed the rules of engagement as explained to them.
so what do we do? convict these young, rash cowboys? will they be our substitute for cheney, yoo, and addington? cheney yoo and addington will never be punished for their crimes and these stupid young men will be punished for their crimes and the cheny crimes too.
it sucks to fuck up and be a nobody. how awful. how awful. how sad.
bdg
I reported briefly in Iraq in early 2004 as a freelancer. One day on a visit to the field near Fallujah (this was 2 months before it was sure death to report in the area) to do some routine interviews, my interviee – a local sheikh – reported that US forces attacked a home in a nearby village called Al Amira. We quickly went there.
We arrived at the funeral for an elderly man and his wife, being buried at the time. The locals to us to the man’s home and it was utterly ripped to shreds by missile hits, tank blasts and heavy calliber rounds. It was barely still standing.
The town claimed that the innocent elderly couple were killed without warning. I saw just some small patches of blood on the wall.
I contacted the PO of the 82nd Airborne (running the area at the time) and she had no comment. A day later they issued a press release saying that 6 armed insurgents were killed in a firefight in the same village on the morning in question.
The US press? They ran the 82nd Airborne’s press release verbatim and didnt bother to check any of its veracity.
No accountability is the problem.
Martian Buddy
jncc:
They do indeed carry a 30mm chain gun which is intended to penetrate the armor of light armored vehicles. Note that the maximum range of an M230 is 4,500m and human beings are just a tad bit flimsier than armored personnel carriers are.
For comparison’s sake, a .50 machinegun fires a 12.7mm bullet that’s still lethal a mile away.
Chuck Butcher
Right, blow smoke up somebody elses ass.
Bullshit, it is my government. I may have worked against BushCo, I may have made my life miserable by pushing back against the run up to this war, but I don’t get to walk away with no responsiblity. I also don’t get to sit in my fucking easy chair making these kinds of calls against that crew just because I can look at a video.
This isn’t a hell of a lot different than saying, “I put my plastic model Bradley in the sandbox and you can’t …” I don’t in the least like what happened but I do understand how it happened and why it happened and that my video experience is completely different than reality.
If you don’t shoot that guy in a video game you get timed out and try again; if one of your cohorts gets whacked he’ll come back. You get to look and analyse and do over. In a video game it isn’t a case of the minority in a town being involved in the fight and most everybody isn’t, here in this video it is the case and only your side is wearing uniforms and playing mostly by the rules.
You act as though this isn’t just exactly what happens in warfare once it got past sword’s length. This bullshit idea is one reason we keep doing warfare – it’s supposed to be sanitary and we have rules to make it so and that is horseshit. We have rules to keep the most egregious and horrific down and this shit here isn’t anywhere in the ballpark. Urban warfare with irregulars means this will be a pretty regular occurance. There is no “good war” that is crap; there may be better or worse reasons for doing it, but the reality is real bad.
“Scrubbing” is a common enough tactic that it is in slang use by troops, they’re expecting it and … naturally see it. The military has let this go because these guys saw what they expected to see and did what they’re supposed to – and got the wrong guys and that happens a hell of a lot more often than we like to think about.
PartyLikeIts1990
What would it matter if they were ALL carrying AKs? I recently watched a documentary about a death metal band of Iraqi kids in Baghdad, desperately trying to organize underground shows while the insurgency is raging. At one point the camera crew filming these kids has to travel around Baghdad with them, so they hire a van and some bodyguards. They get in the van, and it’s PACKED with AKs and pistols and ammo. EVERYONE they’re with is carrying an AK. This is presented as the standard way to move around Baghdad.
What would YOU do if you had to live in that place? No order, no law, armed gangs everywhere, hell yes you’d be carrying, you’d probably have one in each hand and a goddamn missile launcher on your hat if you could find one!
So how exactly does “he’s standing around with an AK” make him suddenly deserving to die at the hands of some redneck american kid a mile away in a helicopter?
Ed Marshall
This was part of a conversation I was listening to about a week ago before a community college class. Two guys, one who had served in Afghanistan and one who was back from Iraq.
I don’t even remember why it came up but they *don’t* like cameras when they are fighting. At worst it’s an insurgent collecting recon or intel and at *best* it’s media and someone who will win awards for catching them doing something where they wind up in federal prison. The argument was over if you should just kill anyone during a fight with a camera or if it depended on how hot a fight it was to kill the cameraman and that was the width of disagreement on what to do with someone taping them during a fight.
Scott P.
At what point does honest misunderstanding cease to be a blanket defense? I think the whole point is that the situation, and the tactics that are used, are going to lead to these kinds of results. I mean, the helicopter is asking for permission to fire, but the folks giving permission don’t know anything other than what the guys in the copter are telling them. It sounds from the audio that the biggest concern was to make sure there were no U.S. forces in the area, not to make sure that the targets weren’t civilians.
The way it’s set up, we have perfect deniability. The soldiers can claim, truthfully, that they were given permission to fire from superiors. Their superiors can say, truthfully, that they didn’t know the men weren’t insurgents. So we have a nice circular reasoning and nobody is responsible. And there are plenty of folks who will say, truthfully, that shit happens all the time in warfare, as if civilian casualties are like the weather, you can complain about them but nobody can do anything about it. So they’re not responsible, we’re not responsible, nobody is responsible, it just happens like spring rains.
Loneoak
What the fucking hell is wrong with us?
mattt
I called them “assholes,” and I stand by that. To watch the second half of the video, where it’s clear from the pilots’ own words that they know they’re watching an attempted evacuation of an unarmed, wounded man, but they misrepresent what they’re seeing in order to get permission to shoot…. and let such behavior pass unjudged is a grave insult to the many, many servicemen and women who don’t give in to the dark side.
Joe L.
I’m sure an incident like this could never result in the creation of more terrorists, more American lives lost. Of course not..
james
I’ve never heard someone who blasts a child with a cannon called a ‘rash cowboy’ before.
PartyLikeIts1990
I’m sure you just missed my helpful correction, but “mass murderer” is the proper term for someone who willfully ends the lives of innocent strangers. Not “asshole”. I imagine if it were your family shredded to hamburger for nothing, you would probably not be calling the culprit an “asshole”.
Joe L.
Exactly. Zero accountability – especially at the top, never there.
Cerberus
“It is good that war is hell lest we grow too fond of it” – Robert E Lee
This video is stomach-churning, hideous evil. As a commentator said way up thread, we are the baddies, we’ve been the baddies for awhile in these pointless occupations of sovereign nations.
Yes, this is what war is, yes, soldiers will gladly twist into parodies of horror by the strains of war, but there is no excuse for us staying, nor the actions taken in the video nor its cover-up. This should be shown far and wide to shake up the mushy middle who fear their dicks might go soft if we “pull out”.
And to everyone who has been defending this shit (and Chuck, that includes you, you mealy-mouthed apologist for war crimes), you have no fucking souls left in your bodies and I pray for your night-time strangulation at the hands of a long-suffering loved one.
Fuck you all.
georgia pig
This was during a bad period in Iraq (not that it’s paradise now). Shooters predisposed to see threats, we don’t know context, maybe previous IED attacks. Sounds like there were Bradleys on the ground somewhere nearby.
The clip really highlights the problem of using the modern military to try to solve political problems, which includes thinking of brutal things like Apache chain guns with overstressed 20-something operators as surgical tools to take out bad guys while leaving innocents untouched. The “good shooting” banter is telling. This is industrial slaughter, not Sgt. York. The chain gun on the Apache fires 600 to 650 30mm armor-piercing explosive rounds per minute (that’s roughly 10 per second) from a ridiculous range of up to one mile. It is aimed by the gunner moving his helmeted head to place the computer-generated crosshair on the target. A computer does the “shooting” – there’s no way a human could make such a shot from such a weapon at such a distance from such a violently vibrating platform. The gunner is merely telling the computer where to shoot.
Martin
For one, I’m not certain the things that might be AKs are even AKs. I’m certain enough that I’d put a lot of effort into confirming that, though, but not so much that I’d shoot those people (easy enough to say sitting behind a laptop). If someone who knew definitively told me there were 2 AKs and an RPG
But there are few clear pictures after the incident of the ground and everything is now covered in dust and debris that if there was an AK there, I’m not sure you’d see it.
All that said, if there were AKs, the guys on the ground would either find them or not. Since the official statements from the military are in some cases flat-out lies, I’m not sure anyone could get a straight answer on whether they found weapons or not. And ultimately, that’s the real problem here. Yeah, bad shit happens in combat – but if you don’t trust what the military leaders and administration are telling us, then you really have to wonder what else is going on.
Midnight Marauder
@Scott P:
Incredibly well said. Thank you for this.
Jenkins
I’d spit on these guys when they returned home.
Shygetz
Okay, if we’re going to talk about these soldiers as potential “mass murderers”, then does anyone know what the ROE were at the time? I mean, if the soldiers were authorized to engage any suspected insurgents, then I can see an argument that this was a tragic mistake. However, if the soldiers were to fire only in self-defense, then there is no way that this is a clean shoot, even under the heightened circumstances of war.
LT
Scott P. : No argument, mostly, but the soldiers can’t do a damn thing about that, and still have to actually deal with hair-raising, gray, not black-and-white shit.
Anton Sirius
I want to try and give the Apache crew any kind of benefit of the doubt here. I really do. But even if you think on the flyby that the camera is an RPG (which, while not a threat to the copter, would have been to the Bradleys on the ground which were headed that way) and that the person holding it had taken up a firing position at the corner of the building (at about the 4 minute mark in the video)…
…even if you concede all that, it’s perfectly fucking obvious by the time the Apache swings back around again (at about the 4:45 mark) that those guesses are wrong. There’s no firing position. There’s no RPG. There’s no threat at all. But of course by that point the crew have already decided to open up as soon as they get around that corner. They’ve shut off their eyes and brains and let their training and conditioning take over.
The decision to fire on the van is inexcusable regardless of whether you notice children in the front seat or not.
gwangung
Then you don’t know what the hell Chuck’s talking about. Sorry, but you just don’t.
flukebucket
And I don’t think that is an accident. It seems pretty well thought out when you think about it.
gypsy howell
What exactly are we doing in Iraq and Afghanistan again? Oh that’s right. We’re murdering men, women and children in their homes and cities, and passing it off as ‘rules of engagement.”
Fucking psychopaths.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Don’t know officially, but one can extrapolate from the pilots getting clearance to fire that anyone, or likely a gathering of people carrying weapons was the ROE for this area for an Apache gunship. And there was a statement by another reporter in the video, who was nearby that it seemed the US military was firing on any such gathering in the area.
The firing on the ambulance to me was clearly because the bodies, or evidence, was being compromised, which I am fairly certain would not be covered by any official ROE, and more for CYA after action accusations.
Mnemosyne
I added a little emphasis to your point, because I think it’s important. You could write the initial encounter off as a horrible mistake — you’re looking for guys with RPGs, you see a group with what looks like RPGs, you rain hell on them. Horrible, but not unusual in a war.
It’s taking that extra step to lie about what you’re seeing so you can get permission to finish the victims off that takes it to the next level. How many people here making excuses for the shooters would make the same excuses for a cop who planted a gun on an unarmed guy that he just shot and killed because it was a tense situation and we’re the ones who put the cop in that bad neighborhood?
Joe L.
Look, anyone who watches and listens to the video can tell there is an incredible desire to get the go ahead to kill. Almost nothing in the way of doubts or cautions.
PartyLikeIts1990
A more accurate analogy would be if the cop shot a few obviously-unarmed innocent bystanders to cover his ass — wait, that’s not an analogy, it’s exactly what we just saw on this video.
Svensker
Bad stuff happens in war. People who are good people do all kinds of weird and awful stuff when the everyday rules are thrown out the window. Perhaps these guys acted horribly, perhaps they acted as I would were I in their situation.
It is hard to judge them.
It is not, however, hard to judge the soulless fucks who sent them there. Bush, Cheney, Feith, Rumsfield, Wolfowitz, Powell, and everyone else who went along with the charade that Iraq was EVER a danger to the U.S. It was a fucking lie from the get-go and they all knew it. I knew it and I’m a fucking middle-aged housewife in NJ. THEY are the ones who should be paying the price for this.
But it is time for the American public to see real footage of this war and take their heads out of their fat asses. Maybe if people see those “ragheads” (I’m looking at you, Ann Coulter) getting blown away, they wouldn’t be so cavalier about the whole thing.
The Pentagon is trying to shut Wikileaks down. Give them your support if you want to keep information like this coming out.
mattt
“You can’t handle the truth.”
Chuck Butcher
You can kiss my ass stupid ass. After stating repeatedly that this is why you do not do war you call me an apologist? This is what happens and you analysing a fucking video has not shit to do with being there in real time. What the hell is it that makes that van special and different from the ones that go boom and wheel around fighters? It is on the scene of a firefight (sort of) and that isn’t rational to those crewmen.
There have been horrendous crimes committed in this war but trying to put this mess into that category minimizes those and demonizes those not responsible. You want to take a ballbat to BushCo, I’m right with you. You want to hang rapists and murderers I’m right there. You want to make something out of this that isn’t there – fuck you. You want this shit to play out like a video game and it won’t, now or ever. You think you can watch this video and make war crimes out of it, you’re an asshole with an internet video and little in the lines of reasoning.
Jager
As a combat veteran, I can’t see how this attack was justified, The choppers were over a mile away, the ground force wasn’t “around the corner” at the time. The controller should have had them observe the scene, halt the ground force and see what developed. To me the Iraqis seemed way too casual and relaxed for guys who were ready to engage US combat troops. As for the helicopters the Iraqis probably weren’t even aware of them. From their postion on the ground surrounded by 1 and 2 story buildings and the angle of the camera shots from the air, I doubt they could see them. The so called RPG guy is looking down the street and isn’t focusing at choppers in the air. But, what the hell do I know, I dealt with insurgents in the jungle with out the help of long range cameras and controllers in air conditioned rooms.
Scott P.
I understand that quite well. Still, there is a desensitization that I think is quite worrisome. In the video game Modern Warfare 1 there is a mission where you sit in a gunship with thermal sights and shoot at enemy troops in and around a cluster of buildings. There are lots of them, 50-100. You pull the trigger and they go down. They don’t shoot at you — they don’t have any SAMs. You’re supposed to kill them all, so even when they start running away you’re expected to gun them down in cold blood. Sometimes you miss them and they crawl around on the ground wounded; you’re supposed to finish them off. I’m sorry, I’m not built that way; thinking about shooting a fleeing man in the back, or a wounded man, even if he is an enemy soldier, makes me physically ill. If you think they are aiming an RPG at you, sure, I can see that. But gunning down a van, men evacuating wounded? I’m sorry, that I’ll never understand. This isn’t even heat-of-battle stuff, where the enemy has been shooting at you and killing your buddies next to you.
Cerberus
Chuck, they fired first and solely, lied about what they were seeing, begged the unarmed civilians to give them an excuse to keep firing, and kept firing anyways.
But please, do tell me how the magical power of ROE makes this into liquid awesome.
Fine, the red is descending from my eyes. I’ll say, that when you put a bunch of meth addicted PTSD sufferers in front of a game console and say shoot to kill on anyone you like, then shit like this will happen. But war is horrible because atrocities occur.
Even when we are the good guys. WWII. Long acknowledged as the last “good war”. Super bad enemy, etc… and we still committed war crimes and “legal” atrocities like they were going out of style. Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Japanese internment camps, and those are just the big stuff before you get to companies on the front lines who say their best friend cut down by fire the day before.
War is breeding ground for atrocities, that’s why we don’t engage it and we can clean it up with well, if they had enough justification and we don’t want to look down on the soldiers, etc…
But what men become in war are beasts. The best of us may rise to the surface, but far more often, it will unleash the worst. The casual racism and sociopathy gets rewarded in apocalyptic fury. Sexism unleashes in kidnappings and rapes. Power trips end lives and petty tyrants breed like rats in the collapse of old systems that protected the weak against the strong.
And yet, we can’t stop cheering it. Before we jumped into war, people were quick to ignore anyone saying no. “Of course, we would want to fight a war, it’ll be masculine and awesome and heroic and shit, what do you hate the troops”. And for years we can’t even point out what war does to those apple-cheeked teenagers in unleashing demons because that isn’t “supporting the troops.”
Yeah, these kids, they may have been following orders, but they committed an atrocity, all remnants of humanity clearly drained out of them as a survival mechanism.
And we have had parades of apologists quick to jump to their defense and claim they totally had a right to commit those atrocities and those dead victims just brought it upon themselves, collateral damage.
It desensitizes us to the dead, tells us to discount the humanity of anyone “different” so we can’t feel their tragedy, so we are motivated to rationalize the indefensible and seek defense simply so “our team won’t look bad”.
Maybe I’m just fatigued about it all, Chuck. Maybe, even after years of fighting, I’m just not jaded and cynical enough to stop physically hurting when I see how the petty evils multiply and feed on the “weak”. Maybe I identify with too many groups that are “targets” for these petty murderers when they come home. The same “late justifications” and “leaps to defense” in the name of masculinity.
Maybe, it physically hurts to watch that video and then scroll through 200 comments with a solid quarter of people trying to find someway to defend it or justify it above all else.
Cause this rot, it doesn’t end at the Bush junta. This is a rot in our society, all the time. This is what fueled the lynch mobs, forms militia groups, goes on “lone wolf” terrorism campaigns against abortion clinics, slaughters trans people as “its”.
It doesn’t stop at the leaders.
maus
And as always, the “SUPPORT ARR TROOPS YOU DON’T KNOW THE MIND OF A SOLDIER HIS FRIENDS MIGHT HAVE BEEN KILLED” retard chickenhawks fill up the youtube comments.
Nothing worse than these guys jerking off to their own Rambo fantasies, I swear.
Jason
NY Times has a small story (with no link to video) buried here: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/04/05/us/politics/AP-US-Iraq-Shooting.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=wikileaks&st=cse
Lyle4
Just by reading this post (no way in hell am I gonna watch the video), and seeing how there’s 20 different people who see 20 different things, I think it’s fair to say that no one watching this in the comfort of their own home on a couch somewhere is in a position to say whether these guys were/are psychopathic assholes or they saw or think they saw things you can’t see.
AW
Lyle4,
No. No, it is not “fair to say.”
There is video evidence.
TooManyJens
@Svensker:
Ann Coulter would smoke a cigarette after watching this video.
MattR
Here is a quick clip of Seth MacFarlane doing a Captain Kirk impression on Real Time earlier this year. The quote is from the episode Taste of Armageddon and it quite relevant to this conversation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R94sRLS0QWI
Annie
Another point…This video reminds us that it is extremely difficult to be at war and “nation-building” at the same time. How many civilians have died — not because of intent or deliberate US acts — but because of being in the wrong place at the wrong time…Family members die, and then the aid people show up to host community dialogues around how they can help you — what an irony…
maus
slag off. i appreciate my friends and family who have served, and that’s WHY it’s so important for us to expose these horrible people and atrocities for what they are. pretending that these situations are “beyond our understanding” is pure cowardice.
maus
You assume “nation-building” is physical infrastructure and social programs. The “nation-building” that we advocate is political consolidation and control.
Annie
@maus
Good distinction – one that is rarely questioned.
In my world, “nation-building” (which is a bizarre construct anyway because these ‘nations’ already are ‘built’), does refer to physical infrastructure, good governance, anti-corruption measures, democratic civil society, and social programs.
SGEW
I would like to see one . . . just one . . . right leaning blog condemn what they see in this video, and/or express disapproval of the resulting cover up.
I can’t believe that this is a partisan issue. (No: check that – I can believe it. I just wish it weren’t so.)
John Cole
Cut the crap. No one is spitting on the damned troops, but they clearly lied multiple times about what they were seeing. At the most there was 1-2 weapons there, and they were not aimed at anyone but slung over the shoulders and carried around casually- there were not “5-6” men with AK-47’s. They misidentified the camera man as an RPG shooter, and then lied that he was “shooting.” There was no muzzle flash. There was no smoke. They lied. Fucking deal with it.
Then they lied again about the wounded man reaching for a weapon, which is particularly evident, SINCE HE NEVER HAD ONE IN THE FIRST PLACE, HE WAS A CAMERAMAN. He never reached for a weapon. He was crawling along the ground trying to stand up. Then they lied about the van that had t he bad luck to be driving by which stopped to help them, saying he was picking up weapons and insurgents, and repeatedly, in a series of escalated exaggerations, lied about what was happening in order to get permission to shoot on a vehicle holding two children.
They acted with complete reckless disregard and lied about what was happening in order to get permission under the ROE. Quit excusing their behavior. You don’t have to “be in their shoes” to spot blatant damned lies.
Scott P.
One last point: it is possible, with some justification, to say we shouldn’t judge these soldiers without more context — we can’t know what they were thinking, we can’t understand what they are going through, so we shouldn’t punish them. We should give them the benefit of the doubt.
And yet, if we give them the benefit of the doubt, aren’t the people they killed entitled to the same benefit of the doubt? Did these soldiers worry about context, about lack of information, about whether or not they knew what those men on the ground were thinking? Of course not, and you’d be laughed off the street for suggesting they should have.
Basic tribalism. Your side gets the benefit of the doubt, the “other” does not.
maus
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/world/asia/05afghan.html?ref=world
they hated us for our freedoms, you don’t know what these poor dudes knew, blah blah blah blah blah. as much as I hate the “echo chamber” of thought and as much as I like being challenged, it’s hard for me to understand how people can constantly make the same excuses for murder. They’re not even new and exciting excuses for murder. It’s just the same goddamned kneejerk whitewashing and poor attention span.
Aaron
Can we perhaps tone down the Manichean rhetoric a bit – that is the sort of shit we mock the right wing for (ZOMG HEALTHCARE IS THE END OF THE WORLD). This is a tragic, and possibly criminal event, but the blame for it falls squarely on the people who put U.S. soldiers in that position to begin with. Soldiers given tools of destruction and placed in harm’s way are going to make bad decisions – people have known for this for a couple millenia now.
War is state-sanctioned murder. This video brings home the emotional side of it, sure, but let’s not pretend these soldiers were way outside the bounds of traditional war activity. When Bush/Cheney decided the send them there, we all knew shit like this would happen
maus
Most of this is venting, but being outraged about the ghosts and spectre of communism is SOMEWHAT different than being set off by actual war-crimes and active murder, recorded on video, with gleeful and jocular intent.
Why be even-handed towards actual versus faux-outrage?
Duh. Part of the horror is the banality of it all. Some of us get mad to keep a sense of perspective.
oldhat
CNN.com literally doesn’t have a single word about this on their front page.
Do they honestly not understand why no one watches their “news” channel anymore?
LT
John Cole:
Would what they were seeing in a helicopter be as clear as what we’re seeing?
And: I’m not seeing the circle-arrow respond thing. Did I get demoted?
Tsulagi
Throw away snark line, but probably fairly close to reality. That and an Apache crew not having their best judgment day. From a WaPo story about this incident last year…
Given what had been going on in the area that morning, it seems like the crew “saw” what they were expecting to see. Like that’s never happened with eyewitness accounts given to police or during trials by well-meaning people trying to do the right thing.
When you do the calculus of whether to go to war, factor in occurrences like this will happen no matter how extensively you train to prevent them. It’s a given. No way I think this helo crew thought those on the ground were civilians and fired on them just for the fun of it or to have something to do. You can find gun camera footage of a fighter pilot dropping hate or a gunship crew lighting up targets on the ground later found to be friendly forces. It happens, humans have glitches and are not 100% error free. Another part of the calculus to weigh in whether the costs of a particular war are justified. And a whole lot of other costs.
charlequin
FoxNews now has this as the lead image story on their site, with a not-completely-terrible writeup (it does quote an “anonymous insider” spewing bullshit near the end and leave off a link to either Wikileaks or the video, but otherwise seems like a reasonable writeup.)
Reuters and MSNBC have both published articles about it but neither has it displayed on their front page.
CNN does not appear to have acknowledged the story in any way.
BR
You’re right, but:
1) Most folks still probably don’t see it that way or understand what they were supporting when they supported the wars.
2) For each video of such action there are at least dozens if not hundreds of other similar incidents that will never be known about, and that multiplier is what gives it significance. (As an example, the first revelations of the use of torture were a hint that there were dozens of more instances that we had yet to see. This is not always the case, but it often is.)
John Cole
Where do you think that video is coming from? A nearby traffic helicopter?
Aaron
That is a good point – I was not trying to conflate the two, but rather commenting on the need to make extreme claims as a way of offering an argument. There certainly is reason to be mad at this video – although I doubt that many on the Right would see anything wrong with what happened. The infuriating part (for me, at least) was how callously and unreflexively people supported the war from the beginning up to the current day.
There is indeed a great deal to be outraged about in the video. But the idea that these soldiers were ‘beyond the pale’ in their actions just strikes me as disingenuous. We all intuitively know (or at least strongly suspect) stuff like this goes on all the time.
Nothing wrong with that at all – I was just suggesting that directing all that anger at these particular soldiers may be misdirected
kc
There are a couple things that need to be said, you are watching this video in comfort and safety – not seeing it in real time where a couple seconds is the difference between going home and a flaming crash
Couple of seconds my ass. No one who watched that goddamned video could come away with the impression that the guys in the chopper (cruising around and around) were in fear for their lives.
LT
I actually thought it was coming from Russia – and I’m not in Alaska at the moment.
And: When I watch video here at my desk, it’s clearer than when I watch it on a rollercoaster. Y’know? I have no idea how video actually looks to someone sitting in a helicopter.
kdaug
MattR –
Ding, ding. No skin off our teeth. Pull a trigger, push a button, home in time to tuck the kids in.
Ain’t war.
Cerberus
maus @238 in re: @237
Yup, it’s the banality of evil that is the worst part of evil.
We are so trained to only view “the worst” of evils, the most unjustified of atrocities or victimizations as somehow the only ones that are meaningful and worth remembering.
I’m a member of several communities and movements where this comes into play. As a woman and a feminist, I’m trained and surrounded by women who are trained to view rapes and sexual assaults through this lens. If you were drugged at a party, raped by a loved one, just felt up without your permission, these are almost to be considered non-events because someone was gang-raped with broken glass bottles.
But the real horror is how common it is. And how common it is is how it gets escalated to things like the gang rape with broken glass bottles and pool cues. It’s all connected.
Similarly, as a trans woman, I’m well connected to the Trans Day of Remembrance which notes how many trans people die every year (too many) which tries to avoid this trap of only focusing on the most sensational of deaths, but again, the evil is not in the individual butcherings, but how freakishly common they are. So common that many trans people who “merely” suffer beatings end up counting themselves lucky.
And everyone knows about how the terroristic murders of abortion clinic staff has made everyone basically treat as normal that there is only one medical procedure in America that you need to go through a phalanx of verbally abusive terrorists to receive (and its the most performed medical procedure in the US).
The real horrors aren’t in the individual incidents as bad as they are, it’s in how its consistency ends up desensitizing us to the horror. Look in history to responses to lynchings and you see the bored, “what you gonna do” responses to them, as if they arose out of nature, unavoidable.
Only now, mostly free of them can we see how sick the culture we came from was.
The worst thing about evils are their banality and commonality.
Aaron
Yeah, sadly, the people who were cheerleaders for the war would probably miss the “banality” of the episode, as Maus said, were they to be exposed to the consequences of their worldview.
Spot on
jncc
Anyone know what the actual ROEs were re the initial firing?
I’ve seen several videos where the mere presence of weapons was sufficient justification to fire. One I remember was where there were 6 or 8 guys in the back of a truck going down the road. They get out fiddle with a tarp and most of the guys get out and walk away. Then one guy goes back to the truck and pulls out an AK and the chopper crew says “We have weapons” and they get permission to fire and they smoke everyone. Including the clearly unarmed people who had got out of the truck and walked 25 yards away from the truck.
I think the ROE must have been weapons free on confirmed sighting of weapons on the ground. If so, the argument that the guys were “relaxed and just walking around” fails.
If so, the problem is with the ROE, not the soldiers – at least for the initial engagement.
((Oh and I opposed the war in Iraq/Afghanistan from day one and still do. So to the folks above who think I am a Freeper or something, let’s just say that you jump to conclusions faster than a chopper pilot with his finger on the fire controls …)
kdaug
Cerberus:
And their persistence throughout human history. Apes with nukes – we’ll do whatever the fuck we want!
Mark S.
@LT
What is your point? If they can’t see shit from their helicopter, then maybe they shouldn’t be firing on people unless they don’t give a fuck about killing innocent civilians.
Midnight Marauder
Whether you opposed the war or not is irrelevant to the reaction your previous posts received in this thread. I would say it was your flippant attitude regarding the atrocities that occurred in the video that got you catching heat. You know, comments like these:
LT
Mark S.
And then we wouldn’t be talking about this at all! Whoopee!
But it did happen, and it seems like a fair point to ask whether or not this would have been as clear to them as it is to us. if you want to be fair about it. Maybe someone who flew helicopters in combat should answer this.
jncc
Well there’s your problem right there. You assume these were atrocities.
From what very, very little I know of the ROE, the initial firing was solid. And, as I said above the second firing may be more problematic.
Do you know that the ROE were violated – or are you just jumping to conclusions?
Honus
Iraq is more like Vietnam every day. Right down to the length of the war.
mattt
Jawa Report has a screen cap that shows there what might really have been an RPG. That changes things, somewhat: The RPG makes the pilots’ judgment that these were insurgents who might threaten nearby ground troops seem more reasonable, and the intial shoot defensible.
It still doesn’t explain the lies that led to the shooting of the van.
Scott de B.
So if you were just following orders, you can’t be blamed for what happened?
MK9
How many Apaches are being lost to RPGs?? There was no serious threat to the gunship.
lee
So the ‘AK-47’s’ at 3:40 were NOT what they identified as weapons.
Nor does it make any sense for them to be ID’d that way.
We have the luxury of watching this in the intertoobs while drinking a diet soda. These guys has seconds to ID threats. They picked the cameras. They choose poorly.
The one fellow who appears to have a AK @3:40 suddenly no longer has one once he turns around.
JSpencer
Ya know, the worst part about this whole thing is the fact that most of America doesn’t want to be bothered with it. They want to be entertained and fed. Reality is in poor taste. Accountability and remorse? Too much work. Learning? Don’t even think about it.
Honus
“Anyone know what the actual ROEs were re the initial firing?”
No, I don’t and fuck the ROEs. Callin’ it your job don’t make it right.
Dollared
Here we are, at the tail end of the thread, with the war games boys trying really hard to defend two guys who sat lazily up in a helicopter and shredded 12 human beings with explosive shells.
And begged to do it some more.
Keep at it, guys. We’re real proud of your brave, contrarian thinking.
jncc
If you are a soldier in a war zone and your orders are to engage any armed people, then no I don’t think you can be blamed for what happened – at least regarding the initial shoot.
And I’ll save you the time of typing your next response – if you think that means that I endorse the defenses of certain folks at Nuremberg, I think the situations are a tad different.
Cerberus
Cause, jncc, there is no such thing as a bad ROE.
As long as there’s a justification, right?
This would be the banality of evil. We’re so used to it.
There was probably a justification, they didn’t know, they had their orders, there’s something that downgrades this to something we can stop caring about, something that’ll stop making us sad about the meaningless wars of invasion we have been entangled in for the last near decade. Something to justify not even caring anymore that we shot a bunch of civilians, people, for nothing in a country we shouldn’t even be in, and we didn’t stop and we didn’t care.
It’s all become routine, ROE approved, somehow, as long as there’s the right lies, fly speck on the monitor, I was tired, I swear.
This is the same banal evil, we see back home. Oh, that terrorist right-wing bomber, militia group, assassin, lone wolf, one of a kind, we’ll start worrying when the violence starts…
Fuck, I’m becoming a mess.
Chuck Butcher
Cerberus,
You aren’t going to find anything where I’ve said this was good. I said I understand how it happened. I said this is what happens and this is why you don’t do warfare and think it will be clean.
These guys were looking for something. They were looking at this place. Two journalists were there, why isn’t clear. Why the crew was looking there isn’t clear but it is clear they expected to find something. What they found looks a bit like what they expected and they saw what they expected to see. This is a real common place thing, video cameras don’t and neither do people who already know when they see a video.
Those guys started out with a POV and the viewers of this video start out with one – because they’ve been told what they’ll see. The video shows at least some unarmed people getting shot and it also shows things that could look differently to the person in real time.
If you give people the job of hunting people who are hunting back their talk isn’t going to sound real “acceptable.” It is going to be bleak and nasty and their humor will be black in comparison to their situation. CK on the Catholic Church isn’t funny in ordinary circumstances and his shit is mild compared where these guys are and what they’re doing.
I don’t apologize for these guys, not my job and they got it wrong. I object to this war crimes stuff and the methodology of getting there. I object to this idea that this isn’t how it goes in warfare, that you’re not going to get bad results if only… We are not better than this when we do warfare – we are fallible, our brains are not computers nor are our senses video cameras nor are we able to see the future – despite being able to see the past. You hook a conditionally reliable human up to high power weaponry and they’re not always going to get it right and the other end of that is going to be screwed. The nasty part of being those soldiers is that they know they’re going to do that, get it wrong or partially right and innocents will suffer. You aren’t coping with that, you’re looking at this with completely different eyes and reacting differently.
Don’t even ask people to do this kind of thing if you’re going to expect nice talk and good results – you will get neither. Not fucking ever and it won’t be a crime it will just suck. I hate this shit, I hate what it does to the soldiers, to the people there, to the people here, and to society in general.
jncc
You misunderstand. If their actions were ROE compliant, then the problem is the ROE – not the soldiers.
Yes, you can have bad ROE. You can have very bad ROE.
Cerberus
Dollared @ 263
It’s all connected. This is the well of poison from toxic masculinity, the end product, both the situation and the act. It’s trained from the get go in our culture’s swamp, in how it defines masculinity and respect for humanity in anyone deemed “other”.
Basically as Jay Smooth said: “There’s something wrong in a culture where killing a man makes you more of a man, but kissing a man makes you less of one.”
And the hard-on for military, as if it can do no wrong and isn’t made of religious nuts and fuck-ups for leaders and scared, bored, sometimes sadistic kids for grunts, is also part of it.
Either way all of it makes me sick.
And yet, for the next war, we’ll have learned no real lessons. Make it more sterile, find new ways to kill with impunity and label the bodies “acceptable targets” after the facts. And make sure no one takes seriously anyone who sees this shit as a bad thing.
Silver
@MarkS
Killing civilians is a feature, not a bug.
@jncc
Ah yes, ve ver just following ze orders!
Where have I heard that one before?
John Cole
It is pretty damned simple to figure out what the ROE are- count the exaggerations until they are allowed to shoot. Pretty clearly they were not allowed to fire until they claimed one of the cameramen was shooting an “RPG.” They were then allowed to fire and “light em all up.”
Then, they were not given permission to fire until they said the van was “picking up the wounded and the weapons.”
Gonna go out on a limb that the ROE required hostile intent of some form. Quit being so damned reflexively defensive. Watch with your own two eyes and listen to what was said. What you are seeing is the military equivalent of a cop planting a gun after a bad shoot. Except it happened as an excuse to shoot.
Midnight Marauder
What happens when everyone who lives in that “war zone” carries a fucking weapon with them everywhere? You know, because it’s a fucking war zone? And fine, don’t blame the soldiers for the initial “good shooting.”
But I’ve noticed you’ve been rather silent on the greater issue of the United States military actively covering-up and lying about the details of this situation, and countless more. The same higher-ups that emphatically lied about how and why those children were attacked, are the same people who actively abetted the following:
But I’m sure all that falls under the ROE, right next to lying about that dastardly photojournalist trying to crawl and get his
cameraweapon so you can unload on him one more time.Cain
Cerebus, Chuck’s saying the same thing in the second time. You don’t want this shit to happen don’t get the fuck into war. Because it does happen, it happens all the time. You send soldiers for 3-5 tours of duty into that hell hole and this is what you get.
More than the soliders the people managing this war needs to be held into account. We should be doing reparations to the people who got killed.
I don’t know what the dispositions of those soldiers though. We put those guns in their hands, we put them into a war zone. I wish had tried harder not to get into Iraq. I wish I had called my congressman repeatedly like I did healthcare. We created monsters. They are our weapons.
cain
jncc
“Pretty clearly they were not allowed to fire until they claimed one of the cameramen was shooting an “RPG.””
John, that’s complete bullshit. They received permission to fire at 3:56. They didn’t even see the guy with the RPG (or the camera) until 4:03 and the statement that the RPG was firing on them came well after they received permission.
Now I understand that you are probably in a funk since the ‘eers bit the dust the other night, but you just aren’t thinking straight on this one.
Cerberus
Chuck and jncc-
Very very agreed.
War is like the patriarchy, it sucks for everyone involved. The “top dawgs” lose their souls. The victims, their lives.
I guess, I just don’t want this minimized, just another “what do we do”. What we do is we don’t fucking go into war!
Cause, this, this is what war is. It’s not cheering parades and kisses on the docks. It’s banal atrocities, friendly fire, meaningless battles, one-sided massacres based solely on nerves or someone’s need to unleash the evils of their hearts on someone they’ve been trained to view as inhuman. It’s rapes and the destruction of societies for generations and massive PTSDs that will be taken out on the innocent for generations to come.
And yet, so often, we treat it like some John Wayne film. Some people will do awesome special effects and then there will be cake and partying and feeling really good about how awesome it will be. And every atrocity gets swept under with “oh, well, what do you expect, these things happen, can’t blame anyone, etc…”
It’s all connected. And things like this need to be highlighted precisely because this is war. People so cracked under stress that they’ll laugh and beg for the chance to keep gunning down a bunch of same-side reporters through a “video game” screen. It’s banally evil.
And the sooner the majority of Americans realize this, the sooner we can stop being quick to enter wars and slow to leave them and treat them solely as means for rich white conservatives to get their jollies off on how much the hippies are weeping.
MikeForEll
The real question behind this video is:
“What did GEN Petraeus know and when did he know it?”
Dollared
@Cerberus
I hear ya. Oh, definitely.
And why is this video on Fox.com and MSNBC.com, but not CNN.com? Because CNN is the War Channel – they cannot acknowledge how they turned war into this really cool entertainment experience. Thank you, Wolf Blitzer!!
John Cole
And cut the bullshit about inadequate training. These weren’t national guard supply clerks tasked to do something like guard troops or something else outside their MOS. Do you know how many millions those weapons platforms cost? Do you know how many hundreds/thousands of hours of training those guys have before they are put into combat? How many hours of briefing about the ROE? They knew what to say to get permission.
jncc
Then “everyone” is probably going to have a really bad day when they encounter a Cobra or Apache gunship.
I’m not sure what they were lying about, if anything, this video is about all I know about the situation. But let me say for the record that I think that lying and coverups are bad.
John Cole
You are right, I was wrong. They received permission to shoot earlier.
And guess what- it was against the ROE:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
9:45.
Bootlegger
I want them to stop “making me safe.” I want it to stop right now. I’d rather face the threat of terrorist attack every damned day than have my nation doing this kind of bullshit. I don’t need to be safe if this is how it is done.
Mjaum
Americans might be able to find something in this video which somehow makes the events not murder, not warcrimes.
It is going to be a lot harder for the US to convince the rest of us.
It is clear that these people (they walk straight across a wide open space, they walk slowly, even leisurely) are not in what they themselves consider a combat zone. They do not take even minimum precautions. They are in no hurry to get anywhere. If these are the actions of insurgents, you’d better nuke the place, it’s full of them.
Even on a pure military level, the shooter should be put in a cage. He is (supposedly) in a combat zone, he has been ordered to give air support to units under fire, and he proceeds to focus on and blow up a group that is so far from the action that they can’t hear it and are behaving like they’re walking around their own neighbourhood. Wow, dude, great job!
Bloodthirsty fucking insane idiot. Not a warrior, not a pilot, hardly human.
And if he was following the ROEs, then the ROEs are themselves a warcrime, quite distinct from the crime of following them.
James in WA
The video and story are the headline story on cnn.com’s page now.
Midnight Marauder
I think you’re both correct in this case. They received permission to fire at 3:56. Then, they circle the building, spot the “RPG”, and one of them makes the claim, “He’s got an RPG. I’m gonna fire” at 4:12, to which someone else then responds, “No. Hold on. Lets come around.” Mere seconds later, before the helicopters have “come around,” someone else (possibly the same guy as before) says “Yeah, we had a guy shooting–and now he’s behind the building.”
They then complete their “coming around” the building and proceed to open fire. On a group of men standing around, seemingly just middling around.
Show me where in that video someone opened fire, or was “shooting”, at one of the Apaches, because I sure as fuck haven’t been able to find it.
Class act.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
The initial action may be excused by the fact that the Apache crew is trained to kill (that is what our military does, right?) and that it’s been proven beyond a doubt that when we humans can’t identify something we are looking at then we tend to see what we want to see (in this case our military training to kill anyone viewed as a threat seeing such a threat). Their opening up on the van is not excusable, nor is the begging for the wounded to pick up a weapon so they can finish him off. More than anything else to me, this ‘begging’ for an actionable move gives a clear look into the mindset of the Apache crew at that time.
IMO they wanted to kill and were looking for any reason to do so, even going so far as to openly beg for it. That’s pure bloodlust, nothing less.
I don’t think the Bradley running over the guy sure helped much either. War or not, if you are even in a slight chance of error in an action then running over someone like they are nothing more than a speedbump sure don’t help. Especially if there was a chance that they might still be alive.
And innocent of any wrongdoing.
jncc
John
I’m watching the MSNBC thing now.
Did you notice the editing at the start the removed the footage of the guys with the AKs and RPG and just showed the guys with the cameras?
But, if the ROE clearly proscribed this conduct then the ROE are fine and it is the soldiers should be subjected to appropriate prosecution.
Cerberus
War deliberately trains men to be sociopaths. The point of training is so that you will without thought of conscience of empathy blow away another thinking, breathing, human being without a thought in the world.
Oh sure, you’re supposed to pay lip service to friend and foe, civilian and “bad guy”, but the point of being “molded into a soldier” is so you’ll kill so fast that no one has a chance to shoot you or your squadmates. If this means dead civilians, meh, collateral damage, who will check? As long as your “team” has more living, you win.
And that’s when everything is going right. When people are doing their jobs and the orders make sense and the battlefields are drawn.
Turn it into an occupation, have a sadistic gunner looking for an excuse to mow down some brown people for a laugh, have ROEs that will excuse any murder of a brown person anywhere, even those on our side (hell, even hero Pat Tillman was gunned down by friendly fire).
And the atrocities build and build.
But war is atrocity. Maybe we do it for a reason that we pray excuses our involvement, but it doesn’t change the price we pay in our humanity in undertaking it.
So maybe, we shouldn’t undertake it for a lark and maybe we should get the fuck out when all we have left is “but gosh gee whilikers, we’d lose if we stopped now”. Cause it’s not a fucking football match. These are peoples lives, not a position on the league table.
Caoimhe
If you’re as bothered by this as I am, you might want to contact your congressional representatives and ask for hearings.
Fern
Lots of use of the passive voice here – “these things happen” “this is what war is”.
Nothing to see, no one is at fault. Yes, the Bush administration bears responsibility for unleashing this destruction, but soldiers bear responsibility for their actions as well.
I do not understand the knee-jerk defensiveness about the actions of American soldiers.
ME
Simply type Namir Noor-Eldeen into Google.
I was presented with 49,200 hits, many being recent or today.
CNN, NBC, BBC and others are carrying it.
The story is not unknown.
The question is who in high authority is going to acknowledge it, instigate changes and sanction those responsible.
wonkie
You know what’s really iraonic? According to a story over on Kos two Republican Congressmen told an interviewer that in theri estimation all the Republicans inn COngres think that we should never have gone into either Iraq or Afganistan.
That’s right–it was all a mistake.
Well, it was a mistake, a terrible one. I guess I should be glad that two Repubicans are willing to admit it. I’d like to hear a mea culpa and apology from the rest of them and from the Dems who collaborated as well.
Bob
This is obviously horrifying stuff and should be covered as the very major story it obviously is.
But I am getting so really, really tired of the cries that “the corporate media will never broadcast this” every time a realy incendiary story comes out. Look, the big media has a goddamn lot to answer for and certainly played it’s part in starting the idiotic war in Iraq, but the idea that the media is so monolithic and presumably personally run by
Mr. BurnsRupert Murdoch from his underground lair really has to end.We should be carefully examining the media’s coverage and criticizing it when appropriate, but it assuming it always and automatically our enemy is simply incorrect and people should wait until there’s actual evidence of something before condemning an entire field. Doing otherwise does not make anyone look good.
maus
@258
man, you’ve really got to slum low to find a site to defend your POV, apparently. Aside from the loathsome source, it doesn’t “change something”, because the military hid the murder of innocents and would not have hid the video if there were actual weapons.
and people should keep getting prosecuted for warcrimes. every single fucking time it happens.
Mnemosyne
You are correct up to the point where they say one thing to their fellow soldiers in the helicopter but say something different to headquarters and keep knowingly exaggerating what they see until they can get permission to open fire.
Lying about what you see so you can get “official” permission to kill people doesn’t get to be glossed over as “the fog of war.” It’s murder.
Bill Section 147
I don’t think the focus should be on the soldiers. After watching the video it is obvious that the situation was not what they were claiming it was on the audio. I will or can even except that shit happens and people in stressed situations see what they want
But I and any military official or government official who watches this are not under stress. I can tell that some thing went wrong and that the people who were shot were not engaging in anything that can be construed as overtly hostile.
So, even if you feel that the soldiers were right in their actions when they were caught up in the moment, it is ridiculous to claim that this was an action that resembles the “official” story.
And as to the guys possibly carrying weapons. It appears at least one guy has a rifle. How is it not his right to bear arms? It isn’t like he is walking in to a place as dangerous as Starbucks, I’ll admit that, but what was all the purple finger bullshit about if not for the right to bear arms?
Mnemosyne
It’s two things:
1) Defensiveness over Vietnam
2) Knowing that we as a nation sent them there to kill people, so morally we are just as complicit in the deaths of those people as the guys who pulled the trigger. If they were wrong, then we were wrong as a nation, and some people just can’t handle that.
maus
@282
Yeah, but without a world court or all of our “allies” dropping us, what’s going to come of it? Not a hell of a lot. Snide comments about what we’re doing aren’t going to solve anything :/
Keith G
Midnight Marauder already typed what I am feeling:
I saw two guys with cameras, Two guys carrying long guns (one by its barrel), and a bunch of guys just walking about (their neighborhood?) What I did not see was indication of hostle intent.
Maybe by the book it was a legal killing, but it was not a moral killing. If there is a just God, the flight crew is fucked. Since I do not think there is, I am only left with proof of why a lot of folks over there do not think we are that hot.
I do not wish to dislike the soldiers. I save my disgust for those who so lightly cheer us on to war because no war is clean and no war is good.
Cerberus
Mnemosyne-
I think it’s even farther than that.
America has not in a 150 years had a war on our soil and most of our experiences of war have been highly sanitized media representations where the happy ending is highlighted and the inherent atrocities and pointlessness downgraded and de-emphasized.
War is seen in our culture as a “masculine rite of passage”, something by which a man proves himself to be a man and where we prove how top dawg we are as a country.
A lot of this I think stems from our unique aspect in World War II. Separated as we were by oceans from the majority of fighting, our only real casualty was on the distant military base at Pearl Harbor. We entered into the war late, after the USSR was beginning to hammer down the nazis. We entered with a weakened and split nazi germany and were able to steamroll in and claim equal credit in “defeating them” after all the nations who towered above us had faltered.
And the nazis were a real evil, so bad that people were pretty much willing to overlook things like us nuking the Japanese or the bombing of Dresden. Plus, we bought some nice goodwill in helping to rebuild a lot of the nations who were really hurt.
But unfortunately, the experience left us with this idea of war as moral action that makes men out of boys and rewards the state with goodwill and respect. Suddenly we couldn’t wait to start jumping in with excuses to occupy and invade and get more of that hit.
And separated as we were from all costs but those to our soldiers in the form of PTSD, we couldn’t see what being occupied does to a civilian population, what the horror of war is at its base, root level and with so much time since the last invasion.
We have been awash in that culture most of our lives now, in war after war. To admit the horror is to admit the monster we have become as a country, to realize who we are and what we have fetishized and sought out as a means toward self-respect and a toxic masculinity.
We don’t want to lose our illusions and realize what evil is in even our hearts, so we’ll deny and try and make it less, so it won’t stick and things can continue as they always have.
Free from examination.
MikeForEll
The UK Guardian pushed the line that there’s some inter-agency tit-for-tat goin’ down, referring to an leaked Defense Department report that Wikileaks was a threat to national security:
“The Pentagon report, reflecting the depth of paranoia about where Wikileaks is obtaining its material, speculates that the CIA may be responsible. But perhaps most embarrassing leak for the US defence department was that of the 2008 report itself which appeared on the Wikileaks site last month.”
Again, I think a salient question is “what did GEN Petraeus know and when did he know it?”
Fern
Thanks, Cerberus and Mnemosyne – that makes a lot of sense.
Zuzu's Petals
I feel sick.
Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt
I got nothing.
Cerberus
Expanding on myself.
It comes with invading versus being invaded. We see war as soldiers, protecting our soldiers, bringing our soldiers home, etc…
Most of the rest of the world has memories in living memory of war as civilians. Trying to outrun the bombs, soldiers coming and shooting your father, scrounging as many possessions as you can and finding somewhere, anywhere still safe.
It screws with loyalties and how war is viewed. For us, we get seduced into the view of war as game and of thinking only of two sides of soldiers proving their mettles as civilians infrequently and sadly get in the way.
For the rest, it’s soldiers gunning down civilians, because the moving rocks of a running person could have been someone firing on them. Destroyed homes and villages, death, decay, and atrocities covered up by invading forces never to see the light of day.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@Mnemosyne: “If they were wrong, then we were wrong as a nation, and some people just can’t handle that.”
This is something that really irritates me about too many of our fellow citizens; they truly believe that our military (or nation) can do no wrong just because it’s the freedomest and bestest place in the world! That our shit don’t stink and that any nation we disagree with is automatically wrong and we are always right. It’s an insufferable level of ignorance that they pass off as pure patriotism and love of country.
“They hate us for our freedom.”
No. Part of the reason they hate us is because too many of us are insufferably righteous psychopathic assholes who breezily excuse and dismiss all deaths caused in our name as just so much inconsequential collateral damage. Hell, I hate that we are that way but it is what it is.
Chuck Butcher
Maybe some of you ought to look into the literature surrounding eyewitness testimony. A video camera is not subject to the errors of interpretation that the human mind is. You could look further into what has been written about the results of suggestion on perception.
Human beings are shitty processors of information, particularly auditory and visual. They get much worse at it under stress or influence of expectations. I never suggested that shit just happens – I was very clear, it will happen and don’t be in that position.
None of us likes the sound of the talk, understand that you will hear that in those kinds of jobs because people have to cope. I’ve had friends and relatives from WWII to present conflicts who trust me enough to talk frankly about it. You would not like it. It sucks to be taught to hunt humans and to have them hunting you. Our cultural imperatives are that you do not do it – and then we teach our people to do that at our bidding. They are going to make it work – because the choice is a breakdown, so you get nasty humor, you get an enemy valued as a bullseye not a person, you get this video.
I detest this “there’s a better way” kind of stuff because it indicates that there is a way. It is a pretense that let’s things like Shock and Awe be plugged as sanitary, it lets people go ahead with this madness because “it’ll be different this time around…” It won’t be different because it isn’t something else, it is warfare.
Mo's Bike Shop
We can haz hartz and mindz?
MattR
Via Froomkin, here is an excerpt of the original NY Times report of this incident.
Regardless of whether or not the soldiers actions might have been justified, there is no way to claim that the American military description of the incident is accurate.
Chris
way to go out on a limb there, jncc.
I don’t think there’s any roe that call for shooting unarmed, injured men and those going to assist them. Happens all the time in war, it happened all the time in WWII on all sides, but if you get caught, that’s what it is – a war crime.
There’s no way one can watch the copter light up the guys moving a downed man towards the van and not know it definitely was “more problematic”. The van doesn’t need a red cross on its side to make that a violation of roe and Geneva conventions. And when it was done to us you better believe they made sure our soldiers knew about it so they could put in a little more umph to the fight.
Slappy White
this is incredibly depressing on so many levels
Dollared
@ James, @Bob, @ME – you people need to actually watch the video. You really are naive.
Yeah, CNN is carrying it – about 20 seconds of the video, only the weapons ID audio, and none of the shooting! And then the Pentagon Correspondent comes on and repeats the official Pentagon line about how soldiers were under fire. And “out of the respect for the families of the dead journalists” they won’t show them gunned down in the street like dogs. Then she talks about Wikileaks. But never, every mentions anything that would indicate any controversy about this event.
The Pentagon Correspondent – you know, the one that would never get another door opened to her if she called the Pentagon spokespeople liars.
CNN really is the Defense Department News.
Mike Furlan
By now no one has an excuse to be “shocked” by what we saw in the video.
That is what modern weaponry does to the human body. And similar scenes can be found in wars for at least the last hundred years.
If a nation decides to go to war, that is what will happen.
Nobody deserves to die that way. But they will die.
There is no morality, there is no justice. A man carrying a weapon doesn’t “deserve” it any more than a man carrying a camera. A 17 year old boy drafted into somebody elses war doesn’t “derserve” it more than a pregnant woman.
The only question is, does that killing help to end the war?
You can argue that it was stupid, not that it was immoral.
What this video shows me is that those guys did not expect to be fired on by the American helicopters, and that this event was probably exceptional.
Cerberus
Mike @313
As the occupying force we are the only people that can decide when “the war ends”. Saying that us killing anyone will “end the war faster” is a sign of how messed up wars of aggression make us.
I mean, we haven’t been dealing with army in either country for at least 6 years now, we don’t really have clear goals other than “winning”.
We took over the country, we’ll decide how it ends and it’ll end when we fucking leave and let the country either heal or collapse.
Right now, we’re too scared of the judgment of history to leave. As long as it’s still a “fight”, then maybe we can redeem ourselves, magically make it all better and give some random purpose.
But that’s not how it works, we invaded. We had shit reasons for invading and now we are little hoping a little colonial white man’s burden will erase the nasty mark on our collective souls.
We are delusional and we are criminal as a country.
We can be a great country, we have greatness in ourselves. This isn’t one of our better moments and as long as we keep thinking our better moments will come through war, it’ll be harder and harder to find those better moments.
Silver
@Mike Furlan
So, if there’s no morality in war, the actions of Bin Laden’s people on September 11 can only be argued to be stupid, not immoral?
Dollared
Actually, Mike, And Cerberus,
We have no idea what will make the war end. We started it, but we have no control over whether it will end. And killing a few journalists and hangers-on on a street corner will not hasten the end.
The only way we have control is if we a) send 1.0-1.5million soldiers to fully occupy the country and kill anyone who resists, creating a total military dictatorship or b) leave.
I take it back. Maybe if our citizens see that our occupation basically has reduced itself to killing a few random men wandering the streets of Baghdad with armor piercing 30MM rounds, we’ll get embarrassed and leave. But not bloody likely. And CNN is not helping.
Mike Furlan
We were lied into this war. We all agree on that.
It should never have been fought.
But the idea that this war, more than any other is uniquely evil is silly.
The horror is better documented this time, that is all.
Mike Furlan
Bin Laden was brilliant. As he planned, our response to the attack hurt us far, far worse than the attack itself.
Almost three times as may US deaths so far in our response and probably 3 trillion dollar wasted.
If we had been smart, we would have taken the deal offered and had Bin Laden delivered to some third party for trial. He would be in jail now, and we would not be having this discussion.
No Afgan war, no Iraq war.
Honus
Try this little exercise regarding”ROEs” and “good kills” etc. Imagine this is say, Columbus Ohio, and those guys walking around with cameras are Americans, your neighbors and relatives, and the guys in the helicopters are saying the same things, but in Arabic. Now how do you feel about the fact that the crew was acting within the ROE?
Cerberus
Dollared @316
100% agreed. As the occupying force, the only way it ends is if we decide to leave or we eliminate everyone living where we are occupying.
Mike @317
Agreed. This war is not uniquely evil. War is inherently evil, we just hope that if the reason is just or if the action is defensive, it will justify that evil for a greater good.
War breeds atrocities, on every side, and the very nature of it by necessity makes killing machines of those fighting if they want to survive.
It’s also why we should leave, let it end, cut the cord, stop digging ourselves deeper for no reason. We’ve lost our reasons, all we’re doing is compounding that evil now.
Dollared
Oh boy am I with Mike F on #318. We are dumber than fence posts.
Honus
“The horror is better documented this time, that is all.”
I’d disagree. This war has been pretty much invisible. Vietnam, on the other hand, was on TV every night, coffins, amputees, broken returnees, burned villages and civilians were constantly evident and the draft took guys from every neighborhood. They knew what to hide this time, and did it well.
Mike Furlan
Or c. Do what we are doing in Korea. Keep enough troops there forever, to keep the violence at a minimum.
Once we made this mistake of invading, there were no good choices.
Mark S.
@Honus at 319
Excellent point.
Annamal
Chuck I do get what you’re saying and I don’t think it’s possible to have a clean war but what makes me really angry with the US is that once the US was technically in control of Iraq it should have shifted straight away to a peacekeeping/nation-building mindset and it should not have deviated from this.
Anything other than peacekeeping makes US troops into occupiers and as you say it makes atrocities a near-certainty.
Again there has never been a clean war but the Timor L’este and Solomon Islands peacekeeping missions show that it is possible(under the right circumstances) to have relatively clean peacekeeping missions which result in a more stable society once the troops leave.
Mike Furlan
“Iraq gun camera video” yields 155,000 hits on Google.
You have to want not to know.
Silver
Sure Mike, I agree with you, but that’s not what I asked.
I specifically asked about the morality of Bin Laden’s actions, not his strategic aims.
Honus
“Once we made this mistake of invading, there were no good choices.”
It’s not like nobody predicted the result:
Cerberus
323 Mike-
True, endless colonialism…works. The problem is that eventually they do want to kick you out. I mean, S. Korea is unique in that we’ve basically made ourselves necessary re: N. Korea and we are relatively unobtrusive on a policing level and hands off about policing. But somehow, I doubt that Afghanistan and Iraq’s people will be feeling very S. Korea about us rather than say India’s view of the Brits about mid-century.
And you @318
Oh yeah, we got suckered in a big way. Well, not the us that’s smarter than a box of hammers, but the political leadership and the elite? Yeah, the insularity of never being invaded meant any “foreign” attack on our soil was bound to unleash the worst in us in really stupid and unnecessary ways.
Honus @319-
It is a matter of empathy. I or you can imagine ourselves as the crewmen or even a random Iraqi. How we would react to foreign invaders, etc…
To the wingnut types, they might as well be 3d models in a video game.
Joseph Nobles
The military has released some of their investigation, including sworn statements and the like. They thought the cameraman around the corner had an RPG. They were responding to a unit on the ground receiving fire from that area.
Later in the day, they withheld fire from another group of AIFs because they saw kids. So they didn’t see the kids in the van either.
Link to the military paperwork from this Washington Independent story:
http://washingtonindependent.com/81446/u-s-military-in-iraq-responds-to-wikileaks-releases-portions-of-internal-investigation
Mike Furlan
If he actually has a chance of achieving his “current goal to establish a pan-Islamic Caliphate throughout the world by working with allied Islamic extremist groups to overthrow regimes it deems “non-Islamic” and expelling Westerners and non-Muslims from Muslim countries–particularly Saudi Arabia.”
http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/ladin.htm
I’d say that he is acting morally.
So far he is losing. But I’m not 100% sure that he will be defeated.
Doesn’t mean that I don’t want him dead for killing my friends in the World Trade Center. I worked there for 20 years.
Silver
@Mike Furlan,
I disagree with you on the basis of morality, but I do have to say you’re consistent. I was pretty sure you were playing with two different decks of cards, but I was wrong.
Honus
and something light from youtube:
< a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXNsXIxBkqs"Battle Hymnn of Lt calley
Polar Bear Squares
Not so good.
This seems particularly barbaric.
Honus
sorry, here’s the link to the prediction from 328:
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0319-04.htm
me
“We have met the enemy and he is us” — Walt Kelly
lucslawyer
I am so goddamn tired of the “fog of war” and “We have to shoot first or we might get killed” crap…WE are the ones who launched this idiotic war and the responsibility is on US when innocent civilians are killed…listening to the back and forth between the chopper and command it is obvious the Americans were out for blood and they got it…I for one am ashamed at the attitude of ALL the U.S. forces involved in this incident…btw…I am the son of an Army officer with 32 years of proud service to his country and it hurts when I see or hear of American soldiers not upholding the standards of conduct he represented….
Justme
These particular “soldiers” are war criminals by definition. Anyone who enlisted or re-enlisted after March 2003 is a willing participant in an ongoing illegal war of aggression.
The helo pilot and the gunners/crew members are directly responsible for their murderous acts but the ground crew and the logistics/support people are equally guilty.
Of course the level of guilt rises according to rank and therefore the highest criminals are Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld etc. Though now it includes Obama, Biden and Gates etc. since they continue the crime.
Bushbama/Obambush have killed tens of thousands more Iraqis/Afghans than any puny Apache pilot could ever hope to do
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Look, The guys in that chopper were lying, but to whom. It seemed to me from watching the video that they convinced themselves what they were seeing were bad guys with guns, of one sort or another. I do not think they were just out for some joy killing, and if you listen closely, at various points there is much anger in there tone, the kind of anger that suggests payback.
It is the rage that captures men’s souls in such a place of daily brutality and killing, from seeing your buddies blown to bits day after day by bombs, and wanting to balance the books. And I am sure that that street runs both ways for the Iraqi’s also. It is not an excuse for what they did, but is a mitigating factor to where I won’t call this murder. My Lai was murder, and premeditated, where the victims of women, children and old folks were lined up along an irrigation ditch and mower down at point blank range. But even that atrocity deserves all factors be at least considered for the failure of morality to be kept. It was an area rife with enemy that mostly only used booby traps and antipersonal mines to kill GI’s every day and remain unseen. Doesn’t change the fact that it was a severe war crime, but it did not occur in a vacuum either.
Put yourself in that position
What they did in this video was not justified by any letter of war law, but men and women fight wars with bullets and death that is up close and personal. Sometimes, or often, judgment is skewed for humans in an environment like that.
It is civilian leaders that put those men in impossible situations that bear the most blame, as we as a society should also shoulder it for putting those civvy leaders in power and not holding them accountable, like with Iraq, and Vietnam. Soldiers go where their told and need to be held accountable for their actions, but with great deference, imo, to the situation they are in, that is utterly insane, and not of their choosing.
maus
All this is plausible until the point at which they murdered innocents, at which point your argument unravels.
How much premeditation separates the black and white? Ten minutes? An hour? A day? It was premeditated, and it was murder. You’re just nitpicking over levels of horror.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
geesh. their, there they’re. My grammar sucks. sorry
wonkie
Actually what struckme about this video is the lack of any idication of fear on the part of the American soldiers who are utterly safe, watching from a distance, not the least bit under fire or threatened in any way and who, from the safety of distance shoot first without investigating to see if there was actually anything worrisome going on. The killigs are carried out inn a way that is detached, almost mechaincal except for the ocassional fit of giggles. No, fear is not an excuse in this case anyway.
But your second point that soldiers obey orders and that orders come from from politicians–yes, I blame the politicians more than individual soldiers. Those politicians who lied to everyone back here about the “reasons” for invading in the first place are directly responsible for every death in Iraq. And their cowardice is even bigger since they knew that they were safe.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Didn’t say it was. But revenge may well have been.
Justme
“Put yourself in that position”
With all due respect go fuck yourself. The position of flying in a military helocopter safely out of range of any ground fire. Killing a bunch of people and then looking to pick off the wounded.
Yea, I will put myself in that position – a worthless coward
General Egali Tarian Stuck
maus
Your analysis is shallow and preconceived, something like an ideologue would present.
ronathan richardson
Maybe I’m speaking on emotion, but all along I’ve been defending the troops as hostages to the neocons. But really, watching this, and from what I’ve heard about the accuracy of Generation kill, it seems like some of our troops are just dying to get the chance to kill someone. They’re looking for grey areas in which they can shoot first and get covered later. Maybe I should be mad at the war pimps for turning them into such bloodthirsty killers, but man, this was hard to watch.
kdaug
No, goddamnit. That’s the point. We weren’t “up close and personal”. We were a fucking mile away. If the people on the ground could even see our helicopter, they probably couldn’t hear it, and they sure as shit couldn’t have hit it with an AK or a RPG.
They were in no danger from the camera crew.
James in WA
@ Dollared 312 said:
Yeesh, now I know why Cole occasionally loses his shit, calls everyone an asshole, and then disappears for 24 hours.
Someone posted, and I quote: “This will never get any mainstream coverage on any news channel, newspaper, or mainstream media site.” I merely pointed out that cnn.com was now carrying the story.
People need to simmer down around this joint.
Cerberus
General-
What they are versus what they did.
If they are men of conscience, they will be as horrified as we are when the fog of war is lifted. If they are not, then they will never care.
But what they are doesn’t matter. They could be kitten-saviors or sociopaths, but what they did was inexcusable atrocity, the careful lying murder of living breathing people for no damn reason and then participating in the cover-up.
There is darkness in men’s souls, casual racism, inhumanity towards man which is not only enhanced in the chaos of war, but actually trained by the nature of what is a soldier. Soldiers are trained to be sociopaths, quick to kill lest the squad be decimated. They are reduced to animals, survival instinct all there is and this is why PTSD is so common.
And what they did has consequences to the dead. And it is the banality of evil that we are so willing to just let it fade into the ether as “one of those things” just because we’re so frightened of the “what they are” aspects.
It is the unique horror of war, all war, that it breeds out of us, our nastiness and our collective societal evils, atrocities by the bucketful. And for the occupiers, the invaders of any war, those atrocities often swarm and breed by the nature of their fights.
This is the dark underbelly of humanity. What we can devolve into.
We need to be accountable to that as a species. This is what we turn young boys into. This is war. This is on them, everyone who helped them and our whole damn country. This is on all of us until we learn that war is not a game and we can’t just “no one’s evil” it all away.
War is vile because it makes us all evil. Those who were good, those who were bad and looking for an excuse, those of us at home supporting it, and even those of us at home who fought it tooth and nail.
It’s on all of us.
Cause evil was done on that gunship, maybe not by evil people. But the evil that occurred doesn’t just go away because the people didn’t really mean it in their heart of hearts.
Just doesn’t work like that.
Phoenix Woman
The Cons got their wish: near-total control of the media that most Americans encounter every day.
The blueprint was laid out by Nixon cabinet member William Simon, and Bob Parry (once of Newsweek, but now running The Consortium) has been sounding the alarms ever since. But the rich liberals who could have funded a radio network that would have gone toe-to-toe with Limbaugh aren’t as dedicated as the Cons are to that sort of thing. It finally took the rise of the internet, and then of blogs, for the left to catch anything resembling an even break.
Cerberus
More to the point, we all commit inhumanities to our fellow men every day with the best of intentions. Casual sexism, casual racism, casual homophobia, etc… This shit builds up into a banal sort of evil. Rape Culture, Xing While Black, hate crimes. The actions themselves and the slow response to them, the distancing of ourselves from them.
This shit is all connected piece by piece. The casual hatreds that make war so easy to sell can also be perfectly molded by the “view the enemy as inhuman so you can kill him instantly” military training into atrocities that make us vomit.
We don’t get to escape accountability for any of that. This is why its so important to be a dirty hippie, to educate, to stand up for radical values, to fight all the long fights and work to better ourselves to resist more of the uglier sides of humanity.
This is why we fight.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
point taken. But Apache crews rarely are in a lot of danger. They were hunting for bad guys in this particular area this day , which was likely part of their mission parameters. From watching this video it is my take that they exaggerated the situation and the question is why. I don’t know for sure, but my personal take is they may well have wanted very much to deliver some payback for the high number of US casualties being taken during this time in 2007. And to proactively protect the ground patrol that was nearby. It also seemed like they were lying as much to themselves as to the command they were seeking permission to engage from. Doesn’t make it right, and it was clearly wrong what they did. I’m not excusing it for a second, just trying to take the entire situation into account.
The other alternative is they were just some cold blooded killers out to waste as many Iraqi’s as they could find. I don’t believe that was the case.
Cameron
War is ugly. Warriors are ugly. This was ugly. But that’s no fucking excuse to attack the U.S. and it’s military with words. War is never easy. The U.S. hasn’t won a war ever since the cry baby pee pants press started tagging along to send the ugly images back home. WAR HAS ALWAYS BEEN UGLY YOU MORONS! I say kick the damned press out and clean house, and then the Middle East can truely live in peace.
Cerberus
General @350
May not be the case, but can be.
Banality of evil and all that.
Just like not every gunning down of an unarmed black man is because of deliberate active racism, but rather the enhanced “danger” that results from casual societal racism and the shoot-first police enforcement methods.
But then, there’s also the Oakland train execution where they shot an unarmed black man they had already put down on the ground execution style and attempted to plant the gun on them.
And really, in the end, it doesn’t always matter if they “fucked up” because of casual banal crap or they are Satan’s twin. Either can be tempted to commit atrocities and either ending ends up with a bunch of dead people where there didn’t used to be dead people.
Those unarmed black men are still just as dead whether their police shooter was well-meaning or KKK. And these men are just as dead whether the nintendo pilots wanted some “revenge” or just wanted to shoot someone dead.
Intent doesn’t matter to what happens. Maybe we can understand, empathize, but what happens is just as bad either way and the consequences just as permanent.
It gets stuck in my craw even more that either way, we shouldn’t have fucking been there, “policing”. We’re occupiers. If we get shot, it’s because we are fucking occupying a country. But we want the rights to shoot up as many civilians as we want because some people want to protect their goddamned homes from invaders who’ll happily shoot up as many civilians as they want.
And we only know about this incident because the “civilians” were our own damn men. Our news crews.
CDWard
And we wonder why Iraqis hate us?
Mike Furlan
I think we all agree that nobody deserves to die the way those men did in the video.
If their death helps to bring peace in Iraq, at least it was not entirely meaningless.
Mostly we should remember this and be ready when the case is made to attack Iran. (or what ever the next place that they think needs killing)
kdaug
Umm… I don’t give a fuck about how they self-rationalize what they did, or how we reviewers 3 years on justify the actions of the killers.
The kid’s dads are just as dead. Pretty sure they don’t care either.
Mark S.
I agree 100% with this:
kdaug
And to be clear – I’m not coming down on you. Not saying it’s your fault that we opened fire on civilians from a mile away.
Just quit trying to defend it as some “face-to-face, whites-of-their-eyes” heroic bullshit.
It wasn’t. It was a fucking slaughter.
Man up.
maus
Again, why the polarity? Of course they wanted to “pay someone back” or whatever fucking ignorant thought was pumping through their hearts at that very point. But there is a chill to their actions and operation.
If by “shallow” in that I’m not going to make excuses for their lies, and that they should not be prosecuted for their crimes, I’ll wear your insult with pride.
I’m not saying they’re Satan incarnate, I’m saying they performed an evil act, and refusing even to hand-wring over what happened is just cowardly and complicit.
JSpencer
There are people who should be having nightmares about this. I hope they do.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Wtf are you talking about, man up. Fuck you and the other sanctimonious twerps like maus and others. I did not excuse what they did, but was offering some perspective on what might have been their motivations in a situation you will never find yourself in.
You live in cock sure world where everything is always black and white and you are sure you have all the answers. You don’t. This did not occur in downtown Pleasantville, USA.
If you can’t handle using your brains for anything more than a soapbox to preach liberal declarations of guilt and judgment sitting in your comfy living rooms, then just piss off. Nuance and failure to acknowledge it is the sign of intellectual laziness.
“man up’ sheesh.
Joseph Nobles
You guys really should get the Army’s side of this. They appear to have their ducks in a row. The link is up above in my last post.
kdaug
Wrong metaphor – I’m a 15 year old kid siting in his/her parent’s basement, replete with orange-stained fingers held high. In a wheelchair.
Defending it. Finding some way to justify it. We can’t possibly understand. THEIR motivations.
War is hell. Blah blah blah.
We invade country. They die. We go away when we want to.
WIN!!
Honus
@363
cause the army would never whitewash anything
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Understanding motivation in charging murder defines whether it is actually that. And that is most true in a war zone.
kdaug
Granted.
Now, is this murder?
Or manslaughter?
Or do you contest other facts not presented?
TenguPhule
Gee thanks for clearing that up.
Yeah, they were fucking meaningless deaths.
kdaug
I’m out. But to GETS:
The human capacity for detailed rationalization in service to fear, is a cosmic force like few others
-K
General Egali Tarian Stuck
I already said I don’t think it is murder, but like you I don’t have all the facts and precisely what was their mission. And from watching the video, I believe they believed they were firing at the enemy. At the very least, it was negligence, or so poor of judgment, they have no business engaging in combat or likely being in the military. I also believe it needs to be investigated out in the open, and from an impartial entity.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Ha, you are reading my musings. I didn’t rationalize anything, and repeatedly stated what they did was not justified. But like I said, this didn’t occur in downtown Pleasantville, USA.
You, like a lot of high brow liberals are a lot like the wingnuts in getting all pissy when the party line is injected with some nuance. Puts a kink in the narrative and that must be stamped out of the conversation.
trollhattan
The Gray Lady has it now as well.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/world/middleeast/06baghdad.html?hp
Myself, I don’t have the words.
maus
Yes, refusing to accept that someone fucked up big time and that their culpability involves more than severe negligence sure is open-minded, internet warrior. Obviously we shouldn’t hold people to higher standards, and this sort of thing happens, so the existence of “grey areas” indicates the acceptability of such behavior. Consider me convinced!
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Shorter maus – I saw a video and am judge and jury and wise in all things.
The only internet warriors on this thread are the ones fighting for liberal dogma. And investigation be damned.
James in WA
Mike, as much as I might agree with you in the abstract, isn’t this sentiment kind of weird? I mean, these were people. Innocent people. Killed arbitrarily. Not to be an asshole, but I think that searching for meaning in their deaths and hoping that it brings progress seems really shitty to me. Seems to me that outrage is really the only appropriate response in this situation.
Put another way: “okay, they gunned down my sister. But at least it wasn’t meaningless, since it might help bring peace.” Yay, the possibility of peace.
Mnemosyne
I clicked through to the report and looked at Attack Mission Request.
Pages 1-10 are redacted.
Page 11 is visible.
Pages 12-15 are redacted.
I have no idea how on earth you can claim the military “has their ducks in a row” when you’re only getting one or two pages of 15-page reports.
They do appear to have put together a pretty extensive ass-covering, I’ll give you that. Of course, the shooting of Amadou Diallo in New York was “within policy,” too, so I don’t put too much faith in agencies deciding after the fact that a massacre just happened to be “within policy.”
Teemu
Yawn. They wouldn’t even run over a stray dog, much less kill a non-combatant.
In the video, professional “journalist” strategically places his body in such a way that army vehicle crushes him in front of cameras. This kind of asymmetric propaganda warfare and incitement practiced by then-deceased hostile agitator is clearly an act of war. I shouldn’t have to point out that civilian disguise and use of human shields is a war crime.
..
Ok, let’s see how long it takes for pro-massacre apologists to top that. So far, Bill Roggio of Weekly Standard has the lead with his “The van, which was coming to the aid of the fighters, was fair game, even if the men who exited the van weren’t armed.”
maus
I’m fighting for the hope that your family will never get gunned down and murdered in the street just because you’re too selfishly grounded in the idea that the US can’t commit atrocities because it’s impossible for us to commit atrocities because it’s impossible for us to not kill civilians. Your smugness is misplaced if all you’re offering as a “nuance” is the thought that there’s some possible way that these people should not be charged with murdering civilians. You offer nothing but excuses and “shit happens”.
Dave
Just imagine one of these
gunnersshooters moving in next door to you someday. Best to keep the music down.Phoenician in a time of Romans
I’m fighting for the hope that your family will never get gunned down and murdered in the street just because you’re too selfishly grounded in the idea that the US can’t commit atrocities because it’s impossible for us to commit atrocities because it’s impossible for us to not kill civilians.
Myself, I’m hoping the US gets precisely what it dishes out to other people.
And if the apologists think that’s a nasty thing to say, that shows that they have guilty consciences no matter what contortions of logic they spout.
AngusJackBootedThugOfMeat
Well, I am late to the thread and just watched this. The video will haunt me for a long time. I realize that I have put up a pretty steady antiwar body of posts here over the years, and that they, and my antiwar position in general, have done absolutely no good whatsoever. I haven’t accomplished a fucking thing. It’s a rather sickening feeling.
Just to stay consistent, for the record I’ll say that the Orwell quote at the top of the film pretty much expresses my view on the subject of the term “collateral damage.” I believe the term is an evil euphemism whose sole purpose is to cover up for something that is morally indefensible. Nothing I have ever seen written on these pages, and that’s a lot, has ever persuaded me to modify that view, and I don’t expect that anything will in the future, all the chest beating and macho spinning to the contrary, notwithstanding. The whole charade just pisses me off.
anonimouse
was the gunship at risk from an RPG?
listen to when it opens fire and when the shells actually hit. it would have been 5km plus away from those men. they couldn’t even hear its rotors. unless any of the he-man keyboard warriors want to argue that an armed group of resisters would stand around in earshot of a gunship. even if they had an RPG, they wouldn’t have been able to hit the gunship with it. the pilot and gunner had all the time in the world to confirm what they were shooting at.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Apparently, you are unable to comprehend what you read. None of what you write about what I wrote is accurate, nor true.
JSpencer
That anyone could watch this video in it’s entirety and then make excuses or gloss over the obvious, horrible reality of the incident shows just how disconnected – perhaps willfully disconnected some people are from simple, direct truth. There is really no successful way to spin the absence of empathy, the absence of conscience, since this is what forms the basis of all of our understanding of right and wrong. Trying to parse it and dissect it, rationalize it, this is the symptom of a terrible ailment. If you can’t feel it in your gut, then you are in trouble. We are becoming a nation of sociopaths and we are all complicit to varying degrees. Some of us know it, some of us don’t.
Paul in KY
IMO, the helicopter commander needs to be courtmartialed. The rest of the crew needs to be removed from that MOS & sent to bulk fuels for the remainder of their enlistment. The whole wing of Apache crews needs to watch this & be retrained on ID mistakes & wishful thinking.
That is at a minimum.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
This is what the wingnut preachers teach us. As well as libtard preachers. So you could be right.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Can’t speak for the other alleged “apologists” but what I have said is it might be a good idea to have an investigation by an impartial entity first before actually reaching a blog verdict of murder based on viewing a video. I know that sounds smug and un liberal of me, but so be it.
JSpencer
Garden variety common sense and empathy can go a long way when it comes to cutting through bullshit, and this incident is really bringing the bullshit to the fore. No excuses.
mantis
I watched the video with the sound off the first time, skipping the beginning commentary, and I certainly noticed weapons carried by two individuals, walking some distance behind the guys identified as cameramen. When the guy first poked around the corner of that building, it certainly looked like an RPG to me the first time. Upon subsequent viewings it does seem to be a camera and not an RPG, but you have to be paying real close attention to see that.
However, the chopper circles around the building, and upon doing so it is clear that this group of men was not preparing to launch anything, and are milling about, oblivious to the danger above them. This should have at least given the chopper gunners pause, even if the ROE allows them to engage upon sight of armed individuals.
Attacking the van and the injured, unarmed man afterwards? That’s just indefensible.
medic
CENTCOM has now released official documents here
The soldiers lie in their sworn statements as well.
LT
From a suberb post at DKos from a Afghanistan veteran:
I tired to bold, tried to underline, tried to put ina paragraph break, which sent the last paragraph our of the blockquote. Frustrating.
William
@JSpencer:
Not that I don’t see your point, but I’m not sure I agree with your conclusion.
When people talk about the horrors of war, this is not some cute phrase. War is inherently horrible. This video is obviously horrible, and the outcome, the killing of innocent people is also horrible. So if as far as you get in thinking about this is coming to grips with that, then yes, any other discussion seems insane to you.
However, there’s another question we need to answer about this specific incident: given that war is horror, is this particular incident egregiously worse? Given that we as a nation sent these guys over there and gave them a particular mission, did these particular guys fail us, perhaps out of depravity?
To think about that question usefully, you have to accept the horrors of war as a baseline. Which inevitably is going to sound sociopathic if you’re still on the first topic.
People seem to want to blame this particular group of guys because they are the ones most directly involved in the horror. I still need to spend more time studying this, but my impression so far is that these guys are not the root problem: it’s the system they are embedded in. In which case the video doesn’t indict them, but the whole enterprise.
maus
@387
You seem to be confusing the court of public opinion with something legal. Your smugness is tied to the kneejerk defense that there’s always something beyond our view that could conceivably explain this away. Given all evidence *available to civilians* this is not the case.
My doubt that this will ever see anything close to an investigation by any “impartial entity” *is* great, of course. There’s no way in hell the US is going to allow anyone else to investigate.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
maus
“My Smugness”? lol, there is none left. You used it all up.
maus
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/4/6/854626/-The-Video:-A-perspective-from-a-liberal-veteran