Thread: Downright disturbing US military behavior

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.

Originally Posted by MrShrike

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.

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.