OnPoint: Iraq, from the air
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Surely the story is the determined cover-up against a media organisation as much as what the video shows now that we finally get to see it.
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Yeh, so what is the story? I liked Keiths approach to the post although the use of " genuine, reasonable, yet catastrophic mistake?" was a summation that was way too lite.
We can't go on screaming our heads off at kid soldiers because they are set up to fail, and the context of sitting in a hellhole needs to be at least considered by typists such as ourselves.
I mean could you even imagine being there? What day would your nerves just start shooting?
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I mean could you even imagine being there? What day would your nerves just start shooting?
That clearly wasn't nerves though. Complete detachment from the humanity of it. Joy at how accurate their shooting was.
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Hi James,
Thanks for sharing your opinion. I have to take exception to it though.
First off lets start with this....
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/55644/collateral%20damage.gif
Pretty clear and unadulterated murder of a civilian.
I read today that the 17 min video was taken from a 38 min video that made it clearer that the action in question was taken amid clashes in the neighborhood; it wasn’t just Bobby and Billy in a chopper wasting some people. Also the longer version made it clearer that one of the people was carrying RPG. An RPG is a sure sign someone is upto no good.
The video was shot on July 12, 2007, over Eastern Baghdad, a war zone, in the middle of the surge. If you are going to walk around in a war zone, during a much publicized “surge”, in a neighborhood during on going clashes, carrying an AK 47 and an RPG when the US is well known to be extensively using drones and attack helicopters, I am sorry, it probably isn’t going to end well very well for you. Ditto for walking close to someone with an AK47 or an RPG in that situation. The key bit is “with an AK 47 and an RPG during on going clashes”.
This is part of a bigger discussion but it's not a warzone, its their country, their neighborhood and their community. The US Govt. has brought a war to their neighborhood for completely made up reasons and yet we can just hand wave it all away as shouldn't have been in a warzone . If standing on a street corner holding a camera and tripod, while US forces are a considerable distance away after hearing gunfire is grounds for being minced, then I don't know what to say.
I'm reminded of this...
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,138376,00.htmlAs to their possession of arms, I would refer to the official US military investigation regarding this but the scene photos showing the RPG are redacted so as to be useless.
I still contend there were no weapons on them at all and that i would err on the side of 'cover-up' if any weapons are found considering the intense amount of official lies regarding this incident.
After 7 years in Iraq and longer in Afghanistan, there must have been hundreds of thousands of individual combat actions on the ground and in the air. The number of incidents where soldiers or airmen have screwed up have been few in proportion. In order to show any kind of pattern of behavior or systemic issues in the US military, there would need to be thousands of such incidents and nothing like that has come out and that number of incidents could never, ever be kept under wraps. The US military and Govt. can’t keep secrets of any kind, especially not this kind of information in the resent political/media environment, so if wrongful identifications and shootings etc. were happening in significant numbers, we would know about it for sure.
You're not looking hard enough, but to be fair, its really is the US media's fault more than anything. Investigative journalism is dead.
Let me quote General Stanley McChrystal
“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat."
(apologies for the NYTIMES link, but I couldn't find any other decent source ) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/world/asia/27afghan.html
Please, I implore you to also read this link.
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...and jesus stop with the "liberal" arguement christaan,it's poor, the causes of this war lay predomiantly in circles who haven't had a liberal thought in their lifetime.
Kia ora Jeremy!
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The US Govt. has brought a war to their neighborhood for completely made up reasons and yet we can just hand wave it all away as shouldn't have been in a warzone.
What did one of the crew say when he heard there were children in the van? "Their fault for bringing kids to a battle"?
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...and jesus stop with the "liberal" arguement christaan,it's poor, the causes of this war lay predomiantly in circles who haven't had a liberal thought in their lifetime.
Shall we count how many Democrats voted for it? How many members of the UK Labour Party? Shall we pretend the Labour government in NZ didn't send troops? Christopher Hitchens? Hallo?
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What did one of the crew say when he heard there were children in the van? "Their fault for bringing kids to a battle"?
Yup, that was the reaction to finding out children were in the van that they wasted.
Further on in the video ( the full length version ) they send a Hellfire down to a house. There is an innocent pedestrian walking by it who gets killed in the explosion.
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Shall we count how many Democrats voted for it? How many members of the UK Labour Party? Shall we pretend the Labour government in NZ didn't send troops? Christopher Hitchens? Hallo?
If you want to lump the whole world into two camps - liberal and not liberal I suppose you're entitled to do that. What I like about this post is that it's trying to excavate some detail. As for sending troops - here's Wikipedia:
The New Zealand government opposed and officially condemned the 2003 Invasion of Iraq by the United States-led "Coalition of the Willing" and did not contribute any combat forces. However in accordance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483 New Zealand contributed a small engineering and support force to assist in post-war reconstruction and provision of humanitarian aid. The engineers returned home in October, 2004 and New Zealand is still represented in Iraq by liaison and staff officers working with coalition forces.
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Shall we count how many Democrats voted for it? How many members of the UK Labour Party? Shall we pretend the Labour government in NZ didn't send troops? Christopher Hitchens? Hallo?
Liberal really is a useless word in these discussions without definition. I wouldn't consider a bunch of these people liberal, but a right wing aquaintance wouldn't consider any of them liberal - for entirely opposite reasons.
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Also the longer version made it clearer that one of the people was carrying RPG. An RPG is a sure sign someone is up to no good.
I'll need a pretty impeccable source on this before I'm willing to conceed any of the people in that group were carrying RPG's.
The video was shot on July 12, 2007, over Eastern Baghdad, a war zone, in the middle of the surge. If you are going to walk around in a war zone, during a much publicized “surge”, in a neighborhood during on going clashes...when the US is well known to be extensively using drones and attack helicopters, I am sorry, it probably isn’t going to end well very well for you.
Just...wow. Would you care to elaborate on where the occupants of Eastern Baghdad should have gone that might have been safe? Like Syria, perhaps?
After 7 years in Iraq and longer in Afghanistan, there must have been hundreds of thousands of individual combat actions on the ground and in the air. The number of incidents where soldiers or airmen have screwed up have been few in proportion. In order to show any kind of pattern of behavior or systemic issues in the US military, there would need to be thousands of such incidents and nothing like that has come out and that number of incidents could never, ever be kept under wraps.
To use your words, Eastern Baghdad is a 'war zone'.
WW2: 1st Sept 1939 - 2nd Sept 1945. Six years.
Major US involvement in Vietnam: 31st Jan 1965 to 15th Jan 1973, approximately. Eight Years.
Gulf War 2: 20th March 2003 to present. Seven years.
Care to speculate as to when we might see the end of 'combat operations'?
It is estimated that 7,000+ civilians lost their lives during the first phase - 20th March to April 30th 2003.
Here's a list of just the miltary-on-military mistakes for roughly that period.
It is further estimated that there has been a minimum of 92,489 Iraqi civilian deaths up to June 2009.
Still, freedom isn't free, right?
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That clearly wasn't nerves though. Complete detachment from the humanity of it. Joy at how accurate their shooting was.
Those guys sounded like they were shitting themselves,o.k they weren't screaming but they were convinced shit was about to happen to them.
Maybe you get a detachment from humanity when you start imagining your death.....and they would have known a few dead workmates. -
Shall we count how many Democrats voted for it? How many members of the UK Labour Party? Shall we pretend the Labour government in NZ didn't send troops? Christopher Hitchens? Hallo?
I can't help think you know the answer to this. These parties are just one half of a two party race that dominates the political interests of their respective countries. While liberalism is thankfully found within the camps of these "Centre rightish parties but not so centre right as the other mob" they are lead by leaders who have gained power by not enhancing their liberal credentials but subduing them.
Politics in these countries have been conducted in an age of strong right wing influence across all competitive parties.
Where is liberalism in recent politics? It's slowly creeping back not out of popularity but necessity. Still the staining of the word "liberal" in the last decades makes it a difficult term to use without first dealing with a reaction of kneejerkish assumptions about your true intentions.
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It is further estimated that there has been a minimum of 92,489 Iraqi civilian deaths up to June 2009.
The Lancet surveys, despite the millions spent by the right to try and demolish their methodology and just about everything else, stands untouched as research into violent deaths in Iraq. It's horrific numbers (and the percentage caused by direct US military action) were further backed by the OBR research from 2007.
The UK government quietly accepted the second Lancet survey's numbers as accurate at least a couple of year back.
The number of incidents where soldiers or airmen have screwed up have been few in proportion. In order to show any kind of pattern of behavior or systemic issues in the US military, there would need to be thousands of such incidents and nothing like that has come out
Really James? I know you're in the US and this sort of stuff simply doesn't come out, but guess what..there have been, over the past 7 years, maybe not thousands but very certainly hundreds of these sorts of incidents reported.
To quote a soldier on the ground in Iraq:
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.
If attacks and terror rained against civilians were as rare as you'd have us believe, the numbers of Iraqi civilian dead, before the outbreak of civil war in 2006 and the huge Sunni vs. Shi'ite slaughter would've have been much lower, but the best empirical evidence we have is that the numbers were in the hundreds of thousands already at that point and that at least half were a direct result of US military action.
And there is buckets of paper and data out there now that underlines that a policy of callous disregard for Iraqi civilian life was part and parcel of the way the US military did business in Iraq at least up to the arrive of Petraeus in 2007.
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James: They received the green light to engage before an RPG was identified.
are we certain it was even an RPG? looked like a big telescopic lens on a camera to me. not really pointy enough to be an RPG </still needs to watch vid again>
Still, freedom isn't free, right?
not when it's backrupting america...
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are we certain it was even an RPG? looked like a big telescopic lens on a camera to me.
This point has been noted by other commentators.
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But in the end, it is incomprehensibly stupid to be unmarked, carrying a large camera and tripod around with armed individuals, when Apache copters are overhead and are near an area where a gunfight had occurred
My opinion, but not my words. Those words were written by Firedoglake, a progressive blogger, so I think it is fair to say my view is hardly extreme. Check out the whole post here:
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/39215
Congratulations to Keith on an even handed post of a difficult topic and good follow up (Don't know that I did you any favors with a comment like that from me on this blog!!)
As far as whether or not they had enough justification to engage, having AK 47s is more than enough justification. Firedoglake again:
Regardless, no one is allowed to be armed except for Iraqi police and Coalition forces. There is no such thing as an armed Iraqi escort for journalists. My only guess is he underestimated how quickly and deadly the situation can become if he were to hang around with armed insurgents
Simon, there may well have been hundreds of suspect incidents, where the US military's ROE were either bent or broken and deaths resulted, but that is out of how many missions? Probably an average of hundreds of missions per day over 7 years and longer in Afghanistan, a hell of a lot of missions. Several hundred suspect incidents is a bloody small % and proof that the US military as a whole has been very disciplined in the sandbox, as much as that might be difficult for far too many to accept.
War is horrible, no doubt about it, but Iraqi's has a shot at a future now. It didn't when Hussein was there. How many people would Hussein's regime have killed since 2003 if he was still in power? If he continued his average, probably tens of thousands at least as well as continuing to brutalize the entire population. And we would have Iran and Iraq both with nutcases in charge both racing to go nuclear. Nice. Leaving Hussein in place had a lot of drawbacks that never seem to get considered in discussions like these. It was hardly a picture perfect situation that 'ole Dubyah went over and stuffed up. It was already a mess.
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I understood the Lancet survey covered all mortaility.
Uncharming compilation of GI stories on the effective ROE here.
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It seems to me that the question of whether an RPG was actually there isn't regarded as relevant in these 'Rules of Engagment'. What matters is whether something, anything, could be plausibly mistaken for one. If you're following James' line of thinking, then holding anything large in your hand at all is sufficient reason for you and everyone standing near you to be indiscriminately killed, and anyone who tries to help you, for that matter, whether they have children with them, whether they're family members or just people who believe in helping people. Doing anything other than hiding inside is sufficient provocation at any time. Even hiding inside isn't going to protect people from armour piercing rounds, of course, and there were dozens of surrounding buildings which appeared to have been hit too, in which there could have been people. Basically, if you haven't evacuated from Baghdad, then you deserve anything that happens to you.
Unlike Vietnam (where much the same sort of thing happened), the Americans have really kept their own body count down. A friend and I speculated before the war broke out just how many bodies would be required for the Americans to lose their bottle and GTFO. I settled on 10,000, based on the idea that about 5 times that number were lost in Vietnam before it was too much, and the politicians have most likely learned a lesson from that. There's a loooong way to go.
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How many people would Hussein's regime have killed since 2003 if he was still in power?
A lot less than was killed by the US led sanctions, which were estimated at killing half a million people during the 1990s.
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James, given your link's grip on the rules of war I'm not inclined to trust him on any fact. I notice the neither links nor anything about him that helps.
Just for staters: 'unmarked'? I think a uniform for non-combatants raises a number of problems.
I can't resist pointing out the Keith raised questions rather than answering them.
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are we certain it was even an RPG? looked like a big telescopic lens on a camera to me. not really pointy enough to be an RPG </still needs to watch vid again>
Yes, I think what was identified as an RPG was a camera lens. No, it wasn't pointy enough to be an RPG, but other kinds of rocket launchers don't look pointy.
They saw a guy observing something from behind cover with a large tubular object in his hand. This was my biggest reason for giving them the benefit of the doubt that it was a mistake. However, my point is that they were given the green light to engage *before* they saw this and everyone freaked out about an "RPG".
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How many people would Hussein's regime have killed since 2003 if he was still in power?
^^ Kyle.
And far more have died during the post 2003 American occupation, than the already awful numbers usually given for deaths under the Saddam regime.
Really James, you always seem to go back to the vile premise that the deaths of Iraqis under US care are somehow morally superior than those in the years before, under Saddam. The distinction is obscene.
I understood the Lancet survey covered all mortaility.
it did but it also broke down the percentage caused by direct US military action.
James, the number of dead speak for themselves. You simply don't get those sorts of numbers without ongoing action where civilians are targeted and retired American generals, in some numbers (including Jack Keane, one of the architects of the surge and retired but de-facto active) in 2006, were very vocal about the tactics used by their military which involved a callous and deliberate policy of disregard for Iraqi civilian life.
The real winner in all this is Iran. Not yet, despite your rose tinted vista, the Iraqi people who are still getting blown apart in some numbers, or who live in the millions offshore, or who's neighbourhoods were bloodily cleansed in 2005-07. We've just stopped hearing about the it all as the media has turned away. You can be optimistic, but you have to be realistic too, and Baghdad remains the most dangerous city in the world. It wasn't in 2002.
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Unlike Vietnam (where much the same sort of thing happened), the Americans have really kept their own body count down. A friend and I speculated before the war broke out just how many bodies would be required for the Americans to lose their bottle and GTFO. I settled on 10,000, based on the idea that about 5 times that number were lost in Vietnam before it was too much, and the politicians have most likely learned a lesson from that. There's a loooong way to go.
It was, in my opinion, the draft that decided things in Vietnam, politically speaking. Not the bodycount.
No-one really gives a stuff about poor kids too young to legally drink signing up. But if mommy and daddy's precious little middle-class sweetheart is called up to get their hands dirty, you'll start hearing some screaming.
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