A couple of weeks ago, General McChrystal spoke some plain truth, and for some reason, the 101st Chairborne did not freak out and call him a traitor, a troop hater, or a commie Frenchmen:
“That doesn’t mean I’m criticizing the people who are executing. I’m just giving you perspective. We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.”
That is worth keeping in mind while we keep offering up sanitized rhetoric like the following:
A senior American military official said that officials at Central Command saw the video for the first time on Monday, the day it was made public by WikiLeaks in a 38-minute version and a 17-minute edited version.
The official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record about the matter, said that the 38-minute version “makes clear that the forces involved clearly believed they were engaging armed insurgents, and were not aware that there were unarmed civilians, let alone journalists, in that group of people.”
Oops! We fucked up! We were acting with good intent! That may console those who pulled the trigger, and that may appease the command structure, and it may make sure no one is ever charged with a crime or prosecuted, but it doesn’t matter a hill of beans to the people who actually, you know, live over there:
But among many Iraqis, many of whom consider Americans to be occupiers who have often used excessive force, any explanation paled against deep anger.
“At last the truth has been revealed, and I’m satisfied God revealed the truth,” Noor Eldeen, the photographer’s father, said in Mosul. “If such an incident took place in America, even if an animal were killed like this, what would they do?”
Both families said they watched the video on Monday evening on Al Jazeera, the Arabic-language news network.
“My question is, those highly skilled American pilots with all their high-tech information, could not distinguish between a camera and a missile?” said Nabel Noor-Eldeen, the photographer’s brother who is an archaeology professor at Mosul University.
Excuses don’t matter to people when they see their neighbor and his daughters ripped apart by a chain gun for the crime of trying to help a person bleeding in the street. Excuses don’t console people when they see their son and their father pulverized for the crime of standing next to people who might be considered a threat. Excuses fall on deaf ears for people who watch their kid get shredded by attack helicopters for the crime of milling in the street near people carrying a gun… in a war zone. If the Rules of Engagement state that anyone simply NEAR someone carrying an AK-47 is a legitimate target, then we might as well just start carpet-bombing the entire country until no one is left alive. Especially when you keep this in mind:
Nearly 200,000 U.S.-supplied rifles and pistols meant for Iraqi security forces are unaccounted for in Iraq, according to a report to Congress.
Loose record-keeping caused the Pentagon and the U.S. command in Iraq to lose track of about 110,000 AK-47 rifles and 80,000 pistols provided to the new Iraqi national police and army, the Government Accountability Office told Congress.
Even if you can excuse away the shooting in your own mind (and I simply do not know how you can excuse them lighting up the wounded man and the van- there just is no way to explain that away, particularly with the pilots begging for the wounded cameraman, crawling for his life, to pick up a gun), it does not matter to the people who have to live over there. And ask yourself what Noor-Eldeen asked- if this happened in America, how would we react?
We’re issuing death threats to congressmen and half the nation has been whipped into a frothing mob and wants to secede because… we expanded health insurance coverage after a legitimate legislative process that was the result of open, free, and fair elections. Can you imagine what would happen if foreign helicopters were gunning down our neighbors in the streets?
*** Update ***
This is impressive. The Pentagon “lost” their copy of this video.
williamc
I can imagine: there’d be a multi-ethnic, all-ages national outpouring of rage and vitriolic anger at the government, screaming at the top of their lungs to “End the War”, “Restore the Constitution”, and how “We Want our Country Back”. This just shows us all again how misdirected and ugly American anger often is. I’m sure there are going to be some comments here defending what happened in this situation and others like it, still not understanding what it is you are talking about or screaming about how both sides do it, forgetting that the only two sides in a war are the living and the dead.
The Moar You Know
I have a hard time with the first part of the shooting, but could maybe be talked into believing that they really thought the cameras were guns. Maybe.
But the second part, where they shoot the van…well, they deliberately lie to get clearance to fire and then shoot a bunch of obviously unarmed people who are carrying nothing and a vehicle that is trying to save a wounded man’s life. That, in addition to being real “doom your soul to hell” actions, is a war crime. As laid out by the Geneva Conventions, pure and simple.
BR
This right here is why empathy is key to a liberal perspective of the world.
We wouldn’t want people in our government who had empathy, now would we? Especially not on the supreme court.
Osprey
That’s what will happen once the FEMA camps are full and there’s no place to put the extra Republicans. /Bachmann
AB
The discussion around this video makes me so mad. Every time I hear someone excuse what happened by saying “it’s a split-second judgement call” or “it’s an understandable mistake” or some bullshit like that I want to yell at people. I don’t care how “understandable” you think it is, innocent people died because of “just a mistake”. People who excuse away what happened here and what happens every time an airstrike kills another civilian should go fuck themselves. Imagine if those people who died were your mother, father, brother, sister, girlfriend, husband, etc. For what? wanting to pick up a body?
The worst that’s going to happen, the worst that always happens is a little pep talk about how we should be more careful or minor meaningless edits in the ROE. Doesn’t give people their lives back and shows no compassion for those who were killed for no reason. This isn’t breaking your mom’s favorite teacup, it’s taking away human lives on a whim.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
What’s all this logic and stuff?
20-25% of this country has always been this way.
More importantly, Lisa Druck (aka Rielle Hunter) is gonna be on Oprah. Now *that’s* a story that qualifies as a shiney object to the Corporate Media Drones.
Violet
The teabaggers would cower, like the pussies they are. And then they’d cry for the government they claim to hate to step in and do more to protect them.
slackjawedgawker
The teabaggers and neocons will have long since passed on by the time China comes looking for the Iraq War debt we owe it. So it would be silly to worry about something like that.
Svensker
I asked that question of a rah-rah-war-fuck-yeah-murika guy a few years into the Iraq war and he was completely puzzled. He did not understand the question as having any equivalency with what we are doing in Iraq/rest of the world. “But we are bringing democracy to them,” he said.
whiskey
slackjawedgawker
All our neighbors? Or just the Jews, the Muslims, the atheists and the rest of the heretics? Because I imagine it all the time!
/Real American, Pat Robertson-watching, “Values” voter
wilfred
No?
If we can mistake an Airbus for a fighter plane, anything’s possible. You just have to believe.
cleek
if it happened while a Democrat was president, there’d be a run on flowers and chocolates as millions of “conservatives” rushed to buy gifts to greet the liberators who freed them from the Dastardly Democrat Dictator.
if it happened while a Republican was president… nah, could never happen. Republicans are too good at keeping America safe from attack.
geg6
We’ve already seen what happens when people from another country who we encouraged to become warlike come over here and do stuff like that. Which is how we ended up with troops in Iraq who do shit like this.
Gene
We’d nuke who ever sent helicopters to attack our people in the streets.
It’s not our fault, we’re better armed than the rest of the world…
Maybe if the rest of the world didn’t want our troops over there, they’d grow a pair and expand their own militaries….thought there may be some down sides to a global arms race, we’d like to avoid…
R. Porrofatto
Hear fucking hear. Bravo. It’s a good thing you’re on our side. These few civilians in this video are only a tip of a very large iceberg that we will never see. For Americans, such “”collateral” victims aren’t actual people; we don’t read their personal stories in special sections of the NY Times, no one reads their names aloud on the anniversary of their deaths, and we don’t want to know that “they don’t value life as we do” is just something we say to dismiss entire lives as nothing. This was all pre-ordained the minute our benighted leaders exacted vengeance on the easiest “target-rich environment” they could hit, while our real enemy still produces videos. The anguish inflicted in our name we can never redress, but our nation will forever be accountable for it.
The Moar You Know
@Gene: Yeah, I lived through most of the last era of mutually-assured nuclear annihilation, I’d prefer to not have to do that again.
The Iranians seem to have figured this out, eh? They surely have noted that we are not shooting civilians in the streets with remote cannon fire in Russia.
I grew up expecting to die in a nuclear holocaust. Maybe my dreams will come true after all.
scarshapedstar
That’s only because the Iraqis spend so much time reading Time Magazine and watching Michael Moore movies!!11
Linda Featheringill
Metaphysical question:
How many times must one be reincarnated in order to have a chance to live in a world that is not totally psychopathic?
That many? Damn. Maybe it isn’t worth it.
rickstersherpa
Another point that Fallows (and Paul Fussell if you read him) has is that once you go to war, things like this are going to happen, especially in modern war.
“The decision to gun down Iraqi civilians in real-time pressure and ambiguous circumstances (“Is that a gun?” “Are they hauling a wounded terrorist away? Can we get clearance to ‘engage’ right now????”) is one millimeter away from the alert and aggressive warrior spirit for which troops are honored and trained. Ideally, every warrior would always know the exact line that separates just enough violence from too much. They can’t know that in real time, which is why no war, even the most necessary and justified, has ever been “clean.”
Fussell and E.B. Sledge routinely describe scenes that they witnessed in the “Good War” where unarmed Germans and Japanese, apparently trying to surrender, were routinely slaughtered. And if you want use some empathy, imagine being in combat, and people trying to kill you day in day out, and succeeding in killing and maiming your friends. And launching RPGs at your helicopter (I knew people killed this way). It makes one thinking pretty tribal, us vs. them, kind of thing. Once you embark on this kind of war, then these ambiguous, borderline, massacres are going to be part of it. So we should not “blythly” go off to war.
One of the problems we have had with our little foreign adventures since 1945 is that innocents will die. We forget this as we go plodding into someone else’s country and then get surprised at how unhappy the unworthy locals are about our presence. And one of the problems Liberals have is that we start out critizing the policy, but then end up critizing the troops that the Wolfowitz’s and Cheneys of the world have put into the situation of having to achieve the impossible, kill the bad guys and protect the good and innocent, when everyone is dressed the same and looks the same.
yes, if you are scared and angry enough, you can believe an Airbus is an F-14.
slackjawedgawker
Um, wasn’t the video part of the evidence reviewed during its internal investigation of the matter? Either:
a) the Pentagon did not lose its copy
b) the Pentagon made sure it was destroyed
c) it neglected to conduct a thorough internal investigation (and then lied and said that it did); or
d) any/all of the above
WTF?
scarshapedstar
If this video were a Democratic politician, it would have just died in a Small Plane Crash.
scarshapedstar
If this video were a Democratic politician, it would have just died in a Small Plane that crashed because it was shot by a Lone Gunman.
Keith G
Easy question to answer. Amazingly (fucking) stupid animal control agent in Texas* get charged.
http://www.khou.com/news/local/ANIMAL-CONTROL-OFFICER-CHARGED-WITH-ANIMAL-CRUELTY-90035437.html
*No, this is not the norm for Texas.
wilfred
And that women become witches who co-habit with the devil, and that that black guy had a gun in his hand, etc.
It’s also true that the strong kill the weak for sport. Only the dead deserve the benefit of the doubt – the living should answer a few questions.
wilfred
BTW, John, thanks for this. The Muslims call it nafs-i-lawwama, it’s a good place to be.
flukebucket
Well, when you consider the number of animals and innocent people killed in the war on drugs probably not as much as the Noor Eldeen thinks.
Keith G
@rickstersherpa:
WTF? If that’s that way a soldier rolls, I sure as hell do not want him/her carrying a gun in my name. And I would think his fellow soldiers would feel the same.
Svejk
Ask, ‘How did Sarah Palin get that attack helicopter?’
scarshapedstar
@wilfred:
Speaking of getting the living to answer questions:
Where are the WMDs? On a related note, why the fuck are we still in Iraq?
El Cid
On this:
Well, imagine it was white Louisiana officers firing on fleeing black New Orleans Katrina refugees whom FoxNooz was saying were murderous looters, or imagine they were threatening looking black men in the midst of the L. A. riots.
Is it really so hard to come up with an analog?
Would it be justified as being “Giuliani time”?
jenniebee
In one of those You can succeed in the business world, dumbass books that I read years ago, there were a few pieces that rang true and stuck with me, and one of them was: the only person who cares about why you fucked up is you. To the people who were depending on you, you just fucked up.
This is exactly what makes neo-colonialism (or straight up colonialism) so difficult. It makes it necessary to create an immediate life-or-death level of control over a population, and even if you make the correct call 99.99% of the time, if there is, on average, an individual soldier making one of those calls once per minute, you will average 45 lethal fuck-ups a month. And you can’t be the good guys everybody is getting behind if you commit 45 lethal fuck-ups a month. And the people who want you out have a pretty good idea of this, so all they have to do is provoke some soldier, somewhere, once a minute on average (ooh, got a whole platoon cranky – we can take the afternoon off!) and they can keep unrest the status-quo.
BTW, Michael Collins (Liam Neeson in the title role) is on on-demand on I think Starz right now, at least in my market. If you’d like a movie look at someone running one of these insurgencies, it’s not a bad one. He starts with air rifles and empty revolvers in the hands of about a dozen men, at the height of his insurrection his “army” is still so small that the capture of 70 of them nearly finishes the whole movement off. But it was enough to get the Irish Free State.
Zifnab
Who the fuck do they think they are fooling? IT’S ON THE INTERNET PEOPLE! Cat is officially out of the bag.
I know 12-year-olds who could do a better job of spinning than that. Other than look even more feckless and incompetent, what the hell does the Pentagon think they are going to achieve with this stunt.
SiubhanDuinne
This whole thing *is* all Obama’s fault, right? (And he personally stashed the missing video in his secret safety-deposit box along with his Kenyan birth certificate, and the brass knuckles Michelle brings out for those special terrorist fist jab occasions she enjoys so much.)
brendancalling
what the fuck, Cole? Don’t you know that our guys are the good guys, even if some “liberals” hate that.
someguy
If I read that correctly, Betrayus is stating that we really didn’t need to kill anybody at all in Afghanistan because none of the people we encounter is proving to be any sort of significant threat to the force.
Gotta wonder what other optional killing the military is getting up to around the globe.
Oh, why I am I worried. I’m sure it’s just inconsequential brown peepul.
Cris
@rickstersherpa: Reminds me of something Howard Zinn used to say about collateral damage. Paraphrasing: If you drive a car at 60 miles per hour down a crowded sidewalk, of course you will kill people. And it’s not an excuse to say ‘I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone.’
Cris
We’d say “Our guys would never run over a dog.”
Comrade Kevin
@brendancalling: Thank you Oliver Willis.
georgia pig
I’m sure bloodlust has a lot to do with it, but a possible explanation for it goes to our entire attitude about wars like these. The prevailing metaphor is that actions like Iraq are all about “eliminating the bad people” and not about achieving rational military and political goals. This has plagued us since Viet Nam and apparently has not gone away. Under this way of thinking, it’s bad to let a wounded guy get away because he’s a “bad guy” who, at some unspecified future time, could go and kill some US GI. This is a weird mutation of military philosophy. The main purpose of a military operation is to gain tactical and stretegic advantage over your adversary, not simply to kill as many guys as you can so they can’t ever possibly come back and kill you. Hell, we ended up making deals with a bunch of these insurgents when it became strategically valuable to do so.
Even if that guy lying wounded on the street was the worst of the worst, he was clearly incapacitated and posed no tactical threat then or in the near future. Concentrating on him was not only criminal, it reflects shitty training and discipline. If these guys were so worried that they might be hit by RPG or AK fire at any moment, why the hell were they hovering around in a multimillion dollar asset waiting to waste valuable ammo on an incapacitated guy who might do something completely futile? Did they have nothing else to do?
El Cid
Hey, we don’t mean to be hiring death squads and terrorists to kill hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Central American civilians, but how dare you suggest our American politicians aren’t trying to bring them freedom and democracy, even if sometimes our best efforts go astray?
Steve Finlay
What would they do in America if an animal was killed like this? You can ask Cheye Calvo about that. Lots of excuses and justifications for the dog killers, and lots of blame for the dogs and the dog owner, who did NOTHING. It’s amazingly similar.
Margarita
One of the most striking things about this incident is its exact parallel with the mandatory, no exceptions, war-movie set piece in which the bad guys snipe at the heroes who are gallantly trying to aid or retrieve their fallen comrade. Only magnified by ten, because these are civilians — including children — retrieving a wounded non-combatant.
sacman701
Part of the problem is that the individual soldier’s interest in eliminating anything that could conceivably pose a direct threat to him is sometimes at odds with the national interest in minimizing civilian casualties.
Mumphrey
My phuqing computer died and ate what I spent some time writing, so now I’ll try to put it all down again. Phuqing computer.
I know the teabaggers would shoot me through the head for even thinking this, but I wonder if it’s time to think about getting rid of our standing military. This whole thing, shooting all those people in the street, doesn’t shock me. It angers me, but it’s no big surprise. We spend billions to teach young, impressionable men and women to kill other people, and we’re good at it. They do indeed learn to kill people. I guess that when your life’s work is mowing people down from 300 yards away, it helps to make jokes about what you’re doing. I’m sure I couldn’t get through the day if I didn’t make some bad jokes, too.
So even though I find the way they behaved appalling, I guess it’s hard to really blame the guys in the helicopter for it. Yeah, sure, they could have been more respectful, and they could have been less eager, and they damned well shouldn’t have shot up that van, I don’t care what the “reasons” were. But it’s really all of us who are responsible. It was our government that sent them there, and it was American society that chose after World War II to have a standing army in the millions, even after we’d gone most of our history without one.
I understand that not having a standing army would leave us without an edge if we were attacked, as it would take time to recruit a new military and get the new soldiers and sailors up to speed, and I guess we’d still need to have officers, even in peacetime, to keep some things running smoothly, but do we really need however many millions we now have in the military? It seems like it’s just too big a temptation to start a war every time there’s a problem in the world. It almost seems wasteful not to use our great army, right? I mean, why do we have it if we can’t use it to go kick a little ass, right?
Maybe I’m far off the mark here, and I don’t know much at all about American military history, so I’m sure some of you could enlighten me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this something we should be talking about as a country?
I dont guess it’s likely it’ll ever come to anything; any politician who even began talking about this would become a nice, big teabagger target, and might well end up assassinated. But, still, I just don’t think that it’s healthy to be so dependent on our military.
wilfred
The best treatment of this entire process is Sartre’s “Racism and Colonialism as Praxis and Process”. Subsitute Iraq for Algeria and us for France.
Just so. The colonialist here is the soldier himself, who protects fellow colonialist like contractors and business men:
Algeria=Iraq=Palestine=Afghanistan.
Souvik
How the heck do you manage to watch a 38 minute unedited version of something and then lose it at the same time? Are they still using VHS tapes?
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
What, here in America? Where Comcast gives us 300 channels and all our disposable income is spent on text messaging devices? Where everybody under the age of 40 thinks that “preparing a meal” means reheating a Big Mac in the microwave? There would be an unconditional mass surrender and a Vichy government immediately formed.
Gus
Hey, Oliver Willis says our guys are the good guys and that some liberals can’t accept that. His argument really was that fatuous.
Cassidy
I get that this is a tragedy, but ‘d have figured journalist would’ve learned to not point cameras at US vehicles after the invasion. Sad, but common sense should apply and stupid hurts.
Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt
Many of you will discount what I’m about to say. Some of you will believe that I am an apologist for war crimes. Some of you, no doubt, will reply with such. So be it. I know what I am.
Having been in situations where telling the sheep from the goats wasn’t all that easy, and having to act in those situations, I can tell you that unless you have the full context, you are doing yourself a disservice by judging on the wikileaks edited video.
I don’t know what happened before or after. Neither do any of you. I know that the video looks pretty horrible, but there’s nothing I’ve seen there except lighting up the van that’s even borderline. The things they say on the video–not remotely surprising to me. That’s not to say that you can’t look on it and experience revulsion. It’s pretty fucking revolting, but as the man said this was something that anyone with an imagination, or the ability to read a history book should’ve seen coming. This was one of several reasons I was against the Iraq war from the beginning.
I’m saying this not to excuse their behavior, but remind you all that even the inexcusable has context that renders it understandable. The same failure of imagination by war supporters that this was possible, is exhibited by others that this is not understandable.
It’s damned hard to lead young men (and women) in combat and achieve your objectives, protect your soldiers, and maintain your honor. I know that I never did anything was illegal or dishonorable or cruel. I never hid anything from my command so I can safely assume that they agree. Nonetheless, I also wonder that accountability and punishment await me at some point.
cyntax
I’ll second this, and maybe that’s just because I’m a vet so you could say I’m biased. But once we went to war with Iraq this was what was going to happen. It was inevitable. As Greenwald pointed out, this isn’t “primarily” about the soldiers–it’s about the system that put them there and keeps them there. We just really need to get the hell out of there as soon as possible cause that’s the only thing that’s going to stop this.
sukabi
lost it in the shredder.
Gus
soonergrunt, I tend to agree. After my initial shock wore off I gave the context more thought. Having never walked a mile in the shoes of the dudes in the helicopter, I’m gonna leave this one alone.
Tsulagi
Oops. But to be fair, several Pentagon spokesmen have said they believe the video released by Wikileaks to be authentic. They’re not questioning it.
There’s a pretty good and fair Defense Tech article about this engagement by the Apache crew with links to the CENTCOM investigation. Gives some perspective on what had been going on that day along with part of an interview by an LTC with the crew pilot. Think the Defense Tech’s writer assessment that “there was apparently an extremely permissive ROE in effect during the operation” is fairly accurate given the next action by that Apache crew after what’s in the Wikileak vid.
The Defense Tech writer ended his article with…
Very true. War will never be conducted with 100% error free surgical precision. Even surgeons have bad days and make mistakes. Those are some of the costs to factor in a decision to bring war. Iraq should never have happened. But I agree with the president that action in Afghanistan is necessary.
Margarita
OK, but your comment doesn’t really disagree with most of what anyone here has said.
Tsulagi
@Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt:
I’d go with that.
Blue Raven
@Gus:
It’s the explanation vs excuse space to me. Is the explanation a valid excuse? As someone who has a concept of what it is to be constantly under high stress, not knowing when the next attack was coming, and having to try to function through all of that, I just can’t say, either. (No, not a vet, the class scapegoat for eight years of school hell and abused sexually and emotionally at home for most of the same period and a few years before that. Thus I say I have a concept of what it’s like. Not an identical understanding.)
Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt
@Tsulagi:
The very concept of the ‘surgical strike’ is a joke. What exactly is surgical about a 1000-lb bomb? Sure, it’s precise, but that’s only useful when it’s targetted properly.
As this video shows, the the weapons are very precise. They hit exactly what they’re aimed at. It is, and always will be, the humans who will aim it wrong, or aim at the wrong target for a variety of reasons.
@Margarita: Where I differ is in the request for perspective. There’s not a lot of that going around right now.
geg6
@Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt:
I’ve had a lot of trouble weighing in on this because of exactly what you say.
However, someone (I think, Sully, but not sure) said what I believe is important about these things and the underlying point of what Cole says above.
The American public, once again, has been completely sheltered from this war and how it is fought and what the real consequences of it are for real people. I think every single mission should be taped, automatically. And I think every single American should be forced to sit and watch every one of those tapes. It would make us all face up to what we do in this world, why people all over the world HATE us. It would also give us more perspective on what our soldiers face and why we need to take great care of them when we’ve put them into these sorts of morally repugnant situations.
I honestly have little outrage for the people on the front lines, though I can see some situations where I might. Those who put them there, however, have nothing but my contempt.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Tsulagi:
Perhaps they should put this guy in charge of film liaison at the Pentagon so the next time Michael Bay comes looking for a half billion dollars worth of cool toys to play with, they can get that conversation started. If the American people are ignorant as a sun-baked rock of what war is actually like, I don’t think the DOD’s hands are entirely clean when it comes to that problem.
MattR
@geg6: I have used this quote from Captain Kirk a couple times recently. For those non-Trekkies (really, you exist?) the background is that the Enterprise has arrived at a planet where the solution to mutual assured destruction was to have a computer simulate the battles and the “casualties” would step into a machine and be disintegrated.
Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: GEN Wayne Downing, the source of that quote, is deceased.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt:
I’m sorry to hear that. Thanks for the correction, and thanks for what you said in #52. I don’t think you are as far outside the norm of opinion here as you may think.
Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt
@Tsulagi: I’m fairly sure that I won’t bother with the comments over there. If the reporter was even handed, the commenters are ravaging him.
Paul in KY
@Gus: I’m going to have to disagree with you about the pilot of the helicopter. That person is an officer, the ground control was an officer. This is what an officer does: Control the troops.
An officer should know how hopped up his men are, using terrible weapons & it is his/her duty to ensure that no (not just a liitle, but NO) indiscriminate killing occurs under their command.
That’s why the helicopter commander ashould be courtmartialed (IMO). the gunner was acting under the orders of the helicopter pilot & can sorta be excused. I would still remove him from his MOS & send him to bulk fuels.
tc125231
@cleek: Wrong Cleek. The “foriegn” helicopters would have been sent out by the gub’mint to take care of Nonconformist scum.
More winks and chocolate.
Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt
@Paul in KY: The co-pilot/ gunner would be an officer as well. Apaches are crewed by only Warrant Officers and Commissioned Officers.
Don
The discussion over on MetaFilter has been interesting and contains some really excellent stuff from Smedleyman, including this bit which I think is really spot-on about the early conflict in the video.
Aside from that I’ll just say more briefly what I said there: what is, to me, so horrible in this video is not the initial shooting – which I think can be, sadly, reasonably explained as a confluence of misunderstandings in the moment – or even the apparently unjustifiable shooting of the van. Nor is it even necessarily the apparent coverup by the military powers-that-be.
The thing I take from this video is the inevitability of these incidents when you consistently use forces capable of dealing bloody death from over a mile away. It’s simply not possible, in my not-so-humble-opinion, for humans to not be desensitized by having this remote control ability. But we’re never going to back down off our love for it because it keeps the almighty daily death count down.
I’m not in favor of being glib with the lives of our troops, but I’m seriously coming to believe that we’re being reckless in the long term by being careful in the short term. Where we dehumanize people by seeing them as mile-away targets on a screen we also communicate to civilians that we’re random distant killers by dealing these deaths from above.
Paul in KY
@Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt:
Does that change my basic point?
Rick Taylor
Things like this were inevitable when we decided to go to war. If you send troops into an ill conceived war where they can’t tell the enemy from the general population, this is what happens.
Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt
@Paul in KY: Only in as much as both crew members in this case are equally culpable. Both crewmen can fly the aircraft and operate all weapon systems, so in the Apache, both personnel are equally responsible under military regulation and law.
brendancalling
@Comrade Kevin:
shoulda added a /snark to that one, but i figured everyone had already seen the link.
Paul in KY
@Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt: I now see how it changes it a little. I would then courtmartial both.
I was hoping you would comment on my view. I thought it clashed a bit with some comments you made & i was interested to hear your opinion of my opinion.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt:
I tried to bring some the perspective thingy in the first thread about this incident and got hammered for it. I think maybe GG in his excellent post softened up the hard cases some, to where it is ok to condemn what happened and broaden the conversation to where these men were highly unwisely put in this situation in the first place.
These video’s need to be exposed for the well scrubbed citizenry of this country to be aware of what their tax dollars are going for, before the next Iraq is proposed by a bad leader.
The all prof Army (no draft), the press, the politicians and mostly we citizens are to blame for Iraq happening, from blissful ignorance of the world around us, and precisely what happens when we give our permission to send the killing machine of the US military tear assing around the world delivering diplomacy with 1000 pound bombs. And canon fire
And also what will happen to the most moral of men when dropped daily into a meat grinder like Iraq.
BobS
@Gus: You have to remember Oliver Willis was the guy in the theater cheering the Imperial Stormtroopers in Star Wars.
jncc
After you posted that link to the MSNBC interview with the retired Col. who said, categorically, that the chopper pilot’s actions were a violation of the ROE, I did some more digging.
I don’t know squat about military procedures, but from what I’ve been able to find on the web, the ROE aren’t that clear. In fact, I was unable to find the specific ROE that were in effect at that time in that theatre of operations. There are a few wikileaks containing what it called the ROE, but they were very general, command wide guidelines. It seems that in the context of 2007 in an area where there had been recent battles, that the on the ground definition of “hostile” may have included any armed person.
Like I said the other day if the pilots clearly violated the ROE, they should be prosecuted. If not, the discipline should be directed higher up the command.
Here’s why I think the chopper gunners probably didn’t violate the ROE for the first shooting and may not have for the second: it seems pretty clear that they received permission to open fire as soon as they identified people carrying weapons. This was before the alleged second RPG sighting, thinking they were under fire, etc.
Re the second shootings: In your post above you seem disturbed by the fact that the gunship crew was begging for the wounded guy to pick up a weapon. I’d say that is exactly the type of people you want in a gunship: People who are very, very eager to destroy every legitimate target. But the statements begging the guy to pick up a weapon seem to imply that the crew was operating within the ROE and that they did not fire on the wounded guy exactly because he did NOT have a weapon. When the van arrived the crew said that they were opening fire because the van was retrieving wounded and weapons. I would find it troubling if the ROE allowed action just because the wounded was being retrieved. I think what their statement means was that it would have been legitimate under the ROE to engage the van if it had been retrieving weapons. I didn’t see any weapons being retrieved. That may mean that there were no weapons, or it may mean the tape was edited (I understand that it is 17 minutes of a 30 plus minute tape) or perhaps they saw this happening somehow that was not being taped. (There are often multiple eyes on one engagement from other choppers or from predators) I don’t know.
If what the retired Col. said a couple of days ago is correct that the ROE were violated, then this is an easy call and the soldiers should be subjected to appropriate discipline. But I think the Col.’s explanation of the ROE may not be conclusive. And I’ve seen footage of literally dozens of incidents where guys just walking around “relaxed” on the ground with weapons casually slung over their shoulders were blasted by gunships.
So if that was a clear violation of the ROE then there should be lots of courts martial going on and I doubt that guys in gunships would be clipping this footage and sending it back home to their buddies. (Which is how I saw the footage of the other incidents.) Just search Apache and Insurgent on the web or youtube and you’ll see lots of footage like this.
beatty
I find it irritating that all of these US journalists embedded with the troops somehow don’t show all this footage that’s now coming out thanks to places like Wiki leaks. Total collusion. Media fail big time. This is what will end the war just like tv did for Viet Nam. History teaches us nothing.
Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt
@Paul in KY:
Precisely. Unless one of the two crew takes affirmative action to stop or prevent the criminal act, he’s as responsible as the actor.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Yea, I’m cool with that. So long as all videos of Apache actions in Iraq are investigated for exceeding the ROE. I don’t want to crucify one crew because somebody leaked a classified video. Bring em all out and we can study them and hang the guilty, one by one. It’s only fair, don’t you think?
Or, better yet. hang the civilian motherfuckers that sent them there by lies. This would be my first choice.
Honus
Our brave soldiers in Iraq have to kill anyone on the street in Iraq with a weapon because they threaten our freedom to be exploited by our health insurance companies. And the Constitution and liberty and free market.
Honus
@jncc: Once again, fuck the ROE. Do you get the idea that if you kill a bunch of harmless civilians from a mile away it doesn’t help us and it sure as fuck doesn’t help them?
The people we killed were our friends, the people we need to have on our side to bring some kind of order to the shit hole of violence we have gone 7000 miles to create. You want to say it is OK to slaughter innocent people who are no threat to us because we have a rule that says we can do it? To paraphrase General MacArthur, “war is not a fucking video game”
Honus
How long do you think it would take to stabilize this country if that shit were being visited on us? Hint: it’s Confederate History Month here in Virginia.
Honus
@Rick Taylor: correct. What happens is that they commit war crimes.
Honus
Sorry for the hysteria. I’m just having trouble making the transition from “it happens and there’s a reason for it” to “it’s OK”
mclaren
@AB:
That’s what modern war means. Lots and lots of innocent people die. These goddamn war movies like Saving Private Ryan or the goddamn bogus videogames like Gears of War create this fantasy where everyone in the combat zone is uniformed and easy to spot as the enemy. Out in the real world, most of the people in an urban combat zone are unarmed civilians, and ever since 1914, 80% of the people who have gotten killed in modern mechanized wars are innocent bystander civilians.
That’s what makes modern war so horrible. For the most part, the soldiers stay safe inside their up-armored vehicles while women and children and old men get mowed down by chain guns and blasted apart with 20 mm cannon shells and roasted alive with napalm and white phospohorus.
Going to war means killing mountains of innocent civilians. It means giant reeking piles of corpses of children and women who never did anything wrong and happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s why you don’t want to go to war unless it’s absolutely 100% necessary for your survival.
Americans seem to have forgotten that. We need to wake up and smell the latte. Unless America is directly and specifically threatened by some clearly identifiable enemy, we should not go to war. That policy served us well from 1812 to 1945. Then we abandoned it, and a lot of bad things ensued.
Paul in KY
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: Agree with your comment yesterday. All the videos of these types of actions need to be reviewed. It was only because 2 of the victims were Reuter’s employees that there was even a BS investigation to begin with.
If the only people killed were Joe Hajis (their version of Joe Sixpack), then there wouldn’t be any kind of investigation at all.