Collateral Murder (merged)
 

Since nobody is going to post it. Hence, I decided to take the lead :oops:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0

America. Land of the free. Home of the brave. Bringing freedom and peace through superior firepower.

Go back to sleep. Everything is fine.

The issue isn't that it happened, its that they lied about it and then went to great lengths to hide the truth after their initial lies were exposed.

The comments from pilot, gunner and the soldier who drove over a dead body were quite disgusting. It looks like there are quite many Xbox kids in US army. Well, it is inevitable if they decease the criteria of recruitment

I remember Cheney around 2006 saying something like "Given what we know today we wouldn't go to Iraq". Now if ol' Dr Doom of the Bush administration says something like that then how can anyone else say that this war is nothing but a cluster ******* of epic proportions pretty much from start to beginning. And all these incidents, lots and lots still uncovered, are part of the package.

Hehe, just watched a program about the FCS (Future Combat System) the US army is finishing and what'da ya know, all the robots and stuff were controlled by Xbox controller. No I'm not kidding. :O:

EDIT: Right, seen it now. Don't know what to say... :nope::nope::nope:

Oh wow. I am just seriously disturbed at how much they wanted to basically just kill, for no good reason.

Disgusting and an an absolute disgrace to the military :down:

However you can't say much good for the military's ROE in this case either. Fairly evident that systemically, the ROE is still way too kill-oriented.

The Pilot&Gunner just makes me sick...:nope:

HunterICX

I'm in no way defending the above but I should imagine every country has a number of individuals within their armed forces of a similar disposition.

All in all though....pretty sad.

Well, I think we shouldn't forget that however you slice it - the problem is that the military's job is to kill people. That always has been and always will be their job, and by all means they have to be trained to do so quickly and effectively.

This doesn't mean that responsibility doesn't need to be exercised and enforced though. One of the problems here is that there is an illusion that with all this technology, everyone has total and accurate information - pilots, ground controllers, troops etc. With that assumption, the ROE totally works - except it doesn't, because the assumption is false. The pilots have already made up their mind about what they're seeing before the first shot is fired, and continue to convince themselves that what they're seeing matches their own imaginary story about what's going on down there as they shoot. And they're going to keep seeing that, because what they came here for is not to make peace and spread positive ideology, but to kill Iraqis.

In short, this is what happens when you put together people trained to kill and an illusion that the technology will help control their killing. There's nothing, in theory, wrong with an army that kills people - that's what it's for. A military that doesn't have killing people as its first objective isn't a real military, and noone needs a wussified military like that. It's that total-information illusion that needs to be tackled and worked with, hopefully with some openness and via the democratic process that its ultimate leaders are elected by. It's getting more ludicrous as to the length the military is willing to go into denial about this in order to do what it wants, not what it should. But I fear it's only getting worse.

The slaughter of the unarmed men trying to rescue the injured journalist made me feel sick. Anyone with some respect for human value, would try to help that man. And the US army just wipes them out with eager. What for? "saving insurgents and picking up weapons...", yeah right. Not by a damn sight.

And the comments they give... Unbelivable...

I agree :sign_yeah:

I can see the accident happening from the beginning but what happened after the initial burst was just horrific. I mean they broke up the perceived threat, Why keep killing???!!! And then to randomly fire into a van stopping to help!

They weren't grabbing bodies or Guns they were helping the one guy still moving.

The words of the pilots showed the disregard for human life...How would they feel if it was their family's down there and it was an Iraqi helicopter slaughtering their children and brothers? I think givin the evidance those guys should be ejected from the military at the very least! Bad judgments like that feed hatred of us.

Now I am far from a tree hugging hippy but our Country is getting further and further off track.

Ron Paul 2012!

"Krieg vertiert." (Egon Bahr)

WikiLeaks, who published that video after Reuters was driven away by the Pentagon when they demanded release of the material on basis of the freedom of information act ( http://www.collateralmurder.com/ ), said that they prepare another video anytime soon, showing the intentional killing of civilians by soldiers.

I repeat this, since I mentioned the same incident in the other thread about WikiLeaks.

It is not only an issue of how war cripples the psyche of those participating in it. It also is about lowered standards for recruitment in order to copensate the fallen interest for joining the armed forces since the Iraq wear began. This fallen interest is both a conseqeunce of fallen wages (especially the air force suffers a shortage in qualified pilots who preferred to join civilian compnaies fpor getting better payment), and the ongoing war and the risk to be sent to Iraq. The fallen levels of character fitness and general social competence and education has been pointed out by US journalists repeatedly in the past 5 years.

The coverup by the pentagon is unexcusable, because this was no mistake being made, but an intentional act of murder.

The crews must face court martial for committing war crimes. I personally would line them up on the wall - last but not least as an examplary call to maintain discipline.

Wow... if you watch the full video, you can hear towards the end where there's another engagement, the gunner is constantly (ok ok, twice) asking how to find some setting or why something's flashing in the HUD. :doh: Umm... training anyone?

true.

Also true.

He was giting an azimuth limit warning during a time when the HUD indicated that his gun had not reached full azimuth and therefore should not be getting an azimuth limit warning.

thats why he says "Im getting an azimuth limit for some reason"

working in the field of aviation i have learned that sometimes you get warnings and cautions when you shouldnt be getting them... this is called a malfunction. it is more a testament to the high quality of his training that he recognized the caution as being in error, rather than not assessing his situation and accepting a false error message

No, I think it was after that. He was looking for the Man(ual) Advancement button, the pilot said "It's by your left door in a clutch", then he asks the gunner "Got it?" and the gunner replies "No."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but something like manual advancement would be pretty important and much used feature for the gunner. :yep:

The other time is when he asks "Why the AP is flashing?".

So, no he didn't know much about what was happening in those two occasions.

You can check them yourself, after 20 mins or so in the vid.

Who says that they brought children into battle? It looks as if they were just driving down the road and saw an injured guy on the side walk and went to help him. Maybe get him to a hospital. The pilots couldn't wait to get clearance to fire and in fact kept saying that they were going for weapons which they clearly weren't!

Even the wounded dude crawling they were begging for him to grab anything that looked like a weapon so they could fire again like he could be much of a threat.

I'm all for blowing up the bad guys but this just has bad judgment written all over it!

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/...ootings_o.html

It's easy to look at a youtube video compared to watching the camera in the cockpit, I'd imagine. Any helo drivers here care to comment on the stability of head vs screen compared to sitting at your desk?

The above link says that there was in fact an AK, RPG, and grenades at the scene. Reuters has been known to hire local photographers and reporters who are in fact associated with one of the combatant forces (the guy who photoshopped the smoke in Lebanon, for example). Not saying these guys were, but in Sadr City, they could very well have been escorted by local (possibly hostile) militia units, no?

Without far more data, it's hard to make a call. Did reporters in areas like Sadr City have to file a "flight plan" with the US to avoid stuff like this, or was it suggested? Was there a warning for reporters not to ever go in some areas unless embedded with US forces?

Bottom line is that this happens, even when the air assets have to call in and get permission for every single engagement. In WW2, a P-47 would simply have gunned down anything that moved on the other side of Allied lines. Anything that moved. So sad as this might be, the % of "collateral" (called "spillage" in WW2) casualties is FAR lower than in previous conflicts, and becomes lower every year.

Yeah, I'm not sure that we can really call this a "battle". It's a civilian area however you slice it, and as long as the population is there, there's nothing to say they couldn't have been just driving along on their daily business and came across this. I'm willing to buy the "good samaritan" explanation for why the van stopped. All the more, I highly suspect that the people there are not so stupid and would have seen the chopper that shot up the scene. The fact that they did not seem concerned by it being overhead seems to tell me they weren't expecting to be shot at - at least in the case of the would-be rescuers, seems like it was just an error.

I'm also quite willing to buy that there were two guys with AKs and an RPG in the original group. Immediately assuming them to be bad guys is problematic, but again, when there are friendly troops rolling through the sector, it's not like anyone would be willing to risk walking up and asking who they were and what they were up to. It does make sense, though, to bring up the old pro-gun argument about self-defense - armed dudes don't immediately equal bad dudes. In this case, though, it doesn't totally matter. What does bother me though is that again, the effect that the pilots were concerned with was not taking out guys already in possession of a weapon, denying a potential ambush, or otherwise pursuing actual tactical goals - what they were really concerned about is killing the entire group and anyone who assisted it, as quickly as possible. That right there is, well, really messed up and indicates a wider systemic problem with the US military - it's all about efficiency, with dubious effectiveness at best. When the primary effect of engagement being sought is achieving kills, well, there's your problem with stability on the ground right there.

I double that...

It could also be the men that dropped the journalists off. As a matter of fact... It could be anyone acting under emotional stress when seeing a man crawling on the street, fighting for hes life.

Why should anyone open fire on unarmed men taking care of a wounded guy. The SOB is lying to the command, just to get a ok to bring them down. This is murder in cold blood. This is so sick that it can by no means be justified at all.

Germans shooting Americans was tried in the last century. It didn't work out so well for the Germans.