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