OnPoint: Iraq, from the air
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If you don't approach the facts with an open mind, if you don't take care to interpret the nuances and the details, to consider alternatives, then you're just pissing in the wind, wildly casting accusations about. What good does that do anyone?
Did you find that strawman in a packet of chips? This is getting irritating.
We looked at the evidence with an open mind. We interpreted the nuances. Shit, the Web has done little else for the last week. To still think after reviewing all the evidence that it could have been a honest mistake is not being "open minded". It's being obtuse.
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To still think after reviewing all the evidence that it could have been a honest mistake is not being "open minded". It's being obtuse.
Keith has made us think about it and some of the results of that process have been powerful (for me anyway). Thanks Keith. I wouldn't call you obtuse.
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I really couldn't be arsed commenting in this thread, for the simple reason it seems to me only an idiot could equivocate about whether or not this is an atrocity. However, the waffling going on has driven me to conclude - yet again - that PA is full of fools in love with the sound of their own sophisticated mendacity.
It must be interesting to look at the world only in black and white.
Did you find that strawman in a packet of chips? This is getting irritating.
Oh come on Giovanni. Tom placed all the blame on the soldiers firing the weapons, not the officers who authorised them to fire, not the chain of command above them, the rules of engagement that were written, and the politicians who put them there. It was a pretty crap analysis of an example that we have in front of us of USA military actions in Iraq, and Keith called him on it.
Keith has noted that the 'RPG' was seen after the authorisation to engage, so he's not exactly James Bremner mouthpiece on the matter.
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keith, i said waaay back on page two:
what this and other videos have given us is a small glimpse into what must be a widespread pattern of indiscriminate killing by US forces
and that this type of murder of civilians is commonplace in all war zones.
the more i think about it (since recovering from my original righteous anger), the more i think the young guys in that apache aren't to 'blame'. they bear responsibility for their actions, and if history is any measure they will be paid back in spades once the brutality of their actions weights in. the buffer separating them from their humanity will dissolve, and then... who knows. vietnam should be our guide there.
blaming them does nothing. it just moves the onus from the machine in which they operate to an individual who is in fact supported in their actions whether they make mistakes or not. in other words, these guys are able to do this because there is no immediate consequence to their actions (and we can have a bigger conversation about killing civilians when you actually have to bathe in their blood, but srebrenica undermines that, as falluja will in the fullness of time).
the real culprit is the cabal who moved this machine into iraq in the first place, and who continue to justify the slaughter with trite aphorisms about freedom.
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the real culprit is the cabal who moved this machine into iraq in the first place, and who continue to justify the slaughter with trite aphorisms about freedom.
And used the persistent state of fear they engineered to keep the Amerikan public writing those cheques.
And, boy, have the Bushies been giving our collective amygdala a workout. Especially Dick Cheney, who has proven himself an unmatched master of the dark art of fear-mongering.
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When our right brain is at Threat Level Red, we don't want to hear about a four-point plan to win the peace, or a list of damning statistics, or even a compelling, well-reasoned argument that the policies of Bush and Cheney are actually making us less safe. We want to get the feeling that everything is going to be all right.
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"At the deepest level," Dr. Siegel told me, "we react to fear as adults in much the same way we did as infants. It's primal. Human babies have the most dependent infancy of any species. Our survival depends on the caregiver. We instinctively look to authority figures to comfort us and keep us safe."
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Keith;
Worth a read
http://gawker.com/5512623/reuters-chief-shoots-down-story-on-killing-of-his-own-staffers-in-baghdadhuman rights lawyers and other experts who have viewed the footage say they have many concerns about how the pilots operated, particularly when it came to firing on the van, which was also carrying two children who were wounded in the attack.
"I don't think there's any question that this is a violation of the Geneva Conventions," said Clive Stafford-Smith, a U.S.-British human rights lawyer who runs the charity Reprieve,referring to the body of laws that governs armed conflict.
"There are two aspects to it — firstly it was clear that these people were unarmed or not fighting, and then there's the shooting of the wounded man as he was trying to crawl away and people were coming to help him," he told Reuters.
The Geneva Conventions state that protection must be given to those who "collect and care" for the wounded in a conflict"whether friend or foe", but lawyers said that principle appeared to have been abandoned in this case.
DESENSITISED KILLING
Chris Cobb-Smith, a former British army officer who has conducted investigations in war zones, said knowing exactly what rules of engagement the pilots were operating under was critical to understanding whether they had acted appropriately.But even then, he said, the decision to fire on the van as unarmed men came to help one of the wounded appeared to be a clear breach of the laws governing military conduct in war.
"Engaging the people picking up the wounded is outrageous,"he said. "That is the element that is blatant. That is against all humanitarian law and the rules of conflict — most definitely and without a doubt," he told Reuters.
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We looked at the evidence with an open mind. We interpreted the nuances. Shit, the Web has done little else for the last week. To still think after reviewing all the evidence that it could have been a honest mistake is not being "open minded". It's being obtuse.
I was aiming that one squarely at Tom. Hell, my conclusions about the video are probably fairly close to yours. Just trying to make my point to Tom that such conclusions are worthless if they're based on ideologies and not facts.
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3410,
Veteran of "Collateral Murder" Company Speaks Out
Josh Stieber, who is a former soldier of the “Collateral Murder” Company, says that the acts of brutality caught on film and recently released via Wikileaks are not isolated instances, but were commonplace during his tour of duty.
"A lot of my friends are in that video,” says Stieber. “After watching the video, I would definitely say that that is, nine times out of ten, the way things ended up. Killing was following military protocol. It was going along with the rules as they are."
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Washburn testified on a panel that discussed the rules of engagement (ROE) in Iraq, and how lax they were, to the point of being virtually nonexistent.
"During the course of my three tours, the rules of engagement changed a lot," Washburn's testimony continued, "The higher the threat the more viciously we were permitted and expected to respond. Something else we were encouraged to do, almost with a wink and nudge, was to carry 'drop weapons', or by my third tour, 'drop shovels'. We would carry these weapons or shovels with us because if we accidentally shot a civilian, we could just toss the weapon on the body, and make them look like an insurgent."
Hart Viges, a member of the 82nd Airborne Division of the Army who served one year in Iraq, told of taking orders over the radio.
"One time they said to fire on all taxicabs because the enemy was using them for transportation.... One of the snipers replied back, 'Excuse me? Did I hear that right? Fire on all taxicabs?' The lieutenant colonel responded, 'You heard me, trooper, fire on all taxicabs.' After that, the town lit up, with all the units firing on cars. This was my first experience with war, and that kind of set the tone for the rest of the deployment."
and
"There was a tall apartment complex, the only spot from where people could see over our perimeter," Hicks told Truthout, "There would be laundry hanging off the balconies, and people hanging out on the roof for fresh air. The place was full of kids and families. On rare occasions, a fighter would get atop the building and shoot at our passing vehicles. They never really hit anybody. We just knew to be careful when we were over by that part of the wall, and nobody did shit about it until one day a lieutenant colonel was driving down and they shot at his vehicle and he got scared. So he jumped through a bunch of hoops and cut through some red tape and got a C-130 to come out the next night and all but leveled the place. Earlier that evening when I was returning from a patrol the apartment had been packed full of people."
There is so much of this stuff out there, backed up by people who were there and available to anyone with 5 minutes and google, to make any claim to the video being an awful exception or to the discipline of American forces inane.
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3410,
And more, lots more
Yep. I get Keith's point, but this is possibly the worst possible example with which to illustrate it.
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but this is possibly the worst possible example with which to illustrate it.
I'm not sure if there are any good examples left. The militarisation of the US since WW2 to a place where the having performed service to the state now overrides the ethics of what they did when they were in uniform horrifies. I cringe everytime I hear an American say We thank you for your service.
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3410,
Oh, I just meant his point about the interpretation of leaked info generally. As you say, we're long past the point where any reasonable informed person could deny that the US military regularly behaves like this.
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Mainstream coverage about the ethics of the arseholes who are ultimately responsible - keeping innocent prisoners locked up to avoid losing face or momentum (h/t Juha).
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.
The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee.
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Tom placed all the blame on the soldiers firing the weapons, not the officers who authorised them to fire, not the chain of command above them, the rules of engagement that were written, and the politicians who put them there. It was a pretty crap analysis of an example that we have in front of us of USA military actions in Iraq, and Keith called him on it.
This is not what I said.
I said the primary moral responsibility for this massacre lies with the pilot, because he pulled the trigger. No one made him to do, ultimately it was a voluntary act by a volunteer soldier. My proposition is indeed a simple, uncompromising one, and that is we are all responsible for our actions. No man can surrender his morality with the defense that he was simply following orders, or the rules of engagement. Down that path lies Auschwitz. A moral man would have said "There are civilians down there, unable to engage". This key difference in the expectation of an innate morality between, say, our citizen soldiers and the Waffen SS is probably THE key moral justification for calling WWII a righteous war, because from this assumption of the innately moral individual springs every assumption our civilisation is built on.
So yes, for me the pilot is the primary guilty party for it was he who pulled the trigger when he had the choice as a moral being to refuse to do so. This, ultimately, is how change happens - when a moral man has the courage to say "no" to an immoral order or refuses to obey an immoral system.
That doesn't mean the officers who authorised them to fire, the chain of command above them, the lawyers who wrote the rules of engagement that were written, and the politicians who put them there are not also guilty. To paraphrase Bronowski: those men are guilty of arrogance, of dogma and of ignorance. What the video shows is the results of people who believe they have absolute knowledge with no test in reality. They are complicit in this crime as well.
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My proposition is indeed a simple, uncompromising one, and that is we are all responsible for our actions.
But this wasn't one man - it was a group of similarly brainwashed men in the army of a country that regards itself as above all others. I think simple and uncompromising might not be the most useful position to take here. But it certainly would make interesting fiction.
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So yes, for me the pilot is the primary guilty party for it was he who pulled the trigger when he had the choice as a moral being to refuse to do so.
I don't think the WW2 trials allocated primary responsibility to those that pulled the triggers. They said rather than orders can not be used as an excuse to evade responsibility for your actions.
Nuremberg and Tokyo made it very clear that the primary responsibility for the more wide ranging crimes that led to those orders still lies further up the chain of command, as the sweeping indictments in those trials made evident.
And that's the bigger issue here for me right now..those further up the chain in the US have, for decades, sidestepped the responsibility for all acts done in their name, funnelling all responsibility downwards. Look at My Lai, at Haditha and Abu Ghraib. The fundamental moral responsibility that command implies, all the way to the top, in the USA, no longer exists. And when there is such a ethical vacuum in the chain of command it rolls downward with some force.
None of which, of course, excuses those who pulled a trigger.
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I said the primary moral responsibility for this massacre lies with the pilot, because he pulled the trigger.
yeah, this is the nazi-hunter approach as well. you blame the individual because he has the choice to kill or not to kill.
this is inaccurate though. like simon says, the hierarchy moves responsibility for action to the individual, but... in every war since time immemorial the young man has reacted the same way, they do the killing then spend the rest of their life in regret.
it's why i put the blame on the machine, and those who put the war machine near civilians. a young man will *always* kill indiscriminately. they *like* it. but keep their permissive framework away, and no killing.
the blame for every death in iraq is actually cheney, because he wanted the machine to go there.
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Nuremberg and Tokyo made it very clear that the primary responsibility for the more wide ranging crimes that led to those orders still lies further up the chain of command, as the sweeping indictments in those trials made evident.
While assigning primary responsibility to the real enablers is fine in principle, under the circumstances of victor's justice it appears to have often been blunted by expediency. When WW2 Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tojo inadvertently referred to Emperor Hirohito's ultimate authority during his trial before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, "the American-led prosecution immediately arranged that he be secretly coached to revise his testimony". The decision to protect the Emperor had been taken, and the victors would ensure that "their" justice would produce a suitable outcome.
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The decision to protect the Emperor had been taken, and the victors would ensure that "their" justice would produce a suitable outcome.
And moved into absolute and final revisionism when the war in Korea, to protect a dictator who was little better than the one in the North, but was ours, demanded it and those who built the Japanese war machine had their guilt expunged were encouraged to ascend again by MacArthur.
It was when US military expediency took precedence over the lives of millions of dead across Asia in WW2.
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No one made him to do, ultimately it was a voluntary act by a volunteer soldier.
Soldiers get court-martialled for not following orders. From boot camp, they have it pounded into them that they have to follow orders, no matter what they think about them personally.
Sadly, when those orders turn out to have been a really bad idea, they end up being at the end of the line when it comes to apportioning blame, as the soldiers at My Lai, Haditha, Abu Ghraib, and no doubt these ones will find out.
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A S,
Soldiers get court-martialled for not following orders. From boot camp, they have it pounded into them that they have to follow orders, no matter what they think about them personally.
From my limited understanding, I believe that U.S. troops are allowed (are almost expected to in some cases) to refuse to obey illegal orders.
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Soldiers get court-martialled for not following orders. From boot camp, they have it pounded into them that they have to follow orders, no matter what they think about them personally.
Yes, soldiers and officers do get court martialled for not following orders, but that does not include, as A S mentions, illegal orders.
Additionally, it needs to be remembered the that ROE the soldiers are operating under are orders and cannot be overridden/altered normally, by anyone but the person who issued them - normally someone like, in NZ's case, the CDF e.g. not someone in theatre.
The only officer likely to be able to alter ROE in theatre, if just for short periods of time, would be the force commander.
Ignoring ROE is a serious crime - but not necessarily a war crime. Often it comes down to word plays between the lawyers. :( In the wikileaks case, as the wounded reporter was crawling on the ground, it could be argued that he was trying to effect an escape so was not "hors de combat". Others would argue differently.
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Sacha suggested elsewhere that this thread was as good as any to post my thoughts about the redshirt fracas in Bangkok, as I'm only a few kms away, but most especially about the appalling way the NZ media's covered it, at least on line. I went one step further and blogged.
Horrible days up here. I'm hoping that they see sense and back down today as all sides seem to be uttered shocked by what escalated yesterday.
Images of the redshirts a couple of weeks back are here.
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Thanks, Simon. That's a great roundup from a current conflict that as you note our media have downplayed in favour of an event of little impact for us.
Provincial editorial perspectives and the pull of mother Europe's heartstrings still reign in some circles it seems. Sooner they die out the better.
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3410,
Provincial editorial perspectives and the pull of mother Europe's heartstrings still reign in some circles it seems.
That's it, Sacha.
Thanks, Simon. Please keep us updated, if the situation warrants it and if you have the time.
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