Like a large part of the military.
Time refers to the time in the video.
At about 3:17, the crosshairs go over “Saeed w/ Camera” and you can hear one of the soldiers say “I don’t if that’s a…” I’d venture a guess and say that he meant “I don’t know if that’s a weapon.” Of course, that part is not subtitled.
At about 3:19, the crosshairs go over “Namir w/ Camera” and one of the soldiers says “that’s a weapon.” From the angle of the camera, it’s not clear what Namir is carrying, all that is clear is that he has something slung over his shoulder.
At 3:39 the crosshairs pan over to another man who is identifiably carrying some sort of rifle-looking object and conversing with two men a few feet behind Saeed and Namir. I shall name him “Man 1” for the purpose of this discussion.
At 3:43, it appears that the man to the right of the man carrying the rifle-looking object is also carrying some kind of rifle.
At 3:45, it appears that Man 1 is actually carrying an RPG.
At 4:11, someone peers out along the wall with something poking out. In retrospect, I’m sure we all agree that it looks like a camera. But if you were a soldier expecting insurgents, and after you saw several of them carry actual weapons, would you have guessed that the man in your crosshairs was actually a photojournalist? Probably not.
At 4:47, at least one of the men is clearly carrying some sort of rifle-looking object and all of the men are crowded behind a corner.
Have you ever held a rifle, or seen someone hold a rifle? Even at a distance, those are obviously not rifles. However, one of them did have an AK-47 according to the Huffington Post, but it was not the man holding the camera. In any case, what about the rest of what you quoted? Whether or not they had an AK-47 is the least of it.
I’m sorry, but you have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m not sure what age has to do with anything, or even that all of them are the same age, in any case. These are the same Iraqi insurgents who are able to snipe U.S. soldiers on convoys from long ranges, and consistently hit unarmed areas, such as where the vest is buckled on the flank of your torso, or under the armpit. The same Iraqi insurgents who are able ambush convoys and blow up entire trucks of IP without the convoy knowing what hit them.
These are not senseless child soldiers. They may not be professional soldiers, but they are not stupid either.
Then I’m not sure you can really pass judgment on what an untrained or trained soldier is, and how they differ. It just doesn’t seem that you really know what you’re talking about.
But it’s showing that it’s true.
Sorry, I misread what you wrote. Like I said before, while I can give the benefit of the doubt for the opening scenes, there was no excuse for accusing a wounded man crawling to the side of the street of having an RPG in the hand he was using to pull himself.
Well, it seems you should re-watch it.
You said:
Someone tries to kill you, you injure them,
Nobody tried to kill the people in the helicopter, so your analogy doesn’t apply.
That’s what he told control he saw. Given the little experience I have with the armed forces, and from what I know from research that I’ve done throughout these past years, I am not really willing to believe him. Those targets are easily distinguishable, and you are still ignoring the fact that all personnel who are trained gunners have to be able to distinguish between civilians, IPs and insurgents.
Otherwise, there would be no use for the military to consistently train soldiers in distinguishing between targets, because no pilot would be able to to do besides their training.
What? “Behind their back?” What are you talking about?
No, there is a noticeable difference between an assault rifle and a camera. The only time the gunner was justified is when he mistook the zoom lense for an RPG, but then the helicopter rotated around the building so the gunner lost justification.
The gunner told control the man had an RPG.
He did shoot. He killed all three men. Then they shot up the van.
Terms of Engagement.
I’ve never been to war, but I know a few folks who fought in Gulf War I and supposedly the Apache helicopter is very hard to see/hear. Supposedly many Iraqi soldiers wouldn’t notice an Apache until it was already firing on them during Gulf War I.
The libertarian and anti-war movements would do best to distance itself away from conspiratorial hacks like Arianna Huffington.
The fact that the military outright lied about what occurred is reason to believe otherwise. Had this been an honest mistake there was no reason for the military to cover it up by claiming there was a firefight in the area and civilians were caught in the crossfire.
This is no conspiracy theory. it’s a fact.
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0405/ret-intel-officer-us-shooting-violated-rules/
It looks like the military was in the wrong here. You shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss a story here just because it seems so unbelievable, because, as Jonathan M.F Catalan mentioned, if this was just a mistake the military had no reason to cover it up.
The “unedited” version of the video:
In the first 1:30 someone says that there is a group of people with at least one of them having a weapon.
At 1:45 one of the guys seems to say “That’s a weapon?” to which the other responds “Yeah.” Listen to the intonation of the voice. It seems like he’s asking a “passive question,” if you will.
Also, these men are carrying something slung over their shoulders. Since the viewer sees the front of the men, not the back, you CANNOT distinguish what they are carrying. The man is told it’s a weapon.
At 2:05 the crosshairs come close to another individual, who definitely is carrying a weapon. At 2:07 I thought the man to his right might have been carrying a weapon, but upon reflection it seems much too light to be anything significant.
At 2:28 the man with the weapon walks behind the building.
At 2:35 you see a man sticking his head out around the corner with something sticking out. This could be a camera. The guys in the chopper believe it’s an RPG getting ready to fire.
There’s multiple voices over the intercom so it’s difficult to tell who’s saying what.
At 3:13 you can see the group of men crowded behind a corner. I can’t make out any weapons now. Then they get shot.
6:16 “Roger we’ll cease fire.”
6:18 “Yeah we won’t shoot anymore.”
6:27 “Maybe he’s got a weapon down in his hands?”
6:28 “No I haven’t seen one yet.”
Around 7:00 “C’mon buddy… all you gotta do is pick up a weapon.”
7:25 “If we see a weapon we’re gonna engage.”
7:45 A man is helping the injured guy up as a van pulls up. The soldiers suspect it’s somebody who wants to pick up “bodies and weapons.” The soldiers ask for permission to engage (7:49). Another man comes to help.
7:53 “Can I shoot?”
7:58 “Request permission to engage.”
7:59 “Picking up the wounded?”
8:01 “Yeah, we’re trying to get permission to engage.”
Next couple seconds you see the two men pick up the injured guy and begin to move him into the van.
At 8:30-ish they get permission to engage the “Bongo truck” from “Bushmaster Seven” - some sort of superior? So they end up shooting the van and the men who run away from it.
11:38 someone else (someone on the ground?) says over the intercom “be advised, there were some guys popping out with AKs behind that dirt pile.” Also mentions getting fired at with RPGs.
14:04 a tank comes in
15:55-ish one of the guys in the chopper mentions that they believed that there was a guy “with an RPG cropping out the corner” (see 2:45)
17:17 “Eleven Iraqi KIAs, one small child wounded.”
Everyone talking about driving over bodies, at 19:01 the gunner says “maybe it was just a visual illusion, but it looked like [the Bradley drove over the body of an Iraqi]”
19:20 One of the troops says: “I got one individual looks like he’s got an RPG round laying underneath him.”
31:36 They follow another man with an AK
Around 33:00 Someone asks about an RPG round and whether it’s still live. Seems to be referring to 19:20 “RPG round laying underneath him.”
At 34:48 they put a missile into a building where the man with the AK went
By the way, my training included being told that it was illegal for us to fire on wounded personnel and personnel in full-fledge retreat. That is one of three main problems. Like I keep saying, the other two are:
- The subsequent cover-up.
- All combat personnel are trained to distinguish between civilians, IP and insurgents. IP are iraqi police. AK-47s, SKSs, etc, are very common amongst the civilian population in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, one of the early missions in Afghanistan was to disarm the civilian population, and this occurred unsuccessfully. So, all combat personnel are trained to carefully distinguish between combat personnel and civilians, even if both are armed. This is why it is so difficult to engage insurgents that are mixed with civilians, and why insurgents use this tactic often in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The ROE says that you cannot open fire unless they open fire on you, but whoever was confirming their order to open fire didn’t seem to consider that, so maybe that’s not a rule for helicopters. Like I said before, the opening shots might have been justified - barely -, but the turkey shoot that took place after was in no way justifiable.
Which ones were in the chopper? Were they the ones who sounded completely out of danger, even jovial, while they said things like, “Come on, let me shoot!” Or were they the ones who were laughing about Namir’s body getting run over by a tank?
Please refresh my memory.
Remember guys, the video camera that is recording and the actual lens of the the pilots are different. Different in the sense that the lens in the helicopter is much clearer…
Hopefully they were struck with adrenalin rather than murderous intent.
That’s exactly the way I saw it. They weren’t actually under-fire. They were all in a hissy fit when they were just watching civilians. Even before they really were under-fire they said that they were being attacked so they could have the opportunity to shoot. So wouldn’t that implicate the military men?
I wish there were more focus on the overall bad aspects of the war effort. Even if this is as bad as it looks its still just one isolated incident. It would be easy for pro-war people to say “Well I don’t support mindless killing. Those people should be court marshaled!” (and they probably will be no?) “But I think overall the war is a good thing”
So bring in the overall statistics! What % of ppl dead are innocent? How many more have died from the collapse in infrastructure (health), how far back is the country set? What are the projected total costs for this fiasco?
^More important, less emotional = strongest argument
Whenever you hear about a group of insurgents being killed on the news this is the sort of thing that should come to mind.
So I watched the entire 39 minute video, and apparently one of the dead guys was laying over a possibly live RPG round, which would imply that there was an RPG there. You can see my notes here. The video directly contradicts what several of you have been saying (e.g. lying in order to shoot an injured person; they waited till they got permission to engage when the injured guy was being picked up by the van).
That is not the case.
“By the third tour, if they were carrying a shovel or bag, we could shoot them. So we carried these tools and weapons in our vehicles, so we could toss them on civilians when we shot them. This was commonly encouraged.”
Washburn explained that his ROE changed “a lot”.
“The higher the threat level, the more viciously we were told to respond. We had towns that were deemed ‘free fire zones’. One time there was a mayor of a town near Haditha that got shot up. We were shown this as an example because there was a nice tight shot group on the windshield, and told that was a good job, that was what Marines were supposed to do. And that was the mayor of the town.”
Jason Wayne Lemue is a Marine who served three tours in Iraq.
“My commander told me, ‘Kill those who need to be killed, and save those who need to be saved’, that was our mission on our first tour,” he said of his first deployment during the invasion nearly five years ago.
Lemue continued, “After that the ROE changed, and carrying a shovel, or standing on a rooftop talking on a cell phone, or being out after curfew [meant the people] were to be killed. I can’t tell you how many people died because of this. By my third tour, we were told to just shoot people, and the officers would take care of us.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8354
Don’t be naive.
What you see is a daily occurrence.
Define innocent.
Prove it. This argument will be much more productive than “hey did you see that one time that one group of guys were jerks maybe. Lets argue about that”
idk… noncombatants… children. Metaphysically pure… you know what I’m getting at.
And what would you deem proof enough?
So what are the combatants guilty of?
Link of interest: Iraq Body Count Project
I don’t understand your position. This is what we all saw: A few guys were walking in the streets with cameras on their shoulders. Two U.S. helicopters saw them, and began to fire until all were dead. They (a) didn’t ask any questions (they immediately requested permission to “engage”), and (b) gleefully cheered as they mowed down the crowd. Those who survived the initial “engagement,” to use their terminology, crawled for their dear lives, and were shot upon once more. Then, a van came along with two men who were clearly unarmed, and which tried to rescue those that showed any signs of life. They were also fired upon repeatedly. So is your argument basically, “wrong place, wrong time,” or that all is justified during war?
Those who wish to “serve their country” need to watch this video.