2010 in Iraq

did we stop doing these threads? we're still there y'know btw iirc

anyway i wanted somewhere to post this:

5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff.

http://collateralmurder.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36182383/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8603938.stm

watched part of it earlier, got the point, wanted to barf

http://collateralmurder.com/file/photos/thumbs/5dwlens.jpg

^ "rocket launcher"

http://collateralmurder.com/file/photos/AliAbbas_VAN.jpg

we just 'engaged' eight individuals
o rly

let us shoot/

jesus christ

In an audiotape released with the video, the shooters can be heard asking for permission to engage, and one says "Light 'em all up!"

Some men drop immediately, while at least one can be seen scrambling to get away.

"Ah, yeah, look at those dead bastards. Nice," one shooter says.

The helicopters later destroy a vehicle that arrived on the scene to help a wounded man. When ground forces arrive, the video shows what looks to be a child being carried from the vehicle and U.S. troops saying the child should be sent to a local Iraqi hospital.

"Well, it's their fault bringing their kids into the battle," a cockpit voice can be heard saying.

if that was a movie scene i wouldn't believe the dialogue was so wilfully fucking stupid

he's got an rpg, that's a weapon

oh wow was just about to post this to a politics thread or something, this is much better. yeah this is...hideous, but probably par for the course for our military.

heard about it via greenwald - http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/05/iraq/index.html

wikileaks people are heroes

ya they rule

yeah watch that dylan ratigan (...lol) talk at the end of that article

nice, never seen assange interviewed before

dylan ratigan is actually a pretty great tv host as far as cable news goes

the grafix and sound fx are kinda goofy. also they keep that clip of the guys getting killed on loop throughout wtf

wow, this is disgusting

from a few days ago, wikileaks apparently being followed and spied on

http://gigaom.com/2010/03/26/wikileaks-asks-cia-to-stop-spying-on-it/

have no idea how you could watch the van being shot at and not see it as cold-blooded murder. ugh.

man I already felt pretty uncomfortable playing the gunship level in call of duty modern warfare, now I'm never touching it again

have no idea how you could watch the van being shot at and not see it as cold-blooded murder. ugh.

― ¬_¬ (Alan N), Monday, April 5, 2010 9:36 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

^this -- definitely the worst part of the video

no person should take glee in killing another human being. I suspect this attitude represents a significant part of our military culture and it's despicable.

These weapons systems are really scary. They make killing a detached experience and yet very intentional and calculated. Soldiers make a conscious decision to kill a human being, but then have no obligation to see the consequences of that decision. Carpet bombing or artillery barrages are detached, but there is not the same conscious decision to directly kill a human being. Closer combat brings soldiers in direct contact with the horrors of war.

I hate the god-like power these soldiers have. It's the darkest sort of arrogance imaginable. The drones are the worst.

So the military has said it's a real video but the last report I said didn't say anything about the audio. But they didn't say it wasn't real.

http://www.oliverwillis.com/2010/04/06/our-troops-are-the-good-guys-some-liberals-hate-that/

this guy's not too bright

Does anyone know if the audio is confirmed? Unless it is I wouldn't believe it.

if that was a movie scene i wouldn't believe the dialogue was so wilfully fucking stupid

still what i think, but if it wasn't real then i'm pretty sure that would be the first defence launched by the military

anyone that doubts whether cruelty is as instinctively human and "normal" as compassion needs to watch this fucking footage.

Guys, don't give it too many views, or the people that made it are going to be pressured by their producers into making more.

Does anyone know if the audio is confirmed? Unless it is I wouldn't believe it.

― Adam Bruneau, Tuesday, April 6, 2010 6:16 PM

we'll have to wait until they find their copy (not that i need these lying assholes to "confirm" anything):

Military can't find its copy of Iraq killing video
http://www.seattlepi.com/national/1155ap_us_us_iraq_video.html

par for the course for any military. dehumanized killing machines.

One of Sullivan's readers posted this today:

90% of what occurs in that video has been commonplace in Iraq for the last 7 years, and the 10% that differs is entirely based on the fact that two of the gentlemen killed were journalists.

War is a disgusting, horrible thing. As cliche as that excuse has become, for people to look at the natural heartbreaking nature of it and say that they're somehow anomalous just shows how far people who have not experienced war have to go to understanding it.

which is why Obama is a bloodstained fuck.

imagine all the videos we never get to see?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19746262/displaymode/1107/framenumber/1/s/2/

photogallery from one of the photojournalists killed in the attack. TOP also has a nice write-up.

"all you gotta do is pick up a weapon" FUCK

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/04/the-wikileaks-video-and-the-rules-of-engagement.html

The problem, of course, is not so much the contents of the video (though of course that is a problem), but the cover-up. This is what happens in war - which is why we opposed it in the first place.

But the attempts at sanitizing war will produce negative effects, both morally and strategically. We may like to pretend that every civilian death is a mistake, and every soldiers death the result of heroism or political cowardice (It's understandable that families want someone to blame, but soldiers are not dying because of lack of equipment; they're dying because that is what happens in a war).

The failure to acknowledge the realities of the war is not just a moral problem though, it is actually damaging for the war effort. The secrecy, cover-ups and manipulation will only make these things occur more frequently, make healthy relationships with the peoples and governments of the middle east almost impossible, and cause rifts and national schizophrenia at home.

The soldiers we hear in the video are not monsters, they are products of a military culture and young men trying to cope with a fairly horrible situation. The results of their disassociation may be disgusting, but it is the national disassociation that is the problem. Like the soldiers, the west refuses to accept a reality in which things are our fault, blaming the victim for it's existence in the path of our weapons, idealizing the dead and demonizing the enemy. The casual enjoyment of the soldiers during their killings is an echo of the enjoyment of the media at reporting their triumphs, and then an echo of those at home who swallow the nonsense fed to them.

Even if, against the odds, the western media, politicians, people and military face up to the reality of war and admit that civilians frequently get killed, soldiers get maimed, plans go awry and that the enemy is human, it is probably too late to avoid a cultural equivalent of PTSD. We may want these soldiers to carry out their tasks with a heavy heart, a compassionate tear rollig down their face as they fire missiles into houses, having weighed the 'greater good' of the militants killed against the civilians caught up in the attack, but this is no more psychologically possible, or likely, than the rest of society viewing things in such a manner.

If people want troops in Afghanistan they will have to accept that the presence of these forces means that things like this attack will happen as par for the course. And I doubt that there can ever be a reality based war.

The casual enjoyment of the soldiers during their killings is an echo of the enjoyment of the media at reporting their triumphs, and then an echo of those at home who swallow the nonsense fed to them.

this is str8 bullshit

How so? I don't mean that it is caused by the media of the public, just that it is the same. My point is that the soldiers are doing the same thing as the nations as a whole, which is closing themselves off from the reality of conflict.

no, the soldiers aren't closing themselves off to the reality of the conflict, they're in it, making it. sure, people outside the conflict turn their heads away and ignore it, as they/we do with most of the world's ills most of the time. i guess some people would be surprised by this video, others not so much. i basically agree with john cook's gawker post.

but the 'triumphs' reported by the media are things like elections being held. trumpeting that is very different imho than whooping it up about shooting people.

Just to clarify - I don't believe that the soldiers necessarily did anything wrong. I certainly don't think that prosecuting them would accomplish anything. They did what they were told to, mostly. But I don't think they were being honest with themselves about what they were doing. I also think this is probably impossible to do. But the distance between them and their targets reduces the humanity of their targets. It's not really controversial that things like screens, maps etc. that remove you from the immediacy of killing make it easier to do so, nor is it controversial that people routinely engage in disassociation in such situations. Whether you consider that 'making' reality is up to you, I guess.

I find the media coverage (especially right-wing) to be engaged in a glorification of our role in afghanistan and iraq, and even coverage of elections was done without real discussion of the price that had been paid for them.

The casual enjoyment of the soldiers during their killings is an echo of the enjoyment of the media at reporting their triumphs, and then an echo of those at home who swallow the nonsense fed to them.

Really it's just that they have been trained to kill, repeatedly, day after day if necessary, as quickly and efficiently as possible, and for that to work they can't possibly be emotionally involved in their targets. This is the life they've chosen and yes it has changed them irrevocably in some ways. They're not a police force or a SWAT team, they've got one job which is to destroy and kill. Which is maybe why having armies do police work is a bad idea.

they shouldn't have been where they were, in 2007. but i think most police forces, even armed police forces, would find it hard dealing with a well-armed "insurgency" (what word do we use?) such as there was in iraq at that time.

Just to clarify - I don't believe that the soldiers necessarily did anything wrong.

Come on. They requested permission to kill a few people who were hanging about on a street corner, and who didn't especially look like they were just about to attack anything. Then they requested permission to kill more people whose only crime was to turn up in a van to take the dead and wounded away. Surely there could at least be no justification whatsoever for the second series of killings.

Zelda come on. You think these soldiers are culpable in some kind of legal sense? I'm looking at their job description and "protecting innocent human life of other countries" seems to figure a very long way down from "kill kill kill kill kill kill kill"

Just to clarify - I don't believe that the soldiers necessarily did anything wrong.

I very much doubt that 'shoot first from a couple of hundred yards where there is no actual danger or threat to any soldier' is the recommended policy when 'liberating' or even policing an occupied territory.

You think these soldiers are culpable in some kind of legal sense?

If they're not culpable in a 'failed miltary operations' sense, at the very least, then seriously the whole kit and caboodle should just go home.

"Wrong" is by no means the same as "culpable in some kind of legal sense". But requesting to kill people who palpably pose no danger to you and claiming otherwise might well break some law or other.

well, i doubt *requesting* it is illegal -- i wouldn't get into that anyway, we only have the tape, and sitting here saying, "oh they were just carrying machine guns, how is that a thing?" seems dumm to me. there's enough in it that's fucked up already.

Requesting it in bad faith might not be illegal, but it's got to be an infringement of some operational procedure, surely?

Or is there no onus whatsoever on the guys in the chopper to verify the information they're feeding to their superiors in order to gain permission to shoot?

iirc they says "there are sum armed guys here, can we kill them?" and hq says "yes".

i don't rly get your second sentence. i would guess most people on this thread feel that the helicopter gunship should not have been there, nor the men with guns -- that the whole situation shouldn't have happened. which is fine, but it can lead to a degree of unreality in confronting what actually happens. the mirror image of the idea of surgical strikes, etc -- no, the soldiers did not have to provide evidence before killing their targets.

i don't care if it's legal or not because the law is written around disgusting behavior as long as you are fighting terrorists or whatever, not to mention int'l law is a joke to the u.s., and these guys are doing just what they're trained to do. it's just wrong because actual people die, y'know? i mean the question of good or bad faith isn't really useful to me since i think (like most of us do?) the whole context is shit

how far out was the gunship? there's quite a delay between the shots and the impacts. it's not like the 'AKs' and 'RPG' would have been a threat to them. perhaps there were nearby ground troops? anyone know what was the wider context?

xp to mayne

I'm with most people on this thread er: they shouldn't be there, but I don't think it's a theoretical argument to posit that while they're there, they have to be held to certain standards.

I'm not sure exactly what you're saying, but it appears to be 'they shouldn't be there, but seeing as they are they shouldn't have to check before killing people'.

I mean, I'm reasonably sure that's not what you believe.

harbl- if the military come out and say that that video is an example of what those guys 'are trained to do' then I don't know what. It would seem to be a pretty spectacular example of what not to do, particularly (as I've said and cozen repeats) given that there is zero threat apparent to US forces, and scant evidence of any kind of insurgent activity at all.

If the official line is that 'dudes on street corners are fair game', then I think it's important that everyone up to and including Obama maybe says this clearly. I don't know why that seems important, it just does to me.

im pretty sure the gunship was sent out in response to US troops taking fire in the streets--i.e. sent out to locate the militia that had been firing on the soldiers

iirc -- again -- they report that these guys have guns, and request permission to kill, which is granted. which from the pov of "they should never have been there" is even worse than them being there. but a chain of command where they have to -- what? -- relay video footage to base before opening fire seems p unlikely even in a "just war", doesn't it?

yes obviously soldiers have to held to standards like "don't target civilians", but "don't kill armed guys unless they're actually pointing them at you" -- not really.

xp

I thought that might've been the case. I imagine those gunships cost thousands just to get in the air

there is zero threat apparent to US forces, and scant evidence of any kind of insurgent activity at all

you can't infer this from the video

but a chain of command where they have to -- what? -- relay video footage to base before opening fire seems p unlikely even in a "just war", doesn't it?

i'm pretty sure i could come up with a better system than 'we'll take your word for it', given however many trillion to work with.

yes obviously soldiers have to held to standards like "don't target civilians",

fuck the 'don't target' bullshit. 'don't hit them' full stop, is the standard, given however many trillion, and the 'liberation' ideology.

I mean lol naivety etc but I don't think I'm ever gonna be held up as any kind of idealist, on ILX of all places?

any consequences to the gunners involved here? anything form the military short of 'lol it's war what do you fucks know about it?'

xpost

What about the attack on the van though? The van guys were taking dead + wounded away. How could they conceivably have been considered a threat?

there is zero threat apparent to US forces, and scant evidence of any kind of insurgent activity at all

you can't infer this from the video

what i can infer from the video is that the standards of evidence required to approve indiscriminate engagement from long distance aren't satisfactory from either a military success or moral justifiaction POV

xpost to cozen re:context

This guy was of course not there, but his reply in the comments section of that Rules of Engagement article seems believable:

It may be useful to note that this video is not from a helicopter but most likely from a fixed-wing AC-130 which fires from the left side. That's why it constantly circles, why the gunners discuss the "azimuth limit" which automatically prevents the gun from shooting the wings as the plane banks, and why the victims seem to pay no attention to the aircraft. The significance is that the aircraft was much further away than a helicopter might have been. The men on the ground probably only saw planes up in the sky over Baghdad with no clue that they were in the crosshairs. Also, some have speculated that the gunner and pilots must have seen with their own eyes a much clearer view of the men and their cameras and guns but in fact they were probably seeing only the same b&w image that we are. This was more of a sniper attack from the air than an "engagement."

and there's also this possibility:

I understand that the U.S. ground units a few hundred meters up the street were under small arms and RPG fire at the time. That the only people in sight on the street were this group of men armed with small arms (AK47) and RPGs means that they were unlikely innocent bystanders.

the RPG was a camera, I'm pretty sure?

I dunno, if you look at around 3:40, the guy just upper right of the crosshairs is carrying something long that doesn't look like a camera. And then the guy peeking around the corner of the building starting at 4:07 could look pretty threatening in a heated situation.

I think I saw two guys holding guns at the beginning. Shoot those guys without warning if you like (I can, in my head, allow that much in a 'war' situation).

Having our hindsight thanks to the journalist's death, it's pretty easy to interpret it as a camera. I don't know. I don't see weapons in people's hands all that often. I'd hate to be the one to have to judge such a situation. I still don't see any way the van thing could be defended at all, though.

how far out was the gunship? there's quite a delay between the shots and the impacts. it's not like the 'AKs' and 'RPG' would have been a threat to them. perhaps there were nearby ground troops? anyone know what was the wider context?

― etrian odysseus (cozen), Wednesday, April 7, 2010 7:43 PM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark

according to another site they estimate the gunship is about 3-4 km away from the delay between the sound and the actual hitting

the thing that really twists the knife for me is with the van - how they relay to HQ that they are 'picking up bodies and weapons' and practically begging for the wounded guy to grab a gun so they can resume firing. seems to me they are willfully misinterpreting the rules of engagement.

*they were willfully

don't worry doodz I'm sure these particular soldiers were just "a few bad apples"

(oh... wait...)

i don't know how anyone here can judge these soldiers. it kind of makes me sick honestly.

I would guess that people are judging them based on their explicitly vocalized desire for injured people to pick up weapons so that they (the soldiers) can legally begin shooting at them again

and the general attitude towards human suffering which can be easily extrapolated therefrom

(also I can't speak for anyone else here but I'm personally judging them as rich first-worlders who are not only mentally distanced from the reality of war but also physically protected by an enormous amount of expensive technology)

enjoying killing people is less morally reprehensible when the playing field is level?

more like building technology whose sole purpose is to make the playing field less level is morally reprehensible, especially if it's gonna be used in aggressive "police actions" rather than to defend against foreign invasion or w/e

"more like building technology whose sole purpose is to make the playing field less level is morally reprehensible"

ah, bullshit to that

(to clarify: i'm against killing civilians yall)

What about the attack on the van though? The van guys were taking dead + wounded away. How could they conceivably have been considered a threat?

they thought the guys in the van were picking up weapons

xxpost: and signing on to be the trained monkey who interfaces with said technology is morally neutral but probably makes u an asshole or sociopath

or means you're probably from a poor and underprivileged background

Or the ROTC kids were the only clique in high school that let you in.

do poor people naturally enjoy killing ay-rabs or does the military make them that way

I'm havin' flashbacks to Abu Ghraib and Christopher Hitchens putting forth the incredibly disingenuous claim that either the soldiers were ordered to do these things and it's their commanders' fault, or they just spontaneously decided to do them and it's their fault

as if there were no such thing as 'military culture'

is it possible to hold a position that critiques "military culture" but has sympathy for individual soldiers, or do we have to just feel utter contempt for anyone who thought joining the army would be a good way to secure a future for him or herself

any consequences to the gunners involved here? anything form the military short of 'lol it's war what do you fucks know about it?'

No doubt the video will make great advertisement for the terrorist cause, which will be the biggest consequence to the gunners, everyone else in the military, and the American people at home. The easiest conclusion is that this is why the US didn't want the footage out in the first place. However we live in a world where these sort of things will get out, information wants to be free, and we should seriously consider whether putting our first line of defense in such an offensive position is really a wise long term strategy if our goal is to reduce terrorism and not encourage it.

Was this on the news much yesterday? When i switched on the TV it was all about Tiger Woods LOL

xpost: yeah actually I want to backtrack a little on what I said a few posts ago about the actions of the individual soldiers being "morally reprehensible", because I don't really like talking about things in those terms; mostly I feel a deep sense of shame at living in a society in which 'my money' (lol) is used to finance wars of aggression fought in my name, coupled with frustration that other people do not share this feeling

that being said, I would still like to hold the soldiers accountable for lacking critical self-awareness, "just following orders", whatever -- I don't think it's idealist of me to expect better from people

xpost @Adam Bruneau. The soldiers in that clip are the terrorists.

pretty sure you can join the army as a good way of securing your future without looking for an excuse to shoot people

bernard snowy's last paragraph completely otm

xpost @Adam Bruneau. The soldiers in that clip are the terrorists.

― Venga, Wednesday, April 7, 2010 2:12 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

slow burner.jpg

I don't think it's idealist of me to expect better from people

hmm

Venga OTM but we can't very well declare war on our soldiers can we?

I just think hanging it on these soldiers, when they were acting like the killing machines they are dehumanized and programmed to be, is the easy way out, and it avoids the overall problem.

You want a war, you are going to fuel terrorism. The solution to ending the terrorism is to end the war. How much infinite goodwill did the US have after 911 that was driven into the ground worldwide with these damn wars?

oh goody let's do this again

It's 2005 in ILX.

I just think hanging it on these soldiers, when they were acting like the killing machines they are dehumanized and programmed to be, is the easy way out, and it avoids the overall problem.

I don't necessarily want to get into the dehumanisation/subjugation of self or w/e aspect of training soldiers, but I'm very curious as to whether the US military genuinely believe that this is acceptable performance, looking at it in the hardest & coldest terms. I know they'll defend it admirably in public, but surely behind closed doors they'll admit that their guys acting in this manner is a big problem on just about every level there is.

yeah i'm not sure what's so hard to understand about the idea that american soldiers are trained to identify threats and then kill or destroy them, and that sometimes they make mistakes. if you accept that, all you're left with is that some of these soldiers appear to be enjoying it, which is actually pretty par for the course in combat. glee in killing is fucking encouraged. is there something psychopathic about it, sure, war is psychopathic in general. the idea that this kind of mistake or the attitudes of the soldiers can be avoided is just ridiculous. "the only winning move is not to play" etc etc.

OTM

'american soldiers are trained to identify threats'

training to identify non-threats would be good too.

Expecting that trained and paid soldiers as part of an invading-yet-benevolent force might take risks to avoid killing civilians might be naive in some cases, but from a gunship 3km away it's in no way a hard ask.

hey don't tell it to me, tell it to those soldiers. i'm sure they'll take your vast knowledge of the subject on board.

nah tbh ur right nobody can judge the military

i mean fuck do civilians even have an opinion anyway?

youre not stating an opinion dude

anyway a friend of a friend was in the infantry and was the guy on the ground in contact with the choppers (not in this instance--just in general). his take on this video lines up pretty closely to tracers.

Expecting that trained and paid soldiers as part of an invading-yet-benevolent force might take risks to avoid killing civilians might be naive in some cases, but from a gunship 3km away it's in no way a hard ask.

― Jesse James Woods (darraghmac), Wednesday, April 7, 2010 9:37 AM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

again, these guys were a couple blocks away from a ground unit taking fire. the question isnt, are these gun-toting fellows going to shoot at ME in my helicopter, its, are they going to shoot at the OTHER SOLDIERS

if anybody can link to an explanation for why they fired on the van I would like to see it, btw (non trolling request)

I found one here.

I read more complaints about how they engaged the van that picked up the wounded in this video. Look, in a war where the enemy takes cabs into battle, you must stop the evacuation of any suspected enemy soldiers if you can. All wounded, good and bad, will get medical attention. And often times a medivac chopper will not only get the enemy to help faster, but American surgeons will give them a far better chance to recover than their local national counterpart.

But we cannot allow anyone to take human intelligence, weapons or suspected enemy forces away from coalition forces on the battlefield under any circumstances.

This is just not acceptable. There is nothing in that video that is unlawful or unethical. There is a whole lot of regrettable there. And I can understand why the military would not want this on youtube, just as you would not want a video of you screaming at your wife on youtube, either.

It’s embarrassing, not criminal.

dude was in the military but I'm not sure how much of that is just punditry. lots of stuff in the comments section too.

that doesn't really square w/me

yeah I'm not really an expert on the rules of warfare but that account doesn't really square with the blog post from the new yorker linked upthread

I don't really buy the they're-trained-to-be-dehumanized-killers-what-do-you-expect argument. You might as well forget about the whole concept of crimes on the battlefield.

If it's US policy to kill people who are very clearly evacuating dead and wounded, I give up.

it is US policy to put hundreds of thousands of people trained almost exclusively to kill and destroy in the role of police officers, which ends up with things like this.

tbh i do kind of forget about the whole concept of crimes on the battlefield when we're talking about obvious errors of judgement like this. when we're talking about tampering with evidence and lying about killing women and children that's something else.

a) whats the point of roe if its not followed (and people in the military are already on record as saying it wasn't followed in this video)
b) the military said they didn't know how the journalists died and would not release the tape to reuters under the freedom of information act

ok.. SWAT team?

am0n i agree with both points

If it's US policy to kill people who are very clearly evacuating dead and wounded, I give up.

― Zelda Zonk, Wednesday, April 7, 2010 9:56 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this isnt US policy this is "war" policy

nah tbh ur right nobody can judge the military

― Jesse James Woods (darraghmac), Wednesday, April 7, 2010 9:43 AM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i mean fuck do civilians even have an opinion anyway?

― Jesse James Woods (darraghmac), Wednesday, April 7, 2010 9:43 AM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

You are judging the situation from a non-combat zone and solely based on 17-39 minutes of video leaked on a website. As much as you can protest what they chose to do, you have to admit their position was far, far more informed on the situation and the context than yours.

http://artwork.datpiff.com/m35af421/Makaveli_Only_God_Can_Judge_Me-front-large.jpg

when we're talking about tampering with evidence and lying about killing women and children that's something else.

Lying about killing children -- or at least firing on them -- is exactly what happened here!

As much as you can protest what they chose to do, you have to admit their position was far, far more informed on the situation and the context than yours.

Well, we have that much to be thankful for. Hate for them to have had the wrong information!

I mean, Dick Cheney was at the centre of a lot of things for a long time there- he's not to be questioned on anything? Bush? Anyone involved in banking/finance?

are you out of your mind? i think you are.

Pancakes yes - was trying to emphasize the lying part

just so that no one thinks i'm like, cool with killing civilians and children etc the only thing i'm arguing here is that war is inherently cruel and unfair and destructive to civilians, that mistakes like this get made all the time in war regardless of how well trained your military is or how well written your rules of engagement, that trained killers often act like psychopaths, and that the only thing i'd really ask of an individual soldier morally speaking is that he or she be honest about what happened - i'd also ask that of their COs, who in this case appear to have completed fucking lied

their position was far, far more informed on the situation and the context than yours

But we can look at that video dispassionately, while they were looking at it all hyped up and ready to shoot. When the van pulls up the shooter immediately says they're picking up bodies and weapons, when there is absolutely no image there that could possibly be construed as someone picking up a weapon. He's just jumped at a justification to fire.

are you out of your mind? i think you are.

Hey, you're the 'let's talk about context' guy on the civilian-killing thread. w/e, other people have been making similar points to mine and not had to volley back shit from you about it so....?

the only thing i'd really ask of an individual soldier morally speaking is that he or she be honest about what happened

Really? A soldier that summarily executes a prisoner of war or rapes a civilian has no moral duties beyond telling the truth? I doubt there is any major country that considers the battlefield a moral vacuum.

well yeah, i agree. whew for a second there i was almost a completely amoral psychopath!

darragh what i'm saying is that war is a suspension of pretty much every moral foothold we have to make sense of things, so you can't compare that with civilian concerns like bank regulations and foreign policy, and if you try you are bound to find your synapses fizzle and smoke

heh maybe i'm posting form a battlefield, i'm taking a break from thread peace out all.

i get that "mistakes are made, war is hell, blah blah" but i don't get why that should just be accepted. when cops make "mistakes", especially on camera, people expect them to be held accountable. are soldiers above this, sort of like guantanamo bay is beyond our normal court system? are the rules of engagement getting thrown out the window when its "insurgents" and is that a decision being made from the top?

^ i'm just gonna mail this dude with my questions, let him translate them from now on tbh^

(substitute "etc." for "blah blah", less assholish ;-))

I mean, Dick Cheney was at the centre of a lot of things for a long time there- he's not to be questioned on anything? Bush? Anyone involved in banking/finance?

Who said any of these? I'm saying don't write off the soldiers completely while overemphasizing our 'objective' viewpoint. These discussions we and others are having about this footage are hardly dispassionate and unbiased.

from a philosophical POV war is specifically "above" or "outside of" normal systems of justice and morality - if it weren't, we wouldn't think it useful

I know it's an infantile POV and everything, I just don't see the point of having a tribunal, or w/e after every war that says 'this was wrong, we shouldn't do this stuff' and, y'know, just keeping on doing this stuff.

one thing i'm a little wary of is the spin wikileaks has put on this, even down to the url "collateralmurder". maybe cuz journalists are involved they've taken it more personal, but it seems to detract from their previous impartiality with leaking stuff.

Maybe the US gov't has hacked Wikileaks to discredit them, and within a day or two it will be revealed to be a huge hoax.

am0n OTM re: spin

from a philosophical POV "war" is specifically "above" or "outside of" "normal" systems of "justice" and "morality" - if it weren't, we wouldn't think it "useful"

"fixed"

btw, i don't agree with this statement at all. the laws of war/IHL pare down our ideas of justice and morality to the bare minimum, sure, but there is still a minimum standard that has to be kept to. not saying these guys don't necessarily, because like you say, we're missing a whole lotta context.

In a stark assessment of shootings of locals by US troops at checkpoints in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said in little-noticed comments last month that during his time as commander there, "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 . . . . To my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I've been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it."
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/07/iraq_video/index.html

yeah i read that too. again, this is what happens when you put combat troops in charge of traffic roadblocks 365 days a year.

maybe he was under extreme stress when he said that though.

Jesus, tho, Tracer 100% otm using army as police is just an awful, awful option.

Award-winning CNN coverage:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_MnYI3_FRbbQ/S7xkDj_-G-I/AAAAAAAACXg/ZjqdzuC-8BY/s320/cnn.pngp

Keep shoot n

Award-winning CNN coverage:

― Adam Bruneau, Wednesday, April 7, 2010 11:46 AM

yeah i'll gladly take some wikileaks spin over that bullshit

'Censored video reveals defanged U.S. media outlet'

If you favour a war/occupation in Afghanistan, this is what you are in favour of. For the Dems who oddly decided they were against Iraq but pro Afghanistan: this is what that was means. This is the routine work of these soldiers - do you think any of them remembered this? Wrote to their family about this (if they were allowed)? Were kept awake by this so they had to visit their Chaplain/psych? No, this was another day in the conflict. These people had seen these situations and results before. They saw it from the people they were trained by.

I think we need to realise that the military didn't cover this up because civilians were killed. Or because reporters were killed. Or because the ROE ware not met. They covered it up because they were asked about it.

This is the routine work of these soldiers - do you think any of them remembered this? Wrote to their family about this (if they were allowed)? Were kept awake by this so they had to visit their Chaplain/psych? No, this was another day in the conflict. These people had seen these situations and results before. They saw it from the people they were trained by.

i hope im misunderstanding you--but if you think that soldiers arent coming home every day deeply, deeply fucked up over the stuff they did and saw in iraq, youre full of shit

Oh, of course they are, and no, that wasn't my point. I merely meant that this was not an exceptional circumstance (*military kid who still lives on a military base. All my friends are serving or ex-serving. And I have some experience of the stress his puts people under)

ok, yeah, i agree with that thought--that being said i guarantee you they all remember this incident. and every incident where they had to use their weapons.

Yeah, maybe. I kind of imagine that it all blends into one, but that's all I can do; imagine.

itt lots of people who think we're the good guys

“If these videos shock and revolt you, they show the reality of what war is like,” says Stieber. “If you don’t like what you see in them, it means we should be working harder towards alternatives to war.”

interview w veteran from the same company
http://utdocuments.blogspot.com/2010/04/transcript-interview-with-josh-stieber.html

But, yeah, I mean, even going, well I guess based on how some of these conversations have gone, saying, that, you know, the conversation that the helicopter pilot and gunner were having was unusually callous or cold-hearted like, I just thought back to my basic training. And how compared with the things that we heard on a day to day basis of how we were supposed to talk and how we were supposed to act, and like the mindsets that we were supposed to have, like, compared to what's...what's in the video, like, even compared to basic training, is not even that extreme.

JS: I mean, that's obviously the most troubling part of the video, and yeah, I think it is very telling of the military's position on that, that isn't seen as any wrongdoing. And, yeah, as far as official guidelines or rules, like, our rules of engagement were constantly changing and no one really took those seriously just because of how arbitrary they were and could change from one day to the next.

And it pretty much became a quest for survival, you know, people pretty quickly lost the idealism that brought us there, and we were fighting to make it home alive. And so, yeah, I mean, there was a lot of controversy within the ranks of you know, how much is too much, but it was definitely a prevalent position to say, that even going above and beyond just responding to somebody with a weapon, but of responding to people who were potential threats even without weapons -- some people would claim that was justifiable for, again, this whole of making it home alive.

when in doubt, shoot all the fuckers

the guy who leaked the collateral murder video has been arrested:

He said he also leaked three other items to Wikileaks: a separate video showing the notorious 2009 Garani air strike in Afghanistan that Wikileaks has previously acknowledged is in its possession; a classified Army document evaluating Wikileaks as a security threat, which the site posted in March; and a previously unreported breach consisting of 260,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables that Manning described as exposing “almost criminal political back dealings.”

“Hillary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public,” Manning wrote.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/toxic-legacy-of-us-assault-on-fallujah-worse-than-hiroshima-2034065.html

Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to a new study.

it takes some stones to write something like this, props to klein

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2008733,00.html

How to disguise a massacre:

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4029/5121285002_afdd154221_z.jpg

Blue = *Friendly*
Green = *Host* Nation
Orange = Civilians
Grey = Enemies.

First one is function of sum, second one is function of time, or how you can dilute the media impact of a massacre by killing a few people each day for 6 years. Just remember that host nation + civilian + enemies = mostly Iraqis.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/melkaone/5121285002/in/pool-1115946@N24/

just bumping this, i know it's not friday material but i find it pretty amazing

You must not have been paying attention in the US politics thread: the Iraq War is over.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/19/saddam-legacy-quran-iraqi-government
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Admin/BkFill/Default_image_group/2010/12/19/1292784190505/Baghdad-Mosque-Houses-Sad-007.jpg

http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/09/10/iraq_not_an_unraveling_but_a_stalemate_and_still_more_violent_than_afghanistan