Slashdot Mirror
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.
I guess there is one thing we know we can do. I just sent $50 to Wikileaks and I bet most other slashdotters can afford that easily, too.
LTC Bleichwehl is just a spokesperson in a Public Affairs Office. I highly doubt he'd be the fall guy.
The Pentagon had their chance to release the video and explain themselves at the press conference covering the attack. In fact, David Petraeus said he would. Then they could have shown from the video footage that there were two guys with assault rifles, and that it would have been impossible to tell that there were two children in the van, and that the camera looks like an RPG from head on, and that they (supposedly) followed the rules of engagement. They could have cut out some of the audio and the images of the Hummer driving over dead bodies. Instead they denied Reuters the video despite repeated FOIA requests, and proceeded to lie about how the children were injured.
My hunch was that Petraeus thought they were following the rules of engagement, and then when they looked at the video later they realized it was worse than they thought, and decided not to release the video. I don't have the experience or understanding to know what's going on either, but those in the Pentagon do. If they're not comfortable releasing the video because they can't justify what happened, and they have to subsequently lie about certain important details, it means that someone screwed up.
1. Double-tap --- engaging an individual or individuals after the threat has been eliminated.
2. Engaging personnel with anti-material weaponry; this isn't illegal but it looks bad. :-p
3. Failing to establish PID (Positive Identification of a threat) before engaging the "bongo truck" full of injured individuals.
4. Failing to establish PID before engaging what is, basically, a group of civilians wandering around the streets.
In essence, they shot some people for carrying weapons, then shot up the ambulance. I'm very saddened by this, since it's not the first violation of the ROE that I've encountered. The last one wasn't caught on tape. I had to put a stop to it myself.
I am not going to take sides here, but it is well known that Nervous Laughter helps people work through stress. These weren't belly laughs on this film, it came across to me as nervous laughter. I am certainly no expert though, having never been in the military nor in any situation anywhere near this.
Do you Gentoo!?
Firing on the van completely blew my mind.
Yeah. The van was recovering the wounded on the ground. They were unarmed and presented no threat. The air element was clear on this; they clearly identified the van as recovering wounded, requested permission to engage, got it, and fired. It wasn't a mistake. That's a court-martial offense.
Despite this being an illegal war, this event could save lives. Public opinion will count against this. The wife at home espousing his husband is "in the war" and "flies a helicopter" could possibly now be met with silence and a few nods, rather than wholesale overt praise at the dinner party. This sort of thing is akin to the photos from the Vietnam War of the children walking from a village, burned and with skin hanging off them after a napalm attack. That series of photos did more damage than any military attack.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Even the Nazis got this right! With only a few glaring exceptions (most of which involved the SS) the Wehrmacht conducted themselves in a civil manner throughout the conflict and treated civilians and our POWs as well as could be expected. The Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine were similarly well behaved.
If even the Nazis are capable of conducting war in a mostly civil manner, we should be capable of the same.
Excuse me, 30mm is NOT allowed for human targets just like WP isn't supposed to be used. Using anti-aircraft/anti-vehicle weaponry against non-armored human targets goes against the Geneva Convention.
Citation, please.
It's not in the Geneva Convention but the St. Petersburg Declaration from 1868 prohibits the use of "incendiary or explosive projectiles weighing less than 400 grams" or something like that based on the fact that at that time, the sole use of small caliber projectiles was against humans. Now the situation changed when AA weapons came into service during the WW I, but it is my understanding that the "don't shoot with it at humans" is still tacitly understood to be in effect and still observed...at least in Europe. US hasn't signed this and they are perfectly free to shoot at Amazonian Indians with exploding tomatoes, or whatever they wish.
Ezekiel 23:20
... the enemy [does this] ... the enemy [does that] ... the enemy [does this other thing] ...
No military has ever tried to fight a counterinsurgency of this scope with this many restrictions on how we behave in combat, ...
I don't consider people my enemy just because they are fighting to oust foreign invaders from their homeland. The repeated use of the word "enemy" is used to de-humanize the people who get killed defending their country from foreign invaders.
Be that as it may, the root of the problem is that the foreign invaders are unable to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. I disagree that the defenders of their homelands are trying to get the invaders to follow the Geneva Conventions. They are making their best effort to kick the invaders out of their country by putting them in a no-win situation. If the invaders obey the Geneva Conventions then they are unable to eradicate the combatants but when the invaders start killing innocent civilians then they create more combatants among the friends and loved ones of the innocent people they killed.
The situation is highly asymmetrical. The invaders stick out like a sore thumb while the defenders are often indistinguishable from the civilians. We can see this asymmetry as an insurmountable problem or we can see it as the key to the solution.
There is no way for the foreign invaders to "win". One approach is to continue the brutality and war crimes until the local population is cowed into submission and then install a puppet dictatorship. Another approach is to back-off on the brutality and war crimes which will keep the invasion + resistance going on indefinitely. The third approach is to declare victory and go home.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
As I've said elsewhere, I hope the next empire deploys troops in your neighborhood, and I hope you are there to watch your loved ones die. I hope they suffer and I hope you have to watch helplessly.
Then talk to me about people just doing their jobs. And while you're at it, you can explain to me why strapping a bomb on yourself and trying to kill just one person sharing their uniform would be cowardly.
This was my thought as well. The analysis was wrong ("They have weapons! He has an RPG! Several AK-47s!") and that's a mistake which shows the need for better analysis. I mean, the guy did appear to have an RPG to me before they opened fire, but it didn't look like he was pointing it at any of them.
Far worse was the decision not to evacuate the kids. I mean, the soldiers on the ground had a much better view of what was going on, and to deny that was a travesty. And the cover-up makes it all that much worse.
In general, I see this as bad intelligence leading to a unfortunate call by soldiers looking to keep themselves safe. That doesn't excuse what happened by the commanders by any means. But I can't image being in that pilot's seat. Or the ground soldier when they made the call not to evacuate the kids.
Random Musings
I know that romanticizing the noble soldiers and Marines is all the rage, but I've worked with a lot of these guys, and some of them *are* actually scum. That's not most of them, but there are more than a few I've met who actually seem to get their rocks off on trigger time, and are WAY too trigger happy for an environment with so many civilians walking around. Why do you think the military command makes them get permission to start shooting, or has rules of engagement in the first place?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
did you actually do military service ? i did. if we used 30 mm rounds on unarmed civilians, we would be in for a looooong series of inquiries and potential repercussions, even only if it was due to needlessly wasting precious ammunition.
and you do not carry a gunship with you. you call it via radio. there is no target necessitating calling of a gunship with anti armor 30 mm ammunition.
this was a great fuck up, and each of the idiots who were involved in that should pay dearly.
Read radical news here
All this means is that someone in the command structure will be ordered to fall on the sword.
Is that all it means? For me, it means all the stories from the military about what happened in a given battle are suspect. I know they lie and cover up now. The only question is if it's done systematically.
Since there was no correction to date from the military, 'systematic' is the most likely answer.
All trust is gone.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Meh. It happens to every army. Didn't some German Peacekeepers in Afghanistan waste a truckload of local soldiers?
I don't see how an hypothetical screw-up justifies every screw-up, particularly one so gruesome and so blatantly unjustified as this one.
It isn't good, but every soldier everywhere lives in a Kill or Be Killed situation.
How exactly is a AH-64 crew threatened by an unarmed group of men including journalists carrying cameras walking calmly in a street? And let's supposed that those imaginary RPGs and AK47s that aren't seen but are mentioned were indeed there. How exactly is a AH-64 threatened by an man wielding one of those, calmly walking around in a street without the faintest hint that he is even aware that a helicopter is in that general area? In the radio chat it is explicitly mentioned that no US ground force is present in that area and it took at least over 10 minutes for a ground crew to intentionally get there while rushing. Who exactly was threatened by those imaginary weapons?
And what about the "bongo van"? How exactly is a AH-64 crew threatened by a "bongo truck"? The AH-64 crew clearly noticed that the people leaving the truck were intentionally aiding those poor souls who got shot by the AH-64's 30mm autocannon. The AH-64 crew explicitly stated that the people from the truck were aiding the injured men and "picking up bodies". How exactly does that threaten a AH-64 calmly flying around? And the AH-64 crew repeatedly state that they wish that the injured reported "picked up a weapon" for them to kill him. How exactly is a AH-64 crew threatened by a man who was just shot by a 30mm autocannon, is squirming on the ground and wasn't carrying any weapon to begin with?
The truth is they aren't threatened. The truth is that this was by far no "Kill or Be Killed situation". Is this a screw-up? Clearly it is. Nonetheless, no one in their right mind can seriously claim that what happened in this case was remotely a "Kill or Be Killed situation". This was a trigger-happy crew who was never threatened and desperately wanted to shoot at people. They didn't even flinched when they were told that they shot at children. "They shouldn't have brought them into a battle". What battle?
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
I see no evidence to suggest that what I saw wasn't an RPG (sure looked like it) and it definitely wasn't one of the two reporters holding it (the video makes an effort to highlight the reporters when on screen.) The guy who carried it had it propped up on his shoulder and was edging the corner of the building, keeping the gunship in his sights, pointing it what appeared to be AT the gunship.
In light of this new information that you did not have, NOW what do you think about the use of a gunship, and the order to go ahead and fire?
Since the read-out on the gun's camera shows them beyond double the effective range of any Soviet-made RPG, I'd say they still acted illegally.
Yeah, a camera really looks soooo much like an RPG.
Lets make a few things clear:
- A Rocket Propelled Grenade, is a lot larger then a camera, you can notice that clearly and I couldn't even remotely identify an RPG from the images.
- An anti-personnel machine gun is no danger to an armored assault helicopter, which is designed to be shot at.
So, putting all that in perspective I think it was a conscious choice on the part of the pilot to commit murder, he was never in any danger of bein shot at.
Noticing from his behavior I'd say he's a sociopath and should be dishonerably discharged from duty, sent of to Den Haag for war crimes and put in prison for life with forced psychiatric treatment.
Same goes for the tank driver who overrun a body (was that person even dead?)
Committing war crimes seems to be normal to the U.S. army and doing something about it appears to be completely alien to them.
Thats a tripod and never identified by anybody as RPG. The only thing identified as RPG in the video is the camera, which can be mistaken for an RPG as the view is blocked by the wall at 4:08.
Try wikipedia, for one. The article is rather biased, but it does show the following:
"A March 7, 2007 survey of more than 2,000 Iraqis found that 78% of the population opposed the presence of Coalition forces in Iraq, that 69% believed the presence of U.S. forces is making things worse, and that 51% of the population considered attacks on coalition forces acceptable, up from 17% in 2004 and 35% in 2006. When asked if Coalition forces should leave, about 35% of the population wanted immediate withdrawl, while about 66% of the population thought Coalitions should remain until various objectives were met, such as security restored, stronger government, independently operating Iraqi security forces, etc."
The linked polls also show that 47% of Iraqis think that the Invasion was "somewhat right" or "absolutely right", which in itself is quite interesting. I'm not sure how Iraqis can oppose the presence of US forces while still wanting them to stay and also thinking that the invasion was justified, but there ya have it. Might have lost something in the translation.
They don't wear uniforms because: a) there is no organised army for them to fight with, and b) if they did they'd be killed immediately. If a people is put up against an overwhelming force, of course they'll stop wearing uniforms. The British had plans to do just that if the Germans invaded in WWII, and indeed the SAS often didn't wear uniforms when out killing bunches of people. Stomping your feet and getting upset because the other guys aren't playing fair is pathetic.