Wikileaks leaked video of Civilians killed in Baghdad - Full video (Warning: Raw feed)

I admire how some people try to find an excuse for friendly fire and killing journalists during a war, but there is no way I accept this. This is beyond my tolerence for how war should be lead.

Now let's read the so called laws of war from Wikipedia:

Roles of laws of war in the United States military
The Hague and Geneva Conventions guide military rules of action for US forces. They can be summarized as:[18]
Fight only enemy combatants.
Do not harm enemies who surrender; disarm them and turn them over to the chain of command.
Do not kill or torture detainees.
Collect and care for the wounded, whether friend or foe.
Do not attack medical personnel, facilities, or equipment.
Destroy no more than the mission requires.
Treat all civilians humanely.
Do not steal; respect private property and possessions.
Do one’s best to prevent violations of the law of war.
Report all violations of the law of war to superiors.

The underlined ones were violated according to my humble opinion. And don't tell me "this is war". Those conventions, rules and laws for war are only good wishes or what?
 
I would definitely like it if our news made even a simple attempt to cover both sides of the conflict.

I can assure you that the agendas fueling this thing run deep.

who knows, maybe there as shallow as pool of oil their fighting for.
 
@LadyINFJ

While I agree that it's regrettable that this occurred, civilian deaths are an accepted and anticipated part of Just War theory. (whether or not this is a just war, is a completely different debate)

Accepting that civilians die in war is not an excuse, it's an actuality. I find it impossible to believe that a war could be waged without civilian deaths, and I don't understand how anyone could believe such a thing. Accidents happen; they're regrettable, but they happen. Had these been intentional killings of journalists, that would be a different story.
 
Why the hell did those soldiers think the civilians were armed? They were pretty clearly unarmed.

Basically it was a stupid mistake. And the soldiers involved should be dealt with accordingly.
 
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Why the hell did those soldiers think the civilians were armed? They were pretty clearly unarmed.

Basically it was a stupid mistake. And the soldiers involved should be dealt with accordingly. I wonder what happened to those soldiers anyway?

From what I gathered there were two members carrying AK47's and one carrying another weapon...from what I understood the soldiers on the street were taking fire. I could be wrong, but as I said before this was combat zone, and its life or death...I stand by what I have said.
 
From what I've read, the mistaken weapons were camera parts of the camera crew. The reporters weren't wearing anything to identify themselves as reporters, and allegedly were following around insurgents (according to a Pentagon report, so take that with a grain of salt)

I question the reasoning behind the killing, because what armed insurgents in their right minds would be parading around a street in Iraq as a gunship circles overhead. On the other hand, the gunship had been engaged in hostilities very recently in the nearby area. The first reports from the ground said it appeared as if one of the dead was lying on top of an RPG round.

All in all, I see the killings as an accident. Terrible none the less, but in the scope of things, and accident. That doesn't mean I find the hostilities acceptable, but in the realm of war and regarding the situation, I find it hard to fault the soldiers for killing civilians (I fault the soldiers for killing in general, because that is their job, and I fault those in charge for even having soldiers over there)

We've had far worse "accidents" in the past 8 years than this one.
 
The sad thing comes to me later on is how the soldiers and civilians define "battle" differently led to such tragedy.

For the soldiers the battle is still on since they were still watching the scene.

However on the other hand, the civilians who approached to help out their fellow countrymen thought it was already over and it is fair to check out the wounded as soon as possible. (It is reasonable to assume that the helicopter was too far to be seen or else they wouldn't get shot twice like that.)

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As for the rationale of the warzone argument, if your whole country is being occupied, there are armed patrols in cities and villages and roads in between, and it only takes 1 radio call to have a helicopter at your doorstep without you even knowing. Where exactly is safe enough not to be a warzone?
 
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I admire how some people try to find an excuse for friendly fire and killing journalists during a war, but there is no way I accept this. This is beyond my tolerence for how war should be lead.

Now let's read the so called laws of war from Wikipedia:

Roles of laws of war in the United States military
The Hague and Geneva Conventions guide military rules of action for US forces. They can be summarized as:[18]
Fight only enemy combatants.
Do not harm enemies who surrender; disarm them and turn them over to the chain of command.
Do not kill or torture detainees.
Collect and care for the wounded, whether friend or foe.
Do not attack medical personnel, facilities, or equipment.
Destroy no more than the mission requires.
Treat all civilians humanely.
Do not steal; respect private property and possessions.
Do one
 
who knows, maybe there as shallow as pool of oil their fighting for.

Don't forget all the kickbacks and profits to be had from independent companies over yonder providing "services."
 
NAI: I think this war could have been far worse, body count wise. I wouldn't say that we haven't done our fair share of killing, but I don't think it's adequate to say that we invaded and slaughtered (our military IS built to invade though) Also, all wars are symbolic in a way. That's why you have kids fighting for their lives and actually feeling like it's what they should be doing.

Well, for me it isn't about our people being there having to defend their lives, it is about why we are there in the first place.

You realize the war was started based on lies, right?

But you are right, we could just nuke them and get that much closer to ruining the world.

We went in and did as much as we could without attracting enough attention to cause any other countries to truly stand up to us.

What about the economic implications?
 
Well, for me it isn't about our people being there having to defend their lives, it is about why we are there in the first place.

You realize the war was started based on lies, right?

But you are right, we could just nuke them and get that much closer to ruining the world.

We went in and did as much as we could without attracting enough attention to cause any other countries to truly stand up to us.

What about the economic implications?

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the war was continued based on lies? Unless I'm assuming wrong, the spark was the 9/11 incident (or the gulf war if you really want to go back that far)

The economic implications of our country? Our country goes through a recession every few dozens of years (For some reason, I want to say twenty but I'm not sure) and we haven't really switched from a war time economy to a peace time economy since vietnam. I don't think our economy has went completely down the crapper yet but this is the worst recession we have seen in a while comparatively.

If you're talking about the economic implications of the middle east then the only thing I can really say is that it's probably destroyed by now outside of oil.
 
There are excuses to be made for initial burst of fire. Watching the video, I found the people and the items they were carrying hard to discern, and it's understandable that the soldiers thought they saw AK-47s, especially if some of those on the ground were already known to be insurgents. The best excuse is that when one of the journalists crouched behind the corner of a building and pointed a piece of equipment at the helicopter, it did look very much like an RPG ready to fire, and soldiers should react quickly and with deadly force when they think one of those things is being aimed at them.
But by the time they circled around the building and saw the group of men standing around casually, not even looking up at the helicopter, they should have realized something was off. It was imprudent to fire at that point. And as I understand it, it was plainly in violation of the rules of engagement to then fire on the van that came by to pick up the wounded man. There were no visible weapons, and no aggressive moves made towards the soldiers.
 
Interesting article about this in the New York Times. Take it with a grain of salt, but interesting none the less
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/08/world/08psych.html?scp=1&sq=PSYCHOLOGISTS%20EXPLAIN%20IRAQ%20AIR%20STRIKE%20VIDEO&st=cse
The sight of human beings, most of them unarmed, being gunned down from above is jarring enough.
But for many people who watched the video of a 2007 assault by an Army Apache helicopter in Baghdad, released Monday by WikiLeaks.org, the most disturbing detail was the cockpit chatter. The soldiers joked, chuckled and jeered as they shot people in the street, including a Reuters photographer and a driver, believing them to be insurgents.
“Look at those dead bastards,” one said. “Nice,” another responded.
In recent days, many veterans have made the point that fighters cannot do their jobs without creating psychological distance from the enemy. One reason that the soldiers seemed as if they were playing a video game is that, in a morbid but necessary sense, they were.
“You don’t want combat soldiers to be foolish or to jump the gun, but their job is to destroy the enemy, and one way they’re able to do that is to see it as a game, so that the people don’t seem real,” said Bret A. Moore, a former Army psychologist and co-author of the forthcoming book “Wheels Down: Adjusting to Life After Deployment.”
Military training is fundamentally an exercise in overcoming a fear of killing another human, said Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, author of the book “On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society,” who is a former Army Ranger.
Combat training “is the only technique that will reliably influence the primitive, midbrain processing of a frightened human being” to take another life, the colonel writes. “Conditioning in flight simulators enables pilots to respond reflexively to emergency situations even when frightened.”
The men in the Apache helicopter in the video flew into an area that was being contested, during a broader conflict in which a number of helicopters had been shot down.
Several other factors are on display during the 38-minute video, said psychologists in and out of the military. (A shortened 17-minute version of the video has been viewed about three million times on YouTube.)
Soldiers and Marines are taught to observe rules of engagement, and throughout the video those in the helicopter call base for permission to shoot. But at a more primal level, fighters in a war zone must think of themselves as predators first — not bait. That frame of mind affects not only how a person thinks, but what he sees and hears, especially in the presence of imminent danger, or the perception of a threat.
The fighters in the helicopter say over the radio that they are sure they see a “weapon,” even though the Reuters photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, is carrying a camera.
“It’s tragic that this all begins with the apparent mistaking of a camera” for a weapon, said David A. Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University. “But it’s perfectly understandable with what we know now about context and vision.
  • Take the same image and put it in a bathroom, and you swear it’s a hair dryer;
  • put it in a workshop, and you swear it’s a power drill.”
To a soldier or a pilot, it can look like life or death. “I worked with medevac pilots, and vulnerability is a huge issue for them,” Dr. Moore said.
The video does show that the second object that the soldiers identified as a weapon was a rocket-propelled grenade, or R.P.G. “An R.P.G. can take them down in a second,” Dr. Moore said.
After the helicopter guns down a group of men, the video shows a van stopping to pick up one of the wounded. The soldiers in the helicopter suspect it to be hostile and, after getting clearance from base, fire again. Two children in the van are wounded, and one of the soldiers remarks, “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.”
Here again, psychologists say, when people are intensely focused on observing some specific feature of the landscape, they may not even see what is obvious to another observer. The classic demonstration of this is a video in which people toss around a basketball; viewers told to count the number of passes rarely see a person in a gorilla suit who strolls into the picture, stops and faces the camera, and strolls out.
The soldiers were looking for combatants; experts say it is not clear they would have seen children, even if they should have.
The video’s emotional impact on viewers is also partly rooted in the combination of intimacy and distance it gives them, some experts said. The viewer sees a wider tragedy unfolding, in hindsight, from the safety of a desk; the soldiers are reacting in real time, on high alert, exposed.
In recent studies, researchers have shown that such distance tempts people to script how they would act in the same place, and overestimate the force of their own professed moral principles.
“We don’t express our better angels as much as we’d like to think, especially when strong emotions are involved,” Dr. Dunning said. He added, “What another person does in that situation should stand as forewarning for what we would do ourselves.”
 
No, no, I'm sure anyone of us could be there having fun. Ta-ta-ta at civilians, and hey, you know the latest joke, they drove over a body with the tank, lol. Really, lol, that made my day, man. What a funny story to tell at home. I don't judge these poor boys that have become stupid killers. We could be them. The question is who needs this whole shit?

However on the other hand, the civilians who approached to help out their fellow countrymen thought it was already over and it is fair to check out the wounded as soon as possible.
Everything is "fair" at war. This is just a rare opportunity to scratch the surface, to get a glimpse of the amount of injustice involved, and the amount of lies to cover such actions publicly. That has happened all the time, it's not some horrific accident. All the crap was covered, none of the officials admitted what really happened. Military and police professionals are trained to become masters at covering crap. Apologies to truly fair pros who may read this, I'm sure such people also exist, but that doesn't change the major problem. Which isn't that the army covers the crap (of course they do; they must) but that people don't have any idea about the true amounts of crap involved.
 
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I remember watching a few video's of U.S. soldiers and Blackwater contractors a few years back on youtube doing similar things like mowing down cars as they went down the highway and laughing about it, before youtube started deleting them when the media got privy to it.

"This is just War"......no, no way in hell. This is pure evil incarnate. My cousin having been an ex-Marine got a job with Blackwater on a security detail in Baghdad back in 2005 , he's about 5 years older than me, and growing up as kids he was always sadistic , he loved abusing animals, and when he started driving he would intentionally swerve onto the side of the road to kill dogs and cats. My point is it takes a sick bastard to do stuff like they are doing to innocent civilians over in Iraq. I believe in revenge and I don't give a shit that these American people that take part in these MURDERS live in the same country as I do, I hope they meet the same fate.

My cousin made it back to tell of the sick psychotic shit he done, I wished he had driven over an IED because there would've been one less murderous scum on the planet, now that is feelings I have for a relative that has my last name, how do you think I feel about these murderous people on the video's that I do not know?

Just because they belong to the American military means we that are also American must root for them and wish them safety while they invade, murder, loot, pillage ? nuh uh...no way. The most honorable thing the U.S. troops could do is a full scale mutiny , throwing down their arms, refusing to go on patrol, refusing to leave the base and demanding to leave the middle east.

Suppose Central America and Mexico decided to march north, cross the southern border into the U.S. and occupy America, mowing U.S. people down at random, or it could be any other country invading the U.S. for example, China even, it would be the same evil as what is going on in Iraq. You can't blame the Iraqi's for hating U.S. troops or taking action against them. Plain and simple..Iraq is being occupied not liberated, stop buying into the media's propaganda machine.


 
Slayer, my brother is a Marine, and [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DboMAghWcA"]he seems to like this song[/ame], and I think it is a better view of a typical soldier than a picture of a pathologically sadistic killer.
 
I remember watching a few video's of U.S. soldiers and Blackwater contractors a few years back on youtube doing similar things like mowing down cars as they went down the highway and laughing about it, before youtube started deleting them when the media got privy to it.


Insane people are insane, nuff said

"This is just War"......no, no way in hell. This is pure evil incarnate. My cousin having been an ex-Marine got a job with Blackwater on a security detail in Baghdad back in 2005 , he's about 5 years older than me, and growing up as kids he was always sadistic , he loved abusing animals, and when he started driving he would intentionally swerve onto the side of the road to kill dogs and cats. My point is it takes a sick bastard to do stuff like they are doing to innocent civilians over in Iraq. I believe in revenge and I don't give a shit that these American people that take part in these MURDERS live in the same country as I do, I hope they meet the same fate.
You're taking "This is just war" out of context. It is not supposed to mean that we can justify the slaughtering of tons of people because we are waging war, no one in their right mind would say such a thing. "This is just war" is describing the fact that accidents like the video in the OP happen. When you place anyone into a conflict where everyone could be gunning for you, are you really going to take the extra second to make sure that object that SEEMS like a gun really is a gun: It's really asking the question of are you really ready to take a bullet and possibly die . The military, also, isn't the only one who has responsibilities here. The reporters were supposedly traveling in a area with insurgents and perhaps even with them, they took an assumption of risk in that regard. If it was intentional, then by all means they should burn in hell, get sent to jail, whatever. Persecuting them for a mistake in a situation in which most people only live though video games is unnecessarily rough and shows a lack of seeing all the points of view.


My cousin made it back to tell of the sick psychotic shit he done, I wished he had driven over an IED because there would've been one less murderous scum on the planet, now that is feelings I have for a relative that has my last name, how do you think I feel about these murderous people on the video's that I do not know?
Your brother is sadistic and all the other stuff you said but does that mean the individuals in the video went out of their way to slaughter people? How does it feel to paint the individuals in the video with the same brush as if THEY have no feelings? They'll probably face demons for the rest of their lives if it was truly an accident. And to judge them for that.

Just because they belong to the American military means we that are also American must root for them and wish them safety while they invade, murder, loot, pillage ? nuh uh...no way. The most honorable thing the U.S. troops could do is a full scale mutiny , throwing down their arms, refusing to go on patrol, refusing to leave the base and demanding to leave the middle east.
While the sentiment is good, I fail to see what suffering a whole mutiny would cause. This war is fought on lies, corruption, and political strife but that does not mean every military member is there because he wants to kill people and all that crap, some individuals actually want to see the middle east rise and function again. Plus the fact that some people really do seem satisfied with killing americans in any way shape or form. And then what at that point? What do we do? Our reputation is what has gotten America so far at this point.


Suppose Central America and Mexico decided to march north, cross the southern border into the U.S. and occupy America, mowing U.S. people down at random, or it could be any other country invading the U.S. for example, China even, it would be the same evil as what is going on in Iraq. You can't blame the Iraqi's for hating U.S. troops or taking action against them. Plain and simple..Iraq is being occupied not liberated, stop buying into the media's propaganda machine.


I think you're painting this situation with a very wide brush. Unless I'm missing out on a lot of information, we have killed more than our fair share of innocents but we aren't mowing them down like we did in vietnam. We are trying, somewhat, to keep our causality count down. I don't think our government is right but I don't think telling everyone in the military that they are a monster is an adequate way to express your views.
 
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