Whatever happens in the first five minutes of the video, killing unarmed people helping wounded is murder, it is out of moral and military code of any legal combat group.
The sad and disgusting part is this video was in the hands of the us military all along and they knew, what happened and how it happened, and they also tried to stop the video from leaking out actively to cover their malformed policy.
This video is proof of murder, disresctpectful combat, imcompetent ranking officers and blind trigger happy pilots.
Calling this video anything other than above is political bullshit.
Same assessment here as a former soldier. The first piece is debatable. I clearly saw an RPG and a personal weapon, and to be honest, unless the cameraman was ID'd, I would be 50/50 on that.
I don't know the tactical situation, but it looks like they were providing aerial cover for a convoy of some sort, since that's who they keep chatting with. This was quite possibly an ambush in it's very early stages. While disturbing (welcome to war) I don't think that the actions of the crew where unbecoming at that point.
I did however have an issue with the destruction of the van. There were no weapons visible, it was clear that they were collecting bodies for transport/medical attention. Any perceived or real threat to the convoy was at that time neutralized, and there was no need to fire.
Doing so clearly violated the Geneva conventions and the US Army's ROE. Both apache crews should be charged with murder, and the authorizing officer should be charged with some lesser charge for not confirming the intended target.
Who ever thinks that these atrocities won't occur in war? The mindsets of the people who commit these actions are not a far leap from the mindset that a soldier has to maintain in order to kill enemy combatants day in and day out.
Every war there's big civilian massacres and other major moral abridgments no matter what the combatants' PR department spews out. We should be realistic about that.
It's not an excuse for those that committed or knew about this, but it shouldn't be unexpected.
> This video is proof of murder, disresctpectful combat, imcompetent ranking officers and blind trigger happy pilots. Calling this video anything other than above is political bullshit.
Proof of murder, huh? I'd point out some things worth thinking about, but it sounds like you've completely made your mind up already. Would it be worth spending a few minutes trying to look at why it happened, and all the elements of the situation, and the thinking patterns of people involved - or would that just be "political bullshit"?
It's easy to apply black and white thinking to a battlefield after the fact, but it seems to miss a lot of the nuance of the situation - the helicopter had been radioed in by ground troops who were under small arms fire. The fight might or might not have still been going. It's not clear where the van came from, and what the positions of the engaged ground forces were relative to the van. Who knows if that style of van had been used recently for combat purposes by the insurgency. This was at the height of the surge - was there a curfew or some ban on vehicles in the area?
I don't know. I'd ask and think about things like that, but is that just "political bullshit"? Battlefields seem to rarely give way to black and white morality. It seems like after something like this comes out, you could get more answers by thinking and asking smart questions than you would by rushing to moral judgment.
You suggest that there exists some "moral code" which justifies killing each other in certain circumstances. Combat is never respectful, nor is it ever moral. To make honorable rules of engagement is to obscure the horrific violation of humanity that war is.
In my opinion, we should only ever declare total war, and we should not allow ourselves the opinion that some wars are less gruesome than others. If we aren't willing to carpet bomb a school, we should not be willing to destroy the family that depends on it.
>killing unarmed people helping wounded is murder, it is out of moral and military code of any legal combat group
I'm not so sure that's true. According to the Hague and Geneva Conventions medical personal are off limits, but are supposed to be identified as such. If the people who jumped out of the van had medical personnel markings, they wouldn't have been attacked.
Instead they were presumed to be members of the same un-uniformed militia which is common in Iraq (as I understand it).
That's not political BS, that's just how war works. War is terrible and should be reserved for the defense of our nation, not these pseudo war escapades across the world that we have now.
I've been of two minds about this post. On one hand, it does seem important. But Wikileaks presents it with a lot of propaganda mixed in. They are going far beyond their original role of merely leaking information. So if anyone knows of (or wants to make) a version that's just the original footage, please supply a url and I'll switch the link to that.
Edit: Switched link. Thanks. Please note that many of the comments on this thread refer to the original page.
However it still has the title "collateral murder".
(and I wholly agree; Wikileaks have crossed the line with their presentation here for me. In my opinion it actually harms the impact of the video and is not in keeping with their purported vision as whistle-blowers :()
In addition to providing the original footage, WikiLeaks appears eager to directly combat the misinformation sown by the U.S. government since the incident took place. My guess is that they wanted to refute the official reports step-by-step to maximize the impact of their leak, and so that there would be little chance of it being swept under the rug by yet another official denial.
Yes, it may come off as propaganda, but why would WikiLeaks want to do all of the hard work acquiring the video, decrypting it, and bearing legal repercussions from releasing it only to have the other major news organizations do the analysis and reap the rewards? WikiLeaks is in need of cash, so there's an incentive for them to provide the full report; and additionally, they do seem to be motivated by a sense of justice, so why entrust the same old news media who might not give it the attention it deserves?
There is only a reference to the website and to Wikileaks at the beginning, no other editorial content (there are subtitles). Might be a bit too little context, would work great in combination with the old New York Times article, though.
I agree that I wish they had released the video with only subtitles and left out the narration. It's powerful enough on its own, the rest only weakens the impact and introduces wiggle room for authoritarians to squeal about the horror of liberal propaganda.
i agree that they're presenting it beyond their original intent, but i'd also point out that they've been striving for a business model as a pure information source, just to keep the lights on, and it hasn't been working out. this might be their attempt at finding a way to monetize some of their information.
I feel like we have a bunch of trigger-happy teenagers viewing the world through a video-game-like HUD with a joystick, just itching to light something up.
Nobody should support this.
Also, imagine being a child with an Apache circling your town waiting to dispense this sort of justice. You'd probably become a terrorist, wouldn't you?
This video is a damn good argument for why what they do is important. Go give them a few dollars. I can't think of a cause I see as more important in the world right now (with the one possible exception of free software).
Iraq is a very dangerous place for journalists: from 2003- 2009, 139 journalists were killed while doing their work.
That seems like an enormous number given that about 4,800 US soldiers died in the same time period. At about 250,000 US troops in Iraq, that would imply about 7,200 journalists total in-country, assuming an equal proportion of journalists killed.
In fact, there were about 220 "embedded" journalists in 2007 [1]. Certainly, there were a lot of journalists not associated with the US Army, but, still, the conclusion seems to be that being a journalist in Iraq is far more dangerous than being an American soldier in Iraq.
Not only that, but journalists are often more exposed than soldiers. They tend to shack up out in the city, drive around in unarmored vehicles with local translators, and aren't tapped into the information network about where bad things are happening right now.
I agree that the shooting of the van was unequivocally wrong and, possibly, murder.
People commenting, though, need to remember a couple of points; they are sat at home viewing this on big monitors under no pressure. In reality that was viewed on a small screen under the pressure of war fuelled on adrenaline.
I can see how the first attack could be considered simply a tragic mistake. Also there is probably little chance they would have spotted the kids in the van. Regardless the attack on the van was utterly unprovoked - I wouldn't call it totally malicious but a mistaken, adrenaline driven, undisciplined and rushed attack. He wanted to shoot it and didn't take the necessary pains to decide if it was a threat or not (clearly, it was not).
Someone should be held very responsible for this.
However I also feel Wikileaks have milked some aspects of the video. I would much prefer to have seen the shortened version without the "heart strings" introduction etc. I believe doing that actually takes away from the impact of the video - show us what happened first, then do the dedications.
Watching the video, it's fairly obvious to me that the people holding supposed rocket launchers were in fact holding cameras with telephoto lenses. However, this is obvious to me after having read comments about the video, as well as with all the captions in the video explaining what it is we're seeing. This is a lot information gathered after the incident, when the people on the ground actually got to go in and see that there were no RPG launchers and so on. So even though I clearly see a telephoto lens, I can't say that the guys in the helicopters could see that. I have a hard time saying that this is clearly murder.
The whole situation seems like a no-win to me. If they (US Military) don't release the video, they cover their ass in the short run, but when the video gets leaked it makes them look more guilty than perhaps they really were. But if they had released the video then, you'd still get tons of people proclaiming how horrible this is.
Don't get me wrong, this is horrible, but it doesn't seem more horrible than a lot of the stuff that happens over there. It's horrible that we're even in this situation.
In hindsight there were clearly mistakes made, but it looks like the Army took the incident pretty seriously, and there was no big cover-up. One also gets a bit of a sense from those reports of the broader context in which the events were happening, which the video on its own does not show.
I'm not so sure that the histrionics from Wikileaks does anyone much good.
Reading the investigation you linked to (the one labelled "1st" I was surprised to see that they describe as perfectly correct the shooting of the van, despite also describing the van as clearly just picking up wounded.
War is very ugly, always, and this is just one of the many aspects of its reality.
Some comments have said this sort of stuff wouldn't happen if the crews involved had high quality optics. The van scene clearly would still happen.
Also very late in the video, when preparing to fire a missile straight into a building, there is very obviously an unarmed man walking along the sidewalk in front of the building, totally relaxed. The excited gunner is so impatient to blow up the building that he simply fires with his crosshairs practically on top of this person.
Again, something that would happen regardless of optics improvements, and a sad message about the level of desensitization soldiers are forced to.
Looks like the helicopter wasn't flying around and saw a group randomly - it was called into a combat region to support ground troops under fire. Still a bad situation, but a bit different than it's being made out.
While this isn't on the same scale, we spent several weeks in high school studying My Lai[1] as a lesson in personal responsibility and morality. It seems we've learned nothing, not even to be honest when these things happen, but, then again, perhaps the lesson is that war changes people in horrible ways?
Wikileaks' continued existence is essential to our democracy.
Significant events (note that this refers to the link as modified by pg, not the link as originally posted):
1:11 - We hear there's a guy with a weapon.
1:38 - We see the weapon.
2:05 - Identification of a second weapon. One of the pilots requests permission to engage. This is given; however the helicopter does not have a clear shot and waits.
2:33 - Identification of apparent RPG (is that the camera?)
2:45 - "We got a guy shooting", not sure what this refers to.
3:15 - One helicopter opens fire. The other joins in a bit later.
4:40 - Apparent gap in the tape?
6:15 - We see a survivor crawling slowly, obviously injured.
7:29 - First mention of a van approaching "and picking up the bodies".
7:40 - We see this van and some apparently unarmed men.
7:48 - One of the pilots says "let me engage". They ask permission to engage several times but get no response until...
8:19 - They finally get a reply, and ask for permission to fire on the van.
8:32 - They get permission and open fire with several bursts.
Without the labels and WikiLeaks cuts, could you have looked at these pictures and determined what the guys on the ground were holding? Honest to god, I could not.
Rules of engagement are good. They should be followed. Unfortunately, the government sets them, and I think even a YCombinator startup would get its butt kicked coming up with better rules.
Example: the Van, that is very gray. Is it a weapons collection unit or a medical assistance device? Its both. Its war. Its moving...
As I read through these comments, some gave a back story that the Apaches were called in by ground troops that had taken fire earlier in the day. If that's the case and you are on that trigger, in that moment, I doubt many of us would be as judicious in our decision making.
Even more interesting perhaps is that I didn't know that, because I don't depend on news organizations for news anymore. Aggregators have been my default source of news for years. News organizations now have the role that weekly publications used to: they're a place you sometimes find interesting articles about things you already knew about.
Yeah, I just noticed that as well. CNN's World page has "He married a video game character," but not a mention of this. Things like this make it hard to feel bad about the looming death of Old Media.
Video will be posted at 16h UTC latest, according to Wikileaks press conference. It shows this incident
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/world/middleeast/13iraq.ht...
and supposedly shows a military helicopter shooting a van rescuing two Reuters journalists.
Murder? What can that video possibly show that would justify calling this incident “murder”? And what’s the motive? Killing journalists can only be a bad move for the US military, so why would they do it on purpose? We already know that those journalists were killed by US military, so that alone wouldn’t be news.
I’m curious.
– edit: I have now seen the video, looks like major incompetency combined with what looks like the wrong training for those situations. Also a possible coverup of this incompetence on part of the investigators. No murder. Bad enough. I would probably argue that this is negligent homicide. Has definitely a different effect than just reading the New York Times article.
The basic premise here is that the guys on the helicopter claim they see weapons (AKs and RPGs). So they shoot shit up, and then the soldiers get there. What I don't get is that nobody seems to be following up on the basic premise: there is no audio communication where the helicopter guys are asking about weapons, or the guys on the ground saying that they do or don't see any weapons (or that they instead see a camera with a bigass tele lens).
This implies that the soldiers don't care whether their kill was justified. Setting aside conscience, this is bad because there's no feedback - next time they'll just mistake the tele lens for an RPG again.
I thought one particularly sickening part was around 18:50 when a Humvee drove over a body, or at least the driver thought he did. And then the other guy on the line jokes "well, he's dead". Talk about disrespecting the dead.
When an American soldier dies, his mates will risk their own lives to recover the body and a book and testerone-fuelled movie get made about it (Black Hawk Down). But when an Iraqi gets shot to shreds by a chain gun and run over by a Humvee, its some sick joke. We live in a twisted, unequal world in many ways.
ps. How amusing that this comment is getting down voted. The truth is unpleasant, but still the truth
Soldiers joke about their job. It's a way of coping with the stress. Firefighters and police officers will make jokes about things most of us wouldn't dare.
I can't help but think this isn't a bad argument for a heavier investment in removing the risk to allied lives element from decisions like this, it's one thing to mistake a telephoto lens on a camera for an RPG as illustrated here http://collateralmurder.com/en/resources.html.
You might be more prepared to risk being wrong if, were you not wrong, you weren't potentially betting your life on the fact. The pilot sounded genuinely scared when he misidentified that RPG, one would not expect the same if it was a UAV feed.
In the video I didn't see a medium white Canon lens as illustrated there. I'm not sure guessing at what a man in a hostile zone is brandishing from behind a corner is going to help:
Whatever it is, don't duck in and out behind corners pointing your black tube at military gunships or approaching convoys. Don't bet your life on whether the guy behind the turret paid to keep the zone clear can sort that out while you pop in and out of view.
Au contraire, the fact that a soldier is far enough away to be able to murder indiscriminately when not at risk is what caused this. If he had been standing more vulnerable but right by that road side this would not have happened.
The further you take the person pulling the trigger away from the person they murder the easier it gets.
Do you really believe the guys that dropped the bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been able to do it given an infinite supply of ammo and a machine gun that never jams pointed at fields full of tens of thousands of unarmed civilians?
[+] [-] mindcreek|16 years ago|reply
The sad and disgusting part is this video was in the hands of the us military all along and they knew, what happened and how it happened, and they also tried to stop the video from leaking out actively to cover their malformed policy.
This video is proof of murder, disresctpectful combat, imcompetent ranking officers and blind trigger happy pilots.
Calling this video anything other than above is political bullshit.
[+] [-] run4yourlives|16 years ago|reply
I don't know the tactical situation, but it looks like they were providing aerial cover for a convoy of some sort, since that's who they keep chatting with. This was quite possibly an ambush in it's very early stages. While disturbing (welcome to war) I don't think that the actions of the crew where unbecoming at that point.
I did however have an issue with the destruction of the van. There were no weapons visible, it was clear that they were collecting bodies for transport/medical attention. Any perceived or real threat to the convoy was at that time neutralized, and there was no need to fire.
Doing so clearly violated the Geneva conventions and the US Army's ROE. Both apache crews should be charged with murder, and the authorizing officer should be charged with some lesser charge for not confirming the intended target.
[+] [-] cookiecaper|16 years ago|reply
Every war there's big civilian massacres and other major moral abridgments no matter what the combatants' PR department spews out. We should be realistic about that.
It's not an excuse for those that committed or knew about this, but it shouldn't be unexpected.
[+] [-] lionhearted|16 years ago|reply
Proof of murder, huh? I'd point out some things worth thinking about, but it sounds like you've completely made your mind up already. Would it be worth spending a few minutes trying to look at why it happened, and all the elements of the situation, and the thinking patterns of people involved - or would that just be "political bullshit"?
It's easy to apply black and white thinking to a battlefield after the fact, but it seems to miss a lot of the nuance of the situation - the helicopter had been radioed in by ground troops who were under small arms fire. The fight might or might not have still been going. It's not clear where the van came from, and what the positions of the engaged ground forces were relative to the van. Who knows if that style of van had been used recently for combat purposes by the insurgency. This was at the height of the surge - was there a curfew or some ban on vehicles in the area?
I don't know. I'd ask and think about things like that, but is that just "political bullshit"? Battlefields seem to rarely give way to black and white morality. It seems like after something like this comes out, you could get more answers by thinking and asking smart questions than you would by rushing to moral judgment.
[+] [-] oconnore|16 years ago|reply
In my opinion, we should only ever declare total war, and we should not allow ourselves the opinion that some wars are less gruesome than others. If we aren't willing to carpet bomb a school, we should not be willing to destroy the family that depends on it.
And yes, the video is horrific.
[+] [-] eagleal|16 years ago|reply
For me this video it's just a tool for journalists to play with, and the media to make some money with. Nothing more.
Has the army retired from war? No. The administration could be punished only once it finishes its goal.
[+] [-] clammer|16 years ago|reply
I'm not so sure that's true. According to the Hague and Geneva Conventions medical personal are off limits, but are supposed to be identified as such. If the people who jumped out of the van had medical personnel markings, they wouldn't have been attacked.
Instead they were presumed to be members of the same un-uniformed militia which is common in Iraq (as I understand it).
That's not political BS, that's just how war works. War is terrible and should be reserved for the defense of our nation, not these pseudo war escapades across the world that we have now.
[+] [-] mo34|16 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] grannyg00se|16 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pg|16 years ago|reply
Edit: Switched link. Thanks. Please note that many of the comments on this thread refer to the original page.
[+] [-] ErrantX|16 years ago|reply
However it still has the title "collateral murder".
(and I wholly agree; Wikileaks have crossed the line with their presentation here for me. In my opinion it actually harms the impact of the video and is not in keeping with their purported vision as whistle-blowers :()
[+] [-] prole|16 years ago|reply
Yes, it may come off as propaganda, but why would WikiLeaks want to do all of the hard work acquiring the video, decrypting it, and bearing legal repercussions from releasing it only to have the other major news organizations do the analysis and reap the rewards? WikiLeaks is in need of cash, so there's an incentive for them to provide the full report; and additionally, they do seem to be motivated by a sense of justice, so why entrust the same old news media who might not give it the attention it deserves?
[+] [-] ugh|16 years ago|reply
There is only a reference to the website and to Wikileaks at the beginning, no other editorial content (there are subtitles). Might be a bit too little context, would work great in combination with the old New York Times article, though.
[+] [-] drunkpotato|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noodle|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krschultz|16 years ago|reply
The original torrent which I have not yet downloaded but may be better http://collateralmurder.com/file/CollateralMurder.mp4.torren...
[+] [-] mambodog|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elblanco|16 years ago|reply
--edit-- I see an unedited copy has been released as well.
[+] [-] shaddi|16 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|16 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jcromartie|16 years ago|reply
Nobody should support this.
Also, imagine being a child with an Apache circling your town waiting to dispense this sort of justice. You'd probably become a terrorist, wouldn't you?
[+] [-] youngian|16 years ago|reply
This video is a damn good argument for why what they do is important. Go give them a few dollars. I can't think of a cause I see as more important in the world right now (with the one possible exception of free software).
[+] [-] jacquesm|16 years ago|reply
Wikileaks is starting down the 'greenpeace' road, great initial intentions eventually becoming a self-perpetuating PR machine.
They should cut down on the hyperbole and the editing, simply release that information that they consider to be legitimate once verified.
[+] [-] drinian|16 years ago|reply
In fact, there were about 220 "embedded" journalists in 2007 [1]. Certainly, there were a lot of journalists not associated with the US Army, but, still, the conclusion seems to be that being a journalist in Iraq is far more dangerous than being an American soldier in Iraq.
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10...
[+] [-] elblanco|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ErrantX|16 years ago|reply
People commenting, though, need to remember a couple of points; they are sat at home viewing this on big monitors under no pressure. In reality that was viewed on a small screen under the pressure of war fuelled on adrenaline.
I can see how the first attack could be considered simply a tragic mistake. Also there is probably little chance they would have spotted the kids in the van. Regardless the attack on the van was utterly unprovoked - I wouldn't call it totally malicious but a mistaken, adrenaline driven, undisciplined and rushed attack. He wanted to shoot it and didn't take the necessary pains to decide if it was a threat or not (clearly, it was not).
Someone should be held very responsible for this.
However I also feel Wikileaks have milked some aspects of the video. I would much prefer to have seen the shortened version without the "heart strings" introduction etc. I believe doing that actually takes away from the impact of the video - show us what happened first, then do the dedications.
[+] [-] Qz|16 years ago|reply
The whole situation seems like a no-win to me. If they (US Military) don't release the video, they cover their ass in the short run, but when the video gets leaked it makes them look more guilty than perhaps they really were. But if they had released the video then, you'd still get tons of people proclaiming how horrible this is.
Don't get me wrong, this is horrible, but it doesn't seem more horrible than a lot of the stuff that happens over there. It's horrible that we're even in this situation.
[+] [-] aheilbut|16 years ago|reply
http://www2.centcom.mil/sites/foia/rr/CENTCOM%20Regulation%2...
In hindsight there were clearly mistakes made, but it looks like the Army took the incident pretty seriously, and there was no big cover-up. One also gets a bit of a sense from those reports of the broader context in which the events were happening, which the video on its own does not show.
I'm not so sure that the histrionics from Wikileaks does anyone much good.
[+] [-] delackner|16 years ago|reply
War is very ugly, always, and this is just one of the many aspects of its reality.
Some comments have said this sort of stuff wouldn't happen if the crews involved had high quality optics. The van scene clearly would still happen.
Also very late in the video, when preparing to fire a missile straight into a building, there is very obviously an unarmed man walking along the sidewalk in front of the building, totally relaxed. The excited gunner is so impatient to blow up the building that he simply fires with his crosshairs practically on top of this person.
Again, something that would happen regardless of optics improvements, and a sad message about the level of desensitization soldiers are forced to.
[+] [-] jackfoxy|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lionhearted|16 years ago|reply
"Bushmaster to all elements: Which element called in Crazyhorse to engage the eight man team on top of the route?"
"Bushmaster six, this is hotel-two-six, I believe that was me. They had AK-47s and were to our east, where we were taking small arms fire. Over."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik
Looks like the helicopter wasn't flying around and saw a group randomly - it was called into a combat region to support ground troops under fire. Still a bad situation, but a bit different than it's being made out.
[+] [-] drinian|16 years ago|reply
Wikileaks' continued existence is essential to our democracy.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre
[+] [-] gort|16 years ago|reply
1:11 - We hear there's a guy with a weapon.
1:38 - We see the weapon.
2:05 - Identification of a second weapon. One of the pilots requests permission to engage. This is given; however the helicopter does not have a clear shot and waits.
2:33 - Identification of apparent RPG (is that the camera?)
2:45 - "We got a guy shooting", not sure what this refers to.
3:15 - One helicopter opens fire. The other joins in a bit later.
4:40 - Apparent gap in the tape?
6:15 - We see a survivor crawling slowly, obviously injured.
7:29 - First mention of a van approaching "and picking up the bodies".
7:40 - We see this van and some apparently unarmed men.
7:48 - One of the pilots says "let me engage". They ask permission to engage several times but get no response until...
8:19 - They finally get a reply, and ask for permission to fire on the van.
8:32 - They get permission and open fire with several bursts.
9:28 - Shooting ceases.
(I didn't go much beyond this.)
[+] [-] johnnyg|16 years ago|reply
Rules of engagement are good. They should be followed. Unfortunately, the government sets them, and I think even a YCombinator startup would get its butt kicked coming up with better rules.
Example: the Van, that is very gray. Is it a weapons collection unit or a medical assistance device? Its both. Its war. Its moving...
As I read through these comments, some gave a back story that the Apaches were called in by ground troops that had taken fire earlier in the day. If that's the case and you are on that trigger, in that moment, I doubt many of us would be as judicious in our decision making.
[+] [-] vaksel|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pg|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] youngian|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Quarrelsome|16 years ago|reply
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8603938.stm
[+] [-] koepked|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsplittgerber|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ugh|16 years ago|reply
I’m curious.
– edit: I have now seen the video, looks like major incompetency combined with what looks like the wrong training for those situations. Also a possible coverup of this incompetence on part of the investigators. No murder. Bad enough. I would probably argue that this is negligent homicide. Has definitely a different effect than just reading the New York Times article.
[+] [-] Maro|16 years ago|reply
This implies that the soldiers don't care whether their kill was justified. Setting aside conscience, this is bad because there's no feedback - next time they'll just mistake the tele lens for an RPG again.
[+] [-] dsplittgerber|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patrickk|16 years ago|reply
When an American soldier dies, his mates will risk their own lives to recover the body and a book and testerone-fuelled movie get made about it (Black Hawk Down). But when an Iraqi gets shot to shreds by a chain gun and run over by a Humvee, its some sick joke. We live in a twisted, unequal world in many ways.
ps. How amusing that this comment is getting down voted. The truth is unpleasant, but still the truth
[+] [-] epochwolf|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etherael|16 years ago|reply
You might be more prepared to risk being wrong if, were you not wrong, you weren't potentially betting your life on the fact. The pilot sounded genuinely scared when he misidentified that RPG, one would not expect the same if it was a UAV feed.
[+] [-] Skeuomorph|16 years ago|reply
In the video I didn't see a medium white Canon lens as illustrated there. I'm not sure guessing at what a man in a hostile zone is brandishing from behind a corner is going to help:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51uImrxH1yL.jpg
Whatever it is, don't duck in and out behind corners pointing your black tube at military gunships or approaching convoys. Don't bet your life on whether the guy behind the turret paid to keep the zone clear can sort that out while you pop in and out of view.
[+] [-] jacquesm|16 years ago|reply
The further you take the person pulling the trigger away from the person they murder the easier it gets.
Do you really believe the guys that dropped the bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been able to do it given an infinite supply of ammo and a machine gun that never jams pointed at fields full of tens of thousands of unarmed civilians?
[+] [-] nfriedly|16 years ago|reply