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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.
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.
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.
... 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
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.
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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!
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