This is what war looks like: leaked footage of Iraquis and Reuters employees being massacred

From a US Army press release, July 13, 2007:

Soldiers of 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, and the 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, both operating in eastern Baghdad under the 2nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, along with their Iraqi counterparts from the 1st Battalion, 4th Brigade, 1st Division National Police, were conducting a coordinated raid as part of a planned operation when they were attacked by small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. Coalition Forces returned fire and called in attack aviation reinforcement.

Nine insurgents were killed in the ensuing firefight. One insurgent was wounded and two civilians were killed during the firefight.

The two civilians were reported as employees for the Reuters news service.

“There is no question that Coalition Forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,” said Lt. Col Scott Bleichwehl, spokesperson and public affairs officer for MND-B.

Yesterday, a leaked video of the incident was released by Wikileaks (the US has confirmed that the video was authentic). What’s below is footage edited by Wikileaks; a longer, unedited version is available at their site. (Trigger warning: The footage shows 10-15 adults shot to death by US soldiers in helicopters. Two children are also shot, but survived.)

The video shows a group of adults, some of whom may be armed, or maybe not. Two of them are carrying large cameras strapped on, which the American soldiers mistake for weapons. The soldiers shoot all of the adults, creating a huge cloud of dust obscuring all the people on the ground.

After the dust has cleared, all of the adults appear to be dead, except for one who is wounded and attempting to crawl away. A soldier in the helicopter appears eager for a reason to shoot the wounded man (“Come on, buddy. All you gotta do is pick up a weapon.”) After a while, a black van pulls up; unarmed men get out of the van, pick up the wounded man, and carry him towards the van. The soldiers in the helicopters fire on the van, apparently killing all the adults and (we learn later) wounding two children in the van, who are taken for treatment at an Iraqi hospital.

Most of the discussion I’ve read about this video focuses on whether or not the shooting was legal under the Rules of Engagement operating at the time; or discussing the attitude of the soldiers. Unsurprisingly, the US Army investigation found that the soldiers and their command did nothing wrong; and the soldiers’ attitude about killing seems not only unsurprising but probably a necessary defense mechanism for them to be able to do their jobs.

What’s more interesting to me is that the US Army clearly lied about the incident. (You can parse the press release to not be a lie, as the Weekly Standard does, but it’s really a stretch. The plain and obvious interpretation of the press release is that the Iraquis were actively in a mutual fight with US soldiers when they were killed, and that’s obviously not true. Additionally, the press release lies by omission by not mentioning the people killed trying to rescue the wounded man). And then the army covered up the incident, by refusing to release the video.

So how do we know the army lied? Because of the convergence of two unlikely events. First, that two of the people shot were Reuters employees, causing Reuters to press for information about the shooting. And secondly, that an anonymous person (presumably someone in the army) had access to this video, and was courageous and heroic enough to leak it.

It is extremely unlikely that something like this happened just once, and by a massive coincidence that one completely atypical incident just happened to involve two Reuters employees and a video being anonymously leaked. What’s much more plausible is that there are many incidents of this kind, but only rarely do Americans find out about them. It’s entirely possible that incidents like these happen all the time.

One thing we can conclude for certain from this incident is that the US Army is untrustworthy. They can, and will, cover up dubious acts by US soldiers, and for all we know do so routinely. The US Army is not a credible source.

Tragedies like this are inevitable in war, and particularly in an occupation. This is as true in Afghanistan as it is in Iraq:

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.”

The comments came during a virtual town hall with troops in Afghanistan after one asked McChrystal to comment on the “escalation of force” problem. The general responded that, in the nine months he had been in charge, none of the cases in which “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.”

In many cases, he added, families were in the vehicles that were fired on.

Which is why wars should happen only as a last resort. War of choice is a monstrous evil. People who favor the US going to avoidable wars are favoring a situation in which — inevitably — innocent civilians are going to be shot to death by US troops, over and over again. Think about the two children who got shot while witnessing their own fathers being shot to death. That’s the inevitable byproduct of war.

It’s notable that, although in the US the major news outlets typically report whatever the US military claims as if it were fact, that’s not true in other countries. Discussing a different cover-up by US troops of the killing of innocent civilians (this time in Afghanistan), Glenn Greenwald writes:

Put another way, anyone reading about what happened from American news outlets would be completely misled and propagandized, while anyone reading the Pajhowk Afghan News would have been informed, because they treated official U.S. claims with skepticism rather than uncritical reverence.

One reason that the US looks so different “on the ground” throughout the middle east than it does here is that we’re reading and watching different news sources. And sometimes, the news that we Americans are watching is lying to us, in a way which makes our forces seem less harmful, and those objecting to US forces seem less justified.

They hate us, in part, because we slaughter them from helicopters. That’s not unreasonable of them.

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38 Responses to This is what war looks like: leaked footage of Iraquis and Reuters employees being massacred

  1. 1
    Kevin Moore says:

    Isn’t shooting people assisting the wounded against the rules of engagement? Did I miss something here?

  2. 2
    Robert says:

    In a marked ambulance, yes. In a black van, it’s just bad guys recovering their wounded. Or so I’d guess.

  3. 3
    Steve says:

    Problems with this analsys

    – Every step of the way the military on the scene is acting proffesionally and calmly. The fact you may be a pacifist or root for the enemy does not remove this calm and professional demeanor.

    – In an attempt to clarify ROE at every step, pains were taken to clarify with higher authority that the order to shoot was approved.

    – The enemy in Iraq is fighting a Guerilla action and hoping to incite a civil war. This is still an attempted goal in progress. There are no uniforms, enemy ID or intent has to be decided by body language, Gender, size of group, grouping and other factors.

    – An RPG is not a civilian weapon. Look it up, lots of info on the net.

    – A new unmarked black Van showing up at last minute was just plain wierd. No first aid or trauma response actions. No reverence for dead, I don’t know what it was but if that was an ambulance they suck, and not a little.

    – High Caliber very loud and lethal machine gun fire from the sky has just killed more then ten people in less than a minute in an active combat zone. Less than five minutes later you bring your kids to the scene to have fun watching dead bodies loaded. how bad are Iraqi parenting skills or could these have been terror hostages? Makes more sense to me. I don’t have proof but we’re all working on speculation here.

    – Does a reporter ONLY work for a news agency. Is it impossible for them to do double duty, or have complex loyalties.

  4. 4
    Jake Squid says:

    Well that’s just a repulsive comment.

  5. 5
    Korolev says:

    From what I can tell in the video:

    1) The people on the ground did not appear to be carrying weapons. I have watched the video very closely. Maybe the pilots had a better view, but the video shows most of the men carrying nothing, and two of the men carrying what appears to be cameras. A later investigation from the US army showed that the pilots probably said the camera was an RPG.

    2) There was fighting in the area at the time. An armored column was moving up and had been recently attacked. Remember, this is 2007 – the time when the fighting was the most severe.

    3) The pilots were clearly anxious to fire at something. This is not unusual. In the Gulf War in 1991, US A-10 pilots were so hopped up and tense and ready for action that they fired upon a British APC, killing a few UK soldiers. From the audio, I’d wager that these pilots were similarily “aching” for action, looking for a target.

    4) There were children in the van. I dispute the claim that they were “clearly visible”. If they weren’t highlighted in the video with captions, I would not have known they were there. A tense pilot probably would not have noticed them on the grainy footage.

    Are these pilots evil? Did they knowningly fire on civilians? In part yes, in part no. There was a lot of fighting going on. But they probably were too eager to shoot. What they did was, from what I can see, clearly wrong and the Army did attempt to try to cover it up by claiming the helicopters were fired upon when they were clearly not. The pilots should probably be fired from ever flying a helicopter, compensation should be payed, at the very least. Probably a lot more than that needs to be done.

    One last thing – these pilots were pretty bad. But please don’t go demonizing all the US troops. A fair number are bad, but I’d wager the US army is no where near as nasty as the insurgents. Doesn’t excuse what those helicopter pilots did, but it’s something to keep in mind.

    Also – remember the US troops on the ground who rushed those two children to hopsital, carrying them in their arms. Remember what those pilots did, to be sure. But don’t forget the prompt and urgent delivery of those children to the hospital. Would the insurgents have done something similar? I think not.

  6. 6
    Ampersand says:

    Korolev, who said the children were clearly visible? They were nearly impossible to see.

    I don’t think the pilots were evil. If I had to guess, I’d say they were ordinary (as am I). Ordinary people aren’t evil, and aren’t saints; we just get their idea of what the right thing to do is by looking at what our peers around us are doing.

    The problem is, given the right (wrong) institutional set-up, perfectly ordinary people are capable of doing horrific, evil things. As these soldiers did. I don’t think it’s helpful to demonize these soldiers, and I don’t think my post demonized them.

    I do think that ordinary people committing awful acts is an unavoidable part of warfare. So the best way to avoid it is to avoid making war in the first place, whenever possible.

    The tragedy here is that the Iraq War was avoidable. I only hope we get the hell out of there as soon as is possible without the whole house of cards collapsing.

    Also – remember the US troops on the ground who rushed those two children to hopsital, carrying them in their arms.

    It was nice of the American soldiers to run to take the kids to be treated, but let’s not pretend it was an astounding feat of heroism. Any decent person, in that situation, would have done exactly the same thing.

    But stopping to help (as far as we know) strangers who have been shot in the street, when you don’t know the situation and don’t know what danger you might be putting yourself in — that’s extraordinary.

    And, in hindsight, horribly foolish, and I wish they hadn’t stopped.

    Still, if we’re going to credit any of the people in the video with great heroism, I’d say the credit goes to the men in the van, who stopped to try and bring the wounded man to safety.

  7. 7
    AlanSmithee says:

    Secretly, I wish I were a goldfish.

  8. 8
    AlanSmithee says:

    I am an angry, incoherent man.

  9. 9
    RonF says:

    If you take a look at the Jawa Report on this you’ll see that there was a man carrying what appears to be an RPG launcher who was not one of the cameramen – although for some odd reason Wikileaks did not show a slow-motion highlighted closeup of him like they did of what they report to be cameramen.

    Kevin, I imagine that shooting at someone who shows up in a marked ambulance (the equivalent of the Red Cross in the Middle East is the Red Crescent Society) and assists wounded is against the rules of engagement. But what this looks like is more insurgents showing up.

    I don’t see as supportable the proposition that the pilots knowlingly fired on civilians. The Mahdi don’t wear uniforms. Someone with an automatic weapon or an RPG launcher in a combat zone does not get the presumption of being a civilian. Neither do the people accompanying them. And the occupants of an unmarked van showing up to aid enemy combatants are legitimately presumed to be enemy combatants. If they were not, then the outcome here is tragic. But that doesn’t make the pilots murderers.

    I don’t think my post demonized them.

    Neither do I.

    It was nice of the American soldiers to run to take the kids to be treated, but let’s not pretend it was an astounding feat of heroism. Any decent person, in that situation, would have done exactly the same thing.

    That would be a function on what expectation there was in that situation of being fired upon by the enemy from the surrounding buildings. If it was known at that time that there was no risk then you are right – heroism is off the table. But as you point out, decency and morality is not. In fact, the enemy in this conflict is well known for inflicting casualties on civilians, waiting for people to come to their aid and then firing upon or bombing them.

  10. 10
    Kevin Moore says:

    The fact you may be a pacifist or root for the enemy does not remove this calm and professional demeanor.

    The fact that you root for the death of unarmed civilians and killing children does not mitigate the enormity of this atrocity.

  11. 11
    RonF says:

    Which is why wars should happen only as a last resort.

    Hear, hear.

  12. 12
    Kevin Moore says:

    But what this looks like is more insurgents showing up.

    It looks like people showing up to drag away one of the wounded. There is no way to tell they are insurgents or concerned civilians or a TV crew with a van or the ice cream truck.

  13. 13
    Doug S. says:

    They hate us, in part, because we slaughter them from helicopters. That’s not unreasonable of them.

    Oderint dum metuant.

    (Note: I am not being ironic.)

  14. 14
    Kevin Moore says:

    Our troops have a job to do, after all – defending our country from those countries who would defend their country from our country – and if we hounded and nit-picked them after every little massacre, gang rape or atrocity, they’d hardly get any killing done at all.

    Via Fafblog

  15. 15
    Robert says:

    Lucius Accius FTW. Doug can collect the statue on his behalf.

  16. 16
    Doug S. says:

    If you’re going to invade a country and change its government, by Jove, do it right! Admit that you’re a foreign occupying power there to impose your will by force, and ruthlessly oppress anyone who gets in your way.

  17. 17
    Ampersand says:

    Doug, how will making the average Iraqi citizen hate and fear the US serve our stated purposes in Iraq?

  18. 18
    Ampersand says:

    Kevin, I imagine that shooting at someone who shows up in a marked ambulance (the equivalent of the Red Cross in the Middle East is the Red Crescent Society) and assists wounded is against the rules of engagement. But what this looks like is more insurgents showing up.

    Ron, I don’t think you understand what the Rules Of Engagement say.

    c. HOSTILE FORCES: NO forces have been declared hostile. U.S. forces are not authorized to engage forces based solely on uniform, appearance, or possession of weapons.

    d. HOSTILE ACTORS: You may engage persons who commit hostile acts or show hostile intent with the minimum force necessary to counter the hostile act or demonstrated hostile intent and to protect U.S. forces, designated non-U.S. forces, nongovernment organizations (IRC [International Red Cross], Doctors Without Borders, etc.), and unarmed civilians.

    e. A Hostile Act is an attack or other use of force against the United States, U.S. forces, U.S. nationals, their property, designated non-U.S. forces, foreign nationals, and their property as outlined in part d.

    Nowhere do the ROE say that it’s acceptable to kill unarmed people attempting to aid a wounded man. That’s not even remotely what they say. There is no plausible interpretation of the ROE which makes shooting the people in the van acceptable.

    That said… it doesn’t matter. Suppose you were right, and that shooting unarmed people trying to help the wounded is perfectly okay according to the US’s ROE. (Which makes us a brutal, horrible, inhuman empire, but if that’s what you believe about the US, okay.)

    Would that make shooting unarmed people helping a wounded man the right thing to do, morally?

    Even if you ignore the gross immorality of shooting people who were presenting no threat at all, what about “hearts and minds”? In general, what do you think Iraqis who have watched this video thought of it?

    Is shooting down people trying to help the wounded making it harder, or easier, for the US’s enemies to gain recruits?

    Is shooting down people trying to help the wounded likely to increase, or decrease, the US’s ability to reach cooperative agreements with elected Iraqi officials?

    Is shooting down people trying to help the wounded likely to increase, or decrease, the viability of demagoguing against the USA as a strategy for folks running for elected office in Iraq?

  19. 19
    Robert says:

    We don’t know that they were trying to “help the wounded”. More to the point, the soldiers living through this in real-time, rather than watching it freeze-framed repeatedly over a period of days, don’t know that. That’s the trouble with a legalistic approach to warfare; it depends on an ability to discern motive that the criminal justice system often can produce through ex post facto review, but that soldiers in the field often cannot.

  20. 20
    Doug S. says:

    Doug, how will making the average Iraqi citizen hate and fear the US serve our stated purposes in Iraq?

    Semi-sarcastic answer: It worked one hundred years ago!

    More realistically, I don’t think we can achieve all of our stated purposes. I strongly suspect that the only way Iraq can be ruled is by an iron-fisted dictator or the equivalent. Saddam, or Somalia. As Thomas Hobbes said, tyranny is generally preferable to anarchy, and I don’t see any in-between status (such as representative democracy) lasting in Iraq for very long. (You’ll either have a weak government at the mercy of local militias, or “one man, one vote, one time” and a new dictator.)

    Going into Iraq was stupid, and now that we’re there, I don’t know what to do about it. Afghanistan, on the other hand, we had to go into. (My father says that we should pull out and let Afghanistan fall, on the theory that they won’t be stupid enough to attack the U.S. again – and if they do, we’ll come back and hit them even harder.)

  21. 21
    Ampersand says:

    We don’t know that they were trying to “help the wounded”.

    Okay, I guess you can come up with some narrative in which they were planning to steal the wounded man’s clothes or something. Nonetheless, by far the most plausible interpretation of unarmed people picking up a wounded man and carrying him to their vehicle is that they intended to assist him.

    More to the point, the soldiers living through this in real-time, rather than watching it freeze-framed repeatedly over a period of days, don’t know that.

    Actually, that’s less to the point (if the point is what I wrote in the OP). Even if you believe that the soldiers did absolutely nothing wrong, that just supports my point:

    Tragedies like this are inevitable in war, and particularly in an occupation. […] Which is why wars should happen only as a last resort. War of choice is a monstrous evil. People who favor the US going to avoidable wars are favoring a situation in which — inevitably — innocent civilians are going to be shot to death by US troops, over and over again. Think about the two children who got shot while witnessing their own fathers being shot to death. That’s the inevitable byproduct of war.

    Let’s suppose you’re right, and it’s unreasonable to expect soldiers on the ground (well, in the air) to refrain from shooting unarmed people carrying the wounded.

    That just makes my argument stronger. Even in the best case scenario, where soldiers do only what you say is reasonable, war inevitably leads to horrible tragedy on a large scale. That makes supporting wars of choice even more monstrously wrong.

  22. 22
    Robert says:

    Well, it means that wars of choice need to be worth it.

  23. 23
    little light says:

    Korolev @5:

    Also – remember the US troops on the ground who rushed those two children to hopsital, carrying them in their arms. Remember what those pilots did, to be sure. But don’t forget the prompt and urgent delivery of those children to the hospital. Would the insurgents have done something similar? I think not.

    Did you watch and listen to the video, Korolev? Yes, the two soldiers who grabbed the wounded children to carry them out did a fine thing, and the soldier on the radio–it may have been one of those two–begging for authorization to rush those kids to the hospital was commendable. But that soldier’s request was denied. There was the soldier on the radio declaring, well, that’s what you get for bringing kids to a battle–in your own neighborhood, and a battle you aren’t fighting in, mind you–and there was the officer who came on when the guy on the ground insisted on medevac for the kids who said no, we will not be rushing them to the hospital, leave them for the Iraqi police to take to the further hospital on their own time, thanks. They were not promptly or urgently transported to the hospital by our troops. And really? Insurgents fight against our guys, therefore they must not believe in helping wounded children? What kind of monsters do you think they are?

    Amp @18: Just–yes.

    Robert @19:

    We don’t know that they were trying to “help the wounded”.

    No, we just have video of a van full of people unconnected to the first altercation pulling up to the scene of a wounded, dying man crawling for shelter, and two of them unarmed and jumping out of the van, rushing to the crawling wounded man, and picking him up to carry him into the van. They may have just wanted his delicious organs, or liked the sound of screaming, or planned to move him to right next to their van and then drive away because it was hilarious.
    Seriously? We have. Video. Of a van full of civilians, with their children, driving along only to swerve over at the sight of a crawling, wounded man, screech to a halt, and then jump out and run to pick him up and carry him. And they’re unarmed, and carrying a wounded man toward their van. What do you think they were trying to do, play polo? Use the dying photographer as a weapon of some kind?
    What do you honestly think the helo crew could have considered as an alternative explanation? That they were bad unarmed people trying to carry a wounded stranger to safety? For sinister reasons? Those men in the van could have been murderers. We can’t know that. But what we do know is that neither did the helo gunners. All they knew cannot have been much more than all we know: the sight of a van seemingly unconnected to the prior altercation screeching to a halt at the sight of a wounded, unarmed photographer and rushing to carry him to safety. It doesn’t matter whether they were good people or not–they were unarmed people helping carry a wounded man out of the line of fire at the risk of their own lives and the lives of the children in their care. And, for whatever reason, this was interpreted as a kill-worthy transgression. Were they “insurgents?” I don’t know. At the moment of the engagement–which is to say shooting them in their backs from the sky while they were unarmed and had their hands full carrying a wounded man to safety–they weren’t insurging, now were they.

    Doug S. @20:

    Semi-sarcastic answer: It worked one hundred years ago!

    As a Filipina-American? No it didn’t. We don’t forget the atrocities of that war. We just got even worse from the Japanese occupation, and learned to be thankful for the backup.

  24. 24
    Doug S. says:

    As a Filipina-American? No it didn’t. We don’t forget the atrocities of that war.

    But the U.S. won that war, didn’t it?

  25. 25
    Sailorman says:

    I think Amp’s original point is more important than the particular video: Whether or not these people were soldiers (using 20/20 hindsight we know they were not), and whether or not the pilots were justified in shooting (using 20/20 hindsight many people suspect they were not)… the END result is that some civilians got shot. And this is a near-guarantee for pretty much any land war that has civilians nearby.

    It may still be worth it. But it’s a cost that should be acknowledged and addressed, not hidden and ignored.

  26. 26
    little light says:

    For definitions of “win,” I suppose, Doug, definitions that include taking heavy, heavy casualties for the enviable prize of…what, again? Occupying a not-particularly-profitable foreign country and making its population really angry and creating a black mark on the record of America’s military conduct forever? Losing so many men for this fairly useless goal–the Philippines posed no threat of any kind to the US or its interests, and had in fact been allied with US forces in the effort to kick the Spanish out–that they had to upgrade the basic grunt sidearm just to feel better about how bad it was?
    Let’s do a tally, shall we? Lots of dead and traumatized people. A huge black mark on America’s moral authority for the sake of an imperialistic invasion and occupation that many Americans didn’t support. The diplomatic consequences of a public, violent doublecross of allies who had just been fighting alongside US forces. Wrecking the infrastructure of a sovereign nation so much that it is still a site of violence and unrest, disrupting the lives of everyone there and making big enough messes the US feels the need to go in and do cleanup diplomatically and forcefully more than a century later. For what? Lower tariffs on imported coconuts? An extra black eye for the already beaten Spanish? Such overwhelming animus that the only thing that made it forgivable was not being as bad as the Bataan Death March? That’s a win to you?

    The US didn’t win that war any more than it won in Vietnam, and you know it.

  27. 27
    Ampersand says:

    James Fallows makes the same point I did, but better:

    …as with Abu Ghraib, there will be a strong temptation just to blame (or exonerate) the lower-level people who pulled the triggers, but that deflects us from real questions of responsibility.

    There will be lot of those “real questions” to consider, from rules of engagement to the apparent cover up of the footage. But the threshold point I meant to start with is this: The very high likelihood of such “tragedies” occurring is a very strong reason not to get into wars of this sort.

    By “of this sort” I mean: twilight-zone urban warfare, not to mention “discretionary” or “preventive” wars, and situations in which a heavily armed-and-armored occupying force of foreigners tries uneasily to mix with a population overwhelmingly of a different race and religion and language. For their own survival, the occupiers need to be hyper-suspicious and ever alert — even though today’s prevalent Counter Insurgency doctrine (“COIN”) warns of the self-defeating consequences of behaving this way. (Indeed, a mounting debate about the COIN approach in Afghanistan is whether the effort not to seem distant from the local population is exposing US soldiers to too much risk.) It is a situation with enormous potential for miscalculation, misunderstanding, and tragedy. And therefore one to avoid if you have any choice at all.

    It is right to be shocked at the violence in this footage, as we are shocked when an especially hard hit in a football game leaves a player motionless on the field. But the violence behind that hard hit is one millimeter away from what the football players are praised and rewarded for doing. 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.”

    We could not know that this episode would occur. But we could be sure that something like it would. It’s not even a matter of “To will the end is to will the means.” Rather the point is: You enter these circumstances, sooner or later you get these results.

    A failure of tragic imagination is what I most criticized in war supporters in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, and it was much of the reason I opposed the war. We can’t do anything about that decision now. But this new footage is worth bearing in mind as we face the next decision — about bombing Iran, let’s say; or extending the anti-Taliban fight into Pakistan; or how long to remain in Afghanistan.

  28. 28
    Robert says:

    Little Light – your response is precisely why second-guessing after the fact isn’t applicable. You list all of the things that the soldiers must have known – but the soldiers didn’t in fact know any of them. The soldiers didn’t know that the wounded guy was a cameraman. The soldiers didn’t know that the wounded guy was unarmed. They didn’t know that the people stopping had children in the car. They didn’t know that the car that stopped was unconnected to the original group. They didn’t know that the rescue group was trying to carry them to safety.

    You know all of these things, because after the fact it becomes possible to establish them. The soldiers didn’t know any of them.

  29. 29
    RonF says:

    No, Amp, I didn’t know what the ROE were/are. Thanks for the citation! Now, for some reason my audio isn’t working when I watch the video, so did the pilots ask for permission to engage (e.g., shoot) the van and the people that came out of it, or did they do that on their own?

    I would say that the pilots would likely state that this shooting doesn’t fall under section (c) but under section (d) – as Robert points out, this happened in real time in the heat of battle while hostile action was going on. I don’t know what those pilots were thinking or what they thought they saw. It’s way too easy to Monday-morning quarterback in slow motion years after the fact. Waiting a second or two to shoot when you’re in combat may mean that either you or the fellow soldiers you’re out there to protect will die. You often don’t have time to think. You react. And as Amp points out, that means that in combat of this nature civilians will likely get killed and that’s one reason why you don’t do this kind of thing unless you’re absolutely forced to do so.

    I would differentiate the case of the people in the van vs. the Reuters journalists. The journalists were closely accompanying people with weapons in a combat area and getting killed doing that is a known risk. You can’t expect that opposition forces will be able to tell that you’re not a hostile actor even though the guy next to you is a hostile actor.

  30. 30
    Doug S. says:

    For definitions of “win,” I suppose, Doug, definitions that include taking heavy, heavy casualties for the enviable prize of…what, again?

    No arguments here; fighting the Philippean-American war was, indeed, a stupid thing for the U.S. to have done. All I claim is that when the fighting stopped, the Philippines was a relatively peaceful territory of the United States.

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  32. 31
    RonF says:

    Well, now. How very interesting. WikiLeaks appears to have edited that video before it was published. Among other edits, they specifically edited out a portion of the video prior to the start of what they showed. That section of the video showed the appearance of a black van in that area and contained audio of American forces stating that it had dropped off the armed men that you see in the extract given on WikiLeaks. They also apparently edited out a section that shows the van and has audio of American forces identifying the inhabitants of the van as recovering not just bodies but weapons. You can see these sections of the video at http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/201985.php .

    You may disagree with the commentary – that’s fine by me. But WikiLeaks apparently is more interested in presenting a particular narrative than they are in presenting the facts and letting people come to their own conclusions.

  33. 32
    Ampersand says:

    Well, now. How very interesting. WikiLeaks appears to have edited that video before it was published.

    Ron, you might have know the video was edited if you read my original post, in which I said:

    What’s below is footage edited by Wikileaks; a longer, unedited version is available at their site.

    Unless you’re going to say that editorializing is itself unethical, I don’t see anything unethical about simultaneously releasing both the editorialized footage and the unedited footage. I don’t know if you’ve visited the Wikileaks site, but the unedited footage is prominently presented on the front page of their site.

    (By the way, have you ever criticized the makers of the ACORN video for refusing to release their unedited footage? Has any conservative done so, ever?)

    That section of the video showed the appearance of a black van in that area and contained audio of American forces stating that it had dropped off the armed men that you see in the extract given on WikiLeaks.

    It doesn’t even look like the same van. The van shown earlier in the footage appears to be matte black everywhere, even though it was driving in sunlight; the van that was shot up later in the footage has light-colored paint (or possibly light-colored dust) covering the roof. That could be a trick of the light, but it’s also plausible that there’s more than one dark-colored van in the city.

    They also apparently edited out a section that shows the van and has audio of American forces identifying the inhabitants of the van as recovering not just bodies but weapons.

    Contrary to your claim, that bit of audio is in both the full and the edited Wikileaks video, which I’m beginning to doubt you’ve watched. (It’s nine minutes into the edited video).

    To be more accurate than you’re being, the soldier says that the van is “possibly” there to pick up weapons, as the van arrives; the soldier never says he sees any weapons being picked up. On the unedited video, the only thing the people in the van can be seen to pick up is the injured man. This is presumably why, by the time the van is shot at, none of the soldiers are saying anything about weapons; they say the men from the van are picking up a person the soldiers refer to as “wounded” and as a body at different times.

    Finally, it’s bleakly funny that on the text narration of the right-wing video you link to, the two shot children are referred to as “insurgents.”

    * * *

    Let’s return to my points.

    First of all, nothing you’ve said changes that the army’s press release for this shooting was extremely deceptive.

    Second of all, you still haven’t answered my questions in comment #18.

    Finally, you’ve never addressed my point that this sort of event is inevitable in war, and that’s a strong reason never to get into a war of choice.

  34. 33
    RonF says:

    No, shooting people trying to recover wounded is not a good thing for the reasons you give in #18 and more. But the thought process on the part of the American forces seems to be “Here are the guys who have been transporting insurgents around to try to kill us.” Sure, it’s not like you can read the license plate number on that van to tell it’s the same one. There’s an issue of “who were those guys, really?” But that’s a different thought process than “Oh, here are some guys coming to pick up wounded, let’s kill them.”

    You’re right. I haven’t addressed the issue of the Army’s handling of this at all. It’s not something I was concerned about discussing.

    Finally, you’ve never addressed my point that this sort of event is inevitable in war, and that’s a strong reason never to get into a war of choice.

    From my post #29:

    And as Amp points out, that means that in combat of this nature civilians will likely get killed and that’s one reason why you don’t do this kind of thing unless you’re absolutely forced to do so.

    “This kind of thing” = “war”, regardless of whether you parse it as a “war of choice” or a “war of necessity”.

  35. 34
    RonF says:

    In the 2nd Amendment debates there are web sites that focus on civilian use of firearms for self defense. Sometimes you see commentary that cites specific examples of such actions as they occur and appear in the news and congratulates the people who have done so. The question has come to my mind “Would I shoot someone if I was armed and they presented a lethal threat to me or my family?”

    I believe that I could. But I would not accept congratulations for it. Killing is a fearsome thing. It may be something you have to do. But it is not something you should seek an opportunity to do, even if necessity demands it. It is not something to take pride in. It is something you should seek to avoid by just about any means possible. As Winston Churchill, a man who fought a brutal war, once said (and I likely paraphrase), “better to jaw, jaw, jaw then war, war, war”.

  36. 35
    RonF says:

    I no longer see an option to edit after I post.

  37. 36
    Ampersand says:

    About the editing — in the next few months, I hope to get the software running “Alas” updated, which will hopefully fix that problem and others.

    Re “that’s one reason why you don’t do this kind of thing unless you’re absolutely forced to do so” — I stand corrected! Sorry about that.

    As far as the choices made by these particular soldiers, I accept that’s something you’re very interested in. I’m not. I think that viewed objectively, they made some bad choices; and I think it’s very understandable that they’d do so, under the circumstances. My point is that they shouldn’t be in these circumstances at all.

  38. 37
    Jake Squid says:

    I hope to get the software running “Alas” updated, which will hopefully fix that problem and others.

    Like the wacky new date/timestamp?