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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/0..._n_525569.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010...my-iraq-attack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPr...layer_embedded
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A secret video showing US air crew falsely claiming to have encountered a firefight in Baghdad and then laughing at the dead after launching an air strike that killed a dozen people, including two Iraqis working for Reuters news agency, was revealed by Wikileaks today.
Gawd Bless our troops for keepin' americuh safe!
From photography
From the Huffington Post article:
"The crew also mistook a telephoto lens for a rocket-propelled grenade."
That's why they opened fire, and assuming their mistake was an honest one, they were right to do so. A guy walking around Baghdad with an AK isn't a big deal and doesn't mean he's an insurgent, but an RPG is a different story, it clearly marks out the guy carrying it as a fighter or insurgent who is involved in violence against US or Iraqi national army targets.
Firing on the van is more questionable, although if they thought that the group of guys they initially fired on were insurgents, then it wouldn't have been unreasonable for them to assume that the van was driven by insurgents too (insurgent groups in Iraq have often used vans and other civilian vehicles to deliver ammo to fighters, pick up casualties, etc.; e.g. battle of Fallujah). Whether engaging it under that assumption was an ROE violation seems unclear at this point.
oh the us military lighting up civilians in a country no one gives a shit about becuase its so far removed from the wrold and beyond any hope of becoming anything remotely normal.
real disturbing faggot.
also it looks like it was a mistake, the big deal is that the cia tried covering it up.
that's the only part of your post that is worth repeatingQuote:
Originally Posted by Absolution
I'd say the general attitude of the soldiers is pretty fucking disturbing. They were clearly looking for an excuse to shoot people. Deserts are boring. I get that. That's no reason to go looking to kill people, mistaken RPG or no mistaken RPG.
Could you elaborate?
EDIT:
What gave you that idea? It was the Army that tried to cover it up with their report that all the dead were insurgents engaged in a firefight, the CIA is totally uninvolved here (unless you believe the Pentagon's apparent suggestion that the CIA is responsible for leaking this video, which sounds like typical interdepartmental BS to me, or the claims of the Wikileaks people that they were threatened by the CIA, which are laughable).Quote:
Originally Posted by Absolution
Ok so just from watching that video, you ABSOLUTELY cannot tell that they are carrying camera instead of weapons. One of them had something that was really long, just like an RPG, another had something in his hand that looked, to me, exactly like a small AK-47, Then one was ducking behind a corner and sticking his camera around the corner like it was a gun and he was shooting around the corner.
Wrong place, wrong time. Simple as that. Sucks they got killed, but shit happens.
I watched this yesterday. I completely understand it was a mistake but its still pretty disturbing.
This surprises you guys?
What gets me is that they were just waiting to kill someone. They just seemed to crave it. They even lied about receiving small arms and grenade fire.
I think what you mean is that the Army PR guys or whoever later dishonestly claimed that there was a firefight going on in the area. The Apache crews never claimed they had received fire, which is what it seems like you're accusing them of?Quote:
Originally Posted by MrTroy
Here's a transcript of the radio voice traffic from the video:
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/6...pe_us_military
Actually I understand that all this happened adjacent to an on-going firefight a few blocks away.
The assumption made was that these guys were either on their way to the action or supporting a flank etc, which tends to explain why when the Apache crew squinted at the camera they came back with "OMG RPG".
I absolutely don't condone what the U.S. forces did, but this is exactly the kind of inevitable accidental killings you get when you invade a country and I don't believe they are personally to blame for it. I blame those who sent them there.
Exactly. The blood of those civilians (and of many of the hundreds of thousands of other Iraqi civilians who have died since 2003) is on the hands of the Bush administration officials who decided to pointlessly and needlessly invade Iraq, thereby placing every Iraqi civilian at risk of being maimed or killed in exactly this sort of incident, which any responsible person has to realize are inevitable in wartime. It's simply GOING to happen, nothing can prevent it, which is why decision makers aren't supposed to decide on war unless it's absolutely positively necessary. Obviously there have been incidents where the actual troops are to blame for firing on civilians without any good reason, but the incident in the video doesn't seem to be one of them.Quote:
Originally Posted by MrShrike
As for the adjacent firefight, there were apparently reports of scattered small arms fire "in the vicinity" that day, but I haven't seen anything to indicate that there was an actual ongoing firefight at the time of the events shown in the video, or that it was as close as a few blocks away. Even without it, though, the Apache crews were perfectly justified to fire on what they apparently believed was a group of armed insurgents moving around the city.
I saw this on another forum, and they were saying that some of the people in the video HAD weapons. The camera people were with them.
Look at 3:48
The two guys on the top right of the crosshairs have weapons. The one on the left has an RPG, and the one on the right has an AK. I thought I saw it earlier, and I went back and looked again, and its pretty easy to see.
There are definitely guys with AKs, but I don't think the video quality we have here makes it possible to say with total certainty that there was an RPG. However, going back over the section you indicate, I do notice that at 3:44-3:45, one of the guys is carrying a long skinny object, seemingly about 3-4 feet long, with a bulge at one end, that easily could be an RPG-7. The guy in the light-colored shirt, the nearer of the two guys standing in the upper right quadrant of the reticle. You can see it for a moment as he turns, just after the guy walking to his left (thus to the right of him on the video) passes in front of him and walks under the center of the reticle.
It COULD be some other long skinny object (folded camera tripod?) but even if it's not an RPG, it's certainly easy to see how it was mistaken for one.
Yea, there is a change that is MIGHT not be an RPG, but it damn sure looks just like one to me.
EDIT: After looking at it again, he holding it by a handle, not by the body, which leads me to believe something is sticking out of it. Ive never seen a tripod with a pistol grip. But thats just me. And the shape is right.
The SA thread is superior: http://forums.somethingawful.com/sho...readid=3288737
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I remember in the infantry before going on deployment we'd spend the last couple weeks reviewing ROE's and this situation in particular we went over quite a bit. Civilians and family members will immediately go out to collect anyone dead and we reviewed case after case of US forces mistakenly killing innocent people who were just trying to show some respect for the dead. This has been widely known for years now these guys have zero excuse.
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There are clearly several unarmed men in the area. Men without camera straps or suspicious tubes, just some dudes standing around. What's the ratio of armed:unarmed that is required to kill everyone in the vicinity? You seem pretty OK with 1:3 or 1:4, but would you be willing to go so high as 1:10?
Would it be alright to kill 50 people as long as one of them was a threat? What's your upper bound, where do you stop killing before you decide that maybe YOU present a bigger threat to the security of the people below you than a couple of assault rifles?
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It does not explain why they fired onto wounded people trying to crawl away, or why they shot into a van trying to evacuate wounded or why they fired a missile at some guy who was walking down the street with no visible weapons do we really have to go over this again.
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I just can't wrap my head around the fact that skyshark is trying to legitimate summary execution of non-threatening people, even in 2007 Iraq. You're GUESTS in that country in 2007. I'll say it again, your military is so busted I'm starting to believe that something should be done to rein you in, because this is ridiculous.
In police actions and peacekeeping missions (remember, this is not a WAR, your infantile press corps is keeping up that pretense for no god damn reason) you wait for them to shoot first. You don't hammer them with death from the sky unprovoked. Especially SINCE this is 2007 Iraq, when these guys probably heard gunfire and armed themselves in case a militia came sweeping through. You do remember this was a bloody ethnic cleansing campaign by both sides in 2007, right? And this happened a few miles from Sadr City.
There was no danger. The helicopter had zero chance of being hit. If those in the helicopter were afraid that they might have been then they're terrible soldiers who kill multiple targets on a hunch and make sure they stay dead even when their capability to fight is zero.Quote:
Kill authorization was granted prior to the incident of pointing a camera around a corner, and the chopper was nearly a mile away. The men didn't even seem to notice the chopper until after the supersonic rounds hit them.
What on earth makes you think that aircraft only have an excuse to engage ground targets if they are in danger of being hit by fire from those ground targets? Are you saying that when attack aircraft spot enemy troops on the ground, they have a moral obligation to move within range of enemy counter-fire before engaging those targets, even if they could engage them from a safe distance? What, just to make it sporting? What if the enemy lacks effective anti-aircraft weapons of any kind; would you then say that enemy ground targets are totally off-limit to attack by aircraft, since it just wouldn't be fair otherwise?
"Hey Bob, I see some enemy troops up ahead at 2000 meters, we could fire on them from here but then they wouldn't be able to shoot back... what do you say we close up to 500 meters before engaging, just to make it a fair fight for 'em?"
Fucking ridiculous. The fact that the Apaches weren't in danger from the guys they fired upon is totally irrelevant to the question of whether the guys were a valid target. You are clearly totally unqualified to pass meaningful judgment on whether these guys are good or bad soldiers. Your suggestion that it's only okay to fire on enemy troops when they have a chance of hitting you back is childish, absurd, naive, and frankly flat-out stupid.
EDIT: None of the SA posts you quote provides an intelligent argument against the initial engagement. In response to the guy who talks about what ratio of armed to unarmed people in a group makes it acceptable to fire on them: Obviously one armed man with fifty unarmed man wouldn't be a valid target, but that hypothetical situation has nothing to do with the incident in question. The group that was engaged in the video was about a dozen men with "five or six" AKs and at least one RPG. It's not absurd to identity a group thus armed as a group of combatants, especially since irregular combatant units often include several unarmed men with jobs such as carrying extra ammo and so forth. So let's stay focused on what actually happened instead of flying off with silly questions like "well would it have been okay to fire if there were 50 guys and only one had a weapon?!"
I'm saying that it'd have been a super idea to actually examine the targets more (since they seemed completely oblivious to a helicopter quite far away) rather than immediately requesting to kill them because:Quote:
Originally Posted by Syme
A. Not doing so could entail the murder of multiple civilians and no actual insurgents killed.
B. The helicopter was safe from being hit.
C. It's a city in Iraq and it's an insurgency. Unless you're in the mountain regions you shouldn't assume that everyone is a insurgent just because you think they may be carrying weapons.
You're presenting a strawman.
I'm pretty sure the US Military operates (theoretically, at least) on the assumption that the murder of innocent civilians is frowned upon. Even if one were to concede that it was a totally awesome idea to open fire on a bunch of people standing around nonchalantly on a hunch that they may be packin' heat, the successive attacks on civilians in a truck picking up the wounded is not at all defensible.Quote:
The group that was engaged in the video was about a dozen men with "five or six" AKs and at least one RPG. It's not absurd to identity a group thus armed as a group of combatants, especially since irregular combatant units often include several unarmed men with jobs such as carrying extra ammo and so forth. So let's stay focused on what actually happened instead of flying off with silly questions like "well would it have been okay to fire if there were 50 guys and only one had a weapon?!"
You'd think that members of the military who criticize/condemn the soldiers in the video would know a bit more than apologists for senseless killings, but yeah.
The SA posts I quoted weren't necessarily meant to be "intelligent." I just found them amusing. You're free to glance at the rest of the thread yourself.
If this is the argument you want to advance, you should have made it in the first place, rather than simply saying that the helicopter was in no danger of being hit by ground fire. Without explaining yourself, that makes it seem like you think that their risk of being hit by ground fire is what determines whether they should have fired on those guys.Quote:
Originally Posted by Husein
Please don't be unclear, wait for someone to reply to the bad argument you have apparently made, THEN tell us what you really meant and accuse the replier of strawmanning for responding to an argument that you weren't actually making. It's only strawmanning when the other guy deliberately misrepresents your argument, not when he misunderstands you because you weren't clear.
So, that said, let's move on the argument that you are apparently actually making. What's this "think they may" be carrying weapons? They WERE carrying weapons, the Apache crews clearly saw those weapons, and the infantry unit that secured the area after the attack found some of those weapons lying on the ground. There's no "may" here.
You're right, the fact that they were carrying weapons doesn't, in and of itself, indicate that they were anti-US insurgents; in Baghdad, especially in 2007 when there was a great deal of civil strife going on, all sorts of people were carrying weapons just for self-defense in the chaotic and lawless situation. But that explains the AKs, not the two RPGs which were apparently found at the scene (at least one of which is visible in the video). An RPG is not a self-defense weapon, not an anti-personnel weapon, and not the sort of thing that ordinary people would carry around to defend themselves against kidnappers or the militia down the street. It's an anti-tank weapon which is of little use against personnel targets, but great for blowing up things like (just for example) humvees and Bradleys, and also for shooting at low-flying helicopters. If the guys had only been carrying AKs, I'd quite readily agree that the Apache crews were irresponsible to attack them on the basis of being armed. The RPGs make it a different story.
Furthermore, based on the radio traffic, it seems that when the Apaches opened fire, they were under the impression that one of the RPG gunners was about to fire his weapon at someone (presumably the Bradley and humvee element that you hear mentioned in the radio traffic between 4:28 and 4:39). Here's the transcript from that section:
US SOLDIER 1: He’s got an RPG!
US SOLDIER 2: Alright, we got a guy with an RPG.
US SOLDIER 1: I’m gonna fire. OK.
US SOLDIER 2: No, hold on. Let’s come around.
US SOLDIER 1: Behind building right now from our point of view.
US SOLDIER 2: OK, we’re going to come around.
US SOLDIER 1: Hotel two-six, I have eyes on individual with RPG, getting ready to fire. We won’t—yeah, we got a guy shooting, and now he’s behind the building. God damn it!
US SOLDIER 5: Uh, negative. He was right in front of the Brad, about there, one o’clock. Haven’t seen anything since then.
US SOLDIER 2: Just [expletive]. Once you get on, just open up.
US SOLDIER 1: I am.
US SOLDIER 4: I see your element, got about four Humvees, out along this—
US SOLDIER 2: You’re clear.
US SOLDIER 1: Alright, firing.
It seems that from the perspective of the Apache crew, they were intervening in an attack that might be seconds away from occurring. They were therefore probably feeling, to put it lightly, a sense of urgency. So to suggest that because they were safe from ground fire, they should have taken their time getting up close and investigating the situation, strikes me as disingenuous.
What hunch? Their weapons, RPGs included, had already been spotted by the Apache crew. What "standing around nonchalantly"? The radio chatter makes it clear that the Apache crew thought an RPG was about to be fired. Stop trying to be cute.Quote:
Originally Posted by Husein
Right, as I said in my first post, that's a separate issue from the initial attack.Quote:
Originally Posted by Husein
Does this mean that if I can find members of the military who defend the soldiers in the video, their arguments would overrule anything you or other (non-military) critics of the incident have to say? Or does the knowledge/experience of military personnel only lend their views authority when those views concur with your own?Quote:
Originally Posted by Husein
There are people both in and out of the military who criticize/condemn the soldiers in that video, and people both in and out of the military who will defend their conduct. So it is meaningless for either side to find servicemen who share their view and then attempt to appeal to their authority. "I found a soldier who agrees with me" doesn't get you anywhere.
At any rate, as far as I can see, most of the military personnel who criticize/condemn the soldiers in the video focus on the part where the van is fired upon. Again, that's not quite the same issue as whether they were justified in firing on a group of men which included RPG gunners, one of whom they believed was just about to fire his weapon.
http://i513.photobucket.com/albums/t..._of_tokyo2.jpg
BAWWWWW
War is a shitty thing that should never, ever happen, but it just does.
Maybe if we all post more about it on the internet it'll stop.
They found weapons around the area (which is... not surprising). There was no question of insurgents because those who were on the ground did nothing that should make a pilot alarmed to the extent that his immediate thought is to open fire.Quote:
Originally Posted by Syme
Except they weren't RPGs. The pilot immediately freaked out when there was the possibility of one of the men having an AK, and this was before the question of an RPG. So basically the pilot expected them to be "evil" before the possibility of an RPG attack ever came up.Quote:
The RPGs make it a different story.
They were horrendously incompetent. They did, in fact, operate on a hunch.Quote:
What hunch? Their weapons, RPGs included, had already been spotted by the Apache crew. What "standing around nonchalantly"? The radio chatter makes it clear that the Apache crew thought an RPG was about to be fired. Stop trying to be cute.
As a SA poster noted:
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What's awfully convenient is that all of this is coming out AFTER tons of skepticism over how the military handled all of this in the first place. Why were the FOIA requests handled so abysmally? Why, when the pilots state that they withheld fire on a vehicle earlier, were they so eager to shoot the one in the video?
I'm a veteran of the U.S. Armed Forces and even I'm skeptical of how this whole affair has played out.
It means that this isn't an issue of "patriots versus [other people]." It's an issue of soldiers disgracing their line of work by murdering civilians and breaking military norms. The issue isn't "X fucked up," the issue is more like "X fucked up and deserved to be punished and not saved by a cover up."Quote:
Does this mean that if I can find members of the military who defend the soldiers in the video, their arguments would overrule anything you or other (non-military) critics of the incident have to say? Or does the knowledge/experience of military personnel only lend their views authority when those views concur with your own?
The fact that the incident was so covered up is a pretty big indication that things weren't very good.Quote:
At any rate, as far as I can see, most of the military personnel who criticize/condemn the soldiers in the video focus on the part where the van is fired upon. Again, that's not quite the same issue as whether they were justified in firing on a group of men which included RPG gunners, one of whom they believed was just about to fire his weapon.
If we want to reach a "compromise" we could both agree with hindsight that opening fire was a bad move, no?
Nice try. There's a difference between "some insurgent with a large family got shot at during a war" and "a bunch of soldiers committed war crimes." For example, soldier shoots insurgent, that's war. Soldier shoots civilian, that's also war (if a bad move). Soldier participates in massacre of ethnic group (e.g. Bosnia), that's a war crime. Soldier opens fire on a van picking up wounded persons, that's (arguably) a war crime. Not in the same quantity of lives lost, of course, but I'm pretty sure it isn't something taken lightly by various international organizations.Quote:
Originally Posted by DAVIDSDIVAD
The fact that this was covered up is what makes it of value to people.
Are you trying to suggest that maybe the group that was fired upon didn't really have any weapons at all, and that the weapons later found at the scene of the attack weren't theirs? Because you can clearly see them carrying those weapons in the gun camera video, including at least one of the RPGs (again, at 3:44-3:45; after reviewing the video at higher resolution, there's not much question that that's an RPG-7 with a round fitted).Quote:
Originally Posted by Husein
Sounds like you are assuming that aircrews need to be "alarmed" or otherwise threatened by their targets before engaging them. In reality, a perfectly common mission for attack aircraft (especially attack helicopters) is to patrol for possible enemy activity or enemy movements, and engage any targets they find on an opportunistic basis. An apparent group of insurgent fighters, regardless of whether they were doing anything "alarmed", would be a legitimate target for an aircraft engaging in such a mission.Quote:
Originally Posted by Husein
You are just flagrantly misrepresenting the string of events surrounding the pilot's request for permission to engage. Unless you have a different video that shows what happened before the video in the OP begins, we don't know exactly what number/mix of weapons the pilot saw prior to requesting permission to engage (the video in the OP apparently begins shortly after he requested that permission). What the early part of the video in the OP does show is the pilot using his reticle to point out the armed men to the guy he's apparently requesting that permission from. And anyone who actually watches the video can see that he's not "freaking out" over the "possibility of one of the men having an AK", he's observing that several of them have AKs, and also that they have unspecified "weapons", at which point he hovers his reticle over Saaed and Namir who are carrying their cameras on shoulder straps (suggesting that the pilot thought they were RPGs, not AKs, although he simply says "weapons").Quote:
Originally Posted by Husein
I guess "hunch" is a word that can be defined however you want. What they operated on was the fact that they saw a group of men armed with "five to six" AKs (pilot's estimate, see 3:47 in the OP video) and at least one RPG, possibly more, which frankly is pretty good grounds for assuming that they are insurgent fighters.Quote:
Originally Posted by Husein
What do you think would have happened differently if the Apache had gotten closer and checked out the situation more thoroughly? Since at least one member of the group DID have an RPG, I don't think it's too likely that the Apache crew would have changed their mind about whether the group was made up of insurgents. They would have gotten closer and seen the weapons, RPG(s) included, even more clearly.
I'm not going to look through 46 pages of posts to find out what exactly he thought was awfully convenient, but sounds like he is talking about different elements of the incident than I am. I've been defending the Apache crew's decision to engage the initial group of men armed with AKs and RPGs, not their decision to fire on the van, or the way the Army later handled the whole incident.Quote:
Originally Posted by Husein
What are you talking about here? I never said anything about it being an issue of "patriots versus other people". I know it's not. What I said is that it's ridiculous for you to find a US military service member who happens to agree with your side of the argument, and then say "well I'd rather trust a soldier than some apologist for murder", as if the service member's opinion automatically trumps any counterargument simply because he was in the military. It's ridiculous because there are also certainly US military personnel who take the other side in this debate, and since obviously both sides aren't right, the mere fact that a person has military experience doesn't mean their view of the incident is automatically more valid than someone elses.Quote:
Originally Posted by Husein
Again: If I find and quote military personnel who defend the events in the video, would you accept that their arguments overrule yours because they were in the service and you weren't? Would you accept it if I quoted such personnel and then said: "You'd think that members of the military who defend the soldiers in the video would know a bit more than armchair war-crimes lawyers, but yeah"? I don't think so. So kindly don't try to pull the same crap.
Right, once again, I'm not trying to argue that the entire incident is fine and dandy; what I've been arguing is that the Apache crew's initial decision to fire on the group of armed men was not unjustifiable. The later firing on of the van is a different story. That's a distinction I've made since my first post in this thread. And I think that the engagement of the van is what really pushed this incident as a whole over the line from "unfortunate wartime incident" to outrage-inducing scandal which the Army felt the need to cover up. If the Apache had only shot up a group of AK- and RPG-armed men which happened to include a couple photographers, there wouldn't have been nearly as much of an outcry (even if those men really weren't insurgents).Quote:
Originally Posted by Husein
Depends what you mean by "bad move". I still don't think the Apache crew was beyond justification in requesting permission to engage a group of men which included RPG gunners carrying loaded anti-tank weapons, strongly suggesting that they were more than just civilians armed for self-defense. But yes, in hindsight, obviously it would have been better if they hadn't done so.Quote:
Originally Posted by Husein
EDIT: Looking over the most recent few pages of the SA thread, it really blows my mind how many posters there are insisting that there was absolutely no grounds for thinking that the group of men fired upon were insurgents, even though you can clearly see that at least one of them is walking around with an anti-tank weapon which is useful primarily for blowing up US military vehicles. Not a camera that was mistaken for an RPG, but an actual RPG. Again, 3:44-3:45 in the OP video, upper right-hand quadrant of the reticle, guy in the white shirt, you can see it as he turns. Yes, we all know AK-47s are a household item in Iraq and having one doesn't necessarily make you an insurgent. But they were armed with more than just AKs. It's not that hard to wrap your head around.