Wikileaks Releases Video of Journalist Killings

linguizic writes "Today Wikileaks released a video of the US military firing large caliber weapons into a crowd that included a photojournalist and a driver for Reuters, and at a van containing two children who were involved in a rescue. Wikileaks maintains that this video was covered up by the US military when Reuters asked for an official investigation. This is the same video that has supposedly made the editors of Wikileaks a target of the State Department and/or the CIA, as was discussed a couple weeks ago." Needless to say, this video is probably not work safe (language and violence), and not for the faint of heart.

Comments

Video

[sopssa]

A short version with some initial analysis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0
Full version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik

If you read the comments from Army and US in the video before it was now released to public, they're just really blatant lies. They also did not release the video when Reuters requested it by Freedom of Information Act. Like the earlier news note, they followed, photographed, filmed and detained a Wikileaks editor about this video, not knowing what will they uncover. There's definitely more dirty secrets they don't want anyone to know.

In the video you see the people weren't attacking anyone, weren't targeting anyone (hell, all they had was cameras!) and that they were just civilians walking on the street. The military clearly had no idea what they were doing. Now theres plans to employ remotely controlled UAC's too? Make it a video game so that you don't need to care about the people you are murdering. These are people with families, with kids, with a whole lot of their own life, dreams and childhood. Then some idiot with large caliber weapons comes and shoots them without even a blink of an eye or thinking what he is doing. In top of that the truth is held from the public and the families of those who were killed, and US Army admits no mistake. I have no respect for these people - they're scum.

Re:Video

[lorenlal]

But covering it up just makes it so SO much worse.

Covering it up is only worse if someone finds out about it. See previous treatment of Wikileaks. All this means is that someone in the command structure will be ordered to fall on the sword.

Re:Video

[lamppost]

I could follow the actions of the gunship operators up to a certain point YOU knew they had cameras, they did not. However, the targets in question did not seem hostile nor did the threat of an RPG seem very real. The firing on the van though, without question, was a mistake. They were clearly evacuating a wounded man, something I thought was pretty much a universal no-no for engagement.

This is what happens in war, this is what happens when you put kids in situations where there lives are in danger and you've taught them to kill. Rather than this specific instance (which has happened in every war ever on every side) I think the real story should be about the cover-up, and the actual purpose of the war itself.

Re:Video

[FriendlyLurker]

These are people with families, with kids

Worse, the video shows two children clearly visible in the front seat of a van being shot up by the gunship after their parents stopped to help the wounded from the first attack. The soldier commentary says something like "serves them right" for stopping.
Never fear, there is a new "Cybersecurity" act now to allow the president to block disturbing leaks and wikileaks from challenging incompetence and corruption in the future. Nothing to see here, move along.

Re:Video

[Jeffrey Baker]

"What's wrong with this" is they had mounted infantry 100m away. The gunship crew could have just called in the coordinates and had the eyeballs check it out. They might have seen that the "AK-47" was a tripod and the "RPG" was a camera lens.

And there was no excuse for blowing away the minivan trying to carry off the wounded survivor.

Re:Video

[RsG]

I could follow the actions of the gunship operators up to a certain point YOU knew they had cameras, they did not. However, the targets in question did not seem hostile nor did the threat of an RPG seem very real. The firing on the van though, without question, was a mistake. They were clearly evacuating a wounded man, something I thought was pretty much a universal no-no for engagement.

Second on that. Firing on people you mistake for the enemy (and who look armed, might even have been armed) is understandable. Firing on a civilian vehicle trying to rescue the wounded is not. A better solution, given that they did have ground assets in the area at the time (as evidenced by the arrival of a group of IFVs shortly after the engagement) would have been to let the ground forces intercept the van. They have the option of stopping it without killing the people inside.

Moreover, if you watch the video, it's pretty obvious that the people who get out of the van aren't armed. At the stage where the van is evacing the wounded reporter, the gunships crew has no reason to assume they pose any threat, to them or the IFVs and infantry about to arrive. What was the point in opening fire?

This is precisely the sort of scenario you want to avoid. If you have a situation like that, you need eyes on the ground. The air crew couldn't see the kids in their downrange; a ground of infantry stopping the vehicle surely would have.

Re:Video

[HungryHobo]

We're seeing a low quality low resolution video and yet we can see that.
Those guys had the full color full resolution experience in person with binoculars.

It's not asking much to actually look where you're pointing a gun before you pull the trigger especially when nobody, absolutely nobody is firing back.

Re:Video

[Lunix Nutcase]

I've always wondered what keeps the Geneva Convention enforced.

Because you don't want the other side doing the things banned by the convention to your own soldiers and civilians?

Re:Video

[saider]

Soldiers do not go into battle with "just enough" to win. They go in with everything they have and they will use the most destructive devices they can. They are not looking for a fair fight.

Keep in mind this was three years ago during some of the most violent times in Iraq. What you are seeing is guerrilla warfare. The enemy does not stand out with "bad guy" uniforms and because of this, the soldiers are on edge and in a defensive posture, exposed out in the open. They are essentially targets sitting around waiting to be shot at. Their friends are being shot and killed or blown up on a daily basis, and this weighs heavily on their thoughts. Operating in an environment like this for weeks on end without a break stresses people to the breaking point. It is only a matter of time before combat fatigue sets in and you start getting mistakes. Mistakes are part of war, and this is reflected in the law of war. Killing civilians is a war crime, but the law leaves ample room for these inevitable actions under stress.

Be careful when you rush to judge people's actions under these conditions.

Re:Video

[NeutronCowboy]

This is what happens in war

This. This is the part that is always missing from certain sections of anti-war protestors and war-supporters alike.

War is messy. War sucks. Sometimes you shoot your own people. Sometimes you miss the enemy and hit some goat farmer in the middle of nowhere; sometimes, you shoot him directly. Sometimes you shoot the goat-farmer because you thought he had a weapon, sometimes you shoot him just because.

War is never clean, can never be clean. Even the old standards of a bunch of guys meeting up in a field to club each other over the head had collateral - how do you think they fed their army on months-long campaigns?

War is not heroic, it's not glorious, and it doesn't solve anything. It just is the standard political discourse, carried on through bullets and bombs. Sometimes, there's a need for that. Sometimes, there isn't.

I like videos like these, because they drive home the point about how messy war exactly is. They start the discussion of "Is our goal worth this cost?" Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. But when you get into a war, be ready for these situations. Because they cannot be avoided.

Re:Video

[Angst Badger]

And what's wrong with this?

Entirely aside from the specific issue of deliberately and indiscriminately killing civilians, there's the larger issue that we are still conducting an unprovoked war of aggression. We don't have any legitimate targets in Iraq. Afghanistan is arguably a different situation (though whether it will do us any good is another question), but the only legitimate action we can undertake in Iraq is to get the hell out of their country.

Re:Video

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly not. What he does make clear is that it is an inevitable result of fighting a guerilla war. In other words, there is no such thing as a "clean" war and anybody who prattles on about smart bombs and limited collateral damage is trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. That this stuff happens in war shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone; it's par for the course for even the best trained army when put in such a situation.

Re:Video

[HangingChad]

Operating in an environment like this for weeks on end without a break stresses people to the breaking point.

There's some truth to that. We had our fire department fund raiser this weekend where we stay up 36 hours to smoke pork shoulders. Even grabbing a couple hours rack here and there by the end of the next day we have to double and triple check everything we're doing because you make really goofy mistakes. And that's after just a day and a half. Trying to imagine what day after day of that in the relentless heat and constant threat, has to be brutal.

I watched the video and didn't see any weapons. Certainly no RPG's, which have a fairly distinctive profile. It was more than the imaginings of a tired mind. No one in the van was armed or picking up weapons, yet that was how it was called in. Fatigue is one thing, this is something else. Like that episode of South Park when the two hunters kept claiming animals were attacking them.

Re:Video

[RsG]

I don't think it hurts the image of the Apache crew, just of whoever ordered them to fire. I'm willing to assume they were given faulty information of the threat on the ground. The question is who decided it was a good idea to use large caliber weaponry very near civilians?

They weren't given faulty data; they were the ones collecting the data. The Apache's gunner was the one with the first eyeballs on the crowd (consisting of around a dozen people, including two reporters).

It's possible some people in the crowd were in fact armed with rifles. Hell, they may have been an armed escort, given that this was a war zone. However the "RPGs" the gunner thought he saw were, in fact, TV cameras. Bear in mind, this is the assessment of a human being in a moving aircraft, looking through a zoomed in camera, at obscured targets, so that isn't as unlikely as it sounds.

The gunship asked permission to engage. They were given it, based on the assessment of that gunner. That part, at least, was an understandable mistake. The part that got me angry was when a civilian van showed up, started evacuating the wounded survivors, and got blown to smithereens - one of the first rules of warfare is "don't fire on the wounded or the people providing aid". Hell, I'm much more pissed that they fired on the van at all than I am they hurt a couple kids inside - they never should have engaged the van in the first place.

Re:Video

[Anonymous Coward]

Those mistakes cost people their lives and families. If US military came to my country like they did Iraq, and killed people I knew like that - then I wouldn't care less about your excuses, I'd be too busy looking for Americans to kill.

Re:Video

[amicusNYCL]

the soldiers are on edge and in a defensive posture, exposed out in the open

Not in this case, in this case they're flying around in a pair of Apaches. I can have empathy for a soldier who's been awake for too long manning a high-traffic checkpoint and shoots at a car when it doesn't stop in time. I don't like that situation, but I can imagine that guy is pretty stressed out and isn't thinking very rationally. I don't imagine the same level of stress when you're flying around in an armored gunship with a 30mm cannon and up to 16 Hellfire missiles. In that case, you're the baddest thing on the block, and you shouldn't be spinning your cannon up against a crowd of people without being damn sure they have weapons pointed at you. If you can't verify that, you call in someone who can. We have all of these surveillance drones for a reason.

Re:Video

[darkmeridian]

The background to the story was that US ground forces that had taken fire from that position called in the Apaches, which found the group of armed men. At least two members of the group had weapons. Look at 3:46 in the extended video. One man is carrying an AK and the other is carrying a long, thin heavy weapon that looks like an RPG. The journalists were carrying large cameras that were mistaken for weapons, especially when one of the journalists knelt at a corner to take a photo in a posture that looks just like a person setting up to fire an RPG. At that point, the chopper pilots were freaking out over the possibility of an attack on friendly forces.

The attack on the minivan seemed like a mistake. There were no weapons in or around the van. Firing on a medical transport seemed immoral. (I'm not sure if it's illegal but no one likes guys who shoot at medics.)

Re:Video

[DG]

I've seen the video.

Yes, the effects of that weapon on people are horrific and not easy to watch, but don't let your horror override your reason.

Those gunships were flying top cover for a ground patrol. (This is all direct from the voice traffic on the video) The ground patrol said they saw people with weapons up ahead, and they asked the air element to have a look.

The air element saw a group of people - not a "crowd" by any means; that's just sensationalism - and saw weapons in the group. According to their ROE, they are allowed to engage armed persons who appear to be a threat (in this case, to the ground patrol) and they did so.

This engagement, as far as I can see, was conducted correctly. They held fire until they were clear of the building and when they IDed that one of the targets was wounded but unarmed, they held fire - exactly as required to by their ROE. The gunner is very keen to have the wounded target pick up a weapon, because that would allow him to open fire again, but he holds fire as required to.

The tragedy here is that the group does not appear to have been an ambush in the making, and that camera equipment was mistaken for weapons. I'm pretty sure I saw at least one AK-47 at one point... but I also saw the camera guy with his camera slung over his shoulder and at that point, it sure looked like a slung weapon.

In other frames, it is more clearly a camera - but I also have the benefit of *knowing* that it *is* a camera. I'm not in a gunship orbiting what I think is an ambush in the making with my buddies' lives in the balance.

From the POV of the ground forces and the gunship, they were seeing an ambush. Based on the activity in the area at the time, which almost certainly had included other, actual ambushes, they were probably pre-disposed to interpret what they saw as an ambush.

So what we have is a tragic case of mistaken identity.

That's terrible, but it happens. It is one of the consequences of guerrilla warfare - when friend and foe look alike, mistakes will be made.

I note too that when the area is deemed secure and the ground patrol shows up, they apply first aid to the wounded and evacuate them. There is a brief question as to where to evacuate them, but there's nothing sinister in that, and it seems like the decision was made to send them to a closer, local hospital rather than wait to get them to an American treatment facility.

This is what war is like. It's not at all pretty, or clean. And when your tools are high-powered weapons, the consequences of mistakes are high and that sucks for all involved. We can, safe behind our computers, armchair-quarterback the decisions made on the ground until the cows come home, but that won't remove the necessity of applying lethal force to the enemies of civilization, nor will it bring back to life those killed in error when mistakes are made.

A tragedy no matter how you slice it.

DG

Re:Video

[HeckRuler]

To be nitpicky, the war in Iraq was over in a couple of weeks. We're REAL good at war. Good job boys.
Since then its been an occupation, not a war. And to be real technical, it was never a Congressional declared war. Which makes Bush a dick for calling it one when it was his own personal quagmire.
We really suck at occupation. We don't want to be there. They don't want us there. And the only reason we ARE there is inertia and the fear that there would be wide-spread sectarian violence. Ok, so MORE wide-spread sectarian violence.

Re:Video

[David Gerard]

"calling this 'collateral murder' is not appropriate and borders on criminal in itself."

You sound like a Vatican spokesman saying the Pope's hard done by, and ignoring all the child rape.

Re:Video

[mcornelius]

Because you don't want the other side doing the things banned by the convention to your own soldiers and civilians?

That's funny, because those on "the other side" like to torture people far worse than any allegation against what has been allowed under either the Bush or Obama administrations (not justifying it; just stating facts), have no regard for medical evacuations, deliberately hide behind women and children, disrupt elections in which they would have the ability to seek approval for their policies from their fellow countrymen, have no hesitation about exploding canisters of chlorine or using WP when they can get their hands on it, don't mind mutilating bodies of Americans and rigging them with explosives, and the list goes on and on.

The Geneva Conventions are enforced by the good sense of most people that are in a position to act accordingly. There are always exceptions, and most of the coverage on this incident has been complete bullshit, from both the DoD and from Wikileaks.

This is like all those "pundits" on TV a while ago, claiming that we shouldn't allow torture because it doesn't work. No, that's bullshit. We shouldn't allow torture, because we shouldn't fucking allow torture. For the same reasons, we should not allow targeting of civilians, or force disproportionate to a legitimate military objective.

Clearly, these guys fucked up. Also, clearly, they were reasonably certain that there was a military objective and that they had acted to achieve that. Everything after that is politics, not justice.

Re:Video

[koreaman]

That's the point: we shouldn't be fighting senseless wars. I think if more Americans knew what the human consequences are, we wouldn't be.

Kudos to WikiLeaks.

Re:Video

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

The "gunship" didn't "ask for permission" to engage. Some fucking hillbilly BEGGED to shoot people, and then begged the final victim to provide a nominal excuse to murder him, once he was down.

At the end, he blamed the rescuers for bringing children into combat! Yeah, they made you HAVE to kill babies, didn't they? These were conscientious people, in a fucking regular neighborhood - doing what you'd hope any one would do, if they found a dying man - drive up quickly and try to get him to help.

Babykillers.

Babykillers, Babykillers, Babykillers.

They are the same - I don't care if it's Nazis bombing Guernica, or Johnny Mainstreet ripping the heads off of nursing mothers in My Lai. Babykillers.

Fuck anyone who makes the dimmest excuse for this. Fuck 'em to hell - 'cos that's where they're going. Talk about "moral relativism".

The good news? The U.S> is headed for the same fate as the Soviets. 12 years from now, people 'round the world will squat in the rubble and say: "Remember America? It seemed like that would last forever..."

Re:Video

[copponex]

The Geneva Conventions clearly delineate willful killing as a grave breach of the agreement.

This video encapsulates the entire problem of American foreign policy: a bunch of idiots who are too scared to put themselves in harm's way to confront and confirm what they think is an enemy, so they make rash decisions that end up killing innocent people and creating more problems for themselves.

Then they lie about their stupidity and cowardice and cover it with words like collateral damage, and try to cover their dishonor with words like freedom and democracy.

It's a sad fucking joke.

Re:Video

[shutdown -p now]

You are a RAGING military apologist. What would it take for you to say something bad about the military?

Shooting targets that are clearly identifiable as civilians would do the trick.

By the way, I'm not an apologist. Attack on the van as taped on the video is clearly wrong - there is no sight of weapons, not even something that can be confused as a weapon, and the people are just evacuating the wounded. I don't know if that counts as a war crime or not from a legal perspective (the van / people didn't have Red Cross emblem, which may be required for this to qualify - I'm not sufficiently well versed in these matters to judge), but it sure as hell looks like one.

However, I think it's a far stretch to say that soldiers attacked van knowing that there were kids inside (which is a fair bit worse than attacking adults), and I do think that the original attack on reporters and their escorts was fair - they were in a warzone in a middle of an ongoing military operations, with shots having been fired at U.S. troops in the vicinity already; and they had things that are either weapons or looking an awful lot like them (and carring them in such a way that makes it look like it's a weapon). In the original Reuters story about this, there's also a mention that, according to witnesses on the ground, "two or three" of the escorts "may have been armed", further corroborating this.

Re:Video

[commodoresloat]

Watch the fucking video. Then come back and tell us what you think.

Re:Video

[Padrino121]

The disappointing theme your comment highlights is your lack of appreciation for the very thing we are supposedly fighting for, the right to democracy and freedom which at their heart value human life. This type of war includes a significant amount of urban warfare and at times collateral damage however regardless of how fatigued one is it is inexcusable to brush off these types of events as mistakes grouped in with the more mundane things we all do when tired. Mistake or not if I fall asleep at the wheel and take someone's life I will be held accountable for it, albeit not the same as if I take a life on purpose but none the less I will be held accountable.

In addition to the points I made above let's discuss one of the issues that applies to your position equally as well as mine. If "mistakes" were made and innocent people died why the obvious cover-up by the military when it was apparent they could not hide the truth?

Re:Video

[chdig]

I disagree with you on the first shooting being understandable -- with the quality of vision the gunmen had, they should not have been able to call the shots they did (and they did). The video made those soldiers look trigger-happy, but far worse showed that the army doesn't seem to have a reasonable set of guidelines on confirming targets.

On the shooting of the van, though, you're bang-on. The exact words of the gunmen leading up to the actual firing on the van were:
"We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly uh, picking up bodies and weapons."
[a van arrived with children in the front seat to pick up a man who'd been gunned down, no weapons in sight]
"Let me engage", was the next request from the gunman, followed by, "Can I shoot", and topped off with a series of requests for permission and a final, "Come on! Let us shoot!"

And then, permission received, they fired on unarmed individuals coming to help a hurt man, who also had children looking out of the front window in (mangled by poor resolution) view of the helicopter.

Nothing much is understandable about these "mistakes".

Re:Video

[shoehornjob]

And we wonder why people "over there" hate us. I wish they could differentiate us from our government. This will never end while we are over there making mistakes like this.

Re:Video

[saider]

Would you also be hunting down your countrymen who plant bombs in public places? Even though those bombs were targeting Americans, they ended up killing a much larger number of their own people.

Re:Video

[Anonymous Coward]

Protocol I, Article 35.

As you are an US military personnel there is no way you can be objective on this matter and as we see you are just trying to justify this war crime. Yes, that's right, shooting unarmed civilian people (Protocol I, Article 50,51), some of the journalists (Protocol I, Article 79) is considered war crime. If you have watched the video, these pyschomaniacs are even shooting the wounded human beings while laughing and swearing. These ... (please do not hesitate to choose your "best words") soldiers and their commanding officers shall pay the price for what they have done. I hope they will be put to a life time sentence without a parole, in a cell. I suggest that, it will be good to make them watch this video along with a short documentary film of lives of victims, at least once everyday.

Re:Video

[tsm_sf]

What exactly do we think will happen when the most powerful military force in our planet's history is employed in what is essentially a police/intelligence capacity? You're taking equipment and personnel designed and trained to utterly destroy large hardware and many, many people and placing them among a civilian population.

How is this massacre a surprising outcome? Put a jittery, sleep-deprived twenty something behind a machine gun in any populated area and something like this is bound to happen eventually. Poor leadership killed these people and, if you believe in this sort of thing, damned a few kids' immortal souls.

Re:Video

[kidgenius]

There was mistaken identification on the cameras, but let's look at it this way. There IS an RPG in the group. As the pilot circles around, the guy with the RPG becomes obscured. At that point in time, it's pretty difficult to know if it wasn't handed off to the guy leaning around the corner, aiming it in your general direction. Looking back, yeah, it is a camera, but you've seen weapons now and given your current state of mind, most everything will look like a weapon. It's unfortunate that some innocent people had to die.

Re:Video

[hvm2hvm]

Yeah, I personally 'liked' the parts where the gunner says "come on, let us shoot".

Re:Video

[nedlohs]

The initial attack isn't the issue. That's fine, you can 100% guarantee someone had an AK47, you'd be an idiot to be doing journalism in a war zone without some security people. And mistakes happen, of course a soldier is going to see anything that looks like a weapon as a weapon - those that don't die or see their friends die.

But there was never a claim made about weapons when they opened up on the vehicle assisting the wounded guy. A "collecting weapons" throw away when they first arrived but they clearly weren't doing so and that wasn't mentioned again when asking for permission to fire.

They just shot to kill the unarmed wounded guy and the unarmed people assisting him. And no one raised a concern at all.

Re:Video

[digitalunity]

Afghanistan is a war with a purpose. The taliban were very much worthy of america's wrath for harboring not just terrorists but the training camps as well. The taliban were repressive for religious reasons which is worthy of despising.

Saddam was repressive, but only as was necessary to repress an underlying tendency towards civil war. I'm sure a lot of people in Iraq miss Saddam because he brought them relative peace(and tyranny). When the violence is really bad, the fear of predictable tyranny is better than unpredictable guerrilla warfare.

We never should have gone to Iraq, but politicians are like marshmallows in the the face of a president calling for military action in the name of "national security" and "terrorism". I wish they had a brain as big as their hubris.

Re:Video

[Stephan Schulz]

Keep in mind this was three years ago during some of the most violent times in Iraq. What you are seeing is guerrilla warfare. The enemy does not stand out with "bad guy" uniforms and because of this, the soldiers are on edge and in a defensive posture, exposed out in the open. ... Operating in an environment like this for weeks on end without a break stresses people to the breaking point. It is only a matter of time before combat fatigue sets in and you start getting mistakes. Mistakes are part of war, and this is reflected in the law of war. Killing civilians is a war crime, but the law leaves ample room for these inevitable actions under stress.

These guys were having fun killing people. This is not and can never be ok. Indeed, they are in a bad place - but its the responsibility of the political leadership that sends them there to ensure that people are not kept in a position that puts them under so much strain that they will break. In fact, the ultimate responsibility lies with the Bush government that started the war without any idea of how to end it. But everyone down to the guy who pulls the trigger can say no to such illegal acts.

And, of course, keeping such fuck-ups secret is completely and utterly unacceptable in a democracy. How can voters be expected to cast informed votes if the government blatantly lies to them?

Re:Video

[mikkelm]

It's the gunner identifying the targets, identifying the weapons, and asking for permission to fire. It's the people on the ground asking the pilot what the situation is, and the pilot returning the gunner's assessment.

Re:Video

[crush]

Mod parent up. This is the single most important point about the whole thing. Incidents like the above are just one INEVITABLE consequence of invading and occupying OTHER PEOPLE'S COUNTRIES.

Re:Video

[Jedi Alec]

There's a reason the laws of war require combatants to dress in an obvious uniform and avoid civilian areas unless unavoidable: because not doing so endangers the lives of civilians. By dressing up like the locals, you cause this kind of mistake.

Uh oh, someone better retroactively inform all those resistance cells in WWII. Oh wait, those are the good guys in our book.

When going up against an opponent that has pretty much every advantage you can think of, guerilla is the way to go. And yes, doing so will cost the lives of your countrymen. But from the point of view of the guerilla, his tree of liberty needs watering as well.

Re:Video

[Lehk228]

did you listen to the radio chatter? they weren't scared they were having fun.

this was sadistic murder for entertainment. everyone on the scene should be charged with war crimes and murder, and everyone who helped cover it up and harass wikileaks should be charged with conspiracy and accessory to murder after the fact

Re:Video

[gweihir]

Last I checked, Brits didn't use gunships in Northern Ireland.

The Brits very sensible did not use overwhelming fore in Northern Ireland. It means your casualties will about match that of the enemy and that in turn gives a possibility to start negotiations on an equal footing at any time. The US way of doing this highly asymmetrical (they will accept a high number of enemy casualties for each one of their own) is by now known to boost support for the underdog side tremendously and typically results in a long, drawn out all-out war. Face it, you have to show respect to the enemy to get respect in return and that means giving the enemy a real chance to kill you.

Of course doing something like this requires warriors, not killers. The US military forces seems to be mainly comprised of cowardly killers today. People that do place getting home alive again over everything else are not warriors. While this is understandable on an individual level, it does more damage than good in the real world.

Re:Video

[chrb]

If these "insurgents" were totally crazy suicidal, they would avoid civilian areas and dress in a clearly identifiable uniform.

There, fixed that for you.

Seriously, the French resistance did not avoid civilian areas or wear uniforms. Neither did the Belgians, or the Greeks, or any resistance force, ever.

But the guys who do have weapons, and do have RPGs, caused that mistake; and they did it on purpose. They have the greater blame.

That is the same logic that the Nazis used in occupied Europe to justify violence against the civilian population following attacks on German forces. Don't gun proponents always say that ultimate responsibility lies with the man holding the gun, and with nobody else? Why in this case are the men firing the weapons not held responsible for their actions?

This abdication of military responsibility and projection onto a third party is reminiscent of Bloody Sunday, where British forces opened fire on civil rights protesters and then blamed the IRA. It is the same excuse that the Serbian forces used whenever they killed civilians - that the KLA were ultimately to blame. The fact that a third party may somehow benefit from soldiers killing civilians does not make it okay to do so. Blaming the third party is a poor excuse - it is the fault of the soldier pulling the trigger, and of his superiors for providing inadequate rules of engagement. Soldiers operating in civilian areas have a duty different from those operating in a war zone - a role more akin to a police force than an invading army, and the rules of engagement need to make that clear.

This was not an active war. This was an occupying military force. The roles and rules of engagement are supposed to be different. Opening fire on civilians without verifying that they are even armed is not supposed to be allowed. Most Americans would go crazy if U.S. police officers or National Guard troops opened fire on some innocent people walking down the street. There was no warning. There was no provocation. This wasn't even some protest. If this happened in the U.S. there would be a hundred posts here decrying government force and suggesting violent revolution. Why do you makes excuses for excessive government and military force being used to kill civilians in Iraq, when you would not excuse it in your own country?

Well, I'm going to make my first donation.

[synthesizerpatel]

For anyone who complains that the main-stream (or alternative media) aren't doing their job, perhaps you should make a donation too. The truth needs to be known and if wikileaks is the only entity out there willing to take that risk, the least we can do is support them.

Re:Well, I'm going to make my first donation.

[Kell Bengal]

Reuters, if I recall, counts as main-stream media. Those people put their lives on the line to bring us news, and they paid the price so that we might know. It's one thing to go to war and lose your life in service of your country. It's another thing entirely to go to war and lose your life in service of the truth. Rest in peace, Reuters reporters - your sacrifice will not go unremarked.

Re:Well, I'm going to make my first donation.

[isorox]

For anyone who complains that the main-stream (or alternative media) aren't doing their job

Mainstream media are often the ones that get shot at by American yahoos. Alternative media are often fat lardasses that blog about "how terrible mainstream media" is while drinking a latte at their local starbucks. Sure, you get some bloggers that simply report on events where they live, but they are typically intelligent enough to stay out of any real on-the-ground danger, its "just" the government.

I work for mainstream media - I'm not a journalist, so I only need to travel airport->office->hotel, but I had to go on a hostile environment course a couple of months ago. One of the things you think about when you talk to people that have been kidnapped and watch videos of people that have had their foot blown off, is "why the fuck am I here".

Re:Well, I'm going to make my first donation.

[martas]

your sacrifice will not go unremarked.

it almost did, though

Outrage of the week

[MaXintosh]

I find this all sorts of appalling. As someone else who started watching it said, "That's really screwed up." But that said, I have almost no hope that this will ever go anywhere. We've seen a seemingly never ending parade of illegal and barbaric behaviour come to light in both Iraq and Afghanistan, on the part of US forces, but each time nothing ever happens because of it. We all seem to just shrug our shoulders and go on with our lives.

Wikileaks is just peeing into the wind. Nothing will probably come of this, because outrage is dead.

I'm really hoping someone proves my cynical attitude wrong.

Re:Outrage of the week

[royallthefourth]

Americans don't really have ways to participate in organizations that will stop this sort of thing from happening.

Republicans endorse it, Democrats endorse it, and third parties are barely even a sideshow. As far as I know, there's no group of "stop sending our military to kill browns" that I can give money to.

I can do all kinds of stuff about domestic policy, try to encourage foreign policy to increase intervention (Darfur (no thanks)), but there's nothing I can do to decrease foreign intervention. It's ugly and the citizens are powerless.
I can't even really blame the troops that much because it's basically a trap for poor people who can't find a job to do the bidding of our imperialist leaders.

I highly recommend everyone read Killing Hope by William Blum to get a good rundown of how much this has been happening in just the last 60 years.

Re:Outrage of the week

[MaXintosh]

I think the problem is that Republicans (I speak as if they're a vague monolithic organization) feel they have to go gangbusters on the war, no matter what. Because it started under their tenure as president.
Democrats (generalization!) feel like that they have to support it, or else risk alienating voters by appearing 'soft' on security.

And the public is very distractable, is the problem. It seems like political views are more hereditary now, instead of come to through introspection.
I think you got a good point about there being nothing to we little people can do to decrease foreign intervetion. But I guess what I'd say is that maybe we can try to lessen the effects of foreign intervention. Give money to try and help the people who's country/lives have gone to hell in a hand-basket. I'm not sure what NPOs are doing work in Afganistan and Iraq...

How are we supposed to understand this?

[Skyshadow]

I always feel like the key trouble with video of any military operation is that the general public has absolutely no basis from which to really understand what they're seeing -- the context of civilian day-to-day just doesn't create the sort of base of experience you need to watch this sort of video and draw decent conclusions from it.

What was the situation? What were these guys trained to do in this sort of situation? What had happened the hour or day or week before in this area, what was happening in the region, what sort of tactics had the bad guys been using, what were other patrols telling these guys? These details are actually more important than what we see in the video towards understanding the events, but we have none of it.

I don't want to make apologies if these guys screwed up -- I'm not of the mindset that out men and women in uniform are all heroes who can do no wrong or anything of that nature. That said, I'm also willing to accept that I don't have the experience or understanding to understand what I'm seeing... I'd be interested to hear from someone who does.

Re:How are we supposed to understand this?

[MozeeToby]

I'll grant you there may be reasons why this happened. Maybe a suicide bomber hit their squad mate in that square just a week ago. Maybe the rules of engagement said to fire if you felt threatened (I highly doubt that but maybe). Maybe some in the crowd looked suspicious, maybe a camera looked like a gun for a second.

None of that would change the fact that a fully automatic weapon was discharged into an unarmed crowd of civilians. If it was a mistake, fine, warfare is ugly and brutal. But the soldiers involved should have been investigated, public apologies should have been made, rules of engagement should have been changed, training should have been improved. Instead, the incident was lied about, covered up, denied, and ignored and that is unforgivable in my opinion.

Re:How are we supposed to understand this?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the video it seems that the soldiers involved genuinely thought there was a present threat, so I don't hold them at fault that much. What they did might have been totally justified by the circumstances surrounding the events.

However, there is a huge amount of blame to be placed in how the government dealt with this situation after the fact. Being open about the situation and not doing what amounts to a cover-up would have helped. A statement of apology and explanation should have been made.

Re:How are we supposed to understand this?

[Jerrei]

I see civilians being shot, I hear officials on comms laughing about the truck driving in there to attempt to save those shot running over a corpse and I see us being told that Iraqi insurgents were responsible. How the fuck is this open to interpretation?

Re:How are we supposed to understand this?

[Skyshadow]

What could possibly be said to justify firing into a crowd of unarmed people?

I suppose my base assumption is that this patrol wasn't just walking down the street one day, saw a group of people and thought to themselves, "Hey, let's blast away at these motherfuckers! I haven't gotten to shoot anyone all day, and I just can't get an erection anymore if I don't do so. Also, maybe we can punch a baby or two when we're done."

For example, why exactly did people have video cameras? I admit that my sole experience in this is having seen 'Hurt Locker', but it seems to me that's the sort of thing that would set off certain alarm bells for me if I were a soldier. What was being said on the ground? What sort of behavior preceded attacks in this area in the past, what sort of warning signs were these guys responding to?

Again, these guys may well have screwed up and may well be deserving of punishment. Assuming, however, that my base assumption (that these guys aren't all evil merciless killing machines) is correct, there must be factors we don't, as civilians, understand.

Re:How are we supposed to understand this?

[burkmat]

Even so, firing at the van stopping to assist the wounded is something I simply cannot wrap my head around.

Say for sake of argument that the crowd of people really were bad guys.
Someone comes driving along, and finds a large amount of dead bodies, with a wounded man writhing at the side of the road. The driver pulls over, and runs out to help the person - and this grants the coalition forces the right to engage? Someone finds a wounded person and tries to help, and for this they deserve to die?
Even if that was a Really Evil Terrorist I can't grasp how the ROE would permit engaging someone to stops to help a wounded person.

Re:How are we supposed to understand this?

[medcalf]

It is not uncommon for the enemy to drive up in vans and jump out. In fact, in places like Palestine (and previously in Iraq, when they had more resources) it is not unusual for jihadis to use ambulances to transport fighters. They try to use our rules against us, which is why it's common for the enemy to deliberately fire at us from within crowds of civilians. (If you want to know why the soldiers didn't stop just because there were also obvious civilians in the crowd, you have an answer now.)

Look, the enemy wants to win. I want for us to win. You want for us to fight clean. Your and the enemy's goals are compatible. My goal is not compatible with the enemy's, and it's far from clear if my goal is compatible with yours. No military has ever tried to fight a counterinsurgency of this scope with this many restrictions on how we behave in combat, and it's not clear if the enemy's exploitation of our rules, and our general determination to adhere to them, prevents us from winning or not. I sincerely hope that we can both minimize civilian (and "civilian") losses, and still win; I am unconvinced that we can.

Re:How are we supposed to understand this?

[FrozenFOXX]

Mod parent up. In a situation like this, hard as it is to believe on Slashdot, mistakes happen. ROE can be not what you expect, and as noted earlier you simply don't know. I always thought the concept of places like this was to hold things in doubt, not to jump onto a bandwagon.

From my wife's experience in the Air Force she had to man the machine-gun pit in front of her Air Base out in Iraq. Her orders were that if anyone stepped beyond the signs she'd shout a single warning. If the person, man, woman, child, car, whomever did not stop, turn around, or otherwise, she was supposed to blow them to kingdom come. Mercifully she never had to, but consider the following:

Same scenario, area is set up as a kill zone. Large group of journalists with cameras walk down the road. She shouts a warning to turn around, they don't heed it (maybe they don't speak English, doesn't matter why). Insert video of blowing away unarmed journalists on a street from a machine gun pit. A van rolls into the kill zone, also does not heed the warning, ALSO gets blasted to Hell and back. What the video would never show you are her orders, the kill zone perimeter warnings, or the situation (in this case extremely hostile area, heavily fortified entrance, no expected visitors except at specific times during which that would not be one of them, so on and so forth).

Now you the viewer know nothing beyond what you've seen. You can make any assumption you want, but the fact is that a video of that doesn't tell you anything beyond a fact, not the WHY it happened. It's appalling, but not for the reasons you'd imagine.


Again, mod the parent up. Why were people blown away? We DO NOT KNOW. What we DO know is that it was covered up by those who shouldn't be covering it up. Now THAT is appalling and deserves a lot of investigation. What were the troops' orders? Who GAVE those orders? Was this a clearly designated kill zone? Was a large group of people with cameras (and later a van dropping in) viewed as a threat? If so, why? Who noted it was a threat? These are the kinds of questions we need answers to first.

It's appalling, yes, but I find covering it up more appalling. If it's a screw-up it's a screw-up and we take it from there. If it's NOT a screw-up then we need to know that, too. We need more info, IMHO. But hey, I could be wrong, maybe our military is just chock full of ruthless barbarians going rogue and itching to kill people. From meeting quite a few of said barbarians I don't think that's true, so I'd like more info first.

Re:How are we supposed to understand this?

[vux984]

I always feel like the key trouble with video of any military operation is that the general public has absolutely no basis from which to really understand what they're seeing -- the context of civilian day-to-day just doesn't create the sort of base of experience you need to watch this sort of video and draw decent conclusions from it.

So what?

1) This is what war looks like. 'The public' should bloody well be exposed to it. If they can't understand it, fine. If it makes them coil away in revulsion, even better. We'd be involved in fewer pointless wars if the public was faced with what it really looked like on a regular basis.

2) If the soldiers had a good reason to fire, a target had been identified, orders had been issued, etc. Then there is nothing to hide. They did the right thing, and the military can bloody well justify it. War is ugly. If this 'had to be done' then let them defend their actions.

3) If this was a mistake. Own up to it, investigate it, and find ways to reduce mistakes like this.

Hiding behind an excuse like the 'public wouldn't understand it' is the most puerile self serving bullshit I can imagine. If anything it argues that the public needs to be exposed to it MORE, not less.

Re:How are we supposed to understand this?

[Zironic]

Isn't the entire fucking reason we're there in the first place to prove that we're better then them? If we start shooting civilians that just shows that we're morally corrupt and it's right of them to drive airplanes into our buildings.

Re:How are we supposed to understand this?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I sincerely hope that we can both minimize civilian (and "civilian") losses, and still win; I am unconvinced that we can.

The problem with your analysis is your definition of "win." It's a modern version of "win the battle, lose the war" approach. Failing to minimize civilian causalities will lose us the war, full stop. That's why there are so many new restrictions on combat, not out of some sort of dogooder ideal that's "compatible with the enemy's goals."

Re:How are we supposed to understand this?

[hipp5]

Ahhh where are my mod points when I need them. Spot on.

Back in the day, winning the war meant killing the general and routing their troops. Even in more recent times it meant destroying their industrial production to the point where they couldn't put up a fight.

However, war has changed. There is no longer an obvious head of command to chop off. There is no industrial production supporting the war. The enemy is made up of pissed off people with $45 guns and rigged-up bombs. They happen to be hugely effective because they are decentralized and aren't afraid to die. To date, the US has fought these wars like catching Hussein or Bin Laden would end things. Like it was chess. It's not.

Winning today's war is fundamentally anchored in not creating more pissed off people that will pick up a cheap gun or build a bomb. It's about convincing people that there's something better than insurgency. It's not about stomping them into the ground.

Every incident like this is one step back in winning the war. I guarantee that this situation just created more angry people with guns. It doesn't matter if it was handled by the book. The book is outdated. War has changed. The army better change too

Re:How long will this video last?

[fysdt]

It's gone viral.. they can't take it down

Re:Context?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Probably because they are too busy running basically content-free "analysts" who just so happen to be retired military of various flavors, with current ties to a variety of defense contractors?

Re:How long will this video last?

[MozeeToby]

Dude, it's on the internet. It's been downloaded, uploaded, torrented, copied, cleaned up, trimmed down, analyzed, re-analyzed, commented on, posted, and removed dozens of times already. Even if you somehow identified every website that currently has it posted and somehow forced them to pull the video, it would live on and be recovered from people's caches and be re-posted to an order of magnitude more websites tomorrow. It's over. If the DoD has any intelligence whatsoever they'll ignore the video and hope it goes away, such is the only possible defense to something you don't like hitting the internet.

Re:Conditional Freedom of Speech? Yay!

[Capt James McCarthy]

Awesome, we need to have a completely anonymous leak site to even know how corrupt our government even is. What a statement!

I always find it interesting that folks are so quick to jump on the band wagon on stuff like this. I mean you suspect everything from any government (and rightfully so), along with any large corporation, but the moment one source puts out one piece of potential evidence everyone is all over how corrupt the entire process is. Really? The whole process of government? Wow. Well, good luck with that.

Let the facts come out and be reviewed. Cover up or not, that too shall be vetted. Perhaps there is more here then what is in the video. We still only see one side of a story here.

Re:Americans

[rsborg]

Minor military fuckups like this happen all over the world everyday, it's not a problem unique to the US.

Yeah, and it's the US's hypocrisy that really chaps people's hide - "You should stand for freedom of the press!" while their military gunning down journalists and hides/denies the action.

Noone says that the US is the most brutal government (far from it), but when it does not practice what it preaches, scorn, derision and hatred ensues.

Re:Conditional Freedom of Speech? Yay!

[Hyppy]

It's not that all government is inherently corrupt. The point is that a government is corrupt if its citizens need to be completely anonymous in order to safely question their government or present damning evidence about it. The harassment and detainment that Wikileaks editors have had to endure is a very telling point in this debate. The anti-Wikileaks documents that have been leaked by, well, Wikileaks, are also an interesting point to note.

Re:Americans

[Hyppy]

Minor military fuckups like this happen all over the world everyday, it's not a problem unique to the US.

The problem isn't with the collateral damage, though blatantly blowing away children and people evacuating the wounded is deplorable. The big problem is the cover-up that followed it.

Re:Simply put you don't shoot wounded and unarmed

[shutdown -p now]

Which is actually rather reassuring, since he didn't fire then. Which means that, no matter what his personal take on it is (he may be thinking that a good enemy is a dead enemy - which is very common among those who watch the war unfold among them, and not on TV), he's still obeying by the rules of engagement and laws of war.

Re:Simply put you don't shoot wounded and unarmed

[Jeffrey Baker]

Maybe you can make a screen shot that shows the rifles and the RPG. All I see is two men with camera lenses and one with a tripod.

C'mon! Let me shoot!

[erroneus]

That was all I needed to hear.

To me the difference between a murderer and a soldier is that a murderer wants to kill. The vast majority of my family and myself included have been or are currently in the U.S. armed services. I am not "anti-military." This is a group of yahoos shooting fish in a barrel. Reminds me of that scene in full metal jacket -- "How can you shoot women and children?" "Easy, you just don't lead 'em as much!"

Re:Simply put you don't shoot wounded and unarmed

[smash]

What a hero. :-\

Video: Why apache gunners are horrible policemen

[BobMcD]

This video clearly demonstrates why policemen do not operate from behind the gun mount on an Apache helicopter.

1) Were or were there not any guns? I didn't see any. If there were, were these guns illegal? Is it really legal to fire on a crowd of people because one or two might be armed? Remember the men with weapons outside the Obamacare townhalls? Would it be okay to turn automatic (anti-vehicle) weapons on that crowd? Did the men on the ground know this was the case before they got shot? Did they even know who was doing the shooting? None of this is clear.

2) Was opening fire on the crowd the only option? Could the choppers have moved away, evading the range of the 'RPG', until the ground forces arrived? Was anyone's life in immediate jeopardy to the point that the military had to open fire?

3) Was this a 'battlefield', as the soldiers claim it was, or was it 'Thursday'? See number 1, but what reasonable chance did the deceased have to avoid getting shot that day?

Police procedure is filled with examples of how do deal with situations such as these. Also, they tend to arrest, rather than assassinate.

My point - You cannot police Iraq with soldiers, unless you just don't care about guilt or innocence, life or death.

Re:Can someone explain what they did wrong?

[OzPeter]

I might have missed something in the video, anyone care to explain?

Ask yourself this .. if American soldiers were attacked and defeated .. and then the attackers came back and creamed the wounded, how would you feel? What sort of outrage would you see in the American press?

Re:Simply put you don't shoot wounded and unarmed

[elnyka]

At 8 minutes 30 seconds you can hear the guy in the Apache, crosshair hovering over a gravely wounded individual that is clearly struggling to even get anywhere saying and I quote "Come on buddy all you gotta do is pick up a weapon".

...which sort of runs counter to the point, since he didn't just drill the guy and move on to the next target like he would have if these troops were just engaging in a spot of wanton murder.

Where was the weapon that the wounded man got wounded for to begin with?

Mistakes

[twoallbeefpatties]

Mistakes are part of war, and this is reflected in the law of war.

One of the surest differences between incompetence and talent is how you deal with your mistakes - not whether or not you never make mistakes, but whether or not you own up to them, learn from them, and adapt to fix the situation or clean up the mess you made as a result.

It is not simply enough to say, oh, it's war, and in war, mistakes are made. If mistakes are covered up, ignored, and lied about, that is not a good sign to any operation.

Why the US is hated.

[VShael]

Remember this, the next time you hear someone push the "they hate us for our freedoms" meme.

Just because this stuff is covered up in the US, doesn't mean it's covered up elsewhere.

The people of the United States are often the most ignorant of the atrocities being carried out in their name.

Re:Why the US is hated.

[copponex]

The people of the United States are often the most ignorant of the atrocities being carried out in their name.

The real problem is that once they found out, they rationalize their brutality and pretty much pretend that it doesn't exist. That's why the guys who fire from gun ships a mile a way are heroes, and the suicide bombers are terrorists. It's why 24 is a number one show. It's why we can see gun violence 24/7 on American television, but a single nipple is a national tragedy of exposing our children to immorality.

Fighting the good fight has nothing to do with the courage it takes, or how much you put on the line to defend your country, especially if your home country is Iraq. It's entirely dependent on what side you are on, and Americans of course always have God on our side. We're always right. We'll never apologize for our crimes. We live in the greatest country God ever gave Man, according to the top three TV personalities on Fox News, which is the top "news" source on American television.

Until we suffer an invasion on our home soil, someone is going to be angling to send our standing army off to die to make a buck or two invading someone else's. And that's not a good prerequisite for becoming a prosperous and peaceful nation.

Did you watch the video? they beg to fire

[SmallFurryCreature]

Listen to the comments by the pilots, they beg to fire on clearly unarmed people in civilian clothing. Then when they learn they fire on kids, they say "well that should teach them not to take kids into battle".

America is in Vietnam 2. And it will loose this war again because its soldiers and leaders are unable to see non-americans as human beings.