Here is why we need Wikileaks — because when our soldiers carry out Collateral Murder, we should know about it. Good journalism should be exposing this stuff for us.
This is a video shot from an American helicopter gunship in Iraq. It shows real human beings being shot to death. I wish I could unwatch seeing it now, so be advised before you click on that play button…it is horrific.
A couple of Iraqi journalists working for Reuters are slaughtered in the above clip, gunned down from a distance by American troops who claim their cameras are weapons, that they're walking around with AK-47s and RPGs…which I simply don't see anywhere in the clip. I see a small group of civilians casually walking down a city street.
Perhaps the killers were merely mistaken, as happens in war. Perhaps they had better views of weaponry than can be seen in this video. But that doesn't explain what happened next, when a van pulls up to help a wounded man and they open fire again, fully aware of what was going on below them, and fire several bursts into the people and into the van.
Maybe they could see weapons more clearly than I can. But then how did they fail to notice two small faces peering out of the passenger side window of the van? They shot journalists and children, all the while laughing and congratulating themselves on the 'nice' pile of bodies they had produced. And when they see soldiers on the ground rushing injured children to aid, they say, "Well, it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle."
I am ashamed. We are the storm troopers, the murderous invaders, the butchers of children, the laughing barbarians. We aren't in Iraq to help those people, our troops are there to oppress them…when we aren't gunning them down outright.
Oh, and go ahead, turn on your TV news. The top stories on CNN are the iPad, Jessica Alba planning to adopt a baby, and Tiger Woods. Doesn't that fill you with confidence?
(via John Cole)
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Josh Steiber, the former soldier who is the subject of the interview linked to by Chimp & John Morales, also wrote about the video on his blog a couple days ago:
No emphasis needed. The rest is worth reading too - including the comments.
More relevant evidence & information can be found at the Centcom Information Portal, including the investigation reports, and esp. the sworn statements & interviews of the pilots & gunners from the two Apaches involved taken starting the day after the incident.
(For John Morales: As you'll see, their reference to the ROE is Troops in Contact (TIC), so it was primarily para. 3.B.1(a) that they used as their initial justification upon being called for support by ground forces)
Those who read the sworn statements will also see additional information concerning children & noncombatants who caused the gunships to refrain from firing on other insurgents (after the van was destroyed, and before the missile fire), and a reference to a red SUV that was followed but not fired upon due to the absence of PID (also after the van was destroyed, and before the missile fire).
The reason these events are not seen in the video is that the "full" 38-minute version posted by WikiLeaks is not the full version after all. From 20-30 minutes were edited out of the original footage during which the pilots & gunners did not act as the crazed murderers they appear to be early on, and behave instead in a strangely humane manner given their earlier exploits. WikiLeaks maintains that the 38-minute version is all they have, so it's possible that their source edited the original footage, thereby depriving all of us of the full context.
In spite of the moronic and ineffectual defense I offered previously, I hope you'll find this information and these materials as helpful as I did.
I wish they had a version without the arrows describing what and who was actually on the ground, and that they forced you to watch that first. Our solders over there don't have the luxury of instant replay.
I only wish that the government hadn't tried to cover up the indecent. I do, however, understand why they tried to.
I can't look, PZ.
I was one of the Veterans for Peace who did what she could to stop this crazy thing.
As you can see, it didn't matter what someone like me (or anyone else for that matter) thought. And it doesn't feel good at all to know that everything I suspected would happen...did.
"That's the way we are. We're pigs."
I was just about to head to see if this was in the endless thread yet.
It's very disturbing.
Oh great! I just saw this video on Andrew Sullivan's blog and was livid with anger. I came to your blog to read something else so that I can go back to work again. But here you have it too!
This video is horrible. I didn't see anyone with weapons in the video either. Especially despicable is the fact that the soldier in the helicopter wanted the wounded reporter to make any movement that may look like he is picking up a weapon so that he can shoot him some more. And then they shot the children! Simply horrible!
Right now scouring the internets, but has Reuters said something yet?
Has there ever been an imperial occupier that hasn't acted this way?
Holy shit. For once, I'm glad that being on dial-up prevents me from watching video. I don't think I could take it.
So why isn't this all over our supposed "liberal" media?
PZ, why do you insist on blaming America first?
[/sarcasm]
Saw this on your twitter feed earlier. Truly awful.
It is just plain murder.
We have no liberal media. We have corporate media. I'm guessing you were being sarcastic and already knew that.
I can't watch this--or the lousy TV news that ignores this horror.
Peg
The Guardian
I don't know enough about the war to know whether it was (In theory) a good idea or not. Still, when you corral a bunch of teenagers into your armed forces with Kid rock songs, product placement in Michael Bay movies and subtle/not so subtle xenophobic propaganda you have to expect results such as this.
It's pretty sad that Pharyngula is probably the place this will get the most exposure.
I hope they identify the SOBs who pleaded for permission to fire and fire again, and make them watch the video every fucking day of the rest of their fucked up lives.
PZ, why do you keep saying "we"? You are not in the army or in Blackwater, you're not a congresscritter who voted for the illegal war, you most likely didn't even vote for any of those congresscritters...
Patriotism is a bug, not a feature.
Yeah, well you know. I can't be expected to put a sarcasm tag every time I make a sarcastic remark. :P
Read the post,
started watching the clip,
stopped watching right after they opened fire and the first people where going down,
people ...
real people...
not actors (i'm sorry, i made a mental connection to the movie "Black Hawk Down" which i found quite disturbing, but nowhere near to this) but actual footage of people getting gunned down from above...
don't know if i even want to watch the rest of it,
Horrible!
The BBC is covering it:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8603938.stm
"Well, that's their fault for bringing their kids to a battle."
Some battle. The men were completely surprised when the chopper opened fire. I didn't see any weapons. I counted maybe one suspicious guy, and I would hope that would warrant a "let's keep watching him, what did he just do?" reaction rather than a "spray the crowd with exploding bullets" response.
The thing I found most disturbing was the gunner waiting eagerly for an excuse to kill the wounded man that would fulfill the letter of the rules of engagement. "C'mon, all you gotta do is pick up a weapon..."
It's been top story on Al Jazeera English for most of the day... but of course that has minimal coverage in the US.
"We are the storm troopers" ...Obviously. It amazes me that so many people do not realize this. The US invaded and occupied a foreign country without cause, murdering people at will, apparently just for the hell of it.
Glorification of the military is rampant in America, and blending that with the ignorance that christianity encourages leads to a uniquely American brand of fanaticism.
Why do they hate us? Watch this video and open your eyes. I have no doubt that most Americans will remain oblivious to this particular incident, and if they accidentally find out about it most will explain it away as an "accident". The most idiotic among us will say "why are you blaming america first?". Statements like that are only made by complete morons.
As someone else posted on the comments for this video, it makes me wonder how many other incidents like this have taken place that we've never heard about.
Full uncut version also posted by Wikileaks - no arrows, more visual details and transmissions. Horrifying.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik&feature=channel
"We are the storm troopers, the murderous invaders, the butchers of children, the laughing barbarians"
You doubted this for a second about the USA professor Myers?
Saw this on Slashdot. Cried. Saw it referenced here. Want to cry again.
Yeah. I'm a big fuckin' bawlbaby. I get that way when I see routine atrocities.
This is what happens when you deify the military.
I'm all for supporting the troops that aren't fucking worthless subhuman trash, but I unfortunately know too many of them that are.
This is real Christendom in action, folks. This is Jesus in all his glory.
Game over, man. These war-lovin', bible-thumping, jingo-freakin' Corporations are running things. Black is white, good is evil, right is wrong.
Oh, we are so screwed...
Horrible is too soft a word, but do not feel like cursing. Being me, I watched it so can expect nightmare duty tonight. Just went through a bout of that and was getting better - my mind has been dry cleaning itself.
It is a horror for the Iraqis and the Afghans when it happens there. It is also a horror for the soldiers who did it and they will face it in the future in their dreams and memories. War cheapens and ruins the lives of both the civilian victims and the soldiers who fire upon them.
Yes, it can be stopped. Commanders have to issue orders about rules of engagement and what they should and can do and enforce the rules. Collateral damage does happen for real at times, but too often it is an excuse. This was not responding with fire when ambushed, adrenalin pumping and fear twanging the nerves. This was at long range and the people had time to think and look. Hell, the things I did which are justified are hard enough to face.
Enough, need to try and switch off.
Oh, one more thing before I forget. I wrote a little show a few years before I died. Episode ten of the first season may be quite relevant in a, 'I can't handle the reality of this situation so I'm gonna escape into a fictional world in which justice exists' kind of way.
The first part can be found here (the following two parts can be found in the related videos section) ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2LLPmqzgSE
#1:
This is what happens when you go to war, and especially when you go to war with an idiot leading the charge from the White House. Even if some other war happy prick put us in this mess, it would have happened, because we went to war for the wrong reasons, without proper planning, without anything guiding the CiC except OIL FEAR KILL OIL FEAR KILL OIL FEAR KILL OIL FEAR KILL. Anyone who had been in the military who wasn't a retard ideologue could see this coming.
That's why Iraqi human rights was one of the first items I brought up when I was at my Congressman's office to let the prick know how moronic this Iraq thing would be. I asked him what would be done if the soldiers committed another My Lai, which would inevitably happen in war, so it had to be addressed. Did we want that on our consciences, especially if we went to war for the wrong reasons. Do you know what answer I and other concerned citizens got?
"Our military is a more professional fighting force now."
He didn't even hesitate to say it.
This is ignorance at best, and at worst denial of reality on a dangerous scale. This incredible mentality is what creates My Lai, Abu Ghraib, and this incident. The rot starts at the head, as the old saying goes, and this travesty started with half the body already rotten from cynicism, narcissism, and flat out greed.
As soon as I heard that remark, I knew we were facing another Vietnam, because we had learned nothing from its mistakes--or its misery.
"This is real Christendom in action, folks. This is Jesus in all his glory."
Echo that! This is the real face of christianity in action.
"We are the storm troopers, the murderous invaders, the butchers of children, the laughing barbarians."
hasn't it been this way for centuries? it's not news. it's been going on since we got here. we Americans have never been the good guys. come to grips with it and keep your head down.
on the other hand, Jessica Alba has never adopted a baby before. this is *news*.
Onward Christian soldiers.
Saw it this morning on Rachel Maddow's blog. I expect there will be mention of it on her show tonight.
Sport killing.
Up high, looking down on them through a screen, and needing nothing but the pretense of suspicion of weapons as a reason. I imagine this happens a lot more than we will ever know.
Apparently picking up a weapon wasn't needed though. Coming to a dying man's aid was enough.
I can't remember how many times Christian TV programing have said that this war will bring Christianity to the middle east. Jesus did say he brought a sword.
Absolutely read the Guardian article mentioned above.
And while you're at it, read another Guardian article and watch the video in it. It's about the <headdesk> stuff that was dropped on Falluja and its <headdesk> effects.
I have no intention of watching the macabre video. When did this incident occur?
Without wanting to sound superior in anyway here (there's nothing to be smug about in this) but did anyone reading this blog (of all places) have any doubt that this is what your troops (and far too often, ours [UK]) are like? This is what they are like. Stressed and trained to kill mercilessly and with impunity. What do you think happens at Guantanamo?
And let it make us utterly determined that we will do everything we can to stop our troops being deployed overseas ever again. This is what troops do in poor countries with dysfunctional Governments. This is not news though...
This will get covered in the media for certain.
I don't think it is a fair inference that the helicopters saw the children or that the cameras were not Klashnikovs and RPGs.
The jovial mood that soldiers have in face of the horrors of far is despicable.
Islamic militant groups do have a habit of brinking noncombatants with them so it makes the US look bad. This is the essence of the soldier's comment on the children: The Islamists killed them long before the soldiers fired a bullet.
Of course, we know know that the van was not full of militants and the inference was not valid at the time. The firing on the van should not have occurred, and indicates the soldier behaved barbarically.
More telling than all this would be what the military procedures are for this sort of engagement. If the helicopter guy violated procedures, that would be small injustice in a war ordinarily fought with more regard for civilians. If the helicopter guy followed procedures than we don't need to see it on video to know that it happens all the time everywhere.
Remember this video the next time you fill up your gas tank or gripe about the cost of gasoline.
This is the reality of war. Stupid, senseless, murderous, insane, cruel war.
Sometimes you have to go to war. Most of the time, however, you don't.
Iraq is one of the "you don't have to" examples.
But we're there - dammit - and our only intelligent move is to get the hell out of there asap.
dboy @ 24:
This has been my point for years, and it's frustrating how people deflect it. That deflection is part of the problem and the first part that needs to be fixed before anything else can be done. Much like the "War" on Drugs, it's turned into a witch hunt against anyone who offers legitimate criticism. Criticize the witch-finders and you will be in the defense stand. Criticize the anti-drug zealots and their methods and you are marked as an addict by definition. Criticize the troops and you are marked as an inhuman monster who hates the troops and should be forcibly impressed into the military, deported, or even killed. (I've been hit with all three numerous times.)
How the fuck can we begin to fix this if any criticism of the military is drowned out in a sea of ignorant patriotism? How can you fix any problem when legitimate criticism is punished severely or simply shut down? How can you make anything better when the very act of asking a simple question is anathema? (very similar to religion over the ages, actually)
I haven't watched it yet. I want to wait for my dad so I have some damn moral support. Some part of me doesn't want to see it, but I feel it's important.
I'm thinking of it this way: if it's hard for me to watch, imagine how much harder it is for the people who were gunned down on their own streets? And how can anything be done if this is ignored because it's "too distressing" to watch? If I can't even be prevailed upon to suffer the distress of being informed (at minimum), then how will this sort of thing not continue to happen again and again forever?
I'm glad BBC is covering it at least (or so someone commented). It's disgusting that in all the deified-military cheerleading the media can't be bothered to report on something that's actually relevant, if not pleasant or fitting in with the bizarro-world they're trying to sell us.
Ironically, foxnews is covering it: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/04/05/video-appears-forces-firing-…
Apparently, the truth is a threat to national security.
Of course, I can easily provide the link to that article. It goes without saying that the video is on the Arabic front page, too.
What's the difference between Vietnam and Iraq?
Fearless Flightsuit had an exit strategy for Vietnam. That's what.
Wow, I remember having been in a couple of demonstrations against this--7 years ago. It was 2003 alright, the same year America murdered José Couso, a spanish journalist, by bombing down the hotel where he and many other journalists from all over the world were placed. Thank good we got a new president that got us out of that illegal, hideous invasion as soon as he could.
The rest of the world have been watching what's been happening in America last year. We thought your president would create some hope not only for domestic issues but also for the neverending hell of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine.
#43:
How about this for how well clear the video was, and how the photographers can be clearly identified from the footage?
Thanks for bringing this up. I wonder how our American rationalists and atheists feel about this. I don't see it mentioned too much. Patriotism (not only chauvinistic nationalism, which is obviously worse) has bugged me for years, almost as much as religion, but it doesn't seem to bother other people.
Hurrah for the freedom fighters!
The people who did this are fools with a will to survive. Combatants often stand out in the open after spotting an attack helicopter? Fuck me sideways if they do. Their was or should have been reasonable doubt per their actual intent.
What the victims did wrong won't excuse the manslaughter, but the one fatal error made was the camera man ducking around a corner aiming some black thing at a military vehicle suspiciously. If I was in the chopper with them I would have some increased fear for my safety at that point, yes.
What I imagine is the most grotesque thing about it is the bloodlust, the callous disregard for human life, the lack of remorse, the sickening inhumane comments afterward. Yet I suppose they have to compartmentalize like that when they murder for a living.
David Marjanovic wrote:
"PZ, why do you keep saying "we"? You are not in the army or in Blackwater, you're not a congresscritter who voted for the illegal war, you most likely didn't even vote for any of those congresscritters..."
Because he's a citizen of the United States of America and pays taxes most of which go to prop up it's bloated, murderous military machine.
#1 you can see an annotated timeline here: http://www.collateralmurder.com/en/timeline.html
July 2007, as it says in the Guardian article, the BBC article, the Aljazeera article...
I have never understood the reasons for invading Iraq. However I knew as soon as the US did invade that incidents like this would take place with some frequency.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/12/AR20070…
Here's an article from the American media describing the fight in the video.
During the fighting, an Apache helicopter fired bursts of 30mm rounds toward several people who had been directing machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades at U.S. soldiers. The helicopter also fired on a silver Toyota minivan in the area as several people approached the vehicle, soldiers said.
The incident just makes me sick. I can barely focus.
There was another blog that posted this that got swarmed with defenders rushing to defend the unjustifiable, find some way that an atrocity could be nice and legal, understandable, merely "unfortunate".
It sickened me even more. There is a rot at the center of American culture, an idea of toxic masculinity built upon the deaths of the weaker, the different. It is a drive so strong that many wanted to dissuade any detractors who ever say war is fundamentally a bad thing. That these atrocities are a part of war and why war shouldn't be a fucking dalliance of occupation and aggressive invasion.
Even in the last "good war" for America, we committed atrocities like they were going out of style. Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Japanese internment camps. And that's before a thousand incidents on the ground like this that we'll never know about.
Even this would have disappeared, only to have been known by "our enemies" that we would have responded to in a daze "how could they hate us" if not for the victims being our own, our hired reporters.
This rot doesn't just stop with the Bush junta, this goes through our society. This careful seeking of the indefensible is heightened, unleashed in the chaos of war, but it's built of the racism and fear of the other seen in lynch mobs and teabagger protests. The rapes of war are built in the sexism of the rapes at home. And the belated justifications and "acceptable targets" are so often felt in the dead bodies of "its", I mean trans people, and also hookers.
And again, I feel sick not only that this occurs and we can't seem to get anyone of political will to stop it, get our troops out or build any framework to prevent the next "wargasm"-style invasion on flimsy pretense, but how it reveals the depravity in our fellow citizens who will do anything to try and erase this incident, what it means, about us and about war.
In short, we suck.
I lived in the US at the beginning of this war. One friend, who was otherwise smart, supported it. 'When will you leave?' I asked her 'And how will this be different from a colony?' 'Oh' she replied 'we would never accept becoming a colonial power'.
That this depth of naïveté could exist in an otherwise thoughtful and throughly educated person...I have to say I learned a lot that day.
That's not his fault.
It could at most be called his fault if it stays that way because he's not doing enough against it... but so far, it looks like he is doing against it what he can.
Reuters is now covering it:
Leaked U.S. video shows Iraq deaths, including Reuters staff
Interesting:
DavidM, I read about and saw photographs from Fallujah not long after the battle where the white phosphorus was dropped. Horrifying. I'm not surprised that there are long lasting effects. It seems like after three wars where we used weapons that cause 20 years of birth defects, poisoned suffering civilians, and latent deaths from cancers and various syndromes... you'd think we'd quit it.
What's the difference between Vietnam and Iraq?
The American public at large cared more.
I watched the video creafully since I like to be informed before making judgement calls. To give the soldiers the benefit of the doubt the guy rouching behind the wall was acting pretty suspisciously, and I can see why someone in a helicopter would freak out over the threat of being fired at with an RPG, but the crowd they actually fired into was quite clearly made up of unarmed people.
The van bit was even more insane- what possible threat could a few guys picking up bodies have posed to the helicopter? The fact that they took the time to track down and shoot unarmed people who had run away from the blast is just mind-blowing. Seriously, what was going through their heads at the time?
And then there's the blatent lie thatno innocent civilians were killed deliberately. The soldiers quite clearly fired at a crowd of unarmed people and then chased down fleeing survivors. And as for how the children were injured..... well how do you think it happened? The giant gun firing at their van might have had something to do with it.
People, people, people! We need to SUPPORT our troops!
A good, strong rope would support them nicely.
What an appropriate time for this post, for yesterday was the 43rd anniversary of Martin Luther King's great "Beyond Vietnam" speech.
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
One of the greatest people this country has produced tried to teach us- but we're still not willing to listen.
Not to defend the actions of the pilots but as for someone who has seen many an AK and RPG the people did look like they were carrying weapons. The way they were carrying their camera's look like AK's slung on the shoulder and being carried by one hand. The guy who also pokes his head around the corner carrying an object also looks like an RPG launcher.
After that though is where things break down extremely fast. Since there were no American forces in the immediate area they should have continued to observe instead of requesting permission to engage and there is ABSOLUTELY no excuse to fire upon the van. ROE at the time was positive identification of target before engaging and as soon as you lose the PID you are no longer supposed to engage. They didn't have PID. They only had suspicions.
The ROE's suck but they are in place to protect the civilian population. What I mean by the ROE's suck is that if you're engaged you can't fire back if you can't ID the source. You can get shot at, know the general area it came from but because you don't see the man who was just shooting at you holding a weapon in his hand anymore you can't do anything about it. Failure to follow the ROE's results severe punishment for junior enlisted. Hell, the higher ups will try to fry you for following the ROE's. Not so much if your senior enlisted and these pilots where anything but junior enlisted, most likely Warrant Officers, not the teenagers the ghost of rod serling automatically assumes.
Those pilots violated the ROE's plain and simple as did higher who gave them permission to engage. They'll get off easily because they are warrant officers/officers.
Fearless Flightsuit wanted to be a war president (even before 9/11), Richard the Lying-Hearted wanted oil, Faux wanted news... I think it's all very simple.
I've never really understood patriotism either. I support freedoms, not countries. Patriotism is just another way for people to split humanity into us vs them instead of realizing that, for better or worse, we're all in this together.
Thank you David. The closest to 'good news' here is that there are fewer U.S. and 'coalition' troops in Iraq today than in 2007. Does nothing for the victims though.
On the collateral damage front, these horrific acts will also supersede the RCC child rape, cover-up and not-pology stories and so enable a different corrupt and immoral organization to survive a bit longer.
This is pretty sick, but I think you have to expect that this is happening ALL the time. Were it not for these being reporters I'm sure this would never have come out.
Americans are occupiers, torturers, killers. In your name this happens...
when I saw the video (the full one), I thought I saw two armed men, and several unarmed (the photographers and others). There also seemed to be a a guy with an RPG (he peered down the street, pointing the weapon in the same direction).
One can understand why an anxious gunner thought that they might be combatants. Ok, so far it's a bad mistake.
However, when the civilians come to pick up the wounded (only one left alive), the f***g gunner can't wait to kill some more - he keeps repeating that 'they are picking up the bodies, can I engage', which is an obvious lie.
Later on, it's perfectly clear that the men in the building destroyed were all unarmed. As he shoots, there is a passer-by walking past the building.
The worst bit is when they all have a good laugh as the tank goes over a body. Hilarious.
Fuck Tony Blair for dragging us into that shit with allies like that. I'm reminded that the majority of British dead in the war were killed by Americans.
http://english.aljazeera.net
Are these Christopher Hitchens' "brave men and women"?
Is this the collateral damage that Sam Harris makes excuses for in "The End of Faith"?
That was utterly horrifying. Does anybody know what happened to the children?
Glenn Greenwald has a timely post discussing the propaganda-like US media war coverage. He mostly discusses an Afghan example, linking to this in an update.
And for those commenting about "well maybe I could understand", this is at the root of the banality of evil. We get so used to it. Oh, yes, there would be a great reason to gun down underarmed people first for no reason and keep firing, there would have to be, cause otherwise, we're just committing evil to avoid admitting a mistake and every time we approve a war, we will see a thousand atrocities. Or even start viewing war itself as an atrocity.
Evil is not all powerful, evil is banal. Something we'll slip into because it's in the culture, everywhere. And only the long scope of time will truly make us see how vile we used to be.
Dugg! at http://digg.com/political_opinion/We_have_seen_evil_and_it_is_us_Pharyn…
I'm still in tears, this just makes me angry!
YEah, that guy on the tape anxious to shoot reminds me of a quote from Monty Python's Meaning of Life:
An AK-47 and RPG are clearly visible at 3:45 if you bother to look, taking out the group was perfectly legit. As for the van, if it where marked then that would have been a clear cut war crime, but it wasn't and as such has no protective status. Personally I would have never fired on it, but ultimately until you surrender you are still in the fight. Being wounded does not make one not dangerous.
Lastly, as far as I know the ROE from day one stipulated that anyone injured from a US or coalition asset was automatically granted treatment at the CSH. Maybe that was changed prior to 2007, but still bad judgment on the commander's part to say the least.
This is what empires do. Somehow Americans have never gotten over the myth of their "divine mission", that somehow we are special, and that very specialness makes us immune to the excesses of militaristic imperialism.
I've often thought that if we'd learned the lessons from the Philippines, Vietnam might not have happened. Now I despair that we just learned the wrong lesson.
All I want to know is when the killers and their enablers are going to be arrested, prosecuted, and locked up for this war crime. I have significant doubts that the Obama Administration will do jack shit about it (other than go after Wikileaks) now that it is public knowledge, but they should.
This is what empires do. Somehow Americans have never gotten over the myth of their "divine mission", that somehow we are special, and that very specialness makes us immune to the excesses of militaristic imperialism.
Yup. We believe our own PR, despite all evidence.
WP beat me to the punch.
Yes, if you advance the video to about 3:51, and look at the two guys standing in front of the (telephone?) pole, you can see one guy clearly toting a long object that appears to be an RPG, and the other guy (in the striped shirt) lazily swinging something which looks an awful lot like a rifle.
So saying that the entire group was unarmed is dishonest. That being said, I still found the soldiers' scorched-earth attitude ghastly and over-the-top.
--Raynfala
CBS News just aired a report and showed SOME of this footage. They left out the part about the children.
Ol'Greg @ 63:
True, at least to a point. There was more outcry against the Vietnam war. One of the legacies of the Vietnam war is the current "support the troops" meme. That came about as a result of the way Vietnam vets were treated upon returning home. There's been a large shift to blind patriotism once again, where people don't want to hear any sort of criticism; all it gets is a "love it or leave it!" or "do you want the terrorists to win?!" bumper sticker screed back.
I remember the outrage over the My Lai massacre. It's sad indeed that there seems to be very little outrage over atrocities now.
This was posted over at Reddit by a person who was there (soldier in Iraq):
--quote:
War is an ugly, atrocious action. Bad things happen every day; good things only rarely. It's a waste of money, time, potential, and especially lives. What's in this video is distasteful to say the least, but it's also intentionally inflammatory (presumably so WL gets more clicks, and we all obliged them). This video is from a period of increasing, and increasingly violent, action by insurgents. Mortar and rocket attacks, IEDs/EFPs, executions in the most grotesque manner, were all becoming the norm.
The men you hear are reacting to stress from a variety of sources: lack of sleep because of indirect fire attacks, stress from friends being WIA/KIA, stress from feeling little support from the Iraqis at that time, from being away from home and family. In all that stress, they still behaved according to the rules of engagement. They positively identified small arms (which are a threat) and misidentified an RPG. Had I not known, I would also have called out RPG. It unfortunately looks like it, and that was amplified by the pose he took. WL added in captions to let you know there were cameras to amplify outrage, but having flown around Baghdad in helos everything looks like a threat after they shoot at you.
Shooting the van was also justifiable because the "insurgents" were going to collect their wounded and weapons. Clearly the aircrew were wrong, but not unjustifiably and probably only in hindsight. They followed the ROEs, received approval to fire, and did so efficiently. Further, the initial statements that said they were engaged with a violent group also does not strike me as "cover up." If you've ever been involved with an emergency situation you know the first reports out are usually wrong. The later reports, however, I find repugnant. Events like this make me want to stay in the military because I don't want the bastards trying to cover up what was a horrific mistake thinking I won't be right over their shoulder next time.
I have found virtually all the military members I was with in Iraq serious, professional (at least on duty!), and genuinely concerned for civilians. You saw the soldiers running out with the kids. Genuine concern there, from fathers, older brothers, cousins that know kids like that back home. The amount of work we did to keep civilians out of harms way was breathtaking sometimes because it put us in much more vulnerable situations. I'm good with that. I signed up, they didn't. As for the attitude and demeanor of the aircrew, yep, it's stomach-turning. I did see this on occasion, and it's not something I've seen many redditors say they teach you in training. It's a defense mechanism to deal with the privations and violence you see. Dehumanizing the enemy makes it easier to deal with it. If you've never read or seen a synopsis of On Killing you absolutely should. That's why running over a body was seemingly funny. I'm ashamed to say I've had similar gut reactions of really terrible things, and like those guys I feel awful about it when I reflect.
This post isn't to justify the killings, but hopefully to tone down some of the hyperbole. It's a terrible tragedy; it's a waste; I'd love to see us out of Iraq as soon as feasible. It's not a war crime. It's not 18-year-old kids just wanting to kill people for the fun of it. Now, let's all be pissed together that it took this long to get the real story out. OK, too long of a ramble but I needed to get it off my chest.
--end quote
Some posts further up try to link this to Christianity. Having watched the video there is no reason to make that link. This is secular brutality.
Patriotism is in-group bias, with group membership predicated on national identity. More poetic definitions ("the patriot wishes to make his country better") are wishful thinking, and rationalisations.
The pedant in me wants to say that the Abrams is not a tank. It's an infantry fighting vehicle: like an armoured personal carrier but more heavily armed.
Perhaps this will cause some of the outrage of the My Lai Massacre, and finally turn public opinion against the wars. Of course, one would have though the Abu Ghraib would have had the same effect.
@ #88:
"The pedant in me wants to say that the Abrams is not a tank. It's an infantry fighting vehicle: like an armoured personal carrier but more heavily armed."
The pedant in me wants to say that it was a Bradley IFV in the video, and that an Abrams IS a tank.
What fight? Please tell me what part of the video shows any of these people doing anything more than crouching at the corner of a building and peering down the street while holding an unidentified black object. And please tell me how the danger from one, maybe two guys with AK-47s is so great to a couple of Apaches hundreds or thousands of feet away that justifies ripping a group of people standing around unawares to shreds with 30mm cannon fire.
How do you surrender to a attack helicopter that mows you down while you're talking on your cellphone doing nothing wrong?
No, Christianity has a lot to do with. It isn't the sole factor, for sure, but the Christianization of the military and the militarization of Christianity supports this kind of action. Look at how evangelicals are picking up on military imagery to promote their cause. Look at how they use the invasion as a way to spread their religion. Look at how they glorify the war as a righteous act against heathens. With this kind of attitude, soldiers than see this as a justification to act violently against their enemy. There are a lot of patriots who are evangelical Christians. They believe America has so divine right to invade a heathen country like that.
The Guardian may have reported it, but using absurdly understated wording.
"Wikileaks video prompts US criticism"
Shouldn't that be "US soldiers massacre civilians?"
"Footage of July 2007 attack made public as Pentagon identifies website as threat to national security"
National security my ass. Soulless idiots that carry out actions like this are threats to world security. Why not focus on the right things? That'll be the day.
In the end I'm afraid can't agree with this, but I do say we should never forget that by far the biggest war criminals are the politicians who sent these kids there.
Jingoism isn't patriotism.
The question I have is, What did we expect? I served for 4 years in the Marine Corps (1996 - 2000) as a machine gunner. What I can tell you from my experience is that our best and brightest (the US) aren't the ones enlisting in our Armed Forces. Now, I loved my brothers very much, and still do, but the truth is we weren't even given the choice to think for ourselves even if we wanted to. The men and women in uniform likely had 2 choices. Enlist or work at Long John Silvers. Get the Fuck out of Po'dunk nowhere and try and start a life for yourself! At 18 and no $ for college, it was an easy decision. Luckily I didn't have to kill anyone and no one was trying to kill me.
We are killing people for natural resources. People that have rocks to defend themselves and cars that barely run. If they have weapons it's because we (the US) probably gave them the weapons. This is all being carried out by the people that avoided taking your order at Taco Bell, but still share the same skill set.
How do we stop it? Who can we rely on to say, "this isn't okay with me." They have to be on the inside seeing what happens in Iraq everyday don't they? The men and women there are all "Patriotic" duty-bound soldiers that will be seen by their peers as "Huge fucking pussies" if they choose to speak out against this type of behavior.
I FEEL HELPLESS!!!
Clearly they also weren't being fired upon. At all. Also, when did it become OK to kill people who simply have weapons, who you have no ability to contact and warn them to disarm? Even if you are correct in your assumption that those were weapons, I want to know why you think it's necessary to kill people who carry weapons in an area of the world beset on all sides by violence. They could have been bodyguards. They could just be civilians arming themselves. If our second amendment is so great, maybe we should allow it to apply in the areas we're illegally invading.
Wow, that sucks.
However, on this crappy video, I can't see any difference between a camera, an AK47, and a spatula, and the guy on the corner really looks like he has an RPG. Perhaps people who have been shot at by guys on street corners with RPGs, or know people who have, are prone to false positives? Especially hopped up on adrenaline! In places where guys with RPGs happen!
If someone told you that it was a video of americans gunning down actual combatants, could you tell the difference? If the victims were actually going to shoot down the helicopter, would you still be outraged?
The kids are barely visible, I didn't see them and I even knew they were there before I started the video, I was looking for them. Their heads are like 2 pixels wide in b/w.
People get desensitized, it's natural, stop whining when soldiers are happy after killing a bunch of people. Yes, it looks really unreal to the rest of us, but this is their job.
However(2), they are just walking around, talking on their phones. They don't look anything like soldiers. And the guy they said was going to shoot them with an RPG, why didn't he move when the helicopter went behind the building? the whole "he is getting ready to fire" thing doesn't make sense. And if he actually DID fire an RPG from there, he would have bbq'd everyone behind him. It doesn't make sense.
CAN'T THEY READ THE TEXT WITH THE ARROWS!? :D
However(3), they really seem to believe there were guys with RPGs and AK47s that were aiming at them. Why would they shoot them if they were civilians? This doesn't make sense either.
So, how about cutting the soldiers some slack instead of judging them by a crappy video. And aim your flame at the faggots who are trying to cover this up.
If these helicopter dudes were just too stupid, I hope they get sent home to flip burgers or something. If they are monsters, like most seem to think, i hope they crash and burn. If not, I hope they can find some way to deal with it before they lose they become any of the above.
This video makes me hate the following:
Warmongering
Politicians
Cover ups
Stupid people
War
And people who see this and go "omg they murder innocent people! even children!"
Mankind in general
Peace.
"An AK-47 and RPG are clearly visible at 3:45 if you bother to look, taking out the group was perfectly legit. As for the van, if it where marked then that would have been a clear cut war crime, but it wasn't and as such has no protective status. Personally I would have never fired on it, but ultimately until you surrender you are still in the fight. Being wounded does not make one not dangerous."
Presuming what you said is true, I don't care if they where waving around fracking ICBMs, WP @ #80, killing people hostile or otherwise is never legit. Killing bystanders is even less. Idiot!
This made me think earlier already, probably in ways it was not intended to do: http://www.thewarriorsong.com/video.html
Just who the fuck do you think you are, and just where the fuck do you think you're posting? Watch your mouth.
shitblade
I don't. I simply mourn the loss of their humanity.
Wow, some of the excuses....
Fighters for liberty, fighters for power, fighters for longer turns in the shower...
I honestly don't understand how anyone could be surprised by any brutality done by our, or any other, volunteer military. It is entirely full of people who signed a contract that says that they are willing to kill people for money.
I wouldn't want to not have a military. I understand the need. I just can't understand why people seem to worship and give adulation to what are literally hired killers.
These people did what they are paid to do: kill. The only part that deems investigation is whether they killed the people we did not direct them to and if they did it in proscribed way.
Ah yes, but at least we managed to impose a constitution anyone would be proud of!
http://www.ihec.iq/content/file/cor_laws/iraqi_constitution_en.pdf
hitblade:
No, I don't think I will. Unlike you, I use my brain, whereas you rely on blind patriotism and shit pulled from your ass.
Watch your mouth, you ignoramus.
Sorry all for making my first post on this thread about hitblade's "faggot" remark. I'm dumbstruck with horror at this video, and can't even compose a coherent post. That just tipped me over the edge for its sheer nasty gratuitousness, but the real horror is in this video.
ChrisD @102
Yes.
It is tragic, the loss of humanity in the killers, how their souls get drained in the chaos of war. It's why we SHOULDN'T fucking engage in it like it was the Superclassico and we hope our team will score a magical goal that'll make all our dicks hard and bring purpose to sad little lives.
War murders the weak, gives excuse for the petty tyrants, slaughters living, breathing, loving humans by the thousands, and drains the humanity of even the side with the moral high ground.
And when we don't even have that...
There is no end to the atrocities you'll get your people to support to avoid thinking about that. Yeah, sure, torture some people in Abu Ghraib, kill random cameramen and beg for a chance to keep shooting, anything to keep me from realizing that I'm one of the baddies.
That's fine by me. It irked me much more than usual too.
WP:
Wtf? Being wounded, clearly not being armed, and being horizontal, in the arms of two other unarmed guys, and he's still dangerous? Fuckwit.
If anybody wants to rewind four years and debate the merits of OIF then fine, do so. Personally I thought at the time, and still do, that it was an unjustified and foolish endeavor, and that whatever good that may have resulted would be utterly dwarfed by the massive destruction and human suffering that the process was sure to entail. If someone says otherwise I'll debate them all night, but I'm not going to waste my time in a pointless discussion of basic military realities with people who at all appearances have never been in combat and have no serious interest in the matter.
Prometheus: I don't think it is a fair inference that the helicopters saw the children or that the cameras were not Klashnikovs and RPGs.
I don't see how you can have it both ways. If they had a clear enough view to distinguish a camera from an RPG -- which one would have to be able to distinguish to justify shooting on civilians in an urban center who aren't pointing anything at you -- then you can see the kids in the van.
I couldn't even understand why the gunner kept on talking about eight men with AK's (multiple) and RPG's from the video. You can't see a damn thing, other than one man or two appear to be carrying something. Was he just making shit up for the recording? Was he insane, seeing AK's that weren't there in his mind?
The helicopter is perfectly safe. There are no troops on the ground that need immediate assistance. This is just civilians milling around, with the unconfirmed possibility that someone might have a weapon in a city in the middle of a civil war.
Are these our "rules of engagement"? Shoot if you have a suspicion that someone might be your enemy? In an urban zone? When all your troops are safe, and you can perfectly well stay out of range until you have real confirmation? Is the plan to just kill anyone who might be a "militant" -- screw the costs in civilian lives?
Isn't that the very definition of a war-crime -- to engage in war without any consideration for civilians?
Gravityloss,
Ugh. For a more sensible comment on the "warrior", I offer Hericletus:
“Out of every 100 men you send me to fight, 10 should not even be here, 80 are nothing but targets, 9 are real fighters – we are fortunate to have them – they the battle make. Ah, but the one, one of them is a warrior. And he will bring the others home.”
This. Seriously - what the hell? "Whoa there - no second chances for you! We meant to kill you dead the first time, so don't even bother crawling away." It's depraved. It's as if those fuckers in the helicopter were offended that their quarry had the audacity to still be alive, to struggle for his life.
Sometimes I hate humanity so. Watching this has affected me far worse than I would have thought. Were I religious, I'd describe it as feeling like a piece of my soul was killed. Damn it, damn it.
Thanks for the warning so I can pass on watching this.
If McCain/Lieberman get their way, it can happen here.
This incident is definately one of the worst I've seen/heard of from the war in Iraq, and is an example of what happens when soldiers have been hardened and brutalised by long tours of duty and exposed to a culture of disregard to the people they're supposed to be helping.
A few comments however, to those who think the best thing to do is pull out- Iraq is *very* slowly clawing at some form of legitimate government, and to leave now would be to potentially throw that all away. Like it or not, rebuilding efforts in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan require security first, and the Iraqi army and police alone cannot provide that at this stage. Invading Iraq was ridiculously stupid, both from a moral and strategic perspective, but now that we're there, we have a responsibility to try and get the best result out of it for Iraqis- and the US has been trying since the 2007 surge (which was a lot more than just throwing troops at the country) to work with Iraqi communities and the government to achive that aim. That is the other terrible thing about this incident in my opinion: that it goes completely against and does extreme harm to the overall strategy that the US and allies are trying to pursue- namely to work closely with local communities and the government in order reduce the impact of the extremists on the population.
For anyone interested in the strategy behind Afghanistan and Iraq, and combating terrorism in general, I highly recommend The Accidental Guerilla by David Kilcullen- he makes a very good argument for what strategies we should be pursuing, both in the current situation and in future, and why incidents like this one are very detrimental to them. Current strategical thought has progressed a long way from the opening of the war; the hard part is getting forces on the ground to apply those strategies reliably in a difficult operating environment.
I'm just surprised that people are surprised by war still.
That's not an excuse for it.
I don't think the people shooting are really monsters, although my post may have sounded like it. I do think that some people do at points get pleasure or satisfaction out of it. I think that propensity is in more people than we realize so when we are confronted with it, the fact is horrifying.
I think the pilots are acting the way that people do in war (no not all, but enough not to be surprising to me). Which is why it's so important not to start so many damned wars.
The most shameful thing really to me though is the attempt at cover up from the military later.
The blatant lies about what occurred are what have me particularly upset.
yup between..2:10 and 2:28 you can see one RPG that could have been mistaken for an AK. And then at 2:33 you can see another one, and it then being aimed at the chopper at 2:44.
I wrote this on the other blog to another crowd of "well, war, you're not military so you wouldn't understand, ROE" types:
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.
Fair enough ChrisD. (shitblade? I invented that)
Caine and Josh, are you defending the people who are trying to cover this up? If you ask me, they are the really bad guys in this sad story.
Caine again, I'm Swedish and not by any standards a patriot of any kind. I use my brain for things like relativism. If you accept the premises, you have to accept the conclusion:
i) The helicopter crew believed they saw armed men aiming at them.
ii) Their job is to shoot such men, if armed and aiming at them.
--------
iii) Their job is to shoot those men.
They didn't shoot the wounded guy cus he was unarmed. They shot at the van cus they were "collecting weapons". They assumed that the van-people were armed. I saw no evidence of this, but in the heat of battle, I assume it's very possible to make such a mistake.
And taken out of it's context, "Being wounded does not make one not dangerous." is true.
David Marjanovic wrote:
"That's not his fault.
It could at most be called his fault if it stays that way because he's not doing enough against it... but so far, it looks like he is doing against it what he can."
Whatever, David...you asked for an explanation of why Dr. Myers kept using "we". I gave you an answer...maybe you're just a little peeved because the answer implicates ALL US taxpayers, whether you supported the war or not(you're just one step removed from the baby killers)!
Of course, there is no way not to pay taxes...if you are feint of heart!
@WP in #112
"but I'm not going to waste my time in a pointless discussion of basic military realities with people who at all appearances have never been in combat and have no serious interest in the matter."
Bravo, thank you for reminding me why it is pointless to engage in this and similar topics on this particular blog.
Are you seriously so fucking stupid that you don't understand what we're objecting to? Look at my name, for Christ's sake. Don't call people faggots. It's not a general epithet to be used at people you don't like. It's a nasty slur. If in doubt about when to use "faggot," see if you think subsituting "nigger" would be acceptable.
Shithead.
hitblade:
Speaking for myself, no I'm not defending those who covered it up. That would be the military. I was offended by your use of the word faggots. Unnecessary, childish and ignorant. I take it you weren't calling those in on the cover up cigarettes, right? When you speak like that, you make yourself out to be an idiot.
As for the rest of your assessment, I disagree.
Caine and Josh, are you defending the people who are trying to cover this up? If you ask me, they are the really bad guys in this sad story.
So, "faggots" are bad guys? There are more than a few of us "faggots" on these boards.
faggot = gay.
good night ignoramuses.
Furthermore, to the point of this is war.
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.
Further to #125 -
What's even worse, hitblade, is that you obviously are too goddamned uninformed to understand it's not OK to use "faggot" as a general pejorative. It didn't even occur to you, it's apparently normal vocabulary for you, in public with no qualms on your part. Hugely depressing to be reminded that people so callous and boorish exist. Everywhere.
damn it... i mean "faggot =/= gay". i need sleep.
Honestly, one of the most horrifying thing's I've seen.
faggot = gay.
good night ignoramuses.
Don't you mean "good night faggots" since you're talking to gay men?
Holy shit MAJeff and Caine, look:
I'm actually (not rhetorically) shocked. He really (and you know it's a "he") actually doesn't get it. He tries to defend it by saying it's equal to "gay," you know, just another neutral pejorative. Like we're the ones who don't understand, and if we understood that faggot=gay we wouldn't be upset.
Oh, I need a drink.
You were calling people bundles of firewood?
damn it... i mean "faggot =/= gay". i need sleep.
REally? Then why do I get called that as an anti-gay slur when walking down the street?
dumbfuck.
Some of you see an RPG.
I see a collapsed tripod.
Some of you see an AK-47
I see a camera with a long lens.
I'd love to know who was right.
I'd love to know what hard evidence there was indicating that these guys were doing anything that warranted the attack by the helicopters.
What pisses me off most is the argument that if the situation is unclear then the soldiers have no choice but to act as if its a threat and defend themselves even if it means killing some innocent people.
BULLSHIT, BULLSHIT, BULLSHIT.
Soldiers, you're the ones with the superior firepower, you're the ones with the body armor, you're the ones with the massive advantage, you're the ones with the massive backup.
You're the ones who consciously decided to become a cog in a death machine. You're the ones who are getting paid hazard duty. You're the ones who are there by choice. You're the ones lauded as gorious, macho, as "armies of one."
If there's a situation where you have a choice between making an error and shooting an unarmed civilian, or making the opposite error and taking a bullet...
TAKE THE FUCKING BULLET.
They are NOT there by choice. They aren't going to be lauded as heroes by a massive propaganda machine. They aren't being paid, they're just trying to live their lives in a country we invaded and fucked up, trying not to die at our fucked up hands.
If its a choice between a member of an invading force shooting an unarmed victim of that invasion or taking a bullet himself, the moral choice is to... well, it's to not have joined an imperialist death machine in the first place but if it's too late for that,
TAKE THE FUCKING BULLET.
In any other circumstance, dying because you're trying to save an innocent or a child is honorable. Only in our fucked up army of conquest and victimization is killing a child because as the oppressor and conqueror you THOUGHT you might be at threat from those you oppress considered a moral, reasonable and responsible action.
Posed with a situation where you might be at risk if you wait to see for sure that someone who appears to be shopping for turnips actually, truly means you harm?
TAKE THE FUCKING RISK, macho soldier man.
No, you need some common fucking decency.
OK, I watched from 2:33 to 2:44 and Newfie #120 is totally right. One of them does sneak around a building and aim an RPG directly at the chopper. I guess it is possible that it is a camera, but it is ambiguous and does appear to have a handle when it is dangling where a camera wouldn't. And why would a journalist hide behind a building and then suddenly jump out and point the camera at the chopper? That looks hostile and could be interpreted that way whether or not it actually was. If this is the same video, why is that not being reported?
Video at 15:32, voice over.
"Well it's their fault for bringing their kids into battle. That's right."
I'm sure there are enough words in the English language to convey my disgust and outrage.
There is a recipe waiting for you in the Thread.
RE: Faggots
Oh yes, when evangelicals says that us faggots are going to hell, they really mean a bundle of sticks will be going to hell. /sarcasm
I seriously doubt he didn't know what you guys meant. Just another dumbfuck of a troll.
hitblade:
You need a brain, you flaming fucking moron. So, it doesn't mean gay, does it? It means what, a bundle of sticks to start a fire? How does that constitute an insult, o brainless one? It damn well does mean gay, it's a slur, used by ignorant assholes such as yourself. You've sure as hell insulted me, Josh, MAJeff and Cerberus, (and probably more) on just this thread alone.
Go to sleep. You can go to hell too.
hitblade: The helicopter crew believed they saw armed men aiming at them.
That simply not true. That's no where in the video -- at best they believed that the men on the ground had the capacity to shoot at ground troops, if the ground troops came closer
They're in a fucking helicopter, quite a distance away! You don't shoot at helicopters with AK's and RPG unless they're right on top of you, as far as I know. No one is pointing anything anywhere in the video, as far as I see. Never does the pilot or gunner say that they're under fire, or someone is about to shoot at them.
It's an absurd statement to say "they saw armed men aiming at them." They didn't even believe that they saw "armed men aiming at them." At best they believed they saw "armed men". At best.
How does that justify shooting into a group of civilians? Because one or two men may be armed -- but you are safely half-a-mile to a mile away? And can perfectly safely retreat quickly if you actually do feel you're in danger?
The entire video makes no sense unless you assume that these soldiers believe that they can legitimately shoot at civilians on the least suspicion that they may possibly be "militants". In other words, that they feel authorized to shoot whenever they see males gathered in any area where conflict has or may occur.
That seems pretty clearly a war-crime -- to act as if you had standing orders (or worse still, to actually have orders) to shoot into crowds of civilians because they are in the conflict zone.
This is what happens when people watch too many Kid Rock promotional videos for the United States Army. Awful...
Seth @137
Well, there was the inconvenient fact that
WE KNOW WHO THE FUCK THEY ARE!
We know that it's a collapsed tripod, a long-lensed camera, etc... because we know that these were Reuter's photographers preparing to head out and meet up with their colleagues. We have identification of who they were.
Reuter's spent long hours getting to the truth of their men's deaths. Why the military lied and covered up what happened to their men.
And now we know why.
The video drains me.
But the people on even the liberal threads. Desperate for an excuse where this can be excused or explained away, somehow less than it was.
They're the ones who have me weeping for humanity.
No, somehow, this was totally legit. Don't make me think bad things about war, you can't make me, you can't make me. Tanks are the only things that still keep me hard. Waah!
Fuck, man.
This right here is the banality of evil. The corrosion on our souls. And what lust for war breeds in our common culture. This is the fruit of all of our most hated qualities as a species.
Red John:
Sorry, not buying that. He obviously did know exactly what we meant, he showed that when he posted his "faggot =/= gay". He just didn't expect anyone to be insulted by it, which goes to show the extent of his assholism.
@aratina:
You could be right - trouble is, I don't know what I'm looking at, or what to look for. I have no idea whether it would be a reasonable inference to think that guy had an rpg (or how much more detail those in the chopper could see that we cannot in this video).
Even if that were an RPG, the blood bath that followed. . .I can't see how it can be excused. The sheer delight those bastards took in it nauseates me (running over a dead body. . hahah. . .wounded guy crawling around in his own blood. . .comedy gold).
aratina cage @ 141:
It's possible you aren't overly acquainted with serious camera gear, either.
You've sure as hell insulted me, Josh, MAJeff and Cerberus, (and probably more) on just this thread alone.
*raises hand*
I actually don't care if someone calls me a fag. I can usually determine when someone is being either homophobic with it or just equating it with the term 'stupid'.
But shitblade has no place using that word when it comes to an act this atrocious, and should certainly own up when called on it. It's just beyond tasteless to be calling people fags after an incident like this.
Even if that were an RPG, the blood bath that followed. . .I can't see how it can be excused. The sheer delight those bastards took in it nauseates me (running over a dead body. . hahah. . .wounded guy crawling around in his own blood. . .comedy gold).
It's like they're treating the battle as a video game. It's incredibly scary, isn't it?
On the subject of marked vans and for all those inclined to make excuses, I suggest that you look into the case Terry Lloyd.
Lloyd was an experienced ITN journalist, one of several members of the press in two clearly marked vans near the Shatt al Basra bridge. There had been a US/Iraqi fire-fight earlier but it was over. US marines fired on the vans despite their markings. A local citizen with a van came to pick up the wounded and the marines fired again into what was by then an ambulance. Several dead, of course, one still listed as Missing Presumed Dead. All unarmed, all civilians, most of them press.
There are at least four war crimes there: just identify them for yourselves, will you, as I want to get to bed. Start with a search on the BBC News site and then you'll discover much more all over the internet.
The US authorities exonerated the personnel involved and refused to cooperate with the inquest on Lloyd.
And all this was in March 2003. How can anyone with 3 braincells not know? How can anyone with 5 braincells not have forseen? My knees have still not recovered from all the marching I did in the months before that illegal, unnecessary and unplanned war.
Right, I'm off before I put my fist through this screen.
Does anybody know if we are seeing the exact same thing as the pilots saw? Or do the pilots have more visual options in a situation like this?
Smart move, Maureen. I should do the same.
I stand corrected. There were some posts inbetween mine and his that I had missed. To quote Dr. Watson, "What an arsehole".
He's in a war zone, and people at the end of the street are fighting, and he doesn't want to be a target? Or because it allows him to rest his long lens against something solid?
I agree, it could be interpreted as an RPG in the heat of the moment, although I disagree it's being pointed at the helicopter - with the benefit of hindsight, you can see it's a camera at 4:16. He's certainly not aiming it anywhere except below the line of sight to the helicopter - it looks like he's taking photographs of the street.
Unfortunately, it does mean that in the non-South Park world. But whatever, it doesn't make sense under any definition of the word in your sentence:
What in a Can of Spam did you mean by that? The people covering this up are not loud biker-gang members or gay and even if they were it would have nothing to do with it. So please tell us what you meant by that.
@147 S
Someone somewhere else on a base completely independent of the base where the Apache came from might have known who they were, but to assume that everyone outside the wire knew who they were, what they were doing and where they were going is ignorant. Many things don't get passed along because of people operating on different frequencies, not having anything to do with their mission, because someone deemed something "super secret squirrel", plans changing or just plain laziness.
There's the inconvenient fact that
WE KNOW WHO THEY WERE NOW BECAUSE WE ARE TOLD WHO THEY WERE. THOSE APACHE PILOTS MOST LIKELY HAD NO KNOWLEDGE OF THEM BEING IN THAT AREA, IF THEY EVEN KNEW WHO THEY WERE WHICH IS HIGHLY DOUBTFUL.
aratina-
It's a fucking camera. Specifically one of those super-long-lenses types you often see at sporting events. If it was an RPG, then his position would have meant he would have blown off his own face firing it as well as blowing up or severely crippling several of his fellow enemy combatant terrorists (or you know, the Reuter's photographers and crew they really were).
Wouldn't have justified half the shit they did even if it was an RPG though. The whole thing sickens me and it sickens me that we are so fucking cowardly as Americans to accept our shit sandwich. Yes, we did wrong in war. That's what war is, that's why we don't invade.
This is supposed to hurt, burn in our guts, and blind us with shame. It's so the next time someone wants excuse to use their shiny new tech on live test fire civilians in some heavily brown country, we know better next time. This video should be required viewing for every American until we stop viewing war like a fucking Michael Bay movie.
aratina cage: OK, I watched from 2:33 to 2:44 and Newfie #120 is totally right. One of them does sneak around a building and aim an RPG directly at the chopper. I guess it is possible that it is a camera, but it is ambiguous and does appear to have a handle when it is dangling where a camera wouldn't. And why would a journalist hide behind a building and then suddenly jump out and point the camera at the chopper?
Wow -- folks with magical eyes. "It could be a camera". When they ask to engage, they say "We have five to six individuals with weapons." We've seen two individuals with bags/guns/etc. They are sighting five guys with no apparent weapons.
Then they "see a guy with an RPG". You can see a guy looking in the direction of the helicopter from around a corner -- he might have an RPG, it could be a shadow, or his arm. Then "We've had a guy shooting" -- but they don't say at them, and we see no "shooting" on the video, or any sound of shooting. I can't tell what they're talking about, or whether they're just repeating something they think they heard the other guy say.
They come around the hotel. There's a bunch of guys still milling around -- apparently getting close to the buildings because they've noticed a helicopter overhead, one would assume.
We know two of the folks were journalists -- matching the two bags/rpgs/weapons we see. We never see the civilians reacting like soldiers/militants. They don't break up and go opposite directions. No one fires while the rest go in another direction quickly.
No one ever suggests that they might be unsure of this -- that anyone has to be sent in to "make sure" of what they saw. It's all blase, calm, quiet.
This isn't a hot situation, where you're within striking distance of an opponent and you either shoot or you're dead. This isn't a helicopter coming down under fire to pick up the wounded. This is a fucking patrol over a fucking civilian area which is perfectly capable of backing away if they think someone is actually fucking capable of harming them.
I don't know what you people are seeing. If you think that because you could "think you might be seeing an RPG" on a video like this, that that justifies shooting into a civilian crowd in a city ---
well, you're clearly not my kind of people. Not at all.
"So, how about cutting the soldiers some slack instead of judging them by a crappy video."
No, I do not think I will cut them any slack. For this poster, and WP and others, been there, got the scars. Served in Vietnam, been a Foreign Service Officer in Burma's 1988 civil war and served in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent times. Afghanistan was in the boonies.
Please do not insult people with the, "oh, you don't understand military realities" crap. Yeah, some of the comments here may, repeat may be over the top and no, most people here have never seen combat or served in the military. I have and I do not accept what happened in the video as justified. Like I said in my first post, they were not taking fire, no troops were present or in danger. They were over eager and their report made it sound like they were observing a heavily armed group and that they were in imminent danger, at least that is how I would have read it if I was the control officer back at base. They wanted to shoot, they reported in a way that supported their desire, they shot.
People here are reacting viscerally to something both real and horrifying. Had it been an armed group in uniform firing at the helicopter (unlikely in this type of war) it would still be horrifying. The fact that the people did not seem to pose an imminent threat does make it hard to view. The children make it worse, although I have to admit I probably would not have noticed kids in the van from what I saw. Insurgent wars are harder because you do not have the luxury of shooting at a uniform a different colour than yours. The guy selling melons is just as likely to be an armed insurgent as any one else. The fear and the constant strain mean you must be more careful, that senior officers must be more diligent. From the video, seems to me that the ROE needs review.
Support the troops? Yes! Best way I know to do that is to bring them home alive and as soon as possible.
davem:
Yep. I commented up above that aratina cage might not be overly acquainted with serious camera gear. It can be mistaken for a lot of things if all you have is a quick look. As a photographer, I can vouch for the highly bizarre positions you're willing to get into in order to get a photo. Large lenses in particular, which are meant to have a tripod support, can be supported with a portable mount, which is a platform and a handle, so you can move with them.
This video should be required viewing for every American until we stop viewing war like a fucking Michael Bay movie.
That's still not going to stop some people. I wonder how many at this moment are watching this video and thinking "wow that was awesome"?
I'm too disturbed to find out.
War needs to be spoken out against as exactly what it is - barbaric.
Thought I'd try and clarify comment № 117,
Check out Senate bill 3081. It seems to me that almost anyone can be classified as an "enemy belligerent" if they are a "person of interest".
Soo hopefully that bill goes nowhwere.
Umm, nowhere that is.
I suppose nowhwere is also a suitable place for the bill to end up.
I agree, but I can't bring myself to watch that far into it.
You're right, I'm not. And that combined with what Cerberus wrote in #147 makes it still seem likely that this was a war crime.
To all the people who seem to be defending this shit, let me just ask you a few questions, assuming you're not just trolls who rolled in from Redstate.
1) I'll admit I can't see much in the video. The quality is shit. The guy with the camera might well have had a rifle too. He might also have had a kitten in a Hannah Montana shopping bag. The main argument I'm hearing is "well you see it MIGHT have been a gun". Funny though, it seems to me that if you're going to kill someone you need more reason than "he might have had a weapon". but...
2) You will argue that this was like when the cops shoot a guy reaching for a cellphone thinking he was going for a gun. Tragic, but they HAD to act. Which brings me to...
3) Really? Last time I checked the Apache was an armoured ship. It can take a few rounds from an AK assuming that it was even possible for the people on the ground to hit the thing. This is not a traffic helicopter that you could shoot down with a 9mm. The RPG (if it was even real) is more serious but again, last time I checked the RPGs the Iraqis have are mostly old Soviet junk. Can they even track a gunship?
4) Finally, as someone upthread pointed out, Iraq is a gun culture paradise anyway. Everyone is armed and it's legal for each household to have an assault rifle. How do we know the "gang" wasn't just going to the gun range?
@159: Someone somewhere else on a base completely independent of the base where the Apache came from might have known who they were, but to assume that everyone outside the wire knew who they were, what they were doing and where they were going is ignorant.
How hard is this? You're not allowed to shoot into civilian groups unless you're under threat, or you have a clear military objective.
They had neither, with the information they had. If they didn't have the information -- they shouldn't shoot.
This isn't a battle. It's a fucking civilian street, with civilians walking around in the middle of the day. You have to be fucking sure to shoot at them when they can't shoot at you.
What's with the stupid apologetics? The only justification is if the copter believes they have a weapon that can reach a patrol helicopter before the helicopter can retreat -- that's the only basis that you should be able to shoot civilians on "suspicion".
It's only more damning that they didn't get info from "base". They weren't in a firefight -- they didn't wait until they got shot at -- and we know that several of the objects that looked like RPG's were not, in fact, RPG's but cameras.
Which means that they couldn't see any better than we can, if they mistaked them. Why? Because they were to far away to see them -- which means they weren't in imminent threat.
This is a fucking city! With men, women and children! With people carrying unclear objects -- because they're doing jobs!
Unbelievable.
And if you had any question about their attitude, well they fucking shoot at a car that passes by to pick up someone who's wounded. Apparently, that justifies shooting as well -- a possible militant is being picked up by a truck, with no sign that they're militants either. But they shoot!
Why? So the militant can't get to the hospital? After they've torn him up with heavy caliber weapons that, if he survives, will leave him utterly useless as a military asset? Where he's no threat to them, the truck is likely (and as a matter of fact is) civilian?
That's their fucking attitude. That all the Iraqis are combatants. That's the only explanation. Trying to find some little excuse for that takes us back to the WWII era, were civilians were fair-target. After all, they might be...
I don't mean to be the callous one here, but if they are looking through the same black and white camera we're looking at, the strapped cameras did look like weapons, and one of the individuals had a long cylinder looking object that resembled an RPG. And when one of the individuals was around the corner, it looked like he was aiming an RPG at them.
I think we realize they were holding cameras, only because we're made aware of it after the fact, but as a former marine I can quite well see why the soldiers though they saw weapons.
The soldiers seemed to honestly believe they were individuals carrying weapons, and the individuals in the van were coming to aid insurgents. I didn't notice the children in the van, until it was zoomed in later in the film, nor did the soldiers even once mention seeing them.
They followed the rules of engagement, but this time it was a tragic consequence.
I understand that individuals here are taken back by the apathetic nature of the soldiers, because our own privilege doesn't allow us to see how apathetic human beings easily become when exposed to violence quite frequently, when violence is just a part of everyday life. People die, and we loose the ability to sit there and sob over it.
This is just the nature of war, and how we encourage our soldiers to be. Conscientious objectors don't make good soldiers, and defeat the purpose of even having a military.
Depressing. Horribly so.
I remember when I was young and uninformed enough to think we were actually going to do something helpful with all this. :/
I'm not 100% positively sure, but if you go to the YouTube link above and watch the video at about 2:40 it looks like the guy they thought had an RPG actually had a camera with a long lens. At one point it looks like the whole thing is out from behind the corner and it appears to be short with a square base, like a camera. When the helicopter swings around you plainly see a guy with a camera, the same guy who initially tried to run when the firing first started.
Right, but you're forgetting the fact that we have people still trying to claim that the guys had RPGs when we know that they didn't. I'm obviously not referring to people who look at the video and say that they could understand how something might be misinterpreted as an RPG. I have seen people stating matter-of-factly that the men in the video were carrying RPGs. Well, guess what. They fucking weren't.
At that distance, you wouldn't hear the sound of the gunfire, but you'd be able to see the shooting easily enough. And people with rifles who are using them or about to use them move in very distinctive ways--compare the posture and gait of the group of Iraqis to the American ground troops later in the video.
Soldiers are mentally trained for combat as well. It can seem like a "macho-video game player" mentality.. and it is. You want people to be able to make good and timely reactions, automatically.
These guys looked to be on patrol for insurgents, and were in communication with others. We see what one camera sees, and hear what more than one are saying, some that have a different angle and larger field of view than that one camera, and we don't know the detail, though I'm assuming less than the camera's optics.
I saw what looked like RPG's in the video, and the crew asking superiors for permission to fire, after describing the situation as they saw it.
Yes, I saw guys with photo equipment also. And at one point a voice is heard identifying a weapon, while the guy with a camera was centred in the frame. Same with the tank rolling over the body, it's highlighted, but how can you derive intent from that?
Yes, if you follow the arrows in this edited video, after watching a sympathetic introduction, you'll likely come away with the view that the edited version intended you to come away with.
It's propaganda.
I'll wait for a transcripted analysis by experts, as I can't actually know what happened here.
Most days I drive to and from classes at my uni, all I have to worry about is incompetent Irish drivers and I can see them.
I have not spent months or years of repeated deployment living in fear of unseen IEDs going off and taking my legs or worse. I have not been shot at by snipers, took heavy fire from assault rifles and rpgs or wondered if the seemingly innocuous vehicle / people are actually intent on facilitating my death.
My point is that it is all very well for us in our comfy homes, sat on our comfy desk chairs to hurl self righteous anger and opine on just what the soldiers should have seen, should have done and acted afterwards. Fact is that hardly any of you have even the slightest idea of what war is like — which is fortunate, what it does and how it feels. You have no idea of the stress or mental toll, and no idea of how things look on the ground. Hindsight is just bloody wonderful, as is slow careful examination of the footage. Until you walk in their shoes, in their environment then you have no real understanding from which to make an informed decision.
Whether right or wrong the US invaded Iraq, having invaded and overthrown Saddam's regime it just could not up and leave the mess it had created. America had to administer the mess it created and the troops are there because of that. The soldiers are there because their job is to go where their government sends them, it is not a pleasant job, it is not a fun job. It is a dull job of boredom punctuated by spells of sheer terror, where grievous injury and death are never far away. The people trying to kill them look just like everyone else as do the vehicles they drive. These people also routinely detonate themselves or the vehicle they are in to kill soldiers, or more commonly their own countrymen. This creates a very tense, stressful environment where mistakes can and will happen, and where hesitation may result in your own or other civilian deaths.
Me, I'll need to see an investigation that finds fault with their actions, I'll not condemn them or hurl abuse at them on foot of one video and my stunning, fortunate lack of comprehension of what war is like at the front. I'd suggest that all the other similar arm-chair experts do likewise.
The children were hard to see but the fact that the van was there to carry off the wounded was something the soldiers were well aware of from the dialog. Why they ever got permission to fire on what was essentially an ambulance is beyond me.
@ Alpinist #87.
Thank you for posting this. I wanted to write something to that effect, but I didn't have the words.
War is hell. I've been through two. Things I witnessed while I was in Iraq (2003): friend in gunner hatch beheaded while driving down the road, due to wire pulled taught across the road. Iraqi kids dropping large rocks on me and friends in the back of an open-back vehicle (broke a friend's arm); We didn't fire back because they were kids. Friend lost his elbow from insurgents placing ball bearing in an IED. Friend electrocuted to death. Vehicle suicide bomber killing over 50 innocent Iraqi civilians (they were working on our post). Same incident, a friend survived the blast, he was standing 3 feet away from the car when the bomb went off.
Second hand witness (heard from friends who witnessed, and saw aftermath): passenger side of vehicle blown completely off; few to no remains of passenger (I didn't know the guy). Mortar hit a cement wall, shrapnel hit friend along his side and leg. Insurgent blew up only iraqi (civilian) hospital within 50 miles, because americans helped build it.
We were hit with mortars on a daily basis, sometimes multiple per day. I've seen civilians used as shields by insurgents. I was on radio duty on day, and listened to a sister unit in a fire fight. I listened to a trained man lose his mind that day, and break down crying on the radio when the rest of his crew was killed in front of him. He was a lieutenant. I've seen insurgents steel Iraqi police uniforms, and wore them, so we wouldn't be able to tell the enemy from friend. I saw a man's leg sliced clean off from a shotgun blast (iraqi police officer firing upon an insurgent); it was the first time I learned how inaccurate shotguns are portrayed on movies.
On another war front (Kosovo), I saw the aftermath of a macedonian soldier kidnapped by two serbian soldiers. They tied him to the back of their car, and drug him along the freeway. Then they started torturing him. Then they carved his name into his chest before releasing him. I never found out why.
War is hell, and you need serious training to be able to handle it psychologically. I had that training, and I still had problems when I came home. A good friend of mine didn't have that training (he was a mechanic, who was unlucky enough to be caught in a firefight). He shot a man who surrendered, because he thought the man made a signal to other insurgents. He was wrong. It's been years, and he still has issues.
When you're out there, you make on-the-spot decisions that cost people their lives. Usually, and if you're right, they were the enemy. Sometimes, you're wrong, and you live with that the rest of your life, like my friend is right now.
One of the things that makes it worse is Armchair Generals, or people who've never been to war (or any intense, extreme environment), and judge you from their armchairs. You get judged for an on-the-spot decision that may or may not have been right by people who've never experienced what it's like to have to make split decisions while your adrenaline is pumping, while you're sleep deprived and stressed. We trained hard just to be able to act and make decisions in environments like that. Back in the civilian world, I've seen people crumble, collapse, pass out, or just go blank, in extremely stressful environments (I worked as an EMT after the war for two years, and I volunteered for the Red Cross).
I don't know if the men in the video were right or wrong. I didn't watch all of it (got to the part where they shot the unmarked van), as I got tired of seeing just more war. I've been of the opinion that we need to abandon this war for a number of years now.
However, For those of you who are being Armchair Generals, please stop making it worse than it already is.
Thank you,
- A veteran
ivan @171
Which is exactly why we shouldn't be in wars when we can avoid them and we should get the fuck out when we're dicking around "nation building".
Wars are de facto atrocities. They will breed atrocities against the civilian population on a level of mass misery unsurpassed by most aspects of human existence.
And we go, so often, war, hell yeah, oh atrocities, they happen, collateral damage, can't be helped.
Yes, it can be helped by not jumping into war willy-nilly. By using examples like these as the reason why you don't engage in a war of aggression, period, not without a moral reason so big it will justify the atrocities you WILL enact pursuing it.
And Americans in particular have gone so long without a war on their soil, that war has become entirely cinema. Something that occurs and oh well, who cares? That show sucks now, sort of deal.
We need to stare these atrocities in the face because this is what war looks like 24/7 when it occurs where you live. And the fact that it's our own men, means we can actually empathize more, sad to say.
But this is war, yes. And that's why we shouldn't be treating war like a big football match to see who'll top the league table. War is not heroic, triumphal, a means to make men out of boys.
War is misery, death, meaningless violence, and endless streams of atrocities like this.
Cause every dead body, every "nice kill" whether armed or not, whether "insurgent" or "civilian" had parents, had friends, had dreams, had loves, had a beautiful mind snuffed out.
And every killer loses a piece of their soul being molded into a machine that would sooner snuff out a random stranger's life than blink, devoid of empathy or humanity so that "our side" will have more survivors than "their side".
War is deliberately hell.
So we should start treating it as such instead of treating it like Captain Awesome's Excellent Adventure of Sandbox Toy Fun!
@ FROG INC. #170
I am in no way defending their actions, see my post way back up at #67 where I point out what they did wrong in regards to the ROE's. I was just pointing out where someone tried to pass off their assumption as fact in my post at #159
ivankaramozov: I think we realize they were holding cameras, only because we're made aware of it after the fact, but as a former marine I can quite well see why the soldiers though they saw weapons.
So what? They "thought" they saw weapons. They were wrong -- so apparently they didn't see well enough to distinguish a camera from an actual weapon.
So they shoot into a crowd, then shoot into a van. Even though they could justify shooting into a crowd because of their super-vision -- they couldn't stop from shooting at children, because apparently their supervision doesn't extend to children.
This is just BS. They weren't on a battlefield. They weren't approaching a village on a patrol. They weren't surprised by hikers.
They were patrolling a city. They have to know that the false positive rate is going to be huge. That they're much "safer" than the folks on the ground.
No, it's not justifiable. If that's justifiable, then I'm justified shooting at someone at a bar who picks up a bottle looks like they might break it to use as a weapon.
Let's put some numbers -- how many Apache's have been knocked down over Baghdad? Unless this is a common occurence that we haven't seen reported, all apologetics are bullshit. Unless, in fact, Baghdadis have been knocking down helicopters, you can't start shooting at them because you're "afraid". The only case I found was in 2003 an Apache was knocked down when attacking a "terrorist training camp" -- presumbly a fortified position.
Ol' Greg: But Dubbyah's masters said no phosphorous incendiaries were used - only illumination rounds. (Even though reading the accounts of people on the ground, they would either all have great familiarity with the phosphorous warheads or else those weapons really were used despite claims to the contrary.) And there *are* weapons of mass destruction! And nukular bombs! Yeah, don't you just love dumbshits? Don't forget we'll only be there for a "few days, not weeks". I wonder if the Iraqis are missing their old murderous dictator and how the "incidental casualties" in this war compares with Saddam's murder sprees.
For the last damn time, being in war and being shot at does not justify random and/or over eager shooting. Yes, the stress is huge. That is why people need tighter control and tighter ROEs and finally why they need to be jerked out of there and brought home. PTSD is going to be major problem from both of these wars simply because there is no front line, no safe areas. Let us not make it worse by letting the troops dehumanize themselves even more by making Baghdad a free fire zone. Most of these soldiers are going to regret anything they did which was questionable, but that will be way in the future when no one cares anymore...just another set of screwed up vets whining about nightmares, eh? Bring them home now.
Heading toward 2am soon, going to bed.
I rarely post here, especially on these topics and Jarred C. in #179 sums up why.
Great post. If I may, I would like to nominate it for a Molly.
JeffreyD, thank you for your posts. Your experience matters and you've given an excellent viewpoint on a difficult subject.
Yeah, I bet these pregnant women who were shot and then had bullets dug out of their dead bodies to cover it up were huge threats as well http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/world/asia/05afghan.html and here is a video of a man talking about Nissour Square when blackwater fired on a crowd of unarmed civilians, killing at least fourteen, one of them this man's nine year old child http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100215/scahill_video
From ABC news, http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/blackwater-chief-accused-murder-gun-runni… here's a description of the words contained in an affadavit of an Iraqi man involved in legal action against Blackwater
"Blackwater personnel routinely attacked and killed innocent Iraqis who posed no security threat, sometimes without informing the State Department of the incidents, and that they sometimes used powerful automatic weaponry that was barred by their State Department contract. He also said that Blackwater personnel destroyed videos that showed them conducting criminal acts of violence."
Here's info from the case of Abeer Kassem, who was a fourteen year old who was raped and murdered by American soldiers http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1543650/US-soldier-jailed-for…
"Sergeant Paul Cortez, 24, admitted he was among five soldiers who broke into an Iraqi home, raped the 14-year-old girl, then shot her and her family and set fire to the house. "
This isn't a one time mistake, this has become the MO of the US military and the Blackwater mercenaries. Murder, rape, and cover up, welcome to US imperialism.
@182
Actually a lot of Apache's have been taken down...
By our own forces.
Friendly fire has been the casualty of a good number of helicopter crews in the two wars, including several incidents where Apaches crashed into each other and the government tried to report it as "insurgent fire".
And frankly, if we are frightened by the lawlessness of the country we are occupying, that we broke, we're not going to fix it. I know, the moral weight of leaving it to decay, blah blah blah. But guys, we broke it. They don't trust us, they shouldn't trust us, and we're still making a habit of killing them left, right, and center because "we don't feel safe".
We need to stop treating this like a video game, like we'll just reach the next boss if we keep at it. It's real life and real lives and as long as we're still blowing their shit up? There just will never be enough safety for anything to spring up that's any level of stable.
We've created terrorist states that hate us. That's what we get for engaging in wars of aggression (much less wars of aggression and occupation against countries that had little to nothing to do with what we were upset about). We need to accept that and the atrocities we have done and stop making it worse.
If you've ever wondered what results when the military attracts people like Eric Harris...well, here's your answer.
...this crap reminds me why I was once called a 'militant pacifist'...and expelled from school for 2 weeks... :/
Anyways, here is the IBC Database entry k6936 for the incident
------------------------
10, including 2 Reuters staff in clashes between US and militants, Al-Ameen, Baghdad IBC Incident :k6936
Type :gunfire, US air fire, mortars, rockets
Deaths recorded : 10
Targeted or hit : clashes between US forces and militants, dead including 2 Reuters employees
Place :Al-Ameen, Baghdad
Date and time :12 July 2007, 11:00 AM
Individuals for whom personal or identifying details were reported
Daughter of dead woman, Unrecorded age, Sex Female
Namir Noor-Eldeen, age 22, Sex Male
Saeed Chmagh, age 40, Sex Male
Individuals for whom only demographic or other non-personal information was reported
Number killed -Occupation - Age - Sex
1 - Unrecorded - Adult - Female
2 - Unrecorded - Child - Unrecorded
Of the 10 deaths recorded here, some personal information was reported for 3 of the dead.
Only demographic information, without any identifying details, was available for 3 other people recorded killed.
Neither personal nor demographic information was reported for 4 other people killed in this IBC entry.
------------------------
Red John #16
Uhm...?! You got to watch news channels from foreign countries if you want to learn about what's going on in the US of A dirty business.
This is an example of what I think is the difference between "responsibility" and "fault". (Others may disagree.)
This monstrosity was committed in our names, justified at least in part as for our benefit/protection, and ultimately sanctioned by a political process we participated in, benefited from, and continue to choose to participate in and benefit from.
We are responsible for this, and we share this responsibility with every other U.S. citizen, even though we are not at fault.
And by disseminating this information, and criticizing it, PZ is accepting his portion of the responsibility, assuming ownership or it, if you will. As are all the rest of us who are participating in this discussion.
Reminds me of some of the problems police departments have had. Prejudice, plus inexperience, plus adrenaline fuck with the brain. Even worse, the greater the number of people pumped up in the situation, the less likely critical thinking.
I'd be willing to bet that the soldiers 100% believed they saw weapons and enemies.
@179
Yes, war is hell, and it makes monsters of all those fighting and victims of all those caught in it. It occasionally releases the best in us, but far more often releases the worst as the only way to survive is to lose one's humanity until the only people that matter are one's immediate family or squad.
I think many of the "armchair generals" at least on the hippie peacenik side, understand that and understand the unique and hideous position soldiers are asked to be put under for reasons that one eventually hopes were good enough and will end up with nightmares that the vast majority of us at home will never have to suffer.
And I think most of us hippie peacenik types understand this so thoroughly, that things like this serve as great underlines for a fact so often lost in especially American culture. Which is that war is hell so we shouldn't be actively diving into it, actively seeking it out and shoving our weight around and treating it like a fun game.
It is a hell, dehumanizing for the soldier, life-ending for the civilian, traumatizing for generations for everyone involved. And yet, in America, we've had at least one conflict every decade. Almost all in 150 years, wars of aggression or occupation, heavily cheered into and with forces slow to leave.
It's a cancer that needs to stop, because war is hell. I can understand how those pilots could be reduced to doing that. But this horror is what war is. It's not bunting, it's not hero's processions, and kissing your lady at the dock. It's atrocities and death and endless nightmares for the rest of your life.
And this shit needs to be pushed back on for all of our sakes.
War isn't a rite of manhood, war is hell.
My excuse is that I don't like being lied to or having information withheld from me in news reports, and Newfie gave the exact places to look for an RPG on the leaked video, and I looked, and I saw what had been called an RPG. So fuck me for not knowing it was a special camera that was whipped out and pointed at the chopper. No, it doesn't justify the slaughter when they swing around the building, nor does it justify a single bullet fired by the US military in that situation, not for a moment. Nothing that happens on that video is sane. It really illustrates how badly this unethical preemptive striking policy we see taking over the military and law enforcement in the USA needs to be stopped.
yup.. just like China, eh?
Right. I could have been more clear that I meant coverage in US media. The foreign media seems to be much more on top of it than we are. Sigh.
I'd just like to point something out: as an example, the maximum range for an RPG-7 (the Soviet mass-produced RPGs that are most common in the Middle East) is about 1000 meters. That's maximum, at which point the thing self-detonates.
If you look at the Wikipedia article, you'll see that the US Army has determined that the hit probability on a 5 x 2.5 meter target moving at 4 m/s at 500 meters is about 4%. The helicopter is somewhat larger than that, but almost certainly at least a kilometer away and moving much faster.
The helicopter crew would have been briefed on these numbers. They knew there was no chance in hell that a guy with an RPG could hit them at that range.
There was zero reason to engage right then and there without any further confirmation, unless they just wanted to see a pretty pile of bodies.
Oh, by the way, how is Tiger Woods doing this year?
I heard he had trouble with his marriage and started above par this year....can't really tell, because I trashed my TV :)
@JarredC: However, For those of you who are being Armchair Generals, please stop making it worse than it already is.
You've got it all backwards. It's bad because those in "armchairs" have let generals and politicians be in charge, have refused to hold people responsible for their wars, have "supported the troops".
War is too important to leave to soldiers. Wars continue because folks back home feel comfortable leaving it in the hands of the soldiers -- who'll keep on fighting as long as they're asked to, as long as they're paid, as long as someone is telling them it's the right thing to do.
If it wasn't for the "armchair generals", we'd still be fighting in Vietnam. Soldiers are in no position to judge -- precisely because they're in the middle of the shit. Precisely because they have huge psychological commitments. Precisely because they're being asked to deal with very dirty things, and do dirty things.
Who would you say is best judge of whether the Iraqis should "rebel" against the US? Militants or civilians? Do you think the militants will ever stop as long as the civilians back them in what they're doing?
Why do we make efforts to cut out the support of civilians for insurgents? Why do we try to make them the judges?
Some of the camera equipment did sort of look like possibly a weapon to me, too.
But I kind of expect professional, trained, U.S. soldiers to be better at identifying weapons than I am.
But even if those were weapons, there was no indication of anything remotely resembling hostile action prior to the chopper opening fire.
And after the first shots were fired. Well, if you were a civilian who suddenly had something rain destruction on your position, wouldn't you try to duck and cover? And if you had a gun, wouldn't you be tempted to try and shoot back? And if you were a reporter with a camera, and you noticed the helicopter, your professional instinct might well be to try and take a picture of it.
If this was done in accordance with the ROE. If the ROE actually allows the arbitrary snuffing of anyone just carrying something that looks like a weapon. . . .
Well, then the ROE itself is evil.
"War is too important to leave to soldiers. Wars continue because folks back home feel comfortable leaving it in the hands of the soldiers --
...which is a very good argument for universal mandatory conscription. That would probably get a lot of Americans to think twice before voting for the hawks.
How many of the "armchair generals" here would support that? (Granted it will never happen.)
Red John:
That's been going on a good long while. I've lost track of how many years ago I gave up on U.S. news for info; I mostly watch BBC news. U.S. stuff, Rachel Maddow, mostly. CNN is a joke. I don't have TV at the moment, we're running a generator for power right now, and can't afford to run the TVs, but I'm not sorry I can't see just what the main U.S. news channels are covering at the moment. I am wondering about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert though.
aratina cage: My excuse is that I don't like being lied to or having information withheld from me in news reports, and Newfie gave the exact places to look for an RPG on the leaked video, and I looked, and I saw what had been called an RPG.
Who was lying to you, or withholding information? The video has the sound track, points out the people. When you see the "rpg", you can hear the gunner, I believe, saying that he "sees an rpg". 'Cept it looks to me like a shadow, or an arm, or a camera, or a reflection.
What is newfie's great "discovery" that isn't clear on the video? That there's a smudge spot that kinda looks longer than it's wide? Seriously?
Are you that sure of anyone's perception for a second or so? Wikileaks never says what the smudge is -- they don't comment one way or another. They just give the facts -- who was known to be there, what equipment they were known to have, etc.
amphiox:
I have that same expectation. Supposedly, they have equipment for doing just that.
Speaking as a photographer, the answer to that is a resounding yes.
@Cerberus, 192
"Which is that war is hell so we shouldn't be
actively diving into it, actively seeking it out and shoving our weight around and treating it like a fun game."
I wholeheartedly agree.
I wasn't arguing or discussing whether we should be at war (or whether it is right), I was talking about those who criticize on-the-spot decisions in a time of extreme stress, while at the same time never having experienced such a thing themselves, and somehow believe that they would have acted differently or better in the same scenario.
In the comfort of my own home, while sitting in my chair in front of this computer, I have all the time in the world to dissect an issue and determine the best course of action. I do this all the time with me college homework (by the way, thank you to all you tax payers for supporting my college education via the gi bill). Just like all of us do.
During timed tests, however, I see my classmates get anxious, nervous, and often make simple mistakes they wouldn't make on homework. It's a minor version of a stressful situation. Imagine what kind of simple mistakes such a person would make in an extremely stressful situation. Such a thing could cost someone their life. Perhaps in such an extreme situation, you pull a fire-arm instead of a taser, and kill someone. Or you mis-identify an object as a weapons, and you fire. Or you honestly believe that item someone is pulling out of their inside jacket pocket is really a pistol, and you shoot first. Or the opposite happens, and you're now dead. Or you believe that the pothole on the ground you saw out of the corner of your eye is innocuous, and the next thing you know, your friends are dead from the IED.
And yet, we somehow feel justified in condemning and criticizing those on-the-spot decisions, because we believe we would have acted differently; but in reality, would we?
The only way you can answer that is to experience it.
yahoo @ 200:
A lot of us didn't vote for them in the first place, you moron. The draft wouldn't cause any of the jingoistic assholes to think differently, they'd enjoy going off to kill.
They hate us for our freedoms. [H/T Glenn Greenwald] Good on you for getting this out there more, PZ. I feel sick, too.
Caine:
Moron am I? I didn't say you voted for any hawks.
"the draft wouldn't cause any of the jingoistic assholes..."
I think it would and I think you are kidding yourself if you believe even the tiniest fraction of those that vote for hawks see combat or even want to see combat.
You can chill with the invective. It's unnecessary.
"I wasn't arguing or discussing whether we should be at war (or whether it is right), I was talking about those who criticize on-the-spot decisions in a time of extreme stress, while at the same time never having experienced such a thing themselves, and somehow believe that they would have acted differently or better in the same scenario."
"And yet, we somehow feel justified in condemning and criticizing those on-the-spot decisions, because we believe we would have acted differently; but in reality, would we?"
That's no excuse... yes they are under pressure, but they've been trained to keep cool in those circunstances. Hear their voices again. Do you hear despair? Those shooters were calm, that was just another routine occurence.
How many situations like that happened and didn't leak out?
frog, Inc.,
I did not watch the video before Newfie pointed out the specific points that at the time seemed to refute the news reports (I'm not really interested in seeing real gratuitous violence). BBC does not say that a camera which could be mistaken for a weapon is clearly pointed at the chopper in the video and neither does the Guardian article, so it seemed like they were both glossing over that fact.
Thanks for boosting the signal for statesiders, PZ.
$50 to Wikileaks from me. Worth it, even from a grad student's budget.
Not like China. China = 1984 USA = Brave New World. There's no top down censorship, only "better stories"
@frog #198,
I think you are arguing against a point I didn't make. My post at #204 expands slightly.
I was not commenting on whether we should be at war, or whether it is right and just. I was not arguing that civilians should not be involved in decision making in regards to war. Hell, I live in America, and swore to protect a republic/democracy. If the population doesn't want to be at war, then we shouldn't be at war. I am a part of that population that doesn't want to be at war.
This is different from the point I was making, and by reading my post at #204, I believe you'll see that.
@200: which is a very good argument for universal mandatory conscription. That would probably get a lot of Americans to think twice before voting for the hawks.
Only if it's very general conscription. Say all men and women between the ages of 18 and 50. Without loopholes. If you vote for war, you are likely to go. Not some kids, not poorer people, not another gender.
Universal, for real.
I am writing this and identifying myself as veteran who served in OIF and OEF, because apparently this gives you more credibility or something when you are commenting on the atrocious behavior or military members.
I am writing this simply to say that any American citizen has every right to comment on any action taken by any military member at anytime that is representing the United States in an official capacity. This is our country and military members serve the nation. It is a sacrifice that one makes when they wear the uniform and that necessarily makes their life subject to greater expectations of higher performance. Each and every mistake will be scrutinized and criticized and that is tough but it's part of the chosen life. If you don't like it then you are free to not renew your contract with the government when that time comes.
The military is an extension of America whether we like it or not. For some reason people act as though it is some autonomous entity that's above critique from the average citizen. How dare anyone say that American citizens don't have a right to judge their military, especially someone who should know what service is about.
This is a representative democracy and we make the collective decision to go to war together even if we all don't support it. We are the owners of this war and we ultimately sanction it with our vote. We have every right to be armchair generals all we like, and members of the military must serve all the same.
"Only if it's very general conscription. Say all men and women between the ages of 18 and 50. Without loopholes. If you vote for war, you are likely to go. Not some kids, not poorer people, not another gender."
Yes, that's exactly what I meant. I didn't used to think so, but more and more these days I am beginning to believe it's the right answer.
Sickening. Just sickening.
The bastards even had the gall to say that everything was being done for the children.
Even if they had done everything they could, that wouldn't have mattered.
@ 214:
Thank you.
While I do think this is Horrific I dont think the Helicopter pilots/Gunners were totally wrong.
I watched it a few times and I saw what appeared to be 1 AK 47 and 1 RPG held at ease (never pointed anywhere but at the floor) my guess would be these were "bodyguards" for the newsreporters.
As the helicopter circles around I can quite clearly see someone kneelying at the corner (when the gunner says he sees shooting) since the people i saw with weapons hadnt reached the corner yet I think this was the photographer taking photos of the circling helicopters (a good shot to have)
With weapons seen and what they misinterpreted as shooting I can understand why they opened fire
I can remmeber a quote from a BBC reporter who was being airlifted by a helicotper and asked what the constant banging noise was - the pilot laughed and replied "Thats the bullets bouncing off the hull", helicopters came under regular attack at this point (and maybe still do) and this has to put the pilots on edge
The problem is all they had were the eyes from 2 cameras constantly moving - when they decided to shoot they couldnt even see the targets due to cover - why air support is allowed to engage withhout eyes on the ground confirming hostiles is just beyond me and is an utter recipe for more horrifcaly bad situations like this to happen - the pilots wernt at fault - the system which allowed them to fire with no confirmation of hostilities from the ground is at fault (ground troops wer ein the area but hadnt even seen the group)
"How dare anyone say that American citizens don't have a right to judge their military,"
I don't think that's what Jarred was saying, it seemed to me that he was just making the point that having the right to judge someone doesn't necessarily make you wholly qualified or an expert on judging such things.
I am thinking he will clear this up for us though.
-Another vet
Operation Yellow Elephant made a rather amusing point of inviting young Republicans to join the military. Max Blumenthal did the same thing.
The "jingoistic assholes" are chickenhawks.
@ frog
What is wrong with the good old theme "Never again war!" ??
No soldiers -> no war.
@ #214
"We have every right to be armchair generals all we like, and members of the military must serve all the same."
I'm assuming this is directed at me, since I brought it up.
Of course you have the right to judge another's on-0the-spot action during violent and extreme situations from the comfort of your own home, never knowing what it is like to experience a similar situation. I was not arguing that you should not have that right.
I was arguing that a person should not engage in such an activity, because it does not help the situation; it only makes it worse.
Yes, we should evaluate what happened, determine if there was fault or not, determine if punishment should be administered, and determine if (and what type of) further training is necessary for the soldiers involved.
But it doesn't really help to say, "you did that? you're a vile and contempt evil person, and I would never do such a thing in your shoes."
There is a difference.
If those guys fill out enough forms, they'll be OK.
More paper = cleaner ass.
@JarredC: I think you are arguing against a point I didn't make. My post at #204 expands slightly.
No, I think I am arguing the same point. It's not enough to judge the overall strategy -- to judge the generals and politicians.
We have to judge the actions of the soldiers on the ground. Now, I understand that many of the situations are difficult, people fuckup, hell, people are dying and killing -- we can't judge soldiers in battle the same way we judge our neighbors cutting the lawn.
That's understood. War is hell, and all soldiers must do things that outside of war would be monstrous.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't and can't judge the limits of what is acceptable. If that's too onerous for the soldiers -- if we're demanding something unrealistic -- then the soldiers shouldn't fight.
If society isn't willing to accept the moral responsibility for what the war entails, then the war shouldn't be fought.
You talked about what you saw in Kosovo. Shouldn't the Serbians see what soldiers did in their names? Shouldn't they take responsibility? Shouldn't they say -- if you can't fight within these bounds, we don't want you fighting for us at all? If they don't do that, aren't they consenting to those acts?
War is an evil mess. Sometimes it's unavoidable and necessary. When a society chooses to go to war, they should do it with a clear mind on what are their limits to the war. It should be clear to everyone -- soldiers and civilians alike. If the moral price is too high too bear, if winning requires acts which we are unwilling to do for that victory as a society, then we shouldn't fight.
If we did that, we'd only fight defensive wars. Atrocities that are often necessary in war can only be justified if you are defending your survival and independence.
Jarred @204
Which is a what you did versus what you are kind of deal. I have great empathy for the unique way war makes temporary monsters of honest men, the pressure cooker situation. But what men will do in such a state is monstrous.
We get that excuse all the time with regards to the number of unarmed black males gunned down by police. Well, stressful, split-second decision. And I can empathize, indeed, with that unique environment, but those atrocities keep occurring and not all of them are for innocent reasons. When everything can be blamed on stress and you're trained to view the enemy as inhuman, you can do things you would never do.
And if you are a bastard, you can have all the excuse to do whatever you want, release whatever dark piece of your soul resides in the split second decision. Not all, not even most, but a deadly, vile some.
And even among the all, that split-second decision will lead to mistakes, to out-of-character moments, of all sorts of behavior, things that are in the "what you did" aspect, atrocities, murders, the snuffing of human lives.
The context means I have sympathy on the "what they are" scale and slow to call them inherently evil, only that the circumstances or some piece of dark soul unlocked by the circumstances has led to them performing an atrocity. Cause "what they did" is monstrous.
And good men of conscience who do this will carry those what they did when they're safely at home and the nightmares flood back in and that's tragic.
As I've said a lot, war breeds atrocities. I can understand the how. The how is in the nature of war, how it twists all involved in painful, horrible ways.
It's why war is bad.
I know, crazy concept. And we do need to highlight the bad of "what they did" often, because these atrocities are part of it and occur and have a negative effect and as we've seen with the shooting of unarmed black men by cops, as long as we allow "circumstance" to dismiss the "what they did" because we have sympathy for how the circumstances means it doesn't so much affect "what they are" as it would in other circumstances, well, there is a problem. Cause it just means they keep doing it and we keep ignoring it.
Oh war is fine, another atrocity, we understand. Oh, cops have rough jobs, this unarmed black man is just another collateral damage.
This would be part of the banality of evil and it doesn't take long for those circumstances to attract the unbridled id of those who really have a "what they are" problem and for the atrocities of "what they did" to get worse and worse as a whole.
It means, essentially, we need to change how we police and it means we need to stop fighting these stupid "prove the manhood of a new generation" type wars.
@ Frog #224
"No, I think I am arguing the same point. [and all the rest]"
I agree with you on these points. And, as I mentioned probably while you were writing that post, there's a difference between evaluating a situation in order to determine what happened, and what should be done (what type of further training, what to look out for next time, etc) - and complaining with the idea that you could handle it better (general you, not you specifically).
Yubal: What is wrong with the good old theme "Never again war!" ??
Because the world is filled with people ready to fight wars. Because unilateral disarmament isn't an option, if you don't want the other bastards getting you. Humans are wild animals -- violent struggle is part of any large society.
I think Gandhi was wrong in principle (even if he was tactically correct for his time and place).
I agree with Orwell, that our peace is safe-guarded by rough men ready to fight. Of course, they safe-guard us against other rough men, ready to fight. Unless you can find a way to universally change all rough men, defense is necessary.
But it can be rare, if we choose it to be so. We can do everything possible to use war only as a last resort, instead of as an extension of economic policy (aka, as a way to steal -- and thereby become the "aggressive rough men" ourselves, against which the rest of the world is defending itself).
Given the number of nukes we have and infrastructure, the US could handle our defense with a pittance of armed forces. The coast guard could probably handle it.
I disagree completely. While it may not be helpful to the military or anyone in the short term I disagree on these counts:
1- When faced with disturbing information people may react emotionally. People who do not have the experience will be more prone to this.
2- The only way to ensure that the information gets looked into however is exposing it to the public. This was covered up. It would have remained covered up if the public did not get emotional about it.
Following your logic then the only way to keep the public and armchair generals like "us" I guess from doing what people do when confronted with upsetting facts is to keep those facts from them.
Thus the second step can never happen.
It's all left to the experts, no scrutiny. Of course we can trust them can't we?
Well really, so far I would say no we can't. We most certainly can not. We can trust them to torture people, kill civilians, rape each other.... and we can count on the government and military to cover it up to keep people from talking about what they don't know.
Now I can believe those soldiers really did think they were being shot at, and I can accept that they made a mistake, and I can accept that their nasty attitudes are a product of ignorance and hyper-exposure unique to soldiers.
However, that does not make it ok. It does not mean we need to shut up about it. It does not make the lies and cover up ok either.
So yeah... and by the way I'm sitting in a little hard spindle chair. The kind that aren't really made for sitting in. It hurts my rear.
@ Cerberus, #225
I agree. Those situations should definitely not be forgotten, or swept by the wayside. It is of my opinion that we should use those situations to train people about to go into similar situations.
It's also key to look at the individual handling the situation. Is this person thriving on the violence, and inherently racist? Or is it a rookie, or a good person in a bad position? Or something else entirely.
I think you and I are on the same page.
Why do we coddle and worship our military without question?
When the enemy steals it's called looting, when the US military does it, it's politely called souvenir collecting.
In the not too distant past soldiers caught looting or raping were hanged.
The troops must be kept in line, and if the only to accomplish that is executing a few of them, well I can live with that.
@#222
I have to disagree with you. I think it is right and necessary for Americans to judge whether the action of the military as a whole is moral and whether the behavior of individual members is contemptible or vile. It is part of the decision making process we must make as a nation to determine whether to continue to wage war or not. If we come to a decision that a certain behavior isn't what we want as a society, then we change our standards and practices. That involves intense scrutiny of all aspects of American public life. It also involves making judgments on people or tactical or strategic decisions that we may or may not be qualified to make but must do so anyway because it's necessary in a democracy. If your standard for casting judgment on matters of public policy was exercised in all matters then no one would be qualified to have an opinion on most things.
erutheone.eric @ # 1: I only wish that the government hadn't tried to cover up the indecent.
Inspired freudian typo of the month. (And are you sure that's the only thing you wish regarding this incident? C'mon, wishes are cheap, and I can think of a few more, more appropriate...)
Jarred @229
For the most part, yes. Though I go a little further and want to use this also for educating us civilians on why we shouldn't fucking support invasive and aggressive war unless it's a last resort for a damn good reason.
Too often, both elites and civilians treat war as a game, rather than the atrocity factory it is. Sure, we need to use it to train the soldiers make less atrocities, but also to show why we shouldn't be keeping them around in colonial occupations.
The troops need to be home, like 10 years ago. If we care about peacekeeping, we can donate a bunch of material aid to a peace-keeping force of NATO soldiers and aid agencies, but we screwed the pooch on being taken as anything other than occupiers and we need to accept the consequences of that.
I would agree if those men had been on the ground, tramping through the streets with adrenaline pounding through their veins, knowing that behind every corner or door a man with a gun could have their name on a bullet. Because then shooting someone is just a reflex, and automatic reaction to danger. That is forgivable.
But they weren't. These men were sitting behind several tons of military equipment with a good eye on what was going on. They were playing a computer game. They sat there and talked, waited, and then they mowed those people down like blades of grass beneath a lawnmower.
So please, forgive me if I don't entirely agree with your position.
Jarred: I agree with you on these points. And, as I mentioned probably while you were writing that post, there's a difference between evaluating a situation in order to determine what happened, and what should be done (what type of further training, what to look out for next time, etc) - and complaining with the idea that you could handle it better (general you, not you specifically).
Well, the question is -- if it was me specifically, and I acted in this way, what do I think should be done to me? Not just for future "we should do better" -- but for justice.
I don't doubt that under certain conditions, I would behave very badly. That's the human condition. I don't know that I couldn't end up like the gunner -- but what would I wish done to me, if I did end up like him?
It's not about me, in one sense, and yet in another it's all about me. Knowing that I might be capable of banally executing civilians under the right history -- how would I judge me, and people like me?
That's always the root of moral discussion. In that sense, "original sin" isn't terribly off the mark -- some of us don't commit some acts, simply because we lack the proper context and history. So when we judge others, we are judging ourselves and our societies.
And we must do that. Otherwise, the wheels come off. It's not sufficient to "be wiser in the future". We have to be just now. We need a military justice system we can trust -- if we can't do that, we shouldn't fight (once again).
We shouldn't almost ever fight, as a matter of fact.
"And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, "O Lord, bless this thy hand grenade, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy."
Universal service might be a good thing *if* there was an option to serve in something like AmeriCorps, rather than traditional military. There are some personality types who just are not good fits for military service: for example, I cannot imagine either of my children being successful in the military without major psychological damage being done. The military stresses uniformity, and doesn't deal well with people who have cognitive deficits, for example.
by all means, get the chickenhawks into the service - make them put up or shut up. But leave my kids, and other people like my kids, out of it.
Becca @237
In my dark heart, I want a law that says if you support a war you get sent to the front-lines, no exceptions, not even for age. Would dramatically cut down the number of wars we fight.
But the reality we live in, the fight isn't just about wars. The attitude this is based in is based in casual racisms, American exceptionalism, military fetishism that is based on being the only true way a boy can become a man, and a toxic masculinity that posits that killing a man makes you more of a man and kissing a man makes you less of one.
There are interconnected aspects of toxic, horrible behavior that leads to incidents like this one and the constant support for war in general.
Things like civil rights activism, feminism, queer rights, education, anti-war activism, global initiatives, etc... will do the work slowly of untangling the crap piece by piece.
But it's nice to dream of how many will be spared the horrors and atrocities by literally scaring the chickenhawks out of their vicarious desire to kill people without suffering personal risk.*
*Though it wouldn't work. Reagan figured out that a great way to get a "good" quick victory was to invade the weakest country possible to get a "win" for the troops to feel good about. So Grenada got to pay the price so wingnut war supporters could feel rock hard about the military. I have no desire to make the nation of Vanuatu suffer the wingnut wars of the future that would result from such a law.
I spent 20 years in the Air Force and have seen some very ugly gun camera video but that was one of the worst. Sadly, it's an example of the "fog of war" which the Apache pilots filled in with preconceptions - they wanted insurgents carrying guns so that's what they saw.
I'm curious if these pilots ever found out who they had killed and what their response was, and if they can sleep at night.
frog,
I wasn't saying pacifism should be unilateral, it should be universal.
Screw the nations, yours and all the others, too.
The soldier makes the conflict become a war, not a couple of bad guys with bad intents in high positions.
If your country calls you to the arms, don't go. If nobody goes, there will not be a war.
War is always unnecessary, it always was in the past and in the future we will abolish it.
My country had conscription, I didn't go when I had to. They took me to the barracks by force, but I refused to wear the uniform. They punched me, I said nothing. They handed me a rifle and I threw it on the ground. They beat the crap out of me and I cried like a little girl. They took me to a 'doctor' who gave me drugs. But I still refused to wear a uniform or to touch a gun. Then I spent 14 month in prison. I used the time to read Kant and Spinoza.
Y.
speaking of evil - http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/breaking-news/man-threatens-deadly… - and I believe so strongly that religion has, and continues to, cause such harm and damage in the world that I demand the right to take down their leadership!
I don't often respond to things I disagree with (or agree with for that matter) on the interwebs, and in fact this may be only my second or third post here in quite a few years as a reader. But now I feel compelled to disagree with most of what's been written here, both by PZ and my fellow commentors.
First, I would like to point out what a great leap it is to go from one (or even several, as this is not the first "war crime" we've seen) incident to labeling the American military as "the storm troopers, the murderous invaders, the butchers of children, the laughing barbarians." We're the "stormtroopers?" Whom would that make the plucky rebel alliance? Al Qaeda in Iraq, the ones who deliberately target crowds of civilians? or is it Would-be warlord Muqtada al-Sadr and his merry band of thugs? But I don't want to get too tu quoque here.
"We aren't in Iraq to help those people, our troops are there to oppress them." Interesting that this comes so soon after Iraq experiences its third free election in my lifetime. I did not support the run-up to the war, didn't vote for Bush, and am under no illusions about weapons of mass destruction or aid to Al-Qaeda, however, I think it is pretty undeniable that Iraq has an opportunity for a brighter future, if the violence stops, than it did without Saddam. There is always the problem that one cannot know the counterfactual, but I must inquire about your opinions anyway, what do all those with these harsh words about American involvement in the region think would be the situation and outlook for Iraq without the war? For the Sunnis? The Shiites? The Kurds? Would they all be joining hands and singing songs together?
But these are not the central point of my disagreement with the post and subsequent comments. It is the kernel of hatred that I see here, the designation of those in the video (and even the US military as a whole) as the Others. As somehow inhuman, or at least not like Us. I see far too much of the Fundamental Attribution Error occuring in this thread. The gunner is judged as a bloodthirsty murderer on account of his actions, but no one has asked if perhaps the situation he was in contributed to those actions.
This helicopter was not simply on a patrol where they decided to open fire on what they thought was an armed group. They were called in as air support for ground troops who were pinned down by enemy fire.
The chopper gunner who we're all demonizing here, is some 18-19 year old kid, who probably knows some of the soldiers that are currently engaged in a firefight. He's probably spent months in a war zone risking his life each day he's there, and he undoubtedly knows fellow soldiers who've been wounded or killed. Contrary to what seems to be the prevailing belief here, people don't join the military just to shoot something. It's a major life decision that likely isn't made lightly.
In his mind he's doing his job and defending the lives of not just the soldiers currently on the ground, but the soldiers who would encounter those gunmen at a later time as well as all the civilians who are put at risk from the continuing violence.
And let's look at the actual situation, because lacking the benefit of hindsight, those in the helocopter saw (or thought they saw) two AK-47s and an RPG in a region where US troops were under fire and made a decision to fire. I don't believe that journalists should be fair game as military targets, even if they're interviewing militants (as I think could be the case her), however they aren't exactly wearing nametags that can be seen by those on the helicopter.
But even PZ, argued that the initial firing could have been a mistake. What of the firing on the van. Here I would point out that the helicopter's occupants didn't have the benefit of arrows pointing out the children in the van (which itself was likely informed by the following events, rather than something anybody would have seen in the video without such knowledge). Additionally, this was not an ambulance, which they would have been notified about (and we certainly would have heard if several paramedics were killed, as we have with the children and journalists), and it's not just some helpful passers-by as it arrived with intent to aid the survivors. The remaining option is that it was an "militant" vehicle.
Does any of this make the actions of the gunner or anyone else correct. No. I think the initial firing was done with too little regard for collateral casualties, and I deffinitely wouldn't agree with firing on even an enemy "ambulance." Something certainly went wrong here, and I might even agree that the actions were criminal. But I find something extremely disturbing in how everyone here has reacted to this.
You are making excuses for a fucking atrocity. That is unconscionable.
If we're going to war, we have to accept responsibility for the horrors. You don't get to wave it away as maybe reasonable, somehow.
Yubal, I aplologize. I don't know what country you are from though you may have said it in other threads. I'm curious though, if you don't mind?
I won't watch this. It doesn't matter to me if there were really guns or not, or RPGs or whatever...this kind of shit is ...damn, I don't even...
Fuck.
@Cerberus (#59, #121, #129, #180 et al.),
Well said.
But how do we stop going to war? Rather, how do we (those of us with a conscience, who aren't jingoistic and xenophobic) convince others that wars should be prevented?
I wonder how our American rationalists and atheists feel about this.
Personally, I reject the assumption that therre is a "social contract". It's not a contract worth the paper it's not written on if you're born into it and there's no alternative.
I was fortunate to be born into one of the nations that's at the top of the heap, and I'll unashamedly enjoy the benefits of my good luck, but I don't have anything to do with how the US is constituted, how it's governed, or any of the decisions it makes. And, before someone says "we can change the government" or "it's our responsibility" - please - don't be naive. Our government is carefully constructed and evolved to perpetuate itself; that's why our votes are nullified behind a sham of representation, and there's a revolving door between big money and leadership, to the point where we've practically got hereditary aristocrats in the Bush and Kennedy families.
The guys in uniform are either well-meaning ignorant patsies or cogs in the machinery; there is no moral position that can be taken to justify going onto someone else's territory and shooting them for their own good - an argument that the patsies in uniform or cogs of oppression choose to fall for over and over again. Unlike most americans today, I am comfortable speaking ill of our brave men and women in uniform; they are the ones who chose to, uh, just follow orders. There is, further, no moral argument (that I can think of) that supports the "it was OK that I shot him because it was war-time and he was trying to shoot me" viewpoint unless you're the guy who was in his home, shooting at a complete stranger who came thousands of miles on a fine day, to point a gun at you and tell you what's what. Everyone who wears a uniform has chosen to align themselves with the state and its monopoly on violence.
There were other people who got that helicopter to Iraq, who maintained its engines and fuelled it, who loaded the guns that were fired, who paid the taxes that bought the damn thing, and who taught those pilots to fly and taught them pretty marksmanship. They probably consider their hands to be clean. I don't.
It's fashionable to try to excuse our heroes in uniform by saying they're good people in a bad situation - or something cute to that effect - but they're volunteers who chose a lifestyle that was going to potentially put them in the position of killing complete strangers because cowardly old plutocrats who live in plush armored rooms told them to. They're in a bad situation of their own making; nobody should respect a person who went out of their way to become a minion of the power elite.
Germany
@ 242:
Really. You find shocked, horrified, dismayed and upset reactions to murder disturbing? How is a person supposed to react to murder? Pardon me if I'm not all cool as cucumber.
Teach your children that killing is wrong. But mean it.
This is where I apologize for what I assume to be my failure to communicate my thoughts. I wasn't excusing or trying to excuse anything. I was attempting to explain how a decent human being can commit an such an "atrocity" without being "evil" for lack of a better word.
AccidentalCommentator @ # 118: This incident is definately one of the worst I've seen/heard of from the war in Iraq...
Haven't been paying much attention over the last seven years, have ya?
As noted above, and in conversations with many Iraq veterans, this is routine - except for the video getting out.
Professor Farnsworth № 242, How should we react? What in your mind would be appropriate. You didn't think we should be there, but you're cool with this because they're doing their jobs? How does action like this stop violence? The attitude among these ahem, professionals, seems to be "kill 'em all and let God sort them out."
And I would add, understand that since war IS horror, wars of choice are irredeemably immoral.
Garret @246
Liberalism, leftism, etc... Standing up against racism, religion, sexism, and the thousand ways the different are demonized, fighting against bloated military budgets, resisting the calls to fear and encouraging and educating everyone else to do the same, speaking truth to power about wars of aggression, do not shy away when the powerful claim you hate the troops and are weak.
Fight for feminism and the decoupling of masculinity from rites of passage involving murder and death. Fight loudly and proudly against all wars of aggression except those obviously necessary by the most dire of circumstances and the most obvious failures of other methods. Fight loudly to teach history, real history, including the bloody reality of our "glorious" wars to anyone and everyone you can.
Basically, the same way we fight every other goddamn battle of progressivism. The long fight.
For the most part, it seems to be working. The number of first world countries in the colonialism, war for kicks game has dramatically fallen off and there's little sign that once notorious countries like the UK, France, or Germany show any sign of starting anytime soon.
USA is slow, but they are younger and stupider for a first world nation and behind on so many barometers of progress. With education, with the long fight we can decouple it too from the machine of harder wang via unnecessary war.
With the problem of terrorism and the new landscape of war, like with many things, Denmark shows us the way to handle it. By treating it as a police problem, they have prevented all acts of islamic terrorism on their soil despite being the number one target in the muslim world and all without revoking the civil liberties of its citizens and while taking on a large number of refugees from war-torn regions.
It sucks that there is no quick fix, but it is not hopeless, just hard, long, and painful.
What we can do first is rub things like this into the wounds of every American until the majority stop flinching and reaching for well-worn excuses.
Cause war = atrocities. Period.
I served for 15 months out of FOB Rustamiyah. I almost lost faith in humanity (and in myself) out there. It was there that I decided I would be an atheist for the rest of my life, no matter how difficult it was, and it was quite difficult for me over there at times (no atheist in a foxhole, after all).
I will say this; it is easy to look at these soldiers and the way they treat their 'victims' and proclaim that they are evil beasts, but they are not beasts; they are children. Children who had a gun thrown in their hand and told to shoot at the person-shaped target before they ever had a chance to grow up, before they are even allowed to consume alcohol or even, sometimes, purchase their own cigarettes.
Sometimes laughing after having ran over a human body is the only way to put aside the reality of what it is you are doing and seeing. The less you view your targets as human (and, coincidentally, the more you consider them as merely person-shaped targets) the easier it is to kill them, and the easier it is to kill, the easier it is to survive.
If you honestly think you could have been thrown in a similar situation, after experiencing what these kids experienced and feeling what those soldiers felt on a day-to-day basis, and you still think you would have felt yourself to be in a position to judge their actions, then you simply do not understand what it is to be at war.
This is not a problem with individuals. The guys in those Apaches were any more inherently prone to desensitizing theirselves with human suffering than the next guy or the next guy. The problem is war and the human response to it. It is in essence a human problem.
Wherever there is war, these evils will exist and propagate, now matter how much ignorant and self righteous societies would like to think their own men and women in uniform are honorable, disciplined individuals. They aren't. They are just people; and they are weak and stupid like the rest of us, and they cope with their forced crimes against humanity in ways the average Joe or Jane isn't going to find very polite or honorable at all.
It should be made clear to those considering enlistment that they may be put in a position to kill a person innocent of wrongdoing. They may then weight their other options.
That's exactly who it was, asshole:
"Reporters working for WikiLeaks determined that the driver of the van was a good Samaritan on his way to take his small children to a tutoring session. He was killed and his two children were badly injured."
And even if you don't believe the reporters for some reason, how the fuck does the video tell you what the driver's 'intent' was before he saw the injured man?
That's very easy to say when one is far better educated and has far more choices in life than most of these kids. Nobody should excuse atrocities, but we also should never lose sight of the fact that the far greater criminals are the politicians who put the guns in the hands of these kids. Yet they're the ones who always get off scot-free.
Steve--Word. The only way to handcuff the criminals in charge is by educating those they would use as their minions.
I will say this; it is easy to look at these soldiers and the way they treat their 'victims' and proclaim that they are evil beasts, but they are not beasts; they are children. Children who had a gun thrown in their hand and told to shoot at the person-shaped target before they ever had a chance to grow up, before they are even allowed to consume alcohol or even, sometimes, purchase their own cigarettes.
Let's be honest with ourselves, for a minute. The way that soldiers are trained has been carefully designed/evolved to promote sublimation of the will to authority, group-think, and to hijack human's pack hunting/raiding behaviors. The military carefully inculcates "esprit de corps" and reliance between peer-groups to socialize its members to form bonds of interpersonal loyalty that facilitate the function of exactly the kind of behaviors that several people in this thread put forth as an excuse for killing: "they shot at my buddy" When a young person comes out of military training (me: summer class of Ft Dix, 1983) they're part of a "band of brothers" that has been programmed to behave as a pack; they're a weapon ready to be used. People can be trained to be weapons in the service of the state, and they have been since ancient times. Our "children" in uniform volunteered for it - and the US shifted to a volunteer military because they fight better than mandatory service soldiers. It's probably got something to do with the cognitive dissonance (cue: psychobabble) of having chosen to be part of the collective, and feeling required to go through with what you're told to do because of those carefully constructed bonds of comradeship. It's not an accident - it's a process, an evolved process, of turning people into killing machines.
But be honest - those "children" did not have a gun thrown into their hand - they asked for it. They wanted to sublimate their will into the collective; the military has appeal for people whose nature is to be a minion; it is carefully and attractively packaged and marketed as such, from Alexander's Companions, Napoleon's Guard, and the handsome Marine Corps ads - "be one of the few, the proud." Be "an army of one" - join the collective and don't be an untermensch. We'll put you and your band of brothers in harm's way and you'll kill everyone you need to, to get home again in one piece. Don't think for one second that the people who build armies don't understand and leverage that dynamic at every step of the way.
The beauty of a volunteer military is that you can see exactly who has committed to defend their in-group in preference to common humanity. It's that simple. Nobody shoved a gun in their hand - they asked for it.
Maybe the soldiers had a justifiable reason to open fire, maybe they didn't (I don't have all the evidence). Their callous indifference to taking away other's lives is disturbing, but not really evidence for or against this.
All I do know for sure is that the decision to cover it up does not reflect well on any that were involved. If it were truly an accident caused by a misidentification, the military should've said so in 2007, shortly after it happened. Since this didn't happen, I can only assume there is far more to this incident.
Caine, Ted Zissou, I won't presume to tell you how to react or how to feel, but you can't throw logic and reason out the window when you're upset. That's exactly how things like this happen. Do you not see that?
I'm suggesting that if you sat that young man (the gunner) down and spoke with him he wouldn't seem like a bloodthirsty murderours villain and, in fact, he probably is not. The point I'm trying to make, and seemingly failing utterly, is that the responses in this thread have been trying to dissociate from this man and the military in general, as if they don't share our humanity. Moreover, it seems like anyone offering a dissenting opinion on the war in general is made out to be somehow culpable for what we see in the video. It is, as I see it, the kernel of the type of hate that causes murder and war and genocide. I am trying my best to ask the commenters not to become what they're arguing against (reading this back it sound far more dramatic than I was aiming for, but I'm not really eloquent enough to resolve that).
I did put up two paragraphs somewhat defending the war (or at least playing the devil's advocate), and I think this has confused people into thinking I was trying to defend the video in my latter paragraphs. I am not.
We must openly admit our mistake.
We must see that regardless of our technology, this kind of horror is exactly what happens in war.
We must see that "a lot of war over there" to prevent any hint of "war over here" is actually NOT the answer. The answer is to prevent war anywhere.
Our violent reaction to 9/11 turned a world that was sympathetic to the United States into a world that is horrified by the United States.
If those young men in the helicopters, and all their fellow soldiers in arms were instead at home here on American soil, investigating shipping, working for the FBI, analyzing terrorist financial transactions, shutting down weapons manufacturers and distributors, and helping the poor and victims of natural disasters - then the United States would still hold the moral high ground, fundamentalist Islam would be MUCH smaller than it is today, and we might even have a new tower in place of the WTC.
Instead, we spend our trillions on ways to make the world hate us, we destroy cooperation, we legitimize and strengthen our enemies while handing them the moral high ground.
You can't fight shadowy terrorists with helicopters! You fight them with allies, informers, information, money. You win the hearts and minds of the people supporting them.
Our economy, not our military, was our greatest weapon. Our military didn't end Soviet tyranny, our economy did. We could have used our economy and our open minds and our capacity for global compassion to marginalize the Islamic hate mongers. But instead we used the wrong weapon on the wrong enemy and gave a billion people reason to actively loathe us for generations.
How much safer could we rest at night if we had a billion fewer enemies? How many young men and women will pledge their lives to kill a few more Americans on the strength of this video alone?
Here's what I don't understand:
1) Even if they thought the cameras were weapons, why did they give permission to engage? It's legal in TEXAS to carry firearms in public! Maybe it's illegal in Iraq... but so illegal that it's all right to shoot you even if you aren't acting in any way threatening?
2) Why did they give permission to engage the van? Even if their story had checked out---these guys were carrying weapons and threatening to shoot at us; we engaged and killed several of them while wounding a few others. Now, a van has arrived to collect the dead and the wounded. THAT VAN IS AN AMBULANCE. IT IS PROTECTED UNDER INTERNATIONAL TREATIES REGARDING THE TREATMENT OF MEDICAL PERSONNEL IN WARTIME.
Even IF your story had checked out up to this point, you DEFINITELY just committed a war crime. In fact, as far as I can tell, you had no probable cause to engage in the first place. But even if you HAD, you have no right to fire on an ambulance.
I do not want to wade into this debate, since it seems a lot of people have made good points on both sides. However, there is one thing I would like to address...
Some commenters keep bringing up that the helicopter was in no danger of being hit by the alleged RPG. Now, I can excuse civilians on the ground walking around with AK47's; but what is the excuse for having what appears to be an RPG? It's not home defense. And if he looked like he was aiming it at something (even if it's not the helicopter), that's a bad situation. People just trying to get by the best they can in a war-zone don't tote anti-tank weaponry. So I can see how the gunner's judgement of the group was colored by what he thought he saw.
Windy, then I was incorrect that it was not a passer-by. And with the benefit of hindsight and a helpful internet commenter I now know that. Then again, I am not in a war zone, don't have the weight of the lives of dozens of soldiers in my hands, and I meet no repercussions for having initially been incorrect. The gunner was not so lucky.
But again I am trying to understand him, not defend him, and to that end I don't think it's helpful to dehumanize him.
The guys in those Apaches were any more inherently prone to desensitizing theirselves with human suffering than the next guy or the next guy.
I disagree. They were self-selected, then put through an elaborate training process. At many points during that process, it is possible to leave (I did!) or be rejected - you can think of military training as a massively scaled version of Milgram's experiment, and those who come out the other side are, in fact, inherently more prone to desensitizing themselves to human suffering than the next guy. The more expensive (in terms of training cost) military specialties are reserved for the most willing to participate - you will not, for example, get through a special forces school without repeatedly expressing a willingness (and interest in...) killing. You will not be taught to fly a very expensive bomber until they have checked out carefully that you'll drop a bomb, and in training you'll do it in simulation over and over without hesitation or they'll wash you out of the school.
Military indoctrination is a massive winnowing process that is carefully designed/evolved to decouple people's trigger fingers from their brains. It's why those guys were flying an apache and not a helicopter ambulance for Medicins Sans Frontieres or the local hospital.
Read almost any first-person account of warfare and you're almost sure to find an expression along the lines of "eventually, I only cared about not letting my buddies down." That group dynamic is deliberately created and constantly manipulated. (BTW, religion has also been ruthlessly and effectively used as a tool for building armies and pre-selecting the youth with high minion-potential)
Since people are giving personal testimonies, here's mine.
I served in the Army during OIF and OEF as an intelligence analyst. I was stationed at Central command, so I was in a joint environment and was involved in operations involving every branch of service (to include ones like this very one in the video). When I left the army I took a job with a civilian intelligence agency. During my time there and after many years of contemplation over my role as a cog in the military industrial complex, I changed my beliefs on my outlook of war and American foreign policy (among other things). I could not reconcile my personal beliefs and moral and ethical convictions with my chosen profession, so I left.
This is what you have to do. You have to own up to your actions and take responsibility for the things you do, if you are compelled to do so. I feel sympathy for young kids who find themselves in the middle of something that corrodes ones moral center in a way that no one should go through. Now, I try to vote so that they don't have to go through this. I personally, have done and said things that I'm not proud of and I will have to live with that for the rest of my life. However, because I was young during much of it doesn't mean that I can't be judged. Because I personally believe that most people in the United States aren't emotionally capable of doing many of the things that I and others in the military do or have done doesn't excuse my behavior. It doesn't make right the callous things that I or anyone else might have said or done. It's all unfortunate that so many go through this and this is a major reason to support veterans organizations, but it doesn't leave one immune from judgment. In fact, I judged myself and changed my behavior that I deemed to be unacceptable.
This is precisely what the public should be doing, in fact, it's our responsibility as citizens.
I am glad that this video was made public because it shows the public the reality of war. The types of decisions military members are confronted with regularly are in this footage. These hard choices are repeated over and over until you have 100s of thousands dead and wounded (I don't discriminate between Iraqi or American deaths or wounded). Hopefully, this harsh reality will encourage people to realize that war is almost never worth while.
The attitudes of the soldiers are appalling...
Its the sort of hot shot attitude that you might take into a computer game or lazer skirmish, NOT the attitude you should take to war when civilians are at risk.
To me it looks like they woke up with the attitude "lets go huntin'n'killin" like a bunch of hicks.
Disgusting. Humans can be so disgusting.
Our military didn't end Soviet tyranny, our economy did.
1) No, their economy did.
2) It didn't end, it "re-branded."
Seriously? A few guys make a mistake and suddenly the United States is the oppressor? Whoever said war was perfect? Do you not realize that during WW2 many innocent civilians, including *gasp* CHILDREN were bombed indiscriminately? It happens.
Also, if you look at the video, not only can you spot the two guys with Ak-47s (oddly enough not pointed out by the video..this omitting of the facts was obviously done for a good reason) but this is a group of guys walking around with weapons with a guy PEERING AROUND A CORNER (???) and looking all kinds of shady. Also, there are troops nearby for whom this group poses a danger (the AKs and the "RPGs"). They have plenty of good evidence to rock the s out of these guys.
The van is a little different. First of all, the video zooms in on these kids and not even then can you tell that they are kids. We can only "see" them because we KNOW beforehand that they are kids. As I was watching the video in real time for the first time I could NOT identify the kids and I was wondering if they were in the back seat or something.
It's an honest mistake and it's war. S*** happens.
*vomits*
To the person the replied to me (your name appears as a URL for some reason) I completely agree. These people who sign up for the service are completely willing (I signed up, after all, and I never blamed anyone for signing the paperwork but my own).
When I say 'thrown' I do not mean 'thrown unwillingly.' I mean merely the the process is quick (basic combat training is 9 weeks for a non combat MOS after all, and then you are supposedly ready for war) and with careful consideration for preparing that person for efficiently taking the lives of other human beings (as you say) and little else.
You think you are the same person after basic, but you aren't; you're indoctrinated. The military mentality is instilled in you, and you are ready to kill and even potentially die on command and it only took 9 weeks (at least for the Army, with a 'non combat' MOS).
Yes. Peering around a corner is a mortal offense, and he deserved to die.
Neither was the DRIVER OF THE VAN, but that didn't stop you from speculating about his suspicious intent, did it? So excuse me for not being impressed by your 'understanding' of how people behave in war zones.
TuxedoCartman @266:
I totally agree - civilians walking around have no excuse to be walking around with an RPG, a weapon that's basically only good for taking out war materiel or groups of attackers depending on the ammunition.
I disagree with your implicit point that therefore, it was okay to kill those people. It was not a life-threatening situation, and did not have to result in death. This isn't even in hindsight, there's no reason for him to have fired on them with such sketchy identification.
Lastly, this is the reason why war is so hard on the soldiers. Because as soon as someone makes a mistake, the media turns on them. And the public turns on them. They are all instantly vilified the second something goes wrong despite the fact that most of these people have no understanding of what it means to be a soldier.
You guys (PZ Myers included, media, general public) need to keep your opinions out of the debate because you are uneducated in the subject and in no position to make any constructive judgments. There are already rules of engagement, these soldiers followed them to the best of their ability and that's all you fools need to know.
Prof Farnsworth writes:
I am trying my best to ask the commenters not to become what they're arguing against
I don't think commenters here are advocating "the tree of liberty, blood of martyrs" stuff or grabbing our rifles and heading to Washington - or anything close to it. Personally, I just keep my head down, pay the taxes I'm compelled to, smilingly do whatever the man forces me to do, and I don't believe the bullshit when I hear it.
The problem I keep confronting is that I think Mao was right: power does come out of the barrel of a gun. Nationalism is not going to go away if we ask it nicely; we've all seen what happens. If you look closely at how the state indoctrinates the military, it turns former citizens into potential weapons that can (and will) pull a trigger on their former neighbors. You don't need to have been at Tienamen Square or Kent State or in - well, any part of the world - to realize that.
Vote? The mice voted to bell the cat. Like many on this forum, I voted for "change" - actually - I voted for a man who promised he'd close Gitmo and get us out of Iraq. As an atheist who grew up in the 70s I can only laugh because the first thing that comes to mind is The Who "...and I get on my knees and pray - we don't get fooled again." I can't even pray.
Is there an alternative? I have been assembling a philosophy of passive/aggressive anti-statism for the last decade or so, but I don't think it's worth even trying; I just want to stay below The Man's radar screen until I die of old age somewhere. That might be the best revenge, really.
Hey, good job ignoring the context of the statement.
Farnsworth № 263 It is, as I see it, the kernel of the type of hate that causes murder and war and genocide. I am trying my best to ask the commenters not to become what they're arguing against (reading this back it sound far more dramatic than I was aiming for, but I'm not really eloquent enough to resolve that).
Wow, my disdain for the war in Iraq and my comments might cause me to kill? Now I've effin heard it all. What hate are you talking about? We simply shouldn't be there doing this shit.
To all of the people leaving comments like, "It's war" "sh*t happens", you're absolutely right. This is war and this is what happens, and that is the problem. This is what people should take away when they watch this video, and hopefully they will see that war is hell and is almost never worth it.
This is the first post I've made on here, and it is to disagree with the bulk of the comments.
Try imagining the video again, without the introduction telling you what you're going to see before you see it, and without the arrows, and it completely changes the video.
If I had watched that video I'd probably be happy, thinking our military had done a good job. A patrol had come under fire, and the supporting gunship saw a bunch of men on a deserted street, several of whom had guns (they sure as shit looked like guns to me, although I admit I'm not trained to tell the difference), and shot them before they could use them.
As for the unmarked van that showed up less than 2 minutes after the shooting stopped, I couldn't see any children even with the arrows pointing them out.
The two things that did bother me were the soldiers wanting the guy to pick up a weapon so they could shoot him, and the "it's their fault for bringing kids to a battle" comment. But I don't think either one of those is terrible, they seem like pretty normal human responses to being in a situation like that.
Basically, if you want to say that this kind of situation is inevitable in any kind of occupation, and therefore we shouldn't use our military this way, I can understand (and agree, occupying and "democratizing" the Sunni triangle is not a job for the American military). But to try and say this video shows how American soldiers are murderers and butchers doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Cerberus,
I stand up to those things by educating myself via books by folks such as Tim Wise (on white privilege) and Naomi Klein (on disaster capitalism) and Noam Chomsky (on US imperialism) and Michael Eric Dyson (on structural racism). I don't watch TV--instead, I consume alternative media (such as Democracy Now). I'm a substitute teacher currently, and I have made a point to explain to students why "that's so gay" is offensive, though I admit that I have ignored those remarks quite frequently.
But I rarely have the opportunity to stand up to bigots and jingoists. Sure, I could attempt to engage in conversation the stranger with the "God Bless America" and "Support the Troops" ribbons on his/her car. Or the person I saw this morning wearing a cap that read, "Redneck" alongside a Confederate flag. The person will more than likely tell me to get lost. Perhaps I should organize a weekly town hall discussion forum here in Salem, Oregon, but those who would attend are probably those who are already inclined to expose themselves to reason and facts. Maybe we make it a national requirement, along with a certain number of hours of community service?
When schools are teaching to the test and the mainstream media is owned and operated by a handful of giant corporations, we're really fighting an uphill battle. Public education and the media should be weapons *against* ignorance and fear, not weapons *of* ignorance and fear.
I didn't read all the comments, but war is painful! And, that is all the more reason for a one world government. The UN functions reasonably well, and without the bullshit of the security council, we could probably all live in peace.
Ban the US, China, Russia, France, and Britain from any discussion that affects anyone else.
Windy, I'm not sure I understand your comment. I speculated on the intent of both the driver and the gunner. Incorrectly in the case of the former it seems, and it's entirely possible that I did so with the latter as well.
But even if my assesment is incorrect it does not validate the comments that dehumanize him.
It just occurred to me that I'm using militaristic jargon by talking about "weapons" against ignorance and fear. Not unlike "war on poverty." Maybe that isn't a big deal, or maybe it is. Food for thought.
http://file.wikileaks.org/file/rules_of_engagement.pdf
These are the rules of engagement in Iraq in 2007. If you read these very carefully, you will see that the Apache gunners did not follow the ROE with regards to Positive Identification of the good Samaritan, as he has been described, who showed up to help.
Cartman, tacroy?
It's a fucking camera. Not an RPG.
We know this, again, because the only reason this saw the light of day is because the people killed were our own fucking men, a group of Reuter's photographers trying to hook up with an earlier group.
And the apologia just makes me vomit. I mean, the video is bad. It's really bad, the atrocities inherent in war. But the responses, the desperate willingness to find something, anything to excuse those actions, find some way to blame it on the victims, make these atrocities less fills me with endless gallons of bile.
This is the banality of evil in no uncertain terms, the quickness many have to horror, especially horror to which we are partially responsible for, by seeking anyway the shit can't stick to them. How quick we are to erase the horror of the rape culture by willing to jump on the victims and claim they must have done something slutty to deserve it. How quick we are to try and erase the horror of how many unarmed black men are shot to death by cops by trying to paint them all as doing sketchy things that deserved it.
And how quick we are to erase filmed atrocities like this by trying somehow desperately to find a reason it would have been perfectly reasonable to blow away members of the press and their rescuers in an area safe enough for said members of the press to spread out and relax as they did.
This was one small piece of a pattern. The atrocities inherent in war. Not everywhere, but just enough and constant. This is the faces, the stories behind thousands upon thousands of stories regarding "collateral damage" and "nests of insurgents" in a war we have no business fighting.
And the vile antics of Freeper troll halo.lcfr show the twisted way we're so willing to corrupt ourselves to avoid the shame of what we have wrought.
This is on us, all of us, because war is atrocity, will breed atrocities like cancer cells dividing.
It's why we shouldn't treat it like a game, shouldn't try and hide from the reality, and shouldn't just hope it all goes away. Every second we spend stupidly occupying nations like Iraq and Afghanistan, every day we fight any war no matter how noble, a tragedy like this is occurring, someone's mother is being raped, someone's father is being gunned down for no damn reason, someone's child is hit by ricocheting shrapnel, some displaced family is starving.
War brings out the worst in us. This. This right here, this is what war is. Not the strutting pilot in front of a Mission Accomplished banner, not some shaky-cam action sequence in a movie, but this.
It's why we shouldn't engage it unless we have a DAMN good reason.
halo.lcfr wrote @ #272:
A mistake? A mistake is when the kid at McDonald's gives you a small fry instead of a large fry. This is a fucking atrocity.
So two wrongs make a right? The fact that senseless violence was perpetrated against innocent human beings in the past justifies this senseless violence? Show me one person here who is speaking out against the atrocity in PZ's post but who thinks that past war atrocities were OK.
That's a fucking joke, right? Peering around a corner and looking "all kinds of shady" (whatever the fuck that even means) is license to be gunned into bloody pieces?
I don't care if the van had 20 kids or no kids at all. It was a random passer-by stopping to help a wounded person, and the gunner opened fire on them for daring to come to the aid of a fellow human in agony.
Fuck you and your fucking callous disregard for human life.
halo.lcfr writes:
You guys (PZ Myers included, media, general public) need to keep your opinions out of the debate because you are uneducated in the subject and in no position to make any constructive judgments.
What constitutes being educated? Agreeing with you?
Some of us have served in the military, some of us have thought about this stuff long and hard, and did not form our opinions lightly or out of ignorance. Your attempt to just lump everyone into "us versus them" is indicative of exactly the kind of simplistic mindset that underlies the problem.
Do you know why philosophers seldom get into actual fights? Because, by the time they're finished defining their terms, it's dinnertime and nobody wants to miss dinner.
This is insane.
Look at the video. The "bad guys" aren't shooting at anything. They're walking around in a loose group, and no one is taking fire. The helicopter crews are looking for weapons, looking for an excuse to kill these people.
The people in the van are not carrying weapons. They're trying to pick up a wounded man. There is no threat at all there.
Listen to the audio. The crews are calling in inflated claims of arms present to get permission to execute them. They want to murder a wounded man, and are hoping he'll pick up a gun to give them an excuse.
This was a completely unnecessary massacre committed by a bunch of American hot dogs spoiling for a fight, as if it were some kind of video game -- and it was to them. Yes, these soldiers were murderers and butchers. They should be punished. The chain of command ought to be stomping down hard on soldiers who pull that kind of cowboy shit. Because this attitude that murdering civilians is excusable is the kind of thing that loses wars.
Hey now. What gives you the idea that you are in any position to boss people around here?
@ 263:
Who says I threw out logic and reason? I didn't. You obviously didn't read every comment of mine in this thread, many of them well before you decided to grace us with your presence.
So, soldiers committing murder, the reason it happens is because people's reactions are emotional? Yeah, I know what you're trying to say, you fail. There is zero excuse for such barbarism, and you have no business attempting to relate people's reactions by claiming the "soldiers were emotional!, just like us!" That's an idiot take on the situation.
Yeah, yeah, doing a play on the old poem, I see. Look, I saw enough (and know enough) Vietnam vets, that yes, they got good and haunted by their actions some time later. The gunner might not be a bloodthirsty asshole, that does not excuse his actions in any way, shape or form. As for those of us in this thread attempting to disassociate, how about addressing the disassociation of the soldiers busy murdering people? Where, exactly, was their humanity? Where was their compassion, thinking about "oh, if this man weren't an enemy, we might sit down and have a drink together?" For fuck's sake, you don't get it both ways here.
Oh, right. Like I'm going to run off and dehumanize myself to the point I think it's fun to murder innocent people. You've been idiotic in every post, all you're doing now is digging that hole deeper. Much earlier in the thread, when comparisons to Vietnam were taking place, I noted that there was mass outrage over the My Lai massacre, and that it is, indeed, sad that we in the U.S. no longer seem to have that outrage in regard to war atrocities.
I am not about to "cut a break" to the men who committed this atrocity. They did wrong and they, along with those who gave their behaviour a pass should be held accountable. Full stop.
@284
The goal is not the enemies, but the mushy middle, the slightly lefters. Look at this discussion thread. Lots of people having to flinch and grow and deal with their implicit biases to see no wrong in our awesomest military.
We win by educating the critical mass, radicalizing them, making it so more and more people have read Zinn and Chomsky and Klein. The 27%ers will almost always be out of reach, but we can marginalize them so they end up like teabaggers, screaming into the darkness in sparsely attended rallies.
Eventually even them just won't have it in them to keep fighting for the way things were.
See Neo-nazi movements in Western Europe, Anti-Irish movements in USA, anti-suffragist movements in the 1st world, etc... Eventually the bigotry just isn't shared enough by the critical mass and we just sort of win.
It's slow, it's painful, but step by step, we win. And it really all begins by radicalizing ourselves as you have done. Now, just stand up for yourself. Argue against the ignorant even if you are dismissed, radicalize the mostly agreeing, and reach out to the mushy middle and corrupt them with your existence.
It won't always feel like winning, but it is.
"free elections" my sorry ass. form over function once again, elections of any sort as the sum total of democracy. what crap. these elections weren't free, they do not symbolize anything other than the US-supported cargo cult "democracy" which will collapse at the latest when the US leaves (and eventually they will); maybe even earlier.
and
you've either not actually read this thread, or you're lying. People have repeatedly stated that they understand that the situation made the monster, and this is why there shouldn't be war unless abso-fucking-lutely inevitably necessary. stop making shit up.
I should say that I don't think you can expect everyone to apply the reasonable certainty Positive ID standard to the initial group that was attacked by the Apaches. This is fairly obvious if you read some of the comments here. Apparently, many people are willing to excuse an attack on anyone holding a cylindrical object. The van that pulls up is a different story as it is a completely unknown quantity. There is no way for the gunner or anyone else to discern the intent of the occupants of the van other than what they are observed doing on camera, and this was rescuing an injured person. Any attack on this van with the information available is a violation of the ROE.
halo:
Oh, do tell. No one is allowed an opinion except you, right? I have news for you - we are allowed an opinion, assclown. "Rules of engagement" don't mean a fucking thing if they endorse murdering civilians. These "soldiers" took delight in murder. That is not right, no matter how you slice it.
Take your assholism some where else. It's not welcome here.
I see an RPG between 3:43 and 4:00. every iraqi in baghdad in 2007 knew that carrying an RPG was punishable by death.
No actually we don't. Our opinions are part of the debate because we're talking about the military our tax dollars pay for and that is our national face across the world. Every US citizen has a right to voice and act on their opinions in this case because as has been said before our military represents us all. We have a right to demand a trial and a real investigation and that's where the experts come into play. So long as you're just talking on a blog your opinion is as good as mine.
When they invite you onto a congressional investigation committee then you can come back and tell us out opinions don't matter.
truebutnotuseful @ 290
It means brown.
Basically, it's the same casual racism that makes an unarmed black male "dangerous" just for existing, necessitating extra caution among police and a greater willingness among them to see innocuous actions as "reaching for a gun".
"Looking all kinds of shady" means they were Walking While Brown. They looked like "the enemy" which would mean any random Iraqi therefore good to shoot as long as you pretended they were insurgents.
Shit like this is common in every war. Atrocities like this and the petty racism that fuel it create horrors. On larger levels, they create genocides.
It's why WAR IS OFTEN A BAD IDEA and should only be engaged in under the direst of circumstances for very good reasons.
Basically, for every war, we should be thinking, is doing this worth eliminating a city's worth of people off the map, shooting our own heroes in the back like dogs, and gunning down our own reporters for being the wrong color? If not, we shouldn't be doing it. Because war means we will be engaging in all sorts of atrocious behaviors. Tortures, genocides, cold-blooded murders of unarmed people, rape, starvation, the destruction of homes, families, and lots of dead children and mothers and fathers.
So if we're doing it for a lark?
We shouldn't be fucking doing it.
It's been over two hundred comments, but nobody's pointed out the obvious yet:
This is exactly the kind of atrocity that occurs when you deploy soldiers to do police actions.
Soldiers have one set of reflexes and training, optimised to kill the enemy before they get killed, and those selfsame reflexes simply do not make for good patrolling, the same way that a flamethrower may make for a credible threat but is not what you want lighting your cigar.
And you can't train a soldier into someone who can do that, because you can't overlay the reflexes needed to be a policeman over the reflexes needed to be a soldier.
Note that this does not excuse the soldiers; it doesn't. I'm simply saying that the situation is analogous to letting a known mass murderer free because you think he's repented; when he kills again, he is still to blame but so is th judge who let him out. Likewise, the soldiers are at fault, but so are the idiots who put them in a police action in the first place.
The soldier's job is identical to that of a gun: his job is to kill quickly and efficiently. You don't wield a gun to "protect yourself"; you wield a gun to kill. Likewise, you send soldiers to war to kill the enemy. That's all a combat soldier is good for.
Any other use of an army is like standing around posing with two M-60s.
________
Disclaimer: I'm not a full combat soldier; just a signaller.
No, I'm making that statement to reiterate the fact that a war doesn't become unjustified when children die. As others have said, it happens. I'm not saying it's right or that I enjoy it when it happens. Just that IT HAPPENS.
And once again you guys manage to take the PEERING comment out of context. If you see a group of armed men peering around a corner, you don't consider that to be shady? At all? In a battlefield?
This kinda stuff happens all the time in Iraq. You know, where they use children as human shields, ambulances as offensive military vehicles during a battle, civilian taxis as troop and weapon transportation etc. I'm not saying that it's right or justifiable to shoot anyone or anything because of that, but I only say this to reiterate the fact that differentiating between a target and an innocent civilian is very hard. The people were perceived as helping a group of insurgents and collecting weapons. It's an honest mistake.
Don't act like you know me. I'm a humanist and I value life very highly. The reason I say that is because I'm also a realist and I accept the fact that during a battle in an urban environment inhabited by innocent civilians, some of them might get caught up in the action despite how careful you try to be (the military spends a ton of money to decrease the risk to civilian life).
It's great when you guys take single quotes and put them out of context. Don't you hate it when creationists do that to you? My reasoning behind my "uneducated" comment preceded said comment. Please read it and if you disagree, say why. Else, pipe down. As for the lumping thing, yes I generalized. My mistake.
yeah because, that's what their jobs entail. Looking for "insurgents" and dispatching them. Here, they saw weapons, AK47s and what to them looked like RPGs. nearby where troops in lightly-armed vehicles, you know the kind that are susceptible to RPG fire. They identified insurgents and fired. Job done.
The van is the arguable part of the video and really, when you see some dudes with guns get shot up just effing leave, please. Leave the medical stuff to those authorized and trained to help.
@ Jarred C:
Thank you times a thousand. You said what I wanted to say, only better. And welcome home, brother.
- Yet another vet.
wrong. we need to be louder, so we can end this shit and prevent it from reoccurring. sugarcoating or being silent about the monstrous crimes and atrocities that are inevitable in warfare only helps those who want to turn more people into monsters and kill more people by creating more wars.
then you're part of the problem. killing someone is never a "good job"; it means somewhere down the line, someone failed at their job.
Farnsworth, what the fuck are you talking about? The Apache was called in to support ground troops pinned down by enemy fire?!? WTF? The only ground troops I see arrive at the end - in support of the APACHE it would seem. They saunter in casually and survey a bunch of corpses.
No, that's just not going to happen due to:
I would use this as an argument against war. The second we can convince everyone in the world not to go to war, we'll be free of these war-related incidents...
@ halo.lcfr
What's the point in stating the obvious? Saying 'It Happens' isn't useful if you believe that 'It' is immoral. What if I say, "People get Aids and die people, get over it"? That's a stupid comment if I regard the scourge of Aids as something that is not useful to humanity. The fact that I see Aids as negative implies that it's something we should eradicate, at least if I label myself a humanist.
Your implication in all of your posts is that War is hell, even though you don't like it, but as a realist you'll deal with it. I just don't think anyone is going to take you seriously with that position, when at the same time, you call yourself a humanist that presumably values human life.
Really? Even without the captions I would think something was off about it. It did not seem normal to me, even if I assumed those were weapons. If I thought they were shooting I would have shot, yet there's just something completely wrong and if I viewed the video and audio separately I might think I was seeing to completely separate incidents.
But remember American is a Christian NationTM.
I find all the talk about how much the camera looks like an RPG a bit silly. Invaders from another country don't have any right to fly over cities and attack people, even if they are holding weapons. If this was happening to us instead of them it would be extremely obvious. Rejoicing in violating the rights of others is the definition of sociopathic behavior.
@Ol'Greg #309
When I first saw the video that is exactly what I thought. These seem like really different events. The description being given vs. what we see seem rather disconnected and played up. If I closed my eyes my imagination would have filled in the blanks with a rather different picture. It makes me wonder what the people on the other end of the radio were imaging when these requests were being made.
WW2? the one that would have never happened had the winners of WW1 not fucked up with the Treaty of Versailles and enslaved a nation and consigned it to starvation and poverty to enrich themselves, so that a decade later the country was ripe for a "messiah" that promised them freedom from and revenge on their slave-masters, and gave them an easy scapegoat to live out their frustrations on?the war which should have taught us not that there's such a thing as a "good war", but rather that even the inevitable and necessary war is a failure and an atrocity?
that WW2?
fucker.
FUCK. THAT. SHIT.
I just watched men from my country beg to hit a dozen plus human beings with what is essentially a meat grinder. I then watched them beg for a man to look like he was reaching for a weapon just so they'd have an excuse to hit him again. As a final atrocity, I watched a good Samaritan, only doing what should be expected of me, you, and any decent human being, get mowed down. Knowing that his kids were forced to watch their father get slaughtered like a cow for trying to help a wounded man is just the last nail in the coffin.
How can you expect me to not be angry at that?
or we can stop being reactive, and instead get our heads out of our collective asses and prevent the situations that cause wars from occurring, instead of repeating the same mistakes over and over again, and then being surprised when wars break out, and proclaim them inevitable.
Because some people act as if children should never die in a war. Ideally that is a great concept but war being what it is, it happens. And as I said in a previous comment, that's the perfect argument against war.
My point is that this is not a reason to call a war unjustified--you know, an event that rarely occurs and is in the very definition of war--but I am by no means saying that it isn't sad or to "get over it." If those were my kids, i'd cry probably for a while and I'd spend the rest of my life in the worst mental condition imaginable. "Get over it" is really the wrong phrase to use. "It happens." When I was 16-17 I got rammed by the driver of an SUV that never stopped to help me or face their consequences. "It happens" but I still felt the pain.
War is not good and I agree. We can all work hard at eradicating it but it's not just up to us. There are other people in the world and they disagree highly with the idea of war not being an option and until the whole world agrees on no war, war is going to be around.
What does my being a realist have to do with how I value life? I am not naive enough to think that this world is perfect and/or that war can be perfect so therefore I don't value life as highly as others?
troll @299
No you don't, because IT'S A GODDAMNED CAMERA.
Those desperate to hide from the atrocity with victim blaming, listen up. One more time, the reason, the only reason, we have this video recording, is because REUTER'S has been spending years pressing the army to release what happened in the massacre of their cameramen. We know who the people gunned down were, we know they weren't insurgents or RPG-wielding terrorists, because we know they are a press crew who were making plans to catch up with another set of press crew who had left earlier.
These are the raw unavoidable facts.
This can't be justifiable. There is no RPG, there were no insurgents, there weren't even shots fired or a warning shot so people could scatter.
And again even if these were jihadi women-rapists, we do not nor should we ever have the right to go into a country and decide that certain groups of people have a death sentence for existing. It is a war of occupation and we want the right to shoot to kill because we think they might want to defend themselves against their OCCUPIERS? Yeah, I wonder how atrocities like this occurred.
I mean besides the fact that war=atrocities, always.
For the last damn time, being in war and being shot at does not justify random and/or over eager shooting.
I'd like to encourage you to consider another possibility - namely that it's never "justified" to return fire.
I think one can make a plausible argument that self-defense can be justified. But how do we justify defending ourself against someone who is defending themself? I'm serious - "self defense" is not an acceptable justification coming from an aggressor; it's just "more aggression."
Militarists have long offered the doctrine that "it's OK to kill someone in war because you're both shooting at eachother" but does that really make sense? Isn't it always the aggressor's responsibility? It seems to me that "he attacked me and wouldn't stop and was endangering my life, so I had to defend myself" carries some weight - and it's why, if someone attacks you in your home, you can't just say "I defended myself" you need to show that you tried to negotiate a resolution before you resorted to violence.
The obvious conclusion is that, since the Iraqis don't want us in Iraq, didn't ask us to come to Iraq, and are trying to make us leave, they are defending themselves against us. If I were dealing with Iraqi troops driving around my yard here in Pennsylvania, I might be able to claim self-defense. But the fighting is not in Pennsylvania; we are not defending ourselves, we are trying to prevent them from defending themselves.
The doctrine of pre-emptive warfare is morally dubious. It's not even sufficient to show ability, stated intent, and plans to attack before pre-empting someone because if you have that information you've got a recipe for a successful ambush. If someone started emailing me telling me they were going to come kill me next friday at 2:00pm, and I thought it a credible threat, it might be good strategy to be having a cookout for my lawyer and a few members of the State Police (or on a plane to someplace else) but it doesn't justify attacking them first because they might have just been trying to sucker me into a losing strategy (like we did to the Japanese in WWII with economic warfare that convinced them they had to try to pre-empt us. Looking at the history if warfare, it seems to me that strategic surprise is very seldom achieved and it doesn't have a vast affect on outcomes anyway. Aggressors seldom attack thinking "this has a chance of working, only if I take them by surprise..." which, of course, reveals the ridiculousness of Bush and Blair's claims that Iraq was a clear and present danger to anyone. Militarists sell events as sudden and surprising, like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (that was clearly in the works for a year before it got heavy) or Pearl Harbor (which was a reaction to deliberate strategy attempting to bring Japan into the war) - pre-emption presupposes surprise might be dangerous and ignores the reality that surprise is practically impossible to achieve.
halo.lcfr @ #278 wrote:
Well, y'know, except for all the soldiers and vets who know exactly what it is like to be a soldier, and who agree that this event was an unjustified atrocity.
Well tough-fucking-luck. We fund the military with our taxes and we vote on the Commander in Chief. We'll say whatever the fuck we want, thank you very much.
If what was done in this video really was in accordance with the ROE, then they are in dire need of revision.
We cower in deference before your monstrously tumescent e-penis.
oh, no. the war has always been unjustified, from start to finishnow. These atrocities should however serve as a lesson against war. this war, and any other war. because all wars are atrocities, even the "justified" ones. that this one wasn't justified makes it so much worse.
Are you honestly saying that children should die in a war?
Please tell me that was a spelling error on your part.
post 261 got me thinking- I am not exactly responding to it so much as giving my impressions of the american style military:
"Let's be honest with ourselves, for a minute. The way that soldiers are trained has been carefully designed/evolved to promote sublimation of the will to authority, group-think, and to hijack human's pack hunting/raiding behaviors. The military carefully inculcates "esprit de corps" and reliance between peer-groups to socialize its members to form bonds of interpersonal loyalty that facilitate the function of exactly the kind of behaviors that several people in this thread put forth as an excuse for killing: "they shot at my buddy" When a young person comes out of military training (me: summer class of Ft Dix, 1983) they're part of a "band of brothers" that has been programmed to behave as a pack; they're a weapon ready to be used. "
In "Homange to Catalonia" George Orwell talks about the military he belonged to in the spanish civil war. It was a volunteer military devoid of hierarchy, where underlings annoyed the hell out of the people training them by asking tons of questions before agreeing to engage in violence. The equiptment was shit, it was freezing, and food was not abundant. It still worked, and without a bunch of bs where people can pass the responsibility for actions up the chain, or be suckered into doing inhuman things. The idea that top down, authoritative style military operations are the 'evolved' version simply isn't true. It is only evolved in the sense that it is compatable with the extreme level of inequality in our society. I am not even sure that unthinking pack animal like soliders are the best kind for military operations; I would think that any task requiring thought would be more difficult to accomplish with the weapon-people. I know that people who have had their psyche altered in the way you describe are ideal for comitting atrocities without hesitation. Defending our communities when it is needed can be accomplished in different and interesting ways.
Not a spelling error, but I did use the wrong word. Caught it as soon as I clicked Submit and waited to see how long it took for someone to find it. :)
Notkieran @302
I just wanted to highlight this comment, which is really spot on.
Part of the specific problem in the war on terror is that unlike the Danes, we've been trying to solve a police problem (terrorism) with a military force and it just ends up with a lot of "collateral damage" and endless occupations of sovereign nations that now have a really good reason to hate us.
Soldiers don't make good police, but do make a large amount of corpses. And changing the ROE so that soldiers are to be used as police and to deploy military tactics against criminal organizations just ends up with a lot of martyrs and atrocities like this.
So yeah, just wanted to highlight their comment because it's key to understanding why the war on terror is so fucked up.
And yes, terrorism is best dealt with by police action. That's what Denmark has done. And they've yet to have an attack, despite having multiple attempts. They've also yet to have a false arrest or any atrocities on their specific conscience (does not apply to potential atrocities performed by Danish soldiers serving under NATO troops in our disaster of an invasion of Afghanistan).
We've also seen it work against our domestic terrorists.
You know, where they use children as human shields, ambulances as offensive military vehicles during a battle, civilian taxis as troop and weapon transportation etc.
They don't have regular troop and weapon transportation because we blew them up, and took them away. They're not fighting us on the battlefield because they tried that and we threshed them like wheat. They're hiding in civilian areas and using civilian gear and looking like civilians because - they're fucking civilians. By definition, since we put the Official Iraqi Army out of business. Hello?
If Iraqi troops were stationed all over my little area of Pennsylvania I'd be an insurgent that looked like a civilian because I'm a fucking civilian and I wouldn't feel obligated to send an engraved invitation to the invaders asking them to name their seconds and meet me in a convenient child-safe battlefield of their choosing.
Militarists are so fucking stupid; they're actually offended that the losers in a war aren't behaving the way they ought to. But they're behaving exactly the way anyone behaves when there are under a military occupation by a foreign invader, where they live. I'm guessing that the Iraqis considered "perhaps if we ask them nicely to 'please leave'?" as an option and discarded it because they're just really, really mean people. Or maybe it's that they're pissed off because we've killed hundreds of thousands of their friends, bombed the fuck out of several of their cities, and not even had the courtesy to say "oops, sorry, you were right about the WMDs" gosh, I'd be a bit resentful of that, myself! Especially if I was dealing with people who were so stupid that they think they can shoot the fuck out of you until you become their friend.
Let me try another perspective: in the US we all laugh at "we're from the government and we're here to help" but when we say that to an Iraqi that joke probably is going to fall on its face.
halo-
Given that in this particular set of wars, we, America, are the aggressors engaging in aggressive invasions and occupations of sovereign nations, the "ending of war" in this particular case is entirely on us.
Iraqis and Afghanis didn't come over here and invade Springfield, Ill so we had to fight them back. We took over their home because we were hurting too bad to understand that a military invasion of unrelated targets was a bad response to a criminal problem involving a decentralized criminal organization needing a police response.
We can "end wars" or at least reduce the amount of atrocities that America has personally engaged in for the last 60 plus years by stopping our continuous policy of occupations and invasions around the world.
Thread's sapping my comment!
Meant to say that that should have been a "poor choice of words."
I assume it was shot at night, because it was black and White. As such:
What stops the long things swinging and being used as a walking stick from being Umbrellas folded up after the days end? You can guess from the weight and the usage (being used as a cane or how it touches the ground) if it is an umbrella.
Since they did not have Night vision, why couldn't they take more time to confirm. A trigger happy gunner is a BIG hint for the commander to re-evaluate all his reports because of cognitive bias.
As for the RPG, it was only assumed to be one after mistaking the Cameras and "umbrellas" as Aks . Already there is a very severe bias present in the interpretation.
If it was a Day shot, the color would have been clearly showed if it was what they claimed it to be. If they gave a BW picture on what was a Day shot, well...
#319:
ROFLMAOELEVENTY111!!!!11
Thank you, thank you. I needed to bust a gut laughing. :) Hopefully he'll not torment us any longer with his punishing dildo mallet, either.
#88 -- This war was started by an avowed christianist President. This is a perfect example of the christian god's work. Bush lied to start this war--hell, the son-of-a-bitch was gunning for Saddam from the very start of his administration. Remember, "Fuck Saddam, we're taking him out", spoken by the newly-elected George W. Bush well before anybody cared about Iraq? Here is a prime example of a psychological cripple wanting to start a FUCKING war to show his daddy that he wasn't a drunk and a screwup, he was a Christian Soldier! And he'd teach that Saddam Hussein a lesson he'd never forget for tryin' to kill daddy dearest. An eye for an eye, isn't it?
By the way, what's up with you having to "view the video" to personally convince yourself that this wasn't a christian massacre? How do you know the chopper pilot didn't have black patches under his eyes with a couple of biblical chapter and verse references printed on them like your favorite college footballer, Timmeh Tebow? Get this, and make no mistake about it: the U.S., as you christianists are so fond of saying, is a "christian nation", and it was a very christianist President leading the christianist military, with their christianist gun sights, to massacre an entire goddamned nation! I said it before, and I'll say it to you again, this is a picture of your Jesus at work, you sick bastard. You're the one with those children's blood on your hands.
It may be uncharitable of me, but I suspect that the pilots and gunners make self-justifying comments, "Ooh! he's got a gun!" as a matter of habit to ensure that any recording, and thus the official version of an incident, includes plenty of ass-covering.
skeptifem:
The idea that top down, authoritative style military operations are the 'evolved' version simply isn't true.
Well, picking some of the most ineffective irregulars in the history of warfare as a counter-example isn't very convincing. :D
I didn't say anything about top-down command structures being the be-all (they're not) I was talking about the techniques used to train men to kill; those have been relatively consistent except for in situations where there is so much anger that there's no need to motivate the troops. That's one of the reasons insurgents are very very different from regular military forces - they're generally motivated to kill invaders (another built-in human pack behavior?) or oppressors. The problem with a standing army is that a nation-state needs to forge this weapon that can be pointed in whatever direction its leaders think make sense at the time; that requires a much more carefully constructed army, especially if you're carrying out wars of aggression or internal suppression.
There's a fair bit to learn from the Swiss, I think. They have constructed an army where the motivation and indoctrination is defensive - fanatically and viciously so - but it would be implausible to mobilize the Swiss army to go on the offensive without building a whole new army from scratch.
Come to think of it you, one could probably establish a list of things to look for in how an army is trained that would indicate it was an army constructed for offensive operations. Period. That's just the training; the rest is easy to see from operations. Defensive armies don't need huge logistical trains (again, consider Switzerland) and all the mechanisms of "force projection" As I write this I realize that there is absolutely no way that anyone could mistake our military as anything but built purely for offense.
I'm a bit late to this, so apologies if I'm hitting on topics that have already been beaten to death...
I read through the first couple dozen posts, and skimmed a few of the recent ones at the end...
First off, I am very much anti-war, and against our presence in Iraq and the middle east in general. secondly, while I generally despise the military, and a large portion of the people in it, I did an enlistment, for what that's worth.
So, when I was watching the video, it did look like 2 of the people in the group were carrying weapons, and also that person poking around the corner did look like they were aiming an rpg or something similar. - granted, this wasn't some sort of critical examination or anything, just a quick reflexive-sort of look at the video.
But, also, when you are in the military, you are trained to protect yourself and (more importantly) your vehicle/position/fellow troops, and in so doing, you are quickly scanning an area, looking for weapons (kinda brings to mind that old adage about everything looking like a nail when you have a hammer...)
Also, I have no idea of what the rules of engagement are, or what there orders were going into the situation. my best (not-too-educated) guess is that the helicopters were providing route reconnaissance/support for the ground convoy/whatever. maybe they were told to clear out anything that could be a threat, maybe they weren't, I don't really know, but that plays an important part in this.
Now, before everyone jumps on me, I want to say that I don't agree with the gunner's comments coaxing the wounded to pick up a weapon, or the requests to open up on a vehicle that appeared to be evacuating the wounded (and furthermore, the comment about it 'bringing weapons' sounds to me like they were trying in advance to cover their asses for shooting civilians and wounded.)
Next complaint - I'm of mixed feelings about what should happen to the gunner and the others on the radio, I don't feel that I have quite enough info to make any judgments on that. However, if there is anything that comes down on this, it should come down on the heads of the higher-ups -those who planned the mission, who distributed the intelligence about it, who cleared the fire orders, who wrote the rules of engagement, and, more importantly, those who attempted to contribute to this being covered up. The military trains people from their first day to instantly obey orders without thought and consideration, and while I may not agree with this, I feel that if this is the standard practice, then by default, and responsibility for wrongdoing (so long as it was not done in direct disobedience to orders) falls squarely on the heads of those in command. - This was one of my biggest complaints with how the whole Abu Ghraib (sp?) bit was handled; I'm not going to say the enlisted peoples actions were right or even defensible, but I feel the upper echelons of the command should have taken the hit for it. -In those sort of messes I can only really see 3 possible scenarios: 1; the command knows what's going on and either actively endorses, condones, or even commands it, 2; the command knows what's going on, and either doesn't care, or fails to properly control and discipline their troops, or, 3; the command has no clue what the hell is going on, and as such, has no place being in charge, and is criminally negligent.
I'm not on here a terrible lot, but I will try to keep an eye on this thread, but if you want to discuss/question/argue/whatever any specific part of my post (or at least expect me to respond to it...) please include my name (ryk) -either as a quote, or whatever, but I'll be doing a search for my name when I catch up on this thread.
-I'll try to keep up and respond to whatever I catch, but I may not have the time to read all the posts.
Cereberus @ #325
I have a friend (a fellow Open Diary User) who was invalided out of Iraq (back problem from lugging and mounting the .50 cal onto the truck). It's very clear from the way she talks about it that she's suffering from PTSD from the attacks on her camp. She didn't snap and start killing people, but that might very well have been because she's an MP and thus had a different approach to potential perps.
The point I think I should have made and didn't actually get around to making was that when we are under pressure, we revert to our default personas, and the default persona of a properly trained soldier is to kill everything that isn't a buddy and then worry about the rest later.*
The trouble is that chickenhawks treat the military like teabaggers treat guns- to be waved about and brandished and used to make a point, and then one day you hear a negligent discharge and some idiot is standing there with a sheepish expression saying "Uh, I just shot Marvin in the face."
Sorry, pressed "enter" too soon. The asterisk was for this footnote:
*I'm not talking about the morality of this, but simply the whole point of making someone into a soldier. An army is a weapon you point at the enemy. The immorality comes from the intent that you have in pointing the weapon, not the way that the weapon kills the target, the person behind the target, everyone in a fifty-foot radius behind the target, and sends a mushroom cloud up into the sky.
I can add this now to that indelible part of my mind that includes Peter Singer's reading from "Rape of the Congo" at the Atheist Convention in Melbourne, which described truly evil deeds. This video could be argued to show an honest mistake, but the satisfaction and eagerness with which the soldiers shot humans to death shows they were too emotionally attached to getting the baddies, any baddies.
Thanks, PZ, for at least giving it this forum.
Still reading through, but this caught my eye.
There is one major difference between Vietnam and Iraq; we don't have an active draft right now. It took several years of massive drafts for the anti-war protests to become a serious force. Over two million men were drafted to serve in Vietnam, and we don't know how many volunteer servicemen* joined out of fear of the draft. If such a draft were implemented today, the outcry against the war would probably be much more vocal.
*I'm using servicemen here specifically because women were not subject to the draft. No slight against servicewomen who volunteered during Vietnam is intended.
Slurs like that have no place here. You will not find sympathy for that outburst.
Wow. One of the most incredible things I've ever seen, PZ.
(Apologies in advance... haven't read any of the thread yet.)
I will have to admit that early in the clip, that person DID look like he was taking cover with an RPG behind the corner of that building. It seems like that was the match that lit the fire.
And then fear, a little cowardice, and a LOT of bloodlust took over from there. Tragic beyond belief.
As with the commenter above, I'm sorry if I'm rehashing old arguments; I didn't read all the comments. I think I might have a couple of new issues to raise though.
Briefly, I tend to agree with the various people who think the initial incident can be forgiven as a misjudgment due to context. That argument has def been done to death, so I won't go into it further.
As far as I'm concerned, however, there are two more very important things (I go into them in greater depth here):
1. The decision to fire was made by someone remotely. This takes responsibility for their actions away from the soldiers (might that make them less careful about picking their targets?). It also adds a delay, so if that HAD have been an RPG rather than, as I suspect, a long-lense, then the delay in reacting may have been fatal for the gun ship. It's seems to attempt to reduce the likelihood of wounding civilians but actually just makes the situation worse for everyone.
2. The act of firing on the men attempting to evacuate the wounded was knowingly authorized by a remote commander. The soldier in the gunship didn't lie, the authorization to fire came BECAUSE they were attempting to evacuate the injured man. It seems from this video that helping your wounded is considered sufficient justification for an attack in the American military. Forgive me, but that seems to break 7 of the 10 rules in this list. That seems to me to be a FAR bigger, endemic problem than any one incident.
CNN has the story:
Great, breaking news. Finally :-/
They've just shown some of the footage on the early evening news on Channel 10 (commercial network) in Queensland. The commentary certainly wasn't supportive of the action.
wtf?
@PZ
This is the part that puzzled me in the video. If they're quite happy to inflate the number of armed men and make claims about guns that don't exist, why the sudden attention to the ROE at this point?
Just a few quick photos of the Commander-In-Chief:
>SaintStephen
>Just a few quick photos of the Commander-In-Chief:
I'm not sure what all is going on there, but...
I'd imagine secret security and all that wouldn't let a president come that close to someone who didn't all but worship him. And, I don't know much about this (so feel free to correct me...), but I would guess that after some event that would scar you up like that, most people would take some sort of 'sacrifice for the greater good' type mentality or something, and of those few who didn't... I'm guessing they are on all sorts of TSA watch-lists now....
@333- yeah I didn't think you were endorsing our style exactly. I hear that 'best military in the world' thing here all the time though. I really liked Homage to Catalonia though, in retrospect it isn't all that amazing that cohesion occurs when there is a good reason for fighting... I had not concieved of military groups that worked off of questioning and cooperation.
Anyway, on to the topic of just wars. My first college class was an ethics class, and our prof did a good job of presenting the topic. We were given a summary of just war theory to read in class, and discuss, and just about everyone found it to be reasonable. Then he informed us what the authors were originally trying to justify, and it turned the whole thing on its head. Everyone thinks their war is justified.
To all the people who are surprised that soldiers laugh and congratulate themselves upon successfully destroying what they believe are the enemy: have you never read a book that presents a soldier's perspective of war?
From the Iliad to Generation Kill, any of them would have disillusioned you on this point. Most soldiers do not break down and cry when they kill someone. Killing people is what soldiers do, and without some mechanism for dealing with that they would be completely useless.
Fortunately, evolution has bestowed upon us humans several such mechanisms. The dialogue of the crewmen ("look at those dead bastards", laughing at driving over a body, etc.) shows them in action, and could just as well have been lifted off of hoplites at Marathon, longbowmen at Agincourt, or GIs at Falaise.
If you think such an apparently casual approach to killing other human beings is unacceptable, your issue is not with this helo crew, or even with the US military in Iraq. Your issue is with war. "As well ask men what they think of stone."
That is not to say I don't think what's shown in that video is horrible, knowing what the Apache crew didn't. I just don't find it surprising, and I don't have any simple solutions.
@248 Yubal
Sorry, I just have to ask: east or west germany?
I´m german as well, and, as set in the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany, was accepted as a conscious objector.
That incident was no fight; that was no battle.
It was an extermination.
To all the people who are surprised that the USA starts wars and commits atrocities:
There's gasoline in your car's gas tank right now, isn't there?
Once you commit an atrocity you are no longer a decent human being.
Is there anybody who can decipher the HUD information on the video and say at what range the gunship 'engaged the hostiles'?
Also, is it not the case that Apache helicopters have only pilot-activated guns - not like a Huey, in which pilot and gunners are different personnel? And that the pilots have a 'monocle' with which they view the scene and direct the gunfire? So the question is - are we seeing in the video the same thing the pilot would have seen, or would he have had a better or worse or perhaps different view?
I've just finished watching the Generation Kill TV series, so I have to say that this video doesn't exactly shock me. Anybody who remembers the behaviour of 'Captain America' won't be too surprised to find that people with his attitude are also flying gunships.
I also remember seeing not too long ago footage from another helicopter camera in which a couple of people who might have been insurgents, might have been farmers were slaughtered at long distance.
Perhaps it's the immediacy of the video footage that is making everybody jump up and down, but writing as someone who opposed the war from the outset in the absolutely certain conviction that it was simply impossible for Iraq to have WMD, I have to say that some people seem to be waking up to the necessary consequences of that decision rather late in the day. Whether its cynicism or exhaustion that makes me think "Well, what did you expect?" I don't really know.
Killing a father who wants to help the wounded in front of his children? This is a GREAT way to make terrorist, suicide bombers and generally people who hate USA.
By the way this is not the first time things like this happens. Was there anybody hold responsible for these kid of things ever?
#347
I would much rather like seeing the moron-in-chief where he rightfully belongs, - swinging at the end of a rope.
With the rest of the US war criminals.
These guys made 9/11 into a minor incidence, which trivialised the losses, by inflicting so much damage, uncritically, on so many, also completely innocent people.
Had I been an American, I would also try and hold my country to the HIGHEST standards, and not one that can justifiably be regarded as the most despotic, warmongering regime around the world. The reality is that the US has been involved as perpetrator of assisting perpetrator in most of the dirty events around the world since WW2, which is well documented by among others Chalmers Johnson, who is another who REALLY loves his country by holding it to the highest standards.
So full honours to PZ as an example of real patriotism based on total honesty!
I need to get me one of them helicopters.
There is nothing much to say of the video, words keep failing even if I know that is not just one incident but one of many.
But when people keep defending the act of one human killing another as 'shit happens' it does not leave much doubt in my mind that the commenter is vile person on par with the shooter. You can find excuses from psychology and from various sources but people are killed, FUCKERS!
WE only have this one fucking life and you shrug off the deaths as part of doing business. Why the fuck you think wars keep continuing? That attitude feeds it, That attitude is like throwing little boys to papal convention and then just shrugging after molestation that shit happens.
Shit happens? Just be silent, just be silent and hope that when something happens to you, people do not just walk by and say 'shit happens, dude'.
Sorry, but I simply cannot care about any muslims getting killed, civilians or not.
Probably because they are anti-reason, anti-science, anti-human rights and anti-democracy.
In fact most muslim civilians would not hesitate slaughtering a gay person.
So, it is impossible to care for them getting killed because the image of them "civilians" torturing gays always pops up.
Muslims are vermin.
No, Tronzu, you are.
Seconded
Tronzu, no need to trumpet your failings.
I note your comment is anti-reason, anti-science, anti-human rights and anti-democracy.
Which means, by your own contention, you consider yourself vermin.
I'm a humanist and I value life very highly.
You have proved otherwise. You may value some life very highly, but not the lives of civilians in a country under occupation by the U.S., which invaded it illegally and under false pretenses. If those civilians were relatives or friends or even from the same country as you, you would have a very different view. In any case, you are an extremely vile and stupid person. Even if some element of this event can be interpreted as "A few guys make a mistake", most of it is, as John Morales says, "an extermination", and it was followed by a deliberate coverup and lies about the events.
you fools
Extreme Dunning-Kruger Effect. And aside from your evident lack of intelligence, you display a parallel form -- such a lack of moral judgment that you are unable to recognize that lack.
Probably because they are anti-reason, anti-science, anti-human rights and anti-democracy.
What a stunning lack of self awareness.
You don't even know that anyone in this video was muslim, cretin.
This is really making the news -- right now it is the #1 title on Arte, and it is also on Libération.
Probably the fact that two of the victims are journalists played a role in this.
Bigot @ 360,
Your generalizations are telling and reveal you as the bigot that you are.And that is not even mentioning that we dont know if those people in the vid were in fact muslims.
If you think such an apparently casual approach to killing other human beings is unacceptable, your issue is not with this helo crew, or even with the US military in Iraq. Your issue is with war.
False dichotomy; all three deserve criticism. And your handwaving about the first is sheer sophistry -- many soldiers display consciences and kill reluctantly and with remorse, unlike those in this video.
That is not to say I don't think what's shown in that video is horrible, knowing what the Apache crew didn't.
Nice dodge, scumbag. The Apache crew committed murder and the military brass covered it up.
No, you idiotic fucks. There are no muslims in Iraq and you don't get slaughtered for even not being a muslim vermin in Iraq.
Fucking unbelievable...when they were systematically torturing and killing gays that would put Spanish Inquisition to shame where were you fucks then with your comments about muslim civilian scum and their whole ghastly hellish culture.
Tronzu,
please leave and take your hate with you.
Tronzu appears to have the IQ of a turnip.
Tronzu, your anti-Muslim hate-mongering trolling is futile (your metaphorical spittle notwithstanding).
....many soldiers display consciences and kill reluctantly and with remorse, unlike those in this video.
Um, does it really make a difference to the victim, or their family?
I've never been with a group of soldiers during an incident like this, but I have been with paramedics, and, at least for the guys I was with, trust me - "institutional" humour is all that keeps them sane. They simply cannot afford the emotions that civilians have - at least, not at the time. They can't cry over every body. Which is not the same as saying they don't feel remorse, particularly at two in the morning, when they've come back from their tour of duty.
Tronzu - I'm gay too, and I was equally disgusted by the Muslim attitude towards homosexuality displayed by the Iraqi death squads. It's only a few degrees worse than the right-wing US Christian attitude, though; the difference being the same as between theory and practice...
this wasn't some sort of critical examination or anything, just a quick reflexive-sort of look at the video.
But, also, when you are in the military, you are trained to protect yourself and (more importantly) your vehicle/position/fellow troops, and in so doing, you are quickly scanning an area, looking for weapons
What's with you rationalizing pukes who can look at a very deliberate process where people had plenty of time to make evaluations -- and we can hear them do it -- and turn it into something else entirely?
Um, does it really make a difference to the victim, or their family?
Um, are you really so fucking stupid as to not understand the point?
I was equally disgusted by the Muslim attitude towards homosexuality displayed by the Iraqi death squads
Apparently then you are equally a bigot. Nothing any Iraqi death squad did has anything to do with the Reuters journalists and others who were gleefully and remorselessly killed in this video.
Colin,
Not to the former, almost certainly yes to the latter.
I think it's much the same, as fatwa-envy demonstrates — besides, I suspect religion is more of an enabler than a cause.
Which of course means they should be murdered.
It's on the front page of the NY Times now (or rather, the home page of the Times online).
Truth, if I agreed with Tronzu that all Muslims should be killed gleefully and remorselessly killed because of the actions of a few towards homosexuals, you'd have a point. As it happens, I don't agree with him - if I did, as I pointed out, I'd have to feel the same way towards Christians. My post was attempting to indicate that the problem is not confined to Muslims.
I was merely indicating that, I, too, found those death squads fairly depressing; I also happened to notice a distinct silence about it in the US media - my comment was a way of saying "Ah, so someone else did notice".
As to your original point, it depends what you meant:
(A) That the deaths in the video wouldn't have happened if the soldiers had been "reluctant" to kill.
(B) That it was distasteful for them to not to show remorse, indeed, to show eagerness.
If you meant (A) - which on rereading your whole post I now think you did -- then I agree with you and apologize.
If you meant (B), see what I wrote about institutional humour.
tm quite rightly alludes to the topic being derailed, something to which I've just been complicit.
As penance, I repeat for emphasis:
some facts:
1) the men don't react to the gunship because it is several km away. watch how long it takes between the chain gun report and the shells hitting.
2) most rpg variants have a maximum range of around 800m. that's max, not optimal.
3) the men move from cover (walking unperturbed) into an open area, probably waiting for a pick up. this is not typical behaviour for iraqi resisters in 2007, after 4 years of war. nor is walking around in groups of 6, which is a shitload of guerrillas in the open any time the occupier has complete control of the air and vigorously patrols it.
4) at no point did any of those men have any weapon that could have remotely threatened that gunship. muslim eye-lasers notwithstanding.
5) at several points the crew had multiple opportunities to confirm their targets.
6) this did not occur nose to nose/split second. a gunship stood off at long range, waited for an opportunity (the people congregating in the open) and opened fire.
7) the onus is always on the occupier to avoid murdering civilians in the countries they occupy. the reason for this unfair imposition is something we call world war 2. at the time, invading and occupying another country on a flimsy pretext made you the bad guy. and we kind of wanted to make it less popular.
8) who is at fault? i'm going to go with the people occupying someone else's country as the result of an illegal war i'm afraid.
Have you been living in a cave for the last seven years?
Tis Himself, OM @57,
Do you live in the US? Do you drive a car? Do you buy consumer items like IPads? Do you buy your food at the supermarket? Do you understand that all of those things depend on one thing and one thing only. OIL!
Do you understand that oil production in the US peaked in the 1970s?!
BTW Did you get a chance to read the paper I linked to the other day?
What I don't understand is how people can say they don't understand.
Not to the former, almost certainly yes to the latter
The point was not whether it makes the dead any less dead, but rather about the morality of the action. As you said, this was an extermination, not a battle. As PZ said,
That's a relevant fact, even if people like Colin are too morally blind to see it.
I agree with Notkieran at 302 - one of the biggest problems here is with making soldiers into police. Wrong training for the wrong job.
And this is not new, and it is not unique. This picture was in Time magazine at least two years before the video here was shot - a family in a car was stopped at a checkpoint and the adults shot by American soldiers for no reason other than not driving quite slowly enough. The picture is the daughter, covered in her parents' blood. (warning: It's bad - I still can't look at it without crying.) There were six children in the car. All I could think of was here are six children who are never going to recover, and the one thing they will be absolutely sure of more than anything else, for the rest of their lives, is how much they hate Americans. This is the story. The longer we stay, the longer we try to police somewhere we shouldn't, the more of these will happen.
Jimmy-Bob @43 -
Yep. I'm Jack's complete lack of surprise. I always assume things like this are going on in war. It's inevitable.
Just think about what cops can be like, in the United States, with people who speak English, share a culture, and live a few miles away from where they live. They shoot, torture, taze, beat, plant evidence, etc. Now take those cops and put them in a war zone where they are being shot at constantly by people they can't understand. Now give them more right to kill without review, give them better training to kill, give them better weapons to kill and make them all nineteen years old. What did you think would happen?
ozvotes - good points. I had noticed the gap between the firing of the 30mm and the impact of the rounds.
It should be possible to calculate the distance fairly accurately, depending on the frame rate (time resolution) of the video.
I know that many senior (and not so senior) British military personal were appalled at the lack of training US soldiers had in policing an insurgency. Even things that can seem quite trivial matter, such as removing your sunglasses when talking to the public.
@ 383,
I am not convinced oil was the driving force for this war, I think more petty motives are more likely, like son wanting to finish dad's job, like an intellectually weak president getting manufactured and made-up "advice" from advisors and so forth.
And, IPads depend on Iraqi oil? If you are advocating this then you're more insane then Tronzu.
Well there are reasons other than Oil and the one's you laid out too Rorschach.
Like it's no coincidence we now have active military forces / bases in two countries bordering Iran.
But keeping one of the worlds largest oil supplies out of the hands of a maniac was surely one of the main reasons as well.
at no point did any of those men have any weapon that could have remotely threatened that gunship. muslim eye-lasers notwithstanding.
Indeed. Take a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik
from 3:00 to 3:20, as the gunship opens fire on a group of clearly unarmed men.
Yeah, how who you consider a maniac changes though, once he was Rumsfeld's and Bush's best mate....
The invasion of Kuwait gave them the "in" they needed in 1990 but Rummy, Cheney and Wolfie had been talking about this type of action for years before Saddam invaded Kuwait.
And personally I think Iran has a lot more to do with this than Iraq's oil.
It was a strategic action that not only would "protect" oil supplies but also give them a way to be very close to Iran, who as far as I understand, has always been considered the real "threat" in that area.
After watching the full video, the one not all gussied up, it does appear there was a legitimate reason to open fire. The person did have an RPG, and I apologize for denying that they did have weapons. There's the possibility that they would have engaged the illegal occupiers in an ambush that should not have happened, so in order to save the lives of people they care about more, they decided to kill people they don't care about much.
Firing on the van at first seemed extreme, but the rationale behind firing upon it, after further review of the video, leads me to believe it was the right thing to do. They had troops about to head into a hostile situation, having a possible enemy combatant on the field prior to the troops arrival could have led to the loss of American lives. There could have been anything in that van, from IED to RPG. It's unfortunate that there was a child in there.
I'm going to give the soldiers the benefit of the doubt in this one. But they're still callous husks of human beings and they have to be that way. The alternative is crippling guilt for them. I sympathize with that plight, but I think the guilt is somewhat justified since everyone over there is obeying illegal orders to occupy.
My post was attempting to indicate that the problem is not confined to Muslims.
You're rather dim. The problem does not extend to "Muslims" as a whole, especially when one takes "Muslim" to include any Iraqi.
(A) That the deaths in the video wouldn't have happened if the soldiers had been "reluctant" to kill.
(B) That it was distasteful for them to not to show remorse, indeed, to show eagerness.
You're extremely dim, and morally blind. Being eager to kill Iraqis, who are called "pricks" and "bastards" in the video, is morally repugnant, not merely "distasteful", and of course it can result in, as PZ said, "a completely unnecessary massacre". All this garbage about what is (people claim) common among soldiers does not relieve these soldiers of moral culpability.
And Saddam wasn't really a friend to Rummy et al as much as a tool to use against Iran.
Fuck!
And we in the UK are complicit because of that lying christian bastard Blair.
I share your pain.
I didn't watch the video because I've seen enough footage of atrocities over the years.
Not a hell of a lot. In all wars govenments send young men out to kill, after filling their heads with bogus idealogical reasons to treat the enemy as subhuman.
The big difference is this generation of young soldiers grew up playing first person shooter video games, and some are unable to differentiate the the enemy characters in the games they played from the reality of innocent people going about their business.
The person did have an RPG
Tell me at what time in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik you see an RPG?
It's amazing that people here can continue to call a camera an RPG even when they know that one of the men killed was a photojournalist. You can see his "RPG" at 1:10 in the video above.
I'm going to give the soldiers the benefit of the doubt in this one. But they're still callous husks of human beings and they have to be that way.
No, they don't, and neither do you, but you choose to be.
The more muslim vermin exterminated the better for the human civilization on this planet.
CNN just covered this an hour ago. They played the first minute or so of the tape then cut it off to respect the families of the victims.
Then the pundit stated it was 'saddening' then launched the "it's war, shit happens" dismissal.
The part about the van being attacked was totally omitted from the coverage.
Which begs the question, "Which is more dangerous, radical islam or american nationalism.
Let's do a victim count.
oh wait.
I'll need a better processer.
Hey, Tonzu, couple of questions.
At what stage in the conversion to Islam does one lose one's humanity? Please be as specific as possible.
If one de-converts from Islam, can one be a human again, or is it kind of like virginity?
If one is investigating what appears to be the murder of a human being, what level of evidence that the corpse was a moslem is required to dismiss the crime? Or at least reduce it to something more appropriate, such as animal cruelty (given that moslems are, according to you, sub-human)?
Should the state actively pursue the killing of those that have converted to Islam, or should it merely support civilian efforts, domensticly?
When converting to Islam, does a US citizen retain citizenship, even though they have become sub-human? Or is it only brown-skinned, foriegn moslems that are sub-human?
(If so, you're using the wrong term. What you mean, and should say is: Sand Niggers instead of moslems. It really would be a more honest description of your feelings and beliefs.)
yes it is war, just like the metro bombings in russia.
Just like the canadians tying civilians with barbed wire on the front of their tanks in the northern salient after dday.
No different than using flamethrowers to bbq a few scared Nipponese crouching like fearful hobbits in a hole in an area so foreign that most americans wouldnt recognize it on a cruise ship going past.
Sorry that you have had such a delightful life that you have never had to contemplate such actions except when cheering on your favorite cinematic heroes from the comfort of your living room chair.
According to the after action reports the rules of engagement were met.
This isnt a sherrif stopping a dodgy looking car hoping for a bust. It is the normal face of war.
If you think this type of action stopped when the occupants of the whitehouse changed think again
http://www2.centcom.mil/sites/foia/rr/CENTCOM%20Regulation%20CCR%202521…{41BA1AAF-785A-481A-A630-12470AFCD6FD}
And the more gigantic bigoted idiots who can't separate stereotypes of populations from individuals acting as individuals, like yourself, that succumb to long slow painful deaths from testicular cancer the better.
See!
It's fun isn't it?!?!
But keeping one of the worlds largest oil supplies out of the hands of a maniac was surely one of the main reasons as well.
Uh, you're saying that the invasion of Iraq was largely in order to keep Iraqi oil out of the hands of the guy who had ruled Iraq for 24 years?
Aside from that silliness, Hussein was ruthless, but he was no "maniac" -- that meme was a major element of the war propaganda, much the way our pal in Panama was painted as a crazy to justify deposing him to gullible jingoist Americans.
Tronzu @400
Ah see i was going to respond to your arguments, but i see there is no need to... your just a twat with a keyboard.
@67
No, they're not lying about the rifles, see upper left at 3:40.
But the problem in Iraq is lawlessness, everybody carries guns around to keep themselves warm, so if the rules of engagement are to shoot anybody with a gun, whether they are engaging in battle or not creates a free-for-all.
You might get away with the "shit happens, it's war" excuse, until the second half of the video, when it's just wanton murder. You're not supposed to shoot unarmed rescue people or blow up a makeshift ambulance.
First off, Tronzu, take your hatred elsewhere and, while you're at it, go fuck yourself. Just because we do not share the beliefs of Muslims and find many practices associated with Islam to be anywhere from disagreeable to outright abhorrent, does not wish we would wish subjugation or death upon Muslims. We make our disagreements with their and other religions known through speech but never through violent action. Like I said, go fuck yourself.
With that out of the way, I next have to apologise for probably repeating what has already been said many times; I have only read a subset of the comments. Even granting the Apache crew the greatest leniency for being on edge during some of the worst violence of the occupation, it is hard to find any justification for what happened here.
Firstly, the identification of weapons is extremely questionable. I tried as best I could to try to view this without the knowledge that there were journalists present carrying camera equipment. All I could see were a few guys milling around with stuff in their hands. There was nothing suspicious in their behaviour until the point where we see someone with would could be legitimately be mistaken for a RPG peering down a street. However, at this point, there is no indication he is targeting the helicopter, nor that he is an immediate threat to other US forces in the area. The sensible response at this point would be continued observation until it was clear whether or not the group were insurgents with hostile intent.
From this point, things completely fall apart. The Apache crew seeks permission to engage on the basis of an inflated number of "armed" men. I disagree with the commenter above who blamed the controllers who gave permission to fire. They did so at this point on the basis of falsified information from the aircrew who wanted to start shooting.
Where this progresses from being a typical horror of occupation into the territory of being utterly debased is when the makeshift ambulance arrived. What possible justification could there be for opening fire on it? This is inhuman, and this point the controllers are complicit in the atrocity as they gave permission to fire following an accurate report of the situation from the Apache crew.
I should note that I could not clearly see the children in the van even though I was looking for them. In the video enlargement at the end, it was still not clear there were children present. This, to me, is not of primary relevance as none of what led to the Apache crew destroying the van should never have happened.
I'm not sure what I find more horrifying: this act of murder or the fact I am not really surprised. Such events are to be expected unless you are inexcusably ignorant of the actions of armed forces during this and any number of occupations through history. The one good thing is that this is now in the public domain and people will get better idea of what really happens in war.
It would be nice to be able to think that this might bring us one step closer to bringing the warmongers Bush, Blair, Cheney, et al to justice, but sadly I am not naive enough to do so.
In #40, David Marjanović wrote "Absolutely read the Guardian article mentioned above". I'll bet ChrisD and most others here haven't.
Yup, and that's 2:10 minutes after the soldiers declare the photographers are carrying weapons.
Remember causality? It goes forward, not the other way.
Is Tronzu a poe? Or was that supposed to be sarcasm?
Strange that I am alive. I lived 5 years in two predominantely muslim countries (Morocco and Malaysia) as an openly gay man and didn't get slaughtered.
Let's play a game of who can come up with the most fucking stupid hate filled affirmation starting with "In fact":
1. In fact most american civilians would not hesitate slaughtering a muslim.
2. In fact most British civilians would not hesitate slaughtering a paki.
3. In fact most French civilians would not hesitate slaughtering a bougnoule.
I'm pretty sure that's a dick with a keyboard.
I do not condemn the soldiers for the initial shooting. Perceived combatants, perceived danger, it's their job to take them out. It's a tragedy, but it's the same kind of tragedy a police officer would have if they perceived that someone was pulling a gun on them, but was taking out a cell phone or something of that sort.
I condemn the soldiers for their following comments. For willing the 'combatant' to pick up a weapon so they can shoot him dead. For shooting clearly unarmed individuals who are trying to help a wounded 'combatant.' For being so callous about the wounding of children.
I condemn the coverup above anything else.
LOL, like no polls on any issue have ever been made with muslim populations.
You truly are blind morons.
Oh great, what a typical display of liberal hypocrisy!
You guys cry foul over our soldier killing a dozen of false-god-worshipping 'suspected' insurgents, and when they blew up our men with IEDs you guys are nowhere to be found! Why do you hate America you dirty liberals?????????????
These limey reporters, god knows who they were, were hanging out with a bunch of men armed with AK47s and RPGs!!!!!!!!!!!!!! How do you esplain dat you stopid liebrals?????? Maybe these limey reporters hate freedom and america JUST LIKE YOU and were trying to tip off insurgents! GOOD RIDDANCE!
@Becca #237
”Universal service might be a good thing *if* there was an option to serve in something like AmeriCorps, rather than traditional military... by all means, get the chickenhawks into the service - make them put up or shut up. But leave my kids, and other people like my kids, out of it. “
This just wouldn’t work. It would defeat the whole point, you’d essentially end up with an all volunteer military and you would be right back to square one. It has to be universal conscription. Exceptions can be made for people with severe mental or physical defects of course, but for the most part, everyone should have the possibility looming that they may have to serve. After all, we don’t ask that only people who vote for certain kinds of legislation are the ones that have to follow that legislation. If anyone is made a protected class then they could ultimately end up sending other people’s children into harm’s way, perhaps in some kind of humanitarian effort that requires military protection. The true conscientious objectors can serve in combat as unarmed medics.
I really see it as the only fair solution here.
Oh great, what a typical display of liberal hypocrisy!
You guys cry foul over our soldier killing a dozen of false-god-worshipping 'suspected' insurgents, and when they blew up our men with IEDs you guys are nowhere to be found! Why do you hate America you dirty liberals?????????????
These limey reporters, god knows who they were, were hanging out with a bunch of men armed with AK47s and RPGs!!!!!!!!!!!!!! How do you esplain dat you stopid liebrals?????? Maybe these limey reporters hate freedom and america JUST LIKE YOU and were trying to tip off insurgents! GOOD RIDDANCE!
@PatrioticAmerican #415:
It's like it's trying to communicate. I think we need a 'stupid-to-English' translator over here!
The US military has a long record of lying about events such as these.
When British service personal are killed on duty there is a Coroner's Inquest. Such an inquest is a court of law charged with determining the cause of death, and the circumstances that lead to it. In cases of suspected friendly fire involving US personal, the US military has a policy of refusing to co-operate. None of the US personal involved are allowed to testify in court, and documents relating to the incident are routinely withheld.
More than one Coroner has complained of this lack of co-operation, and made it clear had it been British personal refusing to cooperate there could well have been contempt of court proceedings.
#417...
Wow... pharyngula has been graced by former president George W. Bush! What an honor... hold on, there, Mr. President... I have a few questions for you...
No, I wasn't saying it was largely the reason but that gaining control over those oil supplies was a reason. And you've got a point about using "maniac". I retract that term. They wanted to keep the oil supplies in the hands of someone they could control.
Rumsfeld and Cheney have been pushing for an extended war since they teamed up to try and sabotage Nixon and Kissinger's peace effort with the Soviet Union in the early 1970's. Those two have been itching for extended war since they made their way to the upper echelon of power in the US.
Saddam's invasion of Kuwait gave them a way to start that and Iran can easily be made into the big evil.
9/11 gave them another great excuse to pursue their desires.
#417
When do you miss the part that they weren't actually armed? There was no RPG supposedly they mistook the guys camera for an RPG.
Did you even go to the Collateralmurder site and read any of the details?
When you see a muslim civilian getting killed, just think this-
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there is a 90% chance that the same muslim civilian would cut a gay person's throat for being gay.
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There, problem solved.
War is the sword leading us to the panopticon we ALL find ourselves locked in today. I've had enough of this shit.
#417 poe
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/05/afghanistan
This is shocking...
All you namby-pamby pacifist liberals don konw how to win a WARR! Remember how we fought WW2 against non-believing japss???? WE THREW NAPALM INTO THEIR CIVILIAN POPULATION CENTER!!! Now that's how you fight a Warrr! but no, liberal politician said, we need to treat enemy humanely, we shouldn't stereotype or profile foreign people, blah blah blah, THATS WHYY gimpy small countries like IRAN dares to stand up to us today!!!!11111 YOu libreal are abasing US into a paper tiger all thanks to you and OBONGO!
And YOU KNOW WAT????? THESE REpoters are grilling in hell right now RGIHT BESIDE OTHER LIEBRAL MEEDIA MINIONS!!!!!!!
When you see a muslim civilian getting killed, just think this-
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there is a 90% chance that the same muslim civilian would cut a gay person's throat for being gay.
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There, problem solved.
Think about this.
When someone uses a statistic like that
100% of the time they are pulling it out of their ass.
Are you sure, Rev?... after reading #427 I am absolutely convinced it is none other than GWB...
When you see a muslim civilian getting killed, just think this-
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
there is a 90% chance that the same muslim civilian would cut a gay person's throat for being gay.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There, problem solved.
#427 dude stop talking about false worshippers and other bull... most of us here are atheists.
Patriotic American my arse. You're just a flamer, or extremely stupid. To you the World is quite a simple place, isn't it? Ever been outside our wonderful United States? Turns out, the US is quite a backwards and violent place compared to other more civilized countries out there... if we acknowledge that we may be able to make the US a better place.
Until then, blind ignorant bible thumpers like you just make this place worse. Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
No, they're not lying about the rifles, see upper left at 3:40.
Yes, there do appear to be rifles from 3:38 to 4:00; they can be more clearly seen in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik from 2:00 to 2:25.
yup between..2:10 and 2:28 you can see one RPG that could have been mistaken for an AK.
Uh, that's clearly a camera, which the man points at the Apache. Having now seen those frames from 2:33 to 2:45 in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik I can believe these soldiers sincerely believed that they were threatened at that moment. However, they then pan around the building where you can clearly see men milling around, mostly empty-handed except for one man clearly holding a camera; that's when the Apache opens fire.
Celtic, you are assuming GWB is able to even use the Internet.
You're giving him too much credit!
there is a 90% chance that the same muslim civilian would cut a gay person's throat for being gay.
You realize that even if this were true, there would still be 10% of muslims who don't deserve to be gunned down stupidly, right?
When you see a muslim civilian getting killed, just think this-
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there is a 90% chance that the same muslim civilian would cut a gay person's throat for being gay.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There, problem solved.
Good point
Also Read the Transcript One of the Soldiers EVen questioned if thye had weapons or not.
01:18I don't know if that's a...
01:19Hey Bushmaster element [ground forces control], copy on the one-six.
01:21Thats a weapon.
When you see a muslim civilian getting killed, just think this-
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
there is a 90%/very high chance that the same muslim civilian would cut a gay person's throat for being gay.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There, problem solved.
halo.lcfr:
You mean, you wouldn't have done the same? Are you sub-human?.
Ellie:
But he did lie. We can hear and see him doing it. 'There are 6 armed men' is a lie; there are two who might have arms. "They're collecting the bodies and weapons' is a lie; they're picking up one injured man. They were out and out lies, recorded for anyone to see and hear. The guy back at base giving the order to engage is exonerated - he was being lied to.
I haven't seen any comment here about the other incident on the longer video, where the Apache puts 3 missiles into the house. There you can see weapons.
The US Army did say that they found an RPG with spare ammunations on site. If this is true, it invalidates the accusation of unprovoked mass murder for we know that Innocent civilians don't fool around on the street with an freaking Bazooka on their shoulders.
Tronzu,
Shut the fuck up.
I'm sure he's got Dick Cheney working the keyboard. He's not aware of it, of course... he just yells shit at the screen and stuff he yells types up on it.
He can see Dick Cheney over on the side playing with some sort of keyboard, but probably figures he's just playing with his Speak and Spell again. Stupid Cheney never puts his toys away when he's done playing with them.
When you see a muslim civilian getting killed, just think this-
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
there is a 90% chance/very high that the same muslim civilian would cut a gay person's throat for being gay.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There, problem solved.
PatrioticAmerican @ #417:
You have proof that the individuals slaughtered in this video were planting IEDs? Please produce it or shut up.
Also, do you think it is justified to take the lives of those you merely suspect of a crime. I 'suspect' you are a moron - a great crime IMO - as insist you are gunned down immediately using an advanced weapons platform from which you have no hope of defending yourself.* Like that?
Absent further qualification as to its meaning, the "why do you hate America" question instant reveals the questioner to be an unthinking fool. Yes I am liberal, and proud of it, but I like to think my personal hygiene is pretty good.
They were Iraqis, or do all foreigners look the same to you?
I doubt it, but carry on...
At most there was one guy with an AK47 and no RPGs. As has been stated here more that once, and is known to everyone who can be bothered to learn a little about Iraq, gun ownership is common. AKs will be found in many households.
Interesting that you can't see that the victims in this video have been robbed of the most basic freedom of all: the right to life.
Looks like Mr Internet Tough Guy isn't tough enough to stick around to defend his position.
* Yes this is hyperbole before anyone gets a case of the vapours. I'm not really advocating murdering dumbfucks.
No, I wasn't saying it was largely the reason but that gaining control over those oil supplies was a reason
You don't seem to have any clue about what you yourself wrote: "keeping one of the worlds largest oil supplies out of the hands of a maniac was surely one of the main reasons as well". A "main" reason would make it "largely" the reason, and gaining control of something is taking it out of someone's hands, not keeping it out of their hands. I'll accept that you simply aren't capable of writing English that says what you mean.
@PatrioticAmerican #440:
Yes, and the US Army also said that civilians weren't harmed. This is also the same US Army who claims that 5 people they murdered in another raid had participated in 'honor-killings' of a few pregnant women and a teenager.
When you see a muslim civilian getting killed, just think this-
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
there is a 90% chance/very high that the same muslim civilian would cut a gay person's throat for being gay.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There, problem solved.
Oh good grief.
Tronzu you have now passed from bigoted dumbass to the lowest of all forms.
Bigoted dumbass who sucks at the internet.
It is time for Tronzu to be thrown away, I think.
Contacted my local news station: WDBJ7. I sent the bureau chief an email about this.
When you see a muslim civilian getting killed, just think this-
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
there is a 90% (very high)chance that the same muslim civilian would cut a gay person's throat for being gay.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There, problem solved.
P.S.
I am disgusted at PZ's irrationality as to calling any MUSLIM civilians innocent.
It makes me wanna puke...
Turns out, the US is quite a backwards and violent place compared to other more civilized countries out there... if we acknowledge that we may be able to make the US a better place.
___________________________________________________
European is more CIVILIZED????? You mean more SOCIOLIZED!!!!! That's why all liberal fancys europe like its sum Hippy-DIPPY utopia where it's all 'rational thinking' and kittens. If you like europe so much then don't stay in America and bug us god-fearing conservative patriotic honest american people!!!!!!!!!111111
Obviously I haven't read all 400+ Comments but Why even debate if there were weapons or not? Don't half the population carry around weapons? (Serious question) If they were to open fire on everyone holding a weapon wouldn't they be Killing a Huge Percentage of the population?
Another Question I have is where is the Evidence that the others (Non-Reporters) were insurgents?
Does carrying a weapon automatically make you an insurgent?
Anyone else think it is time for Tronzu to be plonked?
I don't see "one of the main reasons" and "largely the reason" as the same thing.
But I'll concede that it was poorly written. Which I'm sure you'll not disagree is not uncommon for my comments.
Tronzu,
panopticon...look it up fucktard. Also called the dungeon...where PZ is bound to throw you in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1...
Oops, I pasted and responded to the wrong quote. There does appear to be a rifle and/or RPG at 2:10 to 2:28 in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik
My camera comment is in response to
It's a camera that is pointed at the chopper, the same camera that can clearly be seen when the chopper comes around the building, before it opens fire.
I don't know if it was "the" driving force, but it was one of them.
Also, a nice costly and destructive war abroad always seems to temporarily help getting out of recessions.
It's strange that so many people are opposed to a large debt financed government stimulus when it is used for peaceful means but have no problems when it is used to buy a war and convince "consumers" that they will exercise their patriotic duty by spending more.
Human lives seem to count very little for those warmonggers who see wars as a tool to safeguard a country's supply of critical resources and a means of economic developement.
I am afraid we haven't seen the end of this.
When you see a muslim civilian getting killed, just think this-
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
there is a 90% (very high)chance that the same muslim civilian would cut a gay person's throat for being gay.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There, problem solved.
P.S.
I am disgusted at PZ's irrationality as to calling any MUSLIM civilians innocent.
It makes me wanna puke...
I sense a plonkhammering soon.
@Tronzu:
I don't say this often - but fuck off. You're an irrational, hate-mongering, spamming, troll.
Don't let us stop you. Just make sure you aspirate well.
Imagine a young gay teen, his throat being slit by a muslim civilian.
lesson-->
muslim civilians in one country are psychopathic monsters in another.
PZ Myers can fuck off with his innocent muslim civilians gibberish.
Tronzu STFU its apparent you cannot separate a religion from a culture. I would point out that there is hardly any sufi's in bhagdad but you wouldnt know the fuckin difference
Imagine a young internet dumbass being sent to the dungeon.
Internet dumbasses in one country are babbling morons in another.
Tronzu can fuck off with this babbling dumbfuckery.
I don't see "one of the main reasons" and "largely the reason" as the same thing.
Sigh. I paraphrased the former with the latter because it fit the grammar of my sentence. "largely" means "in great part" -- something that is only a small part of the reason for something would be a minor reason. To complain that these aren't quite the same is to engage in pointless semantic quibbling.
Which I'm sure you'll not disagree is not uncommon for my comments.
Indeed I won't.
Tronzu reminds me of the insane christian character from "Kingdom of Heaven" at the port in Messina... walking around muttering over and over, "to kill an infidel is not murder... it is the path to heaven"...
Yup... you're that fucking bugshit crazy evil, buddy... fuck off with you...
truth machine
One more time. Please note my comments have all been polite. I would really appreciate if you would respond in the same vein.
All this garbage about what is (people claim) common among soldiers does not relieve these soldiers of moral culpability.
I agree completely that it does not resolve these soldiers of moral culpability. I'm not defending these soldiers. Based on the often surprisingly good and technical analysis provided by other commenters (some of whom, it appears, have military experience), their actions were completely unjustifiable.
Okay?
I was just saying that's how soldiers speak (I was specifically referring to their comments in the video) and although there are many other things that point directly to their culpability their cheers at successfully completing their fucked up beyond belief mission are not something you can use to distinguish between amoral and moral soldiers.
And could I be wrong about that? Yes, of course I could. And if I am, please correct me. But do so politely, please.
I have to say I'm very glad its not MY taxes paying for those 30mm cannon shells, otherwise I would have to feel some form of vague shared guilt.
And Tronzu, I'm sorry, your further posts have shown you have no ability to comprehend simple logical points, even from those sympathetic to the outrage you feel (although not to the conclusion you draw from that outrage).
You're a troll.
I've enjoyed the time I've spent on Pharyngula, but it seems I have a bad habit of typing comments that at the time seem fine, but apparently my meaning is never, ever clear; as a writer, I can only blame myself for that, obviously. These comments are then taken to mean something else entirely.
I'm tired of the arguments, particularly when they descend to name-calling, and imputations of amorality.
So keep on fighting the good fight, guys (particularly Josh!) I honestly wish all of you the best.
Mr.Myers, you mentioned that there were kids peeking out oh the windows of the van. I didn't see them. Under the stressed situation of battle field, these Apache pilots probably didn't noticed it too. And they can't wind back and see again.
A lot of you mentioned that the people on the ground seem to be at ease and unalerted to apache's presence. This can be easily explained by the ambience noise of the battlefield and the fact that helicopter is probably hovering several hundred meters away that they didn't notice it. And they were talking on the phone. Who were they talking to? There are several well-known cases of insurgents disguising as civillians to surviel US forces movements, and alarm their comrades via cellphone.
Patriotic blablabla said:
__________________________________________________
European is more CIVILIZED????? You mean more SOCIOLIZED!!!!! That's why all liberal fancys europe like its sum Hippy-DIPPY utopia where it's all 'rational thinking' and kittens. If you like europe so much then don't stay in America and bug us god-fearing conservative patriotic honest american people!!!!!!!!!111111
Yes Europe is more civilized. I lived in France for years and now live in Scotland. I pay 20% taxes (more or less in both countries). I make about 60k dollars / year, and I actually get about 48k. and in exchange I get:
* Freedom of speech
* Freedom of / from religion (especially yours)
* Freedom to sleep with (and have a civil union with) whoever I want.
* The vote. More democratic here than in the US by the way.
* Freedom to travel without fear of being shot in the face
* Freedom to travel and communicate using a good infrastructure - roads / bridges / trains that are maintained and of good quality - and which EVERYONE gets equal access to.
* Freedom from the fear of being left bankrupt because I get cancer or some other shit disease.
* Freedom from the fear of being abandonned to rot by my society because I'm going through a tough patch in life.
* Freedom from the worry of what will happen to me when I'm too old to work.
I have one friend here (an Englishman) who has had 7 (SEVEN) pacemakers put in, from when he was a baby till now. You cannot imagine how much it costs to keep him alive. He has never had to pay a dime after taxes. Indeed, "who will pay" has never EVER been an issue.
I have another (a scottish woman) who has advanced Crones disease. She has spent a total of one year and a half in hospital and again, fees were never an issue.
Europeans are civilized because they take care of each other. I am NEVER EVER going back to the US. You people are mad.
According to Wikipedia the Hughes M230 chain gun mounted on Apache helicopters has a muzzle velocity of 2641 ft/sec.
I make it roughly 2 seconds from hearing the sound and seeing the judder of the cannon from seeing the shells strike the target.
That's (ignoring the deceleration that would be experienced by the shells in flight, which would be minimal in only 2 seconds) about 5282 feet from gun to target.
almost exactly 1 mile.
To those bogged down in an argument over the minutia of who saw what and what could have looked like what, fog of war, armchair generals shouldn't judge, etc.
Please explain why the U.S. occupies Iraq.
Back in 2002-03 I and other peacenik types stated to any who would listen (and those who would not) that incidents like this will happen in all wars. Handing out automatic weapons to teenage males never ends well. Debating and bogging down in the details of the why and the how of any specific incident draws our attention away from the elephant in the room. Why occupy that country in the first place?
All of the Bush administrations reasons for invading Iraq have proven lies. All of them. Trace the evil back to the source.
So why then fall for the trick ?
Insurgents do indeed use civilians are cover. Which is all the more reason to be check, check again and the check another time that the people you are not going to be killing civilians. This is basic counter-insurgency technique, and was worked out half a century a ago. Falling for such insurgency tricks shows a lack of knowledge about military history. How many American Military Personal know how the British fought the communists in Malaya do you think ? Very few, yet they all should. There is no excuse for ignorance.
Not to make any excuses for killers, but this is what I saw: there is, in fact, an RPG in the hands of one of the two men near that telephone pole in this video at around 2:08-2:13. You can see it quite clearly as he turns and swings that object around. It's too long and nose-heavy to be a rifle. The other man a step or two further back seems to carry an AK rifle in his right hand.
The two reporters carrying cameras have passed this point already, they are now closer to the wall. Unfortunately the decision to kill them has been made about 30 seconds prior, when the soldiers mistook cameras for weapons. Obviously they failed in identifying their targets correctly, which means they broke their ROE.
And shooting that van is despicable. There is no threat, just someone trying to help a fellow human being.
I think the clear message here is not that these soldiers are evil, but that this kind of 'engagement' - shooting people based upon distant, poor resolution imagery and no other information - is wrong and very stupid.
I, unlike PZ, can very easily see why the soldiers in question saw guns in their hands, not so much those carried by the reporters but the next two or three people behind them do look, to me, to be carrying assault weapons. And from behind a building, a man crouching low and aiming a camera could be quite easily confused with a rocket propelled grenade launcher.
Its a really basic, high stakes example of confirmation bias colouring perception.
It makes me sick to watch this happen to any human being, even that of a hostile combatant, but it is especially heart wrenching to learn of the truth behind the images - a truth mind you, which was not available to these soldiers at the time.
The fact that they celebrated and relished the deaths of these men at the time is not something I feel comfortable criticising. I am not one who says that all war is immoral - in fact I find that position to be deeply immoral and foolish. I believe that some wars are necessary, and if soldiers have to be desensitised to death in such a way as to trivialise it - though I find it chilling - perhaps I have to accept that. Either way war is hell.
@LaTomate:
Can I live with you?
I would really appreciate if you would respond in the same vein.
You're new here.
I was just saying
I love how some people say a bunch of things and then, when they get into a jam, they retreat to "I was just saying" something uncontroversial that may or may not have even been something they said.
So TM, do you think that Iraq's oil has anything to do with the reasons we were pushed into war with Iraq?
If so do you think that if it was a different leader than Saddam it would have made a difference in their reasoning for war?
You speak about logic, yet you never actually address my simple verifiable and demonstrative point.
Refresh your fucking mind browser already.
Come on... look, I've refrained from getting involved in this debate... I've enjoyed following it and have tried to listen to both sides... but I'm still gonna call bullshit on a bullshit argument made by either side. And this is a bullshit argument.
The point wasn't that the people on the ground were at ease despite the presence of the apache... it's that they were at ease, period and did not seem to be acting in any way or engaging in any way that should have been interpreted as combative. Now, I've already heard the arguments on both sides of this and I'm not supporting nor opposing that viewpoint, simply refuting this "excuse" as presented by michelleM as irrelevant to the point.
Again... come on... who the fuck knows who they were talking to? Maybe his wife or son. How the fuck do you know? Absent actual evidence that they were conducting terrorist activity over their cell-phone, it's a pretty horrific reason to open fire and kill them all on the off chance that they might have been.
Again, I'm not making a case for or against the actions by the soldiers on this video... I'm simply addressing these specific arguments by michelleM as ludicrous.
Which one would that be?
I have another (a scottish woman) who has advanced Crones disease
To spare you some possible embarrassment: that's spelled "Crohn's disease".
This pathetic Tronzu thing is not only obnoxious, reading it is even more boring than setting GOATS ON FIRE. I suggest disemwovelment and that it gets a vacation in the dungeon. Yawn.
@Colin in #468:
One more time. Please note my comments have all been polite. I would really appreciate if you would respond in the same vein.
It’s just the way it is around here. I don’t like it either but folks ability to survive and stomach the invective around here is something that seems to be lauded. In any case, my advice is to take the high road, shrug it off, and stay polite, or get dirty yourself, either way works.
#482 truth machine:
Cheers :)
Another point that needs to be addresses is the wisdom of using a weapon platform such as the Apache in an urban area for not only looking for insurgents but then killing anyone you think is a bit suspicious.
If you are fighting insurgents you do not want to be killing civilians. You need the civil population on your side, or at the very least not hostile to you. Killing people does not endear the families and friends to you. The 30mm ammunition as used in the Apache's chain gun packs a hell of a punch. The type of walls typically found in Iraqi houses is not going to stop it. Fire off 30mm in an urban area and you are going to kill civilians. It is a dumb move.
The point wasn't that the people on the ground were at ease despite the presence of the apache... it's that they were at ease, period and did not seem to be acting in any way or engaging in any way that should have been interpreted as combative. Now, I've already heard the arguments on both sides of this and I'm not supporting nor opposing that viewpoint, simply refuting this "excuse" as presented by michelleM as irrelevant to the point.
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By 'at ease', I mean they were just strolling down the street, not running and taking cover. The incident happened in Sadr city, which is a active insurgent stronghold, anyone walking on the street was suspectable of being a insurgent. The fact that they were carrying weapons, or objects that resemble weapons, doesn't help.
So TM, do you think that Iraq's oil has anything to do with the reasons we were pushed into war with Iraq?
Of course. What a stupid question.
If so do you think that if it was a different leader than Saddam it would have made a difference in their reasoning for war?
What a bizarre question. It depends on what the difference was. Different name? Parted his hair in a different place? ...? If the Queen of England had been the leader of Iraq (by virtue of it being a member of the Commonwealth), it's unlikely that the U.S. would have invaded.
"PatrioticAmerican" is a Poe. Trust me. I have a near-perfect record of Poe-spotting.
I'm not going to get involved in this thread beyond that observation, as I desperately need to avoid getting distracted from studying right now, and this is a topic that deserves more serious attention than I can currently afford to give it.
In an urban area suspecting someone of being an insurgent is not justification for opening fire. It is not how you beat an insurgency. Opening fire and asking questions later is going to kill civilians. Killing civilians is not a good move if you want to beat the insurgents. This is pretty basic counter-insurgency doctrine.
You need people on the ground to defeat an insurgency, and you are going to have some of those people killed. But unless you take that risk, you will lose.
P.S. No one was "pushed" into invading Iraq.
Whatever... my point is that it makes no difference whether they noticed the apache or not... that was the argument you were making... that they were just walking around casually cause they didn't notice the apache. So what? It's a terrible argument.
So if that's the justification for opening fire on any casually walking person or group of people, why not just carpet bomb the whole fucking city while they sleep? Seems if you're going to hold every person in the city as suspect, why bother making distinctions at all?
It's a terrible argument, michelleM.
My very, very personal and certainly not unassailable opinion on this (I did serve in the Navy 1990-94, FWIW), having read through all the comments and looked at both sides of the argument, is that at the end of the day, whatever these guys were carrying, weapons or not, I would like to have seen far, far more in the way of combative or aggressive behavior from this crowd before opening fire and then hunting down and killing the wounded. I just didn't see it.
I understand what the rest of you are saying who might disagree with this, but that's what my conscience tells me, and I'm going to carry this sick feeling in my stomach over it regardless of any justification anyone attempts.
You can't convince the majority of American people to support a war with a country solely to safeguard one's oil supplies, but if you can convice them that the leader of said country is a brutal murderous dictator harbouring terrorists and WMDs, then you'll get all the support you need.
@negentropyeater #493:
Well, to be fair. He was a brutal, murderous dictator. The terrorist thing and the WMD thing, though - those are probably not true at all.
I'm going to go do something about these teeth marks.
Even to this point there are still no conclusive evidence to prove that these people with the reuters reports were not insurgents. And an RPG were recovered at the scene where this supposed 'massacre' took place. Let's face it: walking around in the hot zone with weapons are no different from writing 'insurgent' on one's forehead, and anyone foolish enough to do that will be put down for the safety of everybody else.
Well Saddam was a brutal murderous dictator but there is no shortage of those in the world.
If we invaded countries run by brutal murderous dictators why not start with Burma, or China ?
This can be easily explained by the ambience noise of the battlefield
What "battlefield"?
the fact that helicopter is probably hovering several hundred meters away that they didn't notice it
FAIL. In the soldiers minds, they pointed an RPG at it, so failure to notice the helicopter is not available to the soldiers as an explanation of why the men are not running for cover or even alarmed by its presence.