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

Re:Video

[Anonymous Coward]

Now theres plans to employ remotely controlled UAC's too?

An unidentified program wants access to your civilians:

Large caliber weapons.exe
US Department of Defense

-> Cancel
-> Allow

It's like I'm really...

[Suiggy]

piloting an Apache in Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

Re:How are we supposed to understand this?

[Knara]

Ah yes, the eternal maxim of scandalous reporting: Crowds fired upon are always "unarmed civilians". With no real context to the larger situation going on, we have no idea what the real story is. If I'm in a gunship and a guy in a crowd of civilians has a stinger (or the like), the people in that crowd are about to have a really bad day. Sucks, but that's life.

Recall the (reoccurring) stories every time the Israelis and Palestinians go at it, with instantaneous stories about how the Israelis are targeting civilians and UN buildings. Of course, after things settle down there's some page 19 story about how those buildings were being used as cover for combatants, but no one has any vested interest in showing that the Palestinians military forces aren't all valiant freedom fighters.

Not saying the US military are angels, but there's no ad dollars in "US military does good job in bad situation" headlines.

Re:Video

[Firethorn]

"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.

According to another poster here, they were in contact with the infantry. Infantry who were reporting they had weapons.

At which point, depending, you need to check the vision of the infantry.

Again: I haven't seen the videos. Youtube and similar sites are blocked. I'm not going to say that this incident was proper, I was just saying that once you've decided to kill people during war, as long as you do it in a way to not deliberately increase suffering you're good. You're free to use the most efficient means possible.

Thus, my objection to a video like this is one of target selection, not weapon selection. You're not supposed to go deliberately target non-combatants.

Now, using a 2k bomb on a militant truck parked next to an occupied school would get me going 'WTF' at the weapon selection, especially if there was, say, an A-10 available to hit it with their gun. GAU-8 is more selective than a 2k bomb.