I take the point - but for antitrust issues to apply, Apple would have to have a monopoly on phones
No, European antitrust legislation applies to any "activity that aims to prevent, restrict or distort competition". It is not necessary for a company to be in a monopoly position for those conditions to be true.
Equally, it could also be argued that Apple has a monopoly on iPhone app stores, in order to show that they could exert undue control over what should be a freely competitive market.
It's not a huge leap to conclude that if Apple exploits their position as owner of the iPhone OS and app store to disadvantage their competitors who want to release iPhone apps, then those competitors are going to cry foul.
it hass passed without any hassle and is now available for everyone, so there's really nothing going on at all.
Whilst the positive press around Opera's browser does certainly generate interest in it, it would be a mistake to conclude from this that Apple is a benevolent dictator which treats apps equally when they compete with its own. Did you consider that one of the reasons the Opera browser may have being accepted is because of the attention that Opera brought to the subject? It is certainly possible that Apple's decision to allow the app would have been affected by the fact that Opera is a European company involved in a high-profile ongoing EU antitrust case regarding web browsers. Rejecting the app would probably have triggered an antitrust complaint from Opera, and that is the kind of attention that Apple could do without.
For the most part what I have seen of Wikileaks they are the Nation Enquirer of the internet. They present the data in the most inflammatory way possible and it is often incorrect, incomplete, and biased. They do not just present the data but comment on and embellish.
Look at wikileaks.org. The most recently leaked documents are reproduced in their entirety, with (usually) only one single paragraph to describe the document. The descriptions are descriptive and accurate (if you don't believe me - read them for yourself - stuff like "Quote for a US$85 million line of credit from FirstCaribbean to the government of the Turks & Caicos Islands."). How is a release of original source material along with one single descriptive paragraph "incorrect, incomplete, and biased.. commenting on and embellishing"?
they don't care anymore about being unbiased or responsible than Fox news does.
This is a ridiculous comparison. Fox News pushes opinion pieces as real news. It reproduces none - zero, nada, zilch - of its original sources. Wikileaks reproduces its sources in their entirety. They even released the original, unedited Apache video. If they did not care about being biased, then why would they released the original, unedited video? Has Fox News ever released the original source material of any contentious report? Ever? Probably not. And yet Wikileaks does this every single time as standard policy. There is a huge difference.
Now, set the founder up for more publicity, implicitly encouraging violence upon him.
Assange brings publicity on himself. He is the media friendly face of Wikileaks. He won the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award and he has been a guest speaker at various international conferences. He chose to be interviewed on Al Jazeera, which is watched by 50-100 million households. I'm not suggesting that he actively seeks publicity for himself, but he does choose to seek it on behalf of Wikileaks, in order to further the Wikileaks mission.
It's a chilling effect on anyone who might be initially inclined to provide information to Wikileaks under their cover of anonymity.
Assange chose not to be anonymous so the analogy does not apply. Read his Wikipedia biography for more information. There is no evidence that this will have any effect on anonymous leakers. The people opposed to Wikileaks have various options at this point:
Undermine and discredit Wikileaks by publically unmask some of the anonymous leakers
Ignore Wikileaks, and accept that leaking happens.
Use Wikileaks by leaking "friendly" info, info that makes opponents look bad, etc.
Discredit Wikileaks by leaking info that is subsequently shown to be false.
Push for the legislation and political will to punish Wikileaks as a criminal organisation that undermines national security.
you'll need to back up your claim about police treating aboriginal deaths the same as animal deaths. i've lived here my whole life and never heard such a claim.
I have read many times that, under Australian law, it was legal for white men to hunt Aborigines up until the 1950s. e.g. this:
"the classic "nigger hunting" license that station (ranch) owners obtained from the local police was to permit them to eliminate Aborigines by hunting the local fauna, Aborigines were fauna by constitutional definition, kill them and feel not the retribution of law for murder. I have interviewed men who say this genocide continued into the 1950s when they had to get more subtle about the disposal of the remains, so they'd slit open a steer and slide the corpse inside. Mutual decomposition took care of the rest."
"In fact, as recently as the 1950s, a white man could apply for a hunting permit to hunt and kill Aborigines! Can you imagine? They were hunted and killed as if they were a game animal."
These are not great references - I would welcome a better reference to settle this urban myth one way or the other.
Can you really call someone who chooses to do any particular act a "victim"?
That's an interesting philosophical question. The strict answer is yes - the simple example: "Give me your money or I will shoot you" - followed by your choice to give the speaker your money. You had a choice - you could have chosen to take the bullet - but you are also now a "victim". The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary defines victim as: "someone or something which has been hurt, damaged or killed or has suffered, either because of the actions of someone or something else, or because of illness or chance". This would encompass many forms of gambling.
There are cases where old people are talked into handing over their savings - which they do apparently willingly - because they trust the speaker and do not comprehend that the money is being taken from them. Those people are victims. Where is the line between those people and gamblers? The answer would appear to be some question of what is "reasonable" - it is not reasonable to take a person's life savings, whether through a game of poker, or through some convincing talk. It is reasonable to partake in a game where you lose $1 in exchange for entertainment. It is reasonable to partake in a game where you lose $100 and have some realistic chance of winning a greater amount. It is not reasonable to partake in a game where you lose your life savings and stand no realistic chance of winning a greater amount. It is not reasonable to take money from someone who does not understand the consequences of their actions (that they will have no money, their children will go unfed, etc.). The people who lose in these "unreasonable" games are "victims". But if someone is not coerced, acts in a reasonable manner, with full knowledge of the wider implications of their actions, then they are not a "victim".
I expect Java to gain ground again as developers create apps for Android phones.
Java? Andriod? I wish it ran Java but it aint so. To be called Java it would seem that it must first have the ability to run valid java bytecode which it does not.
It depends on what you mean by "Java" - if you mean the language, then Android is going to increase the usage of "Java". If you mean the "Java Virtual Machine" - then Android will not directly increase the usage of "Java", since it runs Dalvik byte code. But when most people say "Java", they mean the former.
I never understood why people bothered with Acrobat Reader on Linux - KPDF/Okular has been smaller, faster and nicer looking for years, and it integrates better with the KDE desktop. I'd imagine the same it true of whatever Gnome uses?
we're fighting a mobile group that will go wherever lawlessness is tolerated and don't care what happens to innocents around them
Those people - insurgents, terrorists, whatever you would call them - pose absolutely no existential threat to the United States. On a global scale, they are barely worth mentioning. 75 million people were killed in World War II, and the Cold War could have gone hot and then hundreds of millions would have been killed. How many Americans have been killed by these small groups of insurgents/terrorists? A few thousand in a decade. 45,000 Americans are killed every year driving in their cars. Almost one million Americans die every year of heart disease. Stop worrying about the terrorists, and be happy that you will almost certainly never have to live through a real global war.
if one of the US's enemies uses chemical weapons against us, we have no non-conventional means to retaliate, since the US has no meaningful chemical arsenal
The U.S. military does not disavow chemical weapons out of some concern for the greater good of humanity - it rejects them because chemical weapons are, from a military perspective, pretty useless. They are difficult to disperse, you run the risk of killing your own men on the battlefield, you need to handle them with great care everywhere else, and they are ineffective against simple carbon filtration systems which modern military vehicles are fitted with. To quote Wikipedia: "With proper protective equipment and contamination control, chemical weapons are of limited strategic use, due to their modern ineffectiveness." For this reason alone, it is highly unlikely that any enemy of the U.S. would ever use chemical weapons in an attack - they would undoubtedly utilise something more effective.
I am getting sick and tired of the "war between nations is obsolete" rhetoric. It makes no fucking sense, and there is no evidence for it
There is a context to that phrase. When people in the West talk about "war between nations" they aren't talking about war between some random nations in Africa - they are talking about war between the nations of Western Europe, Russia, U.S.A. and other first world nations. To all extents and purposes, the potential for another war has been greatly decreased - the presence of nuclear weapons means that the risk involved with attacking a NATO country, or Russia, or China, is simply too great. Any war between Russia, China and the U.S.A. would be devastating to the entire world, and the majority of people in those nations would be killed. North Korea is not the threat to the U.S. that you think it is - even if they had a nuke with a read-to-launch ICBM, what would they do? The country would be utterly destroyed by a U.S. counterstrike if they ever tried to use it. It makes no sense.
A particular group of civilians, as soon as they are used as cover by a non-civilian, cease to be civilian.
No they don't. They are still civilians, and the law dictates that a commander must choose actions that minimise risk to the civilians, that he must be able to justify any civilian deaths as being proportionate to the military value of the target in terms of the larger war, and that, given alternative choices that achieve the larger objective, he must choose the military action that minimises civilian casualties, even to the extent that it may increase risk to his own troops. link and link
We have special rules for people who recover the wounded
Medical staff are explicitly protected and may not be targeted. Apart from that, I can find no law that protects soldiers in an active battle from being targeted because they are attempted to recover wounded comrades. However, both parties to the battle have a duty afterwards to search for the wounded and to provide medical care to the wounded, regardless of which side they fought on. link
You know- it occurs to me, this video is a lot more apparent to me on a 24" screen than it may be to the pilots on 4" or 6" screens.
Do you really think that the pilots of gunships from the world's most advanced military force use 4" screens as their viewing platform? Please. They were probably using the Lockheed Martin Arrowhead, which is equipped with high-resolution full-colour imaging, optical and digital zoom, night-vision, infra-red, auto-target tracking and auto boresight. The video feed that has been leaked is a heavily compressed grayscale signal meant for real-time transmission via low-bandwidth satellite and AWACS uplinks. It bears absolutely no relation to the kind of data the men in the helicopter have available to them.
The question is, if you see a guy with a gun in a crowd of civilians, whether it's justifiable to kill all of those people (using, for example, explosive-tipped cannon shells) just to nail that one bad guy.
The answer is, no, it isn't - the Geneva Convention explicitly prohibits that kind of response: "Article 50/3. The presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians does not deprive the population of its civilian character."
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.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that there is a presumption of guilt for civilians that makes it okay to open fire on them unless you can prove that they are civilians. This is not the case. Article 50 of the Geneva Convention makes it clear that there is a presumption of innocence:
"Article 50: Definition of Civilians and Civilian Population
1. A civilian is any person who does not belong to one of the categories of persons referred to in Article 4 A 111, lIl, (31 and 161 of the Third Convention and in Article 43 of this Protocol. In case of doubt whether a person is a civilian, that person shall be considered to be a civilian. 2. The civilian population comprises all persons who are civilians. 3. The presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians does not deprive the population of its civilian character."
It is the soldiers job to clearly identify that a target is a combatant before opening fire. If the soldier is unclear as to whether or not a target is a combatant, then that person is to be treated as a civilian: "In case of doubt whether a person is a civilian, that person shall be considered to be a civilian.". The presence of combatants within a civilian population does not excuse firing on civilians: The presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians does not deprive the population of its civilian character." The rules are very clear on this issue.
and said people are hanging around precisely where the fire was opened mere minutes ago
Do you really believe that this happened? I have never seen anyone, journalists or otherwise, walking carefree around an area where there is an active firefight taking place. Civilians usually run from gunfire - the fact that a large group of civilians are casually walking about, clearly unaware that there had been any shooting in that area, suggests that there had not in fact been any shooting in that area.
Also, I wonder if there has been a warning to civilians in the area to stay clear in the case of the taped operation. So far as I know, U.S. usually does that before sending the troops in.
That is not true. Firstly, patrols for weapons etc. would be ineffective if the local population were warned beforehand that the patrols were to take place. Secondly, providing insurgents with knowledge that troops would be patrolling in a particular area beforehand would make those troops a target for roadside bombs.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that there is a presumption of guilt for civilians that makes it okay to open fire on them unless you can prove that they are civilians. This is not the case. Article 50 of the Geneva Convention makes it clear that there is a presumption of innocence:
"Article 50: Definition of Civilians and Civilian Population
1. A civilian is any person who does not belong to one of the categories of persons referred to in Article 4 A 111, lIl, (31 and 161 of the Third Convention and in Article 43 of this Protocol. In case of doubt whether a person is a civilian, that person shall be considered to be a civilian. 2. The civilian population comprises all persons who are civilians. 3. The presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians does not deprive the population of its civilian character."
In case of doubt whether a person is a civilian, that person shall be considered to be a civilian. There is clearly room for doubt in this video. Baghdad is one of the most populous cities on the planet - ranked 22nd with a density of 9,250 per square kilometer. Within a few hundred meters of this incident there are thousands of people living. The men in the street could have been anyone - there was no attempt made to identify them as being combatants or civilians, and therefore the laws of war state that they must be treated as civilians.
If either are true, then crime as a whole should go down.
Logic fail. You would be correct if all other factors were equal. But this is not a reproducible experiment of independent replicates. This is the real world, and there are other factors at play that may be drivers of rising crimes rates even if there were no CCTV.
So, if some street gang had opened fire on the National Guard in New Orleans following Katrina, that particular block of the city would suddenly become a "war zone", and the National Guard would be justified in sending in an attack helicopter with 30mm cannon to shoot anyone walking around that particular city block carrying objects that might be (or might not be) weapons (or cameras)?
I think that at 3:42 you have a good case for two guys walking in the street behind the photographers, with weapons. This doesn't justify the decision to fire w/o a better confirmation than the video, but they look like weapons to me..
Let's hypothetically say that that was true - so what? Carrying weapons is legal in Iraq - private security forces, bodyguards, authorised militias (Sons of Iraq etc.) are all allowed to openly carry guns. So even if you saw some guys with guns, what exactly does that prove? Without further identification, you would still have no idea whether they were friend or foe.
and they had things that are either weapons or looking an awful lot like them
This is not a crime in Iraq - private security forces, bodyguards etc. are allowed to openly carry weapons. No uniforms necessary. Irregular police forces can also carry weapons. Again, no uniforms necessary.
No, they were in a populated civilian area, and major combat hostilities had ceased. It was not a warzone, unless you want to define any city with some armed citizens who are hostile to the authorities as being a warzone.
As if the Germans didn't bomb London at night? And the Japanese didn't fly planes straight into our ships?
That was the whole point of the post you replied to - that the "rules" were not followed in WWII. Both British and German forces deliberately bombed each others civilian populations.
And regardless of their best efforts it is impossible to wage a war without killing innocent people.
These soldiers are not meant to be "waging war". They are meant to be a military force stationed in a sovereign state at the request of that state's democratically elected government, for the purposes of domestic peacekeeping and "nation building". When soldiers operate as a peacekeeping force the rules of engagement are supposed to be different. The British forces in Northern Ireland did not use air strikes in civilian areas - as far as I know, no air strikes were used, period. Air strikes are not useful for domestic security, they are too blunt an instrument, with too high risk of killing innocents. And this is exactly what has happened here - and not just here, but also the thousands of times where similar killings were not investigated. This particular case was only highlighted because journalists were killed, but killings like this of the general population will surely be more common.
Even though those bombs were targeting Americans, they ended up killing a much larger number of their own people.
It is a mistake to think that the people who set the bombs are targetting their own people. Sunni nationalists do not see Shia as "their own people" any more than American white supremacists see African-Americans as "their own people". Living in the same geographical region does not make people part of the same ethno-religious group.
Slashdot Mirror
I take the point - but for antitrust issues to apply, Apple would have to have a monopoly on phones
No, European antitrust legislation applies to any "activity that aims to prevent, restrict or distort competition". It is not necessary for a company to be in a monopoly position for those conditions to be true.
Equally, it could also be argued that Apple has a monopoly on iPhone app stores, in order to show that they could exert undue control over what should be a freely competitive market.
It's not a huge leap to conclude that if Apple exploits their position as owner of the iPhone OS and app store to disadvantage their competitors who want to release iPhone apps, then those competitors are going to cry foul.
it hass passed without any hassle and is now available for everyone, so there's really nothing going on at all.
Whilst the positive press around Opera's browser does certainly generate interest in it, it would be a mistake to conclude from this that Apple is a benevolent dictator which treats apps equally when they compete with its own. Did you consider that one of the reasons the Opera browser may have being accepted is because of the attention that Opera brought to the subject? It is certainly possible that Apple's decision to allow the app would have been affected by the fact that Opera is a European company involved in a high-profile ongoing EU antitrust case regarding web browsers. Rejecting the app would probably have triggered an antitrust complaint from Opera, and that is the kind of attention that Apple could do without.
For the most part what I have seen of Wikileaks they are the Nation Enquirer of the internet. They present the data in the most inflammatory way possible and it is often incorrect, incomplete, and biased. They do not just present the data but comment on and embellish.
Look at wikileaks.org. The most recently leaked documents are reproduced in their entirety, with (usually) only one single paragraph to describe the document. The descriptions are descriptive and accurate (if you don't believe me - read them for yourself - stuff like "Quote for a US$85 million line of credit from FirstCaribbean to the government of the Turks & Caicos Islands."). How is a release of original source material along with one single descriptive paragraph "incorrect, incomplete, and biased.. commenting on and embellishing"?
they don't care anymore about being unbiased or responsible than Fox news does.
This is a ridiculous comparison. Fox News pushes opinion pieces as real news. It reproduces none - zero, nada, zilch - of its original sources. Wikileaks reproduces its sources in their entirety. They even released the original, unedited Apache video. If they did not care about being biased, then why would they released the original, unedited video? Has Fox News ever released the original source material of any contentious report? Ever? Probably not. And yet Wikileaks does this every single time as standard policy. There is a huge difference.
Now, set the founder up for more publicity, implicitly encouraging violence upon him.
Assange brings publicity on himself. He is the media friendly face of Wikileaks. He won the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award and he has been a guest speaker at various international conferences. He chose to be interviewed on Al Jazeera, which is watched by 50-100 million households. I'm not suggesting that he actively seeks publicity for himself, but he does choose to seek it on behalf of Wikileaks, in order to further the Wikileaks mission.
It's a chilling effect on anyone who might be initially inclined to provide information to Wikileaks under their cover of anonymity.
Assange chose not to be anonymous so the analogy does not apply. Read his Wikipedia biography for more information. There is no evidence that this will have any effect on anonymous leakers. The people opposed to Wikileaks have various options at this point:
TFA is dated 13th April 2009.
you'll need to back up your claim about police treating aboriginal deaths the same as animal deaths. i've lived here my whole life and never heard such a claim.
I have read many times that, under Australian law, it was legal for white men to hunt Aborigines up until the 1950s. e.g. this:
"the classic "nigger hunting" license that station (ranch) owners obtained from the local police was to permit them to eliminate Aborigines by hunting the local fauna, Aborigines were fauna by constitutional definition, kill them and feel not the retribution of law for murder. I have interviewed men who say this genocide continued into the 1950s when they had to get more subtle about the disposal of the remains, so they'd slit open a steer and slide the corpse inside. Mutual decomposition took care of the rest."
and this:
"In fact, as recently as the 1950s, a white man could apply for a hunting permit to hunt and kill Aborigines! Can you imagine? They were hunted and killed as if they were a game animal."
These are not great references - I would welcome a better reference to settle this urban myth one way or the other.
In the more civilized world, people should be prevented from making dangerous choices, for themselves, and those around them.
Sometimes they should. I don't want to be on the same roads as a drunk driver. Do you?
Can you really call someone who chooses to do any particular act a "victim"?
That's an interesting philosophical question. The strict answer is yes - the simple example: "Give me your money or I will shoot you" - followed by your choice to give the speaker your money. You had a choice - you could have chosen to take the bullet - but you are also now a "victim". The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary defines victim as: "someone or something which has been hurt, damaged or killed or has suffered, either because of the actions of someone or something else, or because of illness or chance". This would encompass many forms of gambling.
There are cases where old people are talked into handing over their savings - which they do apparently willingly - because they trust the speaker and do not comprehend that the money is being taken from them. Those people are victims. Where is the line between those people and gamblers? The answer would appear to be some question of what is "reasonable" - it is not reasonable to take a person's life savings, whether through a game of poker, or through some convincing talk. It is reasonable to partake in a game where you lose $1 in exchange for entertainment. It is reasonable to partake in a game where you lose $100 and have some realistic chance of winning a greater amount. It is not reasonable to partake in a game where you lose your life savings and stand no realistic chance of winning a greater amount. It is not reasonable to take money from someone who does not understand the consequences of their actions (that they will have no money, their children will go unfed, etc.). The people who lose in these "unreasonable" games are "victims". But if someone is not coerced, acts in a reasonable manner, with full knowledge of the wider implications of their actions, then they are not a "victim".
I expect Java to gain ground again as developers create apps for Android phones.
Java? Andriod? I wish it ran Java but it aint so. To be called Java it would seem that it must first have the ability to run valid java bytecode which it does not.
It depends on what you mean by "Java" - if you mean the language, then Android is going to increase the usage of "Java". If you mean the "Java Virtual Machine" - then Android will not directly increase the usage of "Java", since it runs Dalvik byte code. But when most people say "Java", they mean the former.
Adobe PDF Reader on Linux is vulnerable.
I never understood why people bothered with Acrobat Reader on Linux - KPDF/Okular has been smaller, faster and nicer looking for years, and it integrates better with the KDE desktop. I'd imagine the same it true of whatever Gnome uses?
we're fighting a mobile group that will go wherever lawlessness is tolerated and don't care what happens to innocents around them
Those people - insurgents, terrorists, whatever you would call them - pose absolutely no existential threat to the United States. On a global scale, they are barely worth mentioning. 75 million people were killed in World War II, and the Cold War could have gone hot and then hundreds of millions would have been killed. How many Americans have been killed by these small groups of insurgents/terrorists? A few thousand in a decade. 45,000 Americans are killed every year driving in their cars. Almost one million Americans die every year of heart disease. Stop worrying about the terrorists, and be happy that you will almost certainly never have to live through a real global war.
if one of the US's enemies uses chemical weapons against us, we have no non-conventional means to retaliate, since the US has no meaningful chemical arsenal
The U.S. military does not disavow chemical weapons out of some concern for the greater good of humanity - it rejects them because chemical weapons are, from a military perspective, pretty useless. They are difficult to disperse, you run the risk of killing your own men on the battlefield, you need to handle them with great care everywhere else, and they are ineffective against simple carbon filtration systems which modern military vehicles are fitted with. To quote Wikipedia: "With proper protective equipment and contamination control, chemical weapons are of limited strategic use, due to their modern ineffectiveness." For this reason alone, it is highly unlikely that any enemy of the U.S. would ever use chemical weapons in an attack - they would undoubtedly utilise something more effective.
I am getting sick and tired of the "war between nations is obsolete" rhetoric. It makes no fucking sense, and there is no evidence for it
There is a context to that phrase. When people in the West talk about "war between nations" they aren't talking about war between some random nations in Africa - they are talking about war between the nations of Western Europe, Russia, U.S.A. and other first world nations. To all extents and purposes, the potential for another war has been greatly decreased - the presence of nuclear weapons means that the risk involved with attacking a NATO country, or Russia, or China, is simply too great. Any war between Russia, China and the U.S.A. would be devastating to the entire world, and the majority of people in those nations would be killed. North Korea is not the threat to the U.S. that you think it is - even if they had a nuke with a read-to-launch ICBM, what would they do? The country would be utterly destroyed by a U.S. counterstrike if they ever tried to use it. It makes no sense.
Article 50.3 of which geneva convention or protocol?
link
A particular group of civilians, as soon as they are used as cover by a non-civilian, cease to be civilian.
No they don't. They are still civilians, and the law dictates that a commander must choose actions that minimise risk to the civilians, that he must be able to justify any civilian deaths as being proportionate to the military value of the target in terms of the larger war, and that, given alternative choices that achieve the larger objective, he must choose the military action that minimises civilian casualties, even to the extent that it may increase risk to his own troops. link and link
We have special rules for people who recover the wounded
Medical staff are explicitly protected and may not be targeted. Apart from that, I can find no law that protects soldiers in an active battle from being targeted because they are attempted to recover wounded comrades. However, both parties to the battle have a duty afterwards to search for the wounded and to provide medical care to the wounded, regardless of which side they fought on. link
You know- it occurs to me, this video is a lot more apparent to me on a 24" screen than it may be to the pilots on 4" or 6" screens.
Do you really think that the pilots of gunships from the world's most advanced military force use 4" screens as their viewing platform? Please. They were probably using the Lockheed Martin Arrowhead, which is equipped with high-resolution full-colour imaging, optical and digital zoom, night-vision, infra-red, auto-target tracking and auto boresight. The video feed that has been leaked is a heavily compressed grayscale signal meant for real-time transmission via low-bandwidth satellite and AWACS uplinks. It bears absolutely no relation to the kind of data the men in the helicopter have available to them.
The question is, if you see a guy with a gun in a crowd of civilians, whether it's justifiable to kill all of those people (using, for example, explosive-tipped cannon shells) just to nail that one bad guy.
The answer is, no, it isn't - the Geneva Convention explicitly prohibits that kind of response: "Article 50/3. The presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians does not deprive the population of its civilian character."
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.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that there is a presumption of guilt for civilians that makes it okay to open fire on them unless you can prove that they are civilians. This is not the case. Article 50 of the Geneva Convention makes it clear that there is a presumption of innocence:
"Article 50: Definition of Civilians and Civilian Population
1. A civilian is any person who does not belong to one of the categories of persons referred to in Article 4 A 111, lIl, (31 and 161 of the Third Convention and in Article 43 of this Protocol. In case of doubt whether a person is a civilian, that person shall be considered to be a civilian.
2. The civilian population comprises all persons who are civilians.
3. The presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians does not deprive the population of its civilian character."
It is the soldiers job to clearly identify that a target is a combatant before opening fire. If the soldier is unclear as to whether or not a target is a combatant, then that person is to be treated as a civilian: "In case of doubt whether a person is a civilian, that person shall be considered to be a civilian.". The presence of combatants within a civilian population does not excuse firing on civilians: The presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians does not deprive the population of its civilian character." The rules are very clear on this issue.
and said people are hanging around precisely where the fire was opened mere minutes ago
Do you really believe that this happened? I have never seen anyone, journalists or otherwise, walking carefree around an area where there is an active firefight taking place. Civilians usually run from gunfire - the fact that a large group of civilians are casually walking about, clearly unaware that there had been any shooting in that area, suggests that there had not in fact been any shooting in that area.
Also, I wonder if there has been a warning to civilians in the area to stay clear in the case of the taped operation. So far as I know, U.S. usually does that before sending the troops in.
That is not true. Firstly, patrols for weapons etc. would be ineffective if the local population were warned beforehand that the patrols were to take place. Secondly, providing insurgents with knowledge that troops would be patrolling in a particular area beforehand would make those troops a target for roadside bombs.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that there is a presumption of guilt for civilians that makes it okay to open fire on them unless you can prove that they are civilians. This is not the case. Article 50 of the Geneva Convention makes it clear that there is a presumption of innocence:
"Article 50: Definition of Civilians and Civilian Population
1. A civilian is any person who does not belong to one of the categories of persons referred to in Article 4 A 111, lIl, (31 and 161 of the Third Convention and in Article 43 of this Protocol. In case of doubt whether a person is a civilian, that person shall be considered to be a civilian.
2. The civilian population comprises all persons who are civilians.
3. The presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians does not deprive the population of its civilian character."
In case of doubt whether a person is a civilian, that person shall be considered to be a civilian. There is clearly room for doubt in this video. Baghdad is one of the most populous cities on the planet - ranked 22nd with a density of 9,250 per square kilometer. Within a few hundred meters of this incident there are thousands of people living. The men in the street could have been anyone - there was no attempt made to identify them as being combatants or civilians, and therefore the laws of war state that they must be treated as civilians.
If either are true, then crime as a whole should go down.
Logic fail. You would be correct if all other factors were equal. But this is not a reproducible experiment of independent replicates. This is the real world, and there are other factors at play that may be drivers of rising crimes rates even if there were no CCTV.
So, if some street gang had opened fire on the National Guard in New Orleans following Katrina, that particular block of the city would suddenly become a "war zone", and the National Guard would be justified in sending in an attack helicopter with 30mm cannon to shoot anyone walking around that particular city block carrying objects that might be (or might not be) weapons (or cameras)?
I think that at 3:42 you have a good case for two guys walking in the street behind the photographers, with weapons. This doesn't justify the decision to fire w/o a better confirmation than the video, but they look like weapons to me..
Let's hypothetically say that that was true - so what? Carrying weapons is legal in Iraq - private security forces, bodyguards, authorised militias (Sons of Iraq etc.) are all allowed to openly carry guns. So even if you saw some guys with guns, what exactly does that prove? Without further identification, you would still have no idea whether they were friend or foe.
and they had things that are either weapons or looking an awful lot like them
This is not a crime in Iraq - private security forces, bodyguards etc. are allowed to openly carry weapons. No uniforms necessary. Irregular police forces can also carry weapons. Again, no uniforms necessary.
they were in a warzone
No, they were in a populated civilian area, and major combat hostilities had ceased. It was not a warzone, unless you want to define any city with some armed citizens who are hostile to the authorities as being a warzone.
As if the Germans didn't bomb London at night? And the Japanese didn't fly planes straight into our ships?
That was the whole point of the post you replied to - that the "rules" were not followed in WWII. Both British and German forces deliberately bombed each others civilian populations.
And regardless of their best efforts it is impossible to wage a war without killing innocent people.
These soldiers are not meant to be "waging war". They are meant to be a military force stationed in a sovereign state at the request of that state's democratically elected government, for the purposes of domestic peacekeeping and "nation building". When soldiers operate as a peacekeeping force the rules of engagement are supposed to be different. The British forces in Northern Ireland did not use air strikes in civilian areas - as far as I know, no air strikes were used, period. Air strikes are not useful for domestic security, they are too blunt an instrument, with too high risk of killing innocents. And this is exactly what has happened here - and not just here, but also the thousands of times where similar killings were not investigated. This particular case was only highlighted because journalists were killed, but killings like this of the general population will surely be more common.
Even though those bombs were targeting Americans, they ended up killing a much larger number of their own people.
It is a mistake to think that the people who set the bombs are targetting their own people. Sunni nationalists do not see Shia as "their own people" any more than American white supremacists see African-Americans as "their own people". Living in the same geographical region does not make people part of the same ethno-religious group.