Thread: Downright disturbing US military behavior

Originally Posted by Syme

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.

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.

The RPGs make it a different story.

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.

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.

They were horrendously incompetent. They did, in fact, operate on a hunch.

As a SA poster noted:

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.

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?

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."

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.

The fact that the incident was so covered up is a pretty big indication that things weren't very good.

If we want to reach a "compromise" we could both agree with hindsight that opening fire was a bad move, no?

Originally Posted by DAVIDSDIVAD

BAWWWWW

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.

The fact that this was covered up is what makes it of value to people.