Collateral Murder (merged)

VonHesse · 04-06-10, 11:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Torvald Von Mansee

Anyone read this, yet?

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.co...gon-ctd-3.html

Sorry if someone else has already mentioned it; I'm not going to go back through the thread to see if someone has (if so, someone delete this post).

Thanks for the link, I hadn't seen that yet. Couldn't have put it better myself. As a former member of the US Army who luckily never had to go to war, I was only bothered by one portion of the incident - the firing on the van.

As far as I can see, the sodiers were in compliance with the rules of engagement up until that point. As I was trained, soldiers are allowed to respond with deadly force when they are attacked, or they have reasonable cause to believe that they (or others) are in a percieved danger of being attacked. I've seen the grainy video, and imagining myself in that situation, I refuse to second guess their response. If it looks like people carrying weapons and pointing them at you - shoot it. Heck shoot it twice.

The flip side of that is (again, as I was trained) soldiers are prohibited from firing on any enemy who has ceased to present an active threat, whether by actively surrendering, or by being incapacitated due to injuries sustained. Period. Also, by every convention that I was trained by, firing on any person (soldier or not) who is rendering aid to wounded persons is most highly prohibited and is (as taught to me by my Drill Sargeant) to be considered a war crime, (yes those are the words my D.S. used). That rule is supposed to be followed even if it means that a bad guy gets away to rest up and heal only for us to have to fight him again in the future.

Treating the wounded and persons giving aid with respect is what is supposed to seperate us from the bad guys.

Again, I'm not second guessing the initial firing. I watched the video fully expecting it to be some overblown media hype and for the most part it was. Watching the van that was providing aid get fired on turned my stomach though. We're supposed to be better than that.